Sy Safransky
Sy Safransky is founder and editor of The Sun. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
— From December 2023Two Dollars An Hour
On my first day at the book warehouse, D., the boss, is complaining of sore muscles and a bad headache. Baseball on Saturday, drinking with the boys on Sunday. “I done indulged too much,” he says wearily. His manner is relaxed and friendly.
January 1975Money
Money, or, as Karl Marx’s mother puts it, “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it . . . it would have been much better.”
January 1975Sy’s New York Diary: Amazing Flesh
I read, in the newspaper, about a man who is dragged from his car, knifed repeatedly for the few dollars in his wallet, and left bleeding in the gutter. My mother says her friends don’t go out at night. It’s an old story, old as the city’s tired and dour expression, old as the dry and wrinkled hands of a man trying to remember better days and remembering nothing but bone.
October 1974Chewing It Over
Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.
October 1974American Cheese
American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm.
October 1974
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