It drew deeply from his life in Park Slope, where he shared a brick townhouse with his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt.

“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”

Mentioned this to someone who moved to Bushwick and kept saying "I wish more of Brooklyn was like this" with a rebuttal saying "this is why the people who made it attractive to you aren't here anymore" and got the "it's not my problem" shit. https://twitter.com/hollley/status/1641149981678530560. I think that's where being a "transplant" into a different place becomes violent - your presence IMMEDIATELY disrupts the environments you're in (and because of that, you have an obligation to minimize it as much as possible).

There was a culture then, almost a requirement, that one needed to build platforms and contexts (social or political) to support one’s thesis, and then material practice would follow. These issues were pressing, because by this time I had begun to teach at Cooper Union. I was negotiating between promoting a rigorous painting model and a new context—conversations with students and colleagues about contemporary art issues and institutional critique. So it was a very complicated time for me as an educator, to figure out how to insist on a conversation about painting rigor in relation to contemporary art. I continued to go the way that I needed to with my own work, both protecting it from the institutional framework and furthering my ideas about painting in school and in the studio—it was a tough, amazing time.

In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report showing that New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country.