Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty.
Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write a…
[...] He looked down because the tramp he was stepping over (who intently ate dog food from the can with a plastic spoon) bore a close resemblance to his opera critic. So close that Richard even said, "Hugo?" But the tramp wasn't Hugo. Or Hugo wasn't the tramp. Not yet: not this week. Richard went …
And he would tell you that quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride.
the old super-pub with its sticky chandeliers and sodden carpet, its contrapuntal rock videos and the thick bank of dole-quaffing fruit machines
