My brother Howard alerted me to the death of Paul Auster. I'm not so familiar with him so I asked him to write something. He calls it "Austerity."
Like Bernstein and Woody, Paul Auster was a writer I always identified with New York City. Maybe it was because of his NY trilogy, but also the Smoke and Blue in the Face films. A lot of us went through a real Auster phase in the 80s/90s. I loved Hand to Mouth (A Chronicle of Early Failure) which included a few plays and even a baseball card game he made up. It even had color plates of the deck, just in case you wanted to play. But, my favorite book of his was probably Timbuktu, a short novel about a dog, written from the dog's perspective of watching his homeless owner slowly dying. (I had a dog back then, Aries. She was a sweet, demure animal who NEVER chewed on things. For some reason or other she gnawed on the corner of Timbuktu, which still makes me smile when I look at it. It had been years since I had pulled it off the shelf, but I just found it after hearing of Auster's passing.) Time for a reread. Thanks for the stories, Mr. Auster.
