The Snow Does Not Care

Dispatches from Winter Storm Fern

The snow does not care about St. Augustine.

The snow does not care to distinguish the ways that Claudia Rankine deploys second person to insist on specificity of empathic identification, and how that might or might not be different from Walt Whitman’s use of second person to imagine a transhistorical commonality of American experience.

The snow does not care that your bed is supposed to be delivered today.

The snow does not care that you are supposed to be at a lecture on St. Augustine at 10 am uptown.

The snow does not care that you didn’t see the email about the lecture being moved online.

The snow does not care whether or not your Zoom connection can withstand the passing underground of the subway.

The snow does not care about Minneapolis, though you wish it would.

The snow does not care what state your snow boots are in.

The snow does not care about your flex train ticket.

The snow does not believe that the Amtrak NextGen Acela will appreciably improve anyone’s life, much less yours.

The snow does not care about snow days, and whether children have them or not.

The snow does not care whether or not you have finished chapter three.

The snow has its own reasons for being. The snow does what snow does.

It snows.

(My snow boots are in Massachusetts. Of course.)

So what’s next?

I have two friends with interesting book talks in New York this week, neither of which I can attend, because life is standing, snowlike, in my way.

First up is Prof. Kelley Kreitz, talking about Printing Nueva York at Word Up Community Bookshop at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights tomorrow night, January 28, at 7 pm.

And on Saturday January 31, Will Heinrich celebrates the rerelease of his elegant, devastating novel The King’s Evil at the Sunview Acropolis from 6 to 10 pm. I’m told there might be aquavit.

Now. Back to Chapter three. And then, St. Augustine.