Page-turner

Yesterday I had "lunch" -- actually, one pretty good cigar -- on the back deck.  On my way out, I picked up last week's New Yorker from our recycle basket.  I had already read a long, pretty good article in it ("A loaded gun") and I hadn't seen anything else in the table of contents that really piqued my interest, but come on -- I needed something to read with my cigar so I picked it up.  And I started reading an excerpt from an unfinished memoir by the great Joseph Mitchell.  And I was hooked.  It's fabulous!  It also has some of the longest sentences I've ever seen outside a Faulner novel or a Joyce whatever-those-things-are-that-Joyce-wrote.  For example (with great thanks to the "A Natural Curiosity" blog for presenting it in a form I can just copy and paste):

At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic, it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.