László Jakab Orsós lives in Brooklyn Heights, where busy men on bicycles will deliver just about anything: Thai food, craft cocktails, firewood, cocaine, deli sandwiches. Orsós, a cultural curator at the Brooklyn Public Library, recently took on some part-time work as a delivery guy, dispatching poetry and political speeches throughout Brooklyn. “We’re sneaking into people’s minds!” he said the other day, as an Emily Dickinson poem blared from a Bluetooth speaker mounted on his bicycle. “My heart sings!”
Orsós, who is fifty-seven, grew up in Gellénháza, a model village in western Hungary, which was developed by an oil company. He first visited New York in his twenties, to learn English while painting apartments in the East Village: “My stepbrothers were here studying history and philosophy, driving cabs, and I was reading ‘Great Expectations,’ in the pocket edition, at jobs, underlining all the words, so I had my vocabulary.” After six months, he moved to Budapest, where he spent two decades as a screenwriter, a college professor, and a restaurant critic. “At forty, you start reassessing your life,” he said. “Why did I leave Hungary? The boredom. I just wanted to see how I would operate in a bigger setting.”
He did well. First, as a diplomat, later heading up Salman Rushdie’s international literary festival, all the while riding a one-speed steel-framed orange bicycle, with cantilever brakes, upright handlebars, and a plush saddle, which he bought the week he moved to New York. “I don’t wear a helmet,” he said. “I’ve tried so many helmets, and I’ve promised so many of my friends and lovers, ‘I will wear a helmet, yes!’ But I can’t. I just feel totally constrained. Like my head is wrapped.” Orsós laughed. “I don’t own a tie, either. And it’s not a revolutionary statement. I just can’t—I feel like I’m going to die in a minute! It suffocates me.”
Recently, Orsós pedalled past the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in suède desert chukkas, a patterned V-neck, and a heavy pink overshirt; no tie, no helmet. “Last year, I had this idea, late at night, biking home,” he said. “What if the library building could start whispering? How amazing would it be if the building could just start speaking?” This spring, he pulled it off: ten library branches across Brooklyn began to broadcast recordings of their holdings (poems by the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo; speeches by Malcolm X; excerpts from Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year”) on outdoor speakers, for passersby to enjoy and ignore and remember and forget.
“Libraries in Europe are totally different concepts—they’re closed off from life,” Orsós said. “In America, libraries are cultural platforms. We don’t have chandeliers, we don’t have marble desks. We have shitty tables, rickety chairs, fluorescent lights, people murmuring gibberish and walking around with thousands of handwritten pages—the manuscript they’ve scribbled down in the course of their life. But that’s what makes it!” A library is more than a building, he explained. It’s a mind-set, it’s the exchange of ideas: “The library comes with us wherever we go!”
In Boerum Hill, Elizabeth Bishop and Brenda Shaughnessy echoed through the brownstone-lined streets, from Orsós’s bike speaker. Maya Angelou’s voice bellowed, “Be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud.” A woman with a red tote bag, a straw hat, and two iced coffees paused under a magnolia tree, listening. “Be a blessing to somebody!” Angelou read. The woman’s Labrador eyed a squirrel. Nearby, a man wearing a raincoat barked into his cell phone.
“Normally, it’s loud, thrumming, honking—a totally different syncopation,” the woman said. “It was a totally different mood all of sudden.”
Orsós rode on. At a stoplight, another cyclist, with a speaker blasting dubstep, pulled up. The riders exchanged knowing glances; Frank O’Hara and Skrillex caterwauled together in the warm air. A few minutes later, Orsós pedalled past a sidewalk café, E. E. Cummings’s “i carry your heart with me” trailing behind him: “(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.”
A blond woman wearing a black turtleneck looked up from her iPad; an older couple sharing a club sandwich did not. A baby in a stroller almost cried.
Nearby, at a crosswalk in Cobble Hill, listeners strained to hear a Sonia Sanchez poem over the sound of an idling bus. “It’s not an avenue project, it’s a side-street project,” Orsós said. “I really believe in the metaphysical component—that, even when people are not knowing what’s going on, it’s happening, it’s finding a way into their bodies.” A man wearing wireless Bose headphones walked past Orsós, indifferent to the streaming verse. “Robots are not our audience!” Orsós said. “I call them robots,” he explained. “The people with the headphones. And I’m really afraid of them. They’re not human. It’s weird.” ♦
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