I made these pictures outside The Strand bookstore at 11th Street and Broadway at about nine o’clock last Saturday night, before going in and purchasing two of David Foster Wallace’s books. It was a good night, my fourth since returning to the city after Christmas. Dinner at a French restaurant with an old friend and a new friend followed by a circuitous walk to the East Village, interrupted by this stop at The Strand (synecdochic for my relievingly reignited interest in literature), followed by Milk at the Village East Cinema with a different old-friend-new-friend pair, followed by a late night hour in the Café University with white pizza in one hand and DFW’s essay on David Lynch in the other, followed by a DJ set by Ali Shaheed Muhammad at Le Poisson Rouge with the original pair of friends, followed by the Q train back to Brooklyn. In short: the kind of night that motivates all those elitist stereotypes that fueled my romanticizing of New York as I applied to grad school in late 2007.