UFR Weekly Newsletter #15: The Thing About Boston
David Cotrone
Whenever I was in the car with my father we would play music. Sometimes Van Morrison and sometimes Warren Zevon and other times whatever we could find on the radio. It all sounded good even though the speakers were broken. When it was warm out we rolled down the windows and danced in our seats: hands drumming the steering wheel, feet hitting the floor. He told me about the Talking Heads, and how when they got started they played small bars in New York. People from the street would wander inside to hear them, drawn to their sound because it was something different.
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Embracing That Weirdness: A Conversation with Jordan Castro
Theories by Grant Faulkner
From the archives: Five poems by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
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I used to take the train every day and one time I was reading and someone came up to me and asked if I was reading something fake or something true. I wanted to say it was both but I didn’t. In a dream I saw graffiti that said I wish I could tell you about my life in a way that wasn’t broken. At the end of his essay, "Falling," Donovan Hohn says there’s a riddle that goes, “The music stopped, and he died.” You have to figure out the context. He eventually gives you the answer but then he says it doesn’t matter, that there's only speculation. I went to a museum that had some old journals on display and Bob Dylan’s was all pictures. In high school I took Latin and I went in early and my teacher brought soda bread and we would drill and drill and I still couldn’t get the words right. I’m writing things as I remember them because that’s all I can do. Everything connects and it’s okay that I don’t know how.
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"The small kitchen was clean and warm. It smelled like coffee and cinnamon rolls. She put one on a napkin and handed it to me. I thanked her, and while I chewed the sweet buttery bread, she lit up a cigarette and asked about my mother. Then you cane downstairs just in your jeans, no shirt, your chest pale and thin, your nipples pink, and your mother rushed over and kissed and hugged you like you'd been gone and just gotten home. And you didn't pull away, you hugged her back, and when your eyes caught mine, you lowered your face into the hair at her shoulder, and kept hugging."
- Andre Dubus III, "Tracks and Ties"
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The thing about Boston is that the subways are old but the streets are older. It’s easy to get lost but even easier to find your way.
Be well,
David