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Essays

12 Encounters with New York City

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Bill Hayes in Essays

An essay commissioned by the Queensland Performing Arts Center magazine, Australia (2019):

 

01
New York at 8am: I throw open the windows. Cars and cabs are already lined up at the gas station and I swear I can smell the urine on the sidewalk eleven stories below.

02
There is a young black woman singing, headphones on; really singing; beautiful voice – on an uptown 6 train. The car is packed. Packed. She faces the door, watches her reflection in the glass, and sings. Suddenly, she stops: “I’m sorry for the noise!” she yells loudly enough to quiet the entire car. All the passengers around her shake their heads, shrug: No, not noise.

“I’ve heard way worse,” a man next to me says.

03
I see Malik panhandling on 14th Street. We first met four years ago, the day after he’d been let out of prison. He’s been in halfway houses, ‘three quarter’ houses, homeless shelters, and I don’t know where else since. I have taken dozens of street portraits of him over the years; I always give him some money, clothes, food, Metro card, whatever I’ve got on me. Now he’s moving to Georgia. One of his kids lives there – he thinks.

“What about you? You gonna stay here or you gonna go?” he asks.

“I’m gonna stay.”

Malik shakes my hand and pulls me in for a hug.  “You stay strong in New York, nigga’! Stay strong!”

04
I have a dream about Oliver, the first since he died: I see him opening the door to the Read the rest of this post »

On Editing Oliver Sacks

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Bill Hayes in Essays, News

By Bill Hayes – Originally published in LitHub, April 23, 2019

 

As much as Oliver Sacks loved writing (and I do mean the very act itself—filling his fountain pen; starting a fresh yellow pad; whispering words aloud to himself as they came to him), he also loved getting published.

The “getting” part was a big part of it: Even after publishing 13 books and hundreds of essays and articles in his lifetime, Oliver still considered it a privilege to “get” his work in print. (The last piece he saw published, “Sabbath,” appeared in The New York Times just 15 days before his death on August 30, 2015.) His readers might be surprised to learn how little he cared about where a piece of writing first appeared. It did not have to be in the most prominent places—The New York Times, The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, the holy trinity for writers in the US—though he certainly felt fortunate to have his work appear frequently in their pages. Oliver was just as happyRead the rest of this post »

Swimming In Words With Oliver Sacks

Posted on August 29, 2018 by Bill Hayes in Essays, News

His love of language was a gift in itself.

By Bill Hayes

Published in The New York Times – August 29, 2018

The beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was a man of many enthusiasms — for ferns, cephalopods, motorbikes, minerals, swimming, smoked salmon and Bach, to name a few — but none more so than for words.

When I say he loved words, I don’t simply mean within the context of being a writer of numerous classic books — “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “Musicophilia.” Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)

“Every day a word surprises me,” he once commented, beaming, apropos of nothing other thanRead the rest of this post »

New Essay in NYT Magazine on 1981-1983

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Bill Hayes in Essays

The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital – NYT “T” Magazine
Where art, hip-hop, AIDS activism, break dancing — and the enduring notion that New York City is the center of the world — were born, and born anew.

By Bill Hayes – April 17, 2018

ONE OF THE realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why was that building torn down? Why did that bar close overnight? Whatever happened to the bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.

Place is as crucial to the architecture of memory as it is to dreaming, and like those New Yorkers who seem to disappear, spaces themselves carry their own memories here. Departed landmarks like CBGB or the Mudd Club are not so much addresses in downtown Manhattan as they are touchstones in the collective consciousness, occasionally reminding us of what was and of how much has changed — not least, ourselves. CBGB is where a 16-year-old Adam Horovitz — soon to be known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys — opened for punk legends Bad Brains in 1982; the Mudd Club is where, a few years earlier, Talking Heads, performing just days after the release of “Fear of Music,” coolly name-checked both spots in the iconic song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Moments like these still haunt the city — half recalled, half imagined — even now thatRead the rest of this post »

Oliver Sacks: A Composer and His Last Work

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Bill Hayes in Essays

I took many pictures of Oliver Sacks during our life together — and not just because I adored him. He was an irresistible subject for a photographer, with his bushy beard, sparkling bespectacled eyes, expressive hands, gaptoothed smile and the athletic build of someone who could easily swim long distances, even into his 80s.

