Les Lettres Tristes - Foxy Production

By Tan Lin
B 1 2007
I read a story about people who, because they
died of wounds inflicted any number of years
earlier, are known as reclassified homicides.
There were thirty-five such homicides in New
York in the past year and they are a matter of
public interest. Often they lead to upgraded
criminal charges and new trials. The NYPD
releases the information throughout the year,
based on rulings made by New York City’s
medical examiner and information that passes
through New York City’s Office of Public
Records, which is the conduit for all deaths that
occur after 1949. The number of reclassified
homicides was unusually high for 2006 and
it lead to an uptick in the number of total
homicides for the year, which was also greater
than in 2005. No explanation for either of
December, Twelve, Two Thousand and Eight
these increases has been found. During 2006,
neither forensic methods nor the manner of
reporting deaths changed within the office
of the medical examiner, and Raymond
Kelly, New York’s Police Commissioner, said,
“They’re what we have to live with. It is a bit
of a fluke.” Sirkime Stevenson died today
(January 2006) though he was killed in 1991
when bullets fired by a stranger in a passing
car shattered his spine, eventually causing
infections that resulted in the amputation of a
leg (1997). Until that point, he had dreamed of
walking again. The killer was never identified.
B 4 1997
I read a story of an older woman on the
subway who offers her seat to a woman with
a young child, both of whom get off the IRT
No. 2 train at 72nd Street. A reporter in the car
inquires after the older woman, learns that her
name is Drane Shyti, an Albanian, fifty-seven
years old, that she has been in America for two
years and misses her own children, a son in
England and a daughter in Greece. Ms. Shyti
“works in a hotel laundry.” “Her husband is
a porter.” Before coming to America, he had
been a math teacher and she an elementary
school teacher. On the same page, beneath
the fold, an article documents a website that
allows users to compare aerial shots of the
same areas of New York taken at two points in
time. The years, like most items in such public
inventories, is arbitrary: 1996 and 2004. The
site, oasisnyc.com is funded by government
and private agencies and provides information
on property ownership and land use. An aerial
photo, one of three that are reprinted, shows
a section of Coney Island with shadows cast
OX to A to Z Journal, Like a Nocturne By Dave Miko
by the Parachute Jump ride in 1996; in 2004,
the shot of the same ground reveals different
or conflicting information produced by the
passage of time, which appears to be manually
rendered: a green ball field that is used by the
Brooklyn Cyclones.
A 1 2005
My head is bent over the obit of Frank Stanton,
the understated, reserved CBS executive who
was William S. Paley’s right hand man but never
socialized with his boss, and who helped shape
television as a medium “for the majority of
Americans.” Stanton was so sure Paley would
offer him the chairmanship of CBS that he
refused President Johnson’s offer to become
the next Secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare. But in the end, Paley held onto his
job, and Stanton was forced to retire without
becoming chairman. He left CBS disillusioned,
referring to the institution as “just another
company with dirty carpets.” On his last day,
he declined to attend a party that Paley had
thrown for him and simply left the office as if
it were another work day. He told Lillian Ross
of the New Yorker: “I think I’ll make it home
in time for the 7 o’clock news.” He left no
survivors and asked that there be no memorial
service and that no donations be made in his
honor.
A3 2008
And then, as I read his obit, I think of a
room that is ambient and incapable of being
distressed by objects. Such a room of the most
minor of anxieties (such as yours or mine)
might be assembled by a computer in the same
way that an airport might “use computers to
schedule flights.” 1
D2 1987
Such a room might include a refrigerator
produced in Korea by one company and
marketed in China under a different brand to
less or more stringent energy configurations
that are consistent with terms set forth by the
Kyoto Protocol.
D12
Such protocols, like the room, might include
the sound of the rain, with which has picked
up sulfur dioxides in the form of stack gasses,
turning the leaves of a fern in southeastern
Ohio yellow. And then, the rain will be heavy
at times and will cause local flooding in low
lying areas.
C 3 1975
As a rule of description, it may be necessary to
“cause the parable to rain” or the crust of the
earth to become a cigarette.
C5
And because it is early, such a room might
also include the sound of the rain turning
into something that looks like snow or a
bottle of Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a novel or a
newspaper.
What is the minor anxiety of a novel? I believe
it was something you were reading yesterday
or the day before because the novel is a brand
that is no longer made by hand.
C9
The newspaper is so plainly like all our other
feelings. I remember plainly a lesson from
1 Mark Wigley, “Network Fever” Grey
Room 4, p 12-61