Reading Nabokov is like looking at a brick wall: not one of those boring facades that you find on buildings everywhere. It’s more like looking at the backside of an urban edifice: a wall that doesn’t face a street. Such walls are always far more interesting than the pretty facades that hide them from common view. They’re always rich, textured, and a poetic rhapsody on form, function, and the point at which these two things meet. More than anything else, they’re about this point of intersection. I suppose it isn’t just Vladimir Nabokov that reminds me of brick walls. There are other authors who strike me the same way: Ursula K. LeGuin is one such writer. Sherri S. Tepper is another, as is the improbably-named China Miéville. I can place any number of great writers on this list. Their narratives are thick and varied in ways that shift my perception of the written word. I can lose myself in their works, forgetting after a line or two that I’m simply reading, simply looking at long lines of black squiggles on white paper. I feel as if I am looking at a wall with individual bricks (and even flourishes of graffiti or pigeon drops) that give life to something else. As I wander with Corey, photographing the city, I invariably see the backside of a particular Romanian church. I think it was once a synagogue, though I’m not absolutely certain. From the front, it’s a rather nice, blond building. From the back, it’s something rich and strange with rude little windows, some of which have been bricked over. The windows are old, with worn woodwork and the vague shapes of paint cans and toilet paper rolls vaguely curtained from outside scrutiny. The windows are spaced irregularly and far apart. They are jarring contrasts to the bricks surrounding them. But it’s always the bricks that draw me. Their colors are various. Sometimes intense. Sometimes subtle. It all depends on meteorological conditions and the angle of view. Most recently, I saw the bricks and the windows through twilight and rain, and got the impression that I was looking at a narrative I could scarcely fathom. I am familiar with books. I am familiar with ancient scrolls. I’m even familiar with walls, carved with recognizable hieroglyphic doodles, cuneiform spikes, or alphabet-rendered declarations in Latin and Greek. And now, I wonder at the reality of walls themselves as narrative. What if the bricklayers and masons responsible for so much urban construction are also writers. What if they are poets, lyricists, or novelists of an arcane pedigree. What if they know each brick by name and by tone and arrange them in ways that only brick-readers may understand. I thought of this as I saw this wall and its ruddy/blond bricks, separated in rows by darker, blocks of clay that looked as if they were stained with soot. Can you read them from left to right (or right to left) pausing at the punctuation of windows? I often wonder—if this is the case—what vast and unread novels, poems, or songs stand around us, easily seen but not-so-easily read. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great (and drier) week than Chicago currently faces.