The last picture I took of him, however, captures something quite different. His eyes do not meet mine, his head rests on a propped hand, and he is completely absorbed in a Bach piece he’d been learning to play.

I made a print and showed it to him a couple of days later. He didn’t find it especially flattering, but he liked it. It reminded him of the engraving of an elderly Beethoven in the “Oxford Companion to Music” from 1938. He knew that book practically by heart — a favorite aunt had given it to him as a boy — and he could describe the illustration and its caption with perfect recall: Beethoven’s room is “untidy,” he told me, “and there sits the aged composer, ‘very ill, but indomitable.’ ”

I nodded, his words echoing in my head: very ill, but indomitable — yes.

Read the rest of this post »

Out Late With Oliver Sacks

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Bill Hayes in Blog, Essays

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When Oliver Sacks died on Aug. 30 of last year, at 82, the world lost a beloved author and neurologist. I lost my partner.

Oliver hated that term: partner. “A partner is what one has in business,” he would say, bristling, “not in bed, not in the kitchen next to you making dinner.” The man was nothing if not meticulous about words. We’d never married — never wanted to — so “husband” was out, and “companion” was too euphemistic. Oliver was old-fashioned: He preferred the word “lovers.” We loved each other; that said it.

Thinking back on my life with Oliver, two episodes from his last year come to mind, each revealing something of the private and public Dr. Sacks. The first took place at home in late November 2014, two months before he learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Read the rest of this post »

In Praise of Impracticality

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Bill Hayes in Essays, NY Times
My pictures 1 130 - Version 2

(Originally published in the NY Times)

I SAW a girl on a Manhattan-bound subway train one day wearing a knockoff Louis Vuitton head scarf and false eyelashes long enough to make a daddy longlegs envious. Her look — a sort of Sally-Bowles-does-Brooklyn — was complete with a matching knockoff L.V. handbag and umbrella. She was seated next to a young man who was as dashing in his way as she was adorable, but she took no notice of him as she was completely absorbed in a paperback titled something like “Becoming a Practical Thinker.”

I had an impulse to tear the book from her hands.

“Don’t do that,” I wanted to say. “Practicality will not get you where you want to go.”

Read the rest of this post »

A Monet of One’s Own

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Bill Hayes in Essays

monet-notbh

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1919 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Originally published in the NY Times)

I SLIPPED away from work on a recent Monday to take my two nieces to the Garry Winogrand photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York right now.

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

Read the rest of this post »

On Not Writing

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Bill Hayes in Essays
On Not Writing

(Originally published in the NY Times)

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.

I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.

Read the rest of this post »

Lessons From the Smoke Shop

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Bill Hayes in Essays

Illustration: Oscar Bolton Green

Illustration: Oscar Bolton Green

(Originally published in the NY Times)

MY 30-year-long subscription to The New Yorker ran out a few months ago — pure absent-mindedness on my part — and since then I buy a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from my apartment.

It makes no sense financially. I could save 73 percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.

Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches. The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter for a book of matches from the box next to the register:

Read the rest of this post »

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Recent Essays

  • 12 Encounters with New York City

    September 11, 2019
  • On Editing Oliver Sacks

    April 24, 2019
  • Swimming In Words With Oliver Sacks

    August 29, 2018
  • New Essay in NYT Magazine on 1981-1983

    May 14, 2018
  • Oliver Sacks: A Composer and His Last Work

    November 26, 2017
  • Out Late With Oliver Sacks

    August 30, 2016
  • In Praise of Impracticality

    November 29, 2014
  • A Monet of One’s Own

    September 13, 2014
  • On Not Writing

    August 23, 2014
  • Lessons From the Smoke Shop

    May 31, 2014
  • Thank You for Hacking Me

    December 21, 2013
  • The Secrets Inside Us

    December 3, 2013
  • Subway Lifer

    October 15, 2013
  • A Year in Trees

    April 6, 2013
  • Out With the Old Anxiety

    December 22, 2012
  • On Being Not Dead

    November 12, 2012
  • A Poem Written on the Stars

    June 4, 2012
  • Plato’s Body, and Mine

    April 21, 2012
  • AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

    June 6, 2011
  • Insomniac City

    May 11, 2011

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