the guy living two floors above kira

The winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature is eighty years old. A reporter said he had been coming to his building for the past three years on this day, and that it had rained all three days. A neighbor said they had been waiting on this for fifteen years. The winner, the poet Tomas Tranströmer, hasn't really spoken since he had a stroke about twenty years ago.

The subjects of news are sometimes preposterously fragile things, and they make you realize how much energy and eventfulness and tension news brings to bear. It's an unreasonably bright light, and when news shines it on something like Tranströmer it can't but rebound upon the news itself. News is a very incestuous thing; the photographers photograph other photographers photographing, and a writer thinks that this a dynamic worth chronicling. There's a hierarchy of litheness: a lumbering camerawoman was filming the nameplate on the door while two photographers, like agile little scavengers, leapt and pranced on the stairs behind her, using her light on the door and her body for their meta coverage.

For most people who are not megalomaniacs, being news must be fantastically unpleasant. Lights were blinking red and there was an extremely loud, erratic beeping that sounded like a robot parakeet. The staircase was unnavigable and camera flashes were extra bright and frequent because these pictures go in the paper -- to get seen one has to get blinded. There were young, irreverent people who were there because the equipment is heavy and because the point is to get there, panting, and to scoop, break and get the story. And so there was also a young man who took off his shirt in the hallway, who wore boxer briefs with a purple geometric pattern and Michael Jordan sneakers. There were dozens of these people.

There were strangers who hadn't read his poetry but who needed a piece of him, to claim to have known him in some small way. When you're news you are scrutinized by professional curiosity, by an industry that crowns interviewers by how good they are at making people cry (see Piers Morgan). When you're news you need a security guard.

Someone told me that Tranströmer plays the piano with his left hand, that he had in fact just been playing while we were out in the hall. They were surprised I hadn't heard.

It's super weird, hilarious, wonderful to think that this guy heard the same horrible renovations that I heard in this apartment, I love the idea of my silly little life with it's sensory perceptions being sensed by someone who senses so exquisitely. It's like a challenge to me to try to hear the finer monstrosity of the drilling that starts at 7:30 AM.