New York has a rather desultory book culture. Thus the odds of running into a book mad friend in the Strand while he’s visiting New York are not as astronomical as they might seem.

But they’re still long. Imagine my surprise, then, when I rounded a corner searching for Ezra Pound’s ABCs of Reading (didn’t find it) and run into Paul Gazzoli, the great white hope of UVA’s classics department, now happily ensconced for his PhD at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

We paid for our books (I did get a copy of Chronicles of Tao, a book I read half of while visiting my friend Richard), and I dragged him off to lunch at Arium. We chattered about all kinds of things, including how he’s started dressing like a character out of P.G. Wodehouse. In fact, he’s looking more and more like our early music director Paul Walker every day.

How nice to have someone to talk to about obscure places in Europe and archaic languages with again! Maybe I’ll try to extend my stay in Europe and descend upon him for couple days in Cambridge.

madhadron :: Jul.30.2006 :: New York City :: Comments Off