the world has turned and left me here

3: in search of daniil kharms

Girl behind the counter in a soho bookstore: I came in looking for works by a Russian surrealist poet I had recently run across in a journal. His name is Daniil Kharms. No way will I find anything by this guy I thought. But instead she started rattling off titles after an amazingly brief pause. The information flowed through her so quickly it was almost scary...I don't think I could have googled it myself and read through the search results any faster. (Even with something like surfraw amazon.)

It reminds me of the jazz guitarist I saw last night: one of those quintessential guitar geek turned guitar god types who have basically zero synaptic gap between their mental music and their physical music, and can play anything under the sun. (Luke Sticka I'm talking about you here too.)

As I listened to her digging through the list of publications, randomly remarking on the interesting details of each, making connections to other components of the literary scene, I realized just how huge a book nerd this girl was. She seemed very nice and interesting. But there was a particular edge to her when it came to how much she knew. The edge was a thing called pride. I wondered how often people got this same impression from talking to me..."a nice person, but something about them makes me a little uneasy..."