I used to read more when my day job was a 45 minute commute to midtown, but I finished Scott Bradfield‘s The People Who Watched Her Pass By a couple of weeks ago. The book is sad and hilarious and there are passages so descriptively vivid I swear I’ve already seen the photograph:
“Grandma was sitting on a scratchy osier sofa in a blue bathrobe, staring at a hardback-sized transistor radio on a table. A loop of twisted coat hanger had been jammed into the nub of the broken antenna. Grandma’s toothless mouth hung open, with a strange disregard for propriety, and her left hand, clenched and veiny in her lap, was the heaviest, solidest, and most substantial thing about her. Grandma continually massaged the clenched fist with her leaner, more adept hand, as if comforting a pet. She was the thinnest person Sal had ever seen, and her skull resembled a stippled raw pink bathing cap underneath her sparse, recently-permed hair.”
(I used to admire the poetry posts that Alec Soth had on his old blog—meet the new blog. I found the ideas bounded about in that blog immensely helpful when I first started shooting and his Friday poetry posts, even though I don’t have a large appetite for poetry, were great.)