Reading Report #2

Brooklyn climbs itself like an autodidact, like a vine using its own stalk as a trellis, like a bridge being built out across a river with no supports. The streets work the graveyard shift for the squeaky wheels dreaming self-improvement dreams, but the days thwart ambition with an inventory of niggling details: "Beer bottles and beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that had held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces." Or, rather, human feces? This is a civilized, late twentieth-century Brooklyn, but a Brooklyn in which men urinate out into the void from the windows of the upper floors of brownstones. A protagonist reminisces about a childhood hobby of shitting as a group pastime, an outdoor activity. Do the citizens of the borough, bum and burgher alike, take delight in shitting in the gutters, on subway rails, in the parks, on stoops, in the rivers, on sidewalks? Do we all stand and point and howl with the joy of our own unaided manufacture? Who was it who said that this is the only city in the world where the dogs can step in human shit? Brooklyn is a wise child, innocent and depraved, wild-eyed and sleepless, its Brooklynness impossible to box, wrap, or bottle. Brooklyn is a nation of immigrants and exhibitionists, escapees and cartographers, pirate lepidopterists and amateur gang leaders, petty thieves on sabbatical and nice guys who got stuck halfway; in short, life is not entirely wonderful here, and on that point, children and adults can agree, but they always get stuck squabbling over the particulars. Every curve of this marvelous place, a once and future garbage dump; each corner harbors ghosts; every crook vibrates with the history of the culture. (For example, did you know that part of The Warriors was filmed on one of the dead platforms of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop?) I love New York.

Positively 4th Street

I've forgotten the party, but I remember the bum, the one in Washington Square, stumbling around singing "New York, New York" to all the tourists and the students and the dogwalkers and dealers, really belting it out; he had a hell of a voice this guy, a boozy, old time Bowery voice, a real charming hounddog crooner, but he only had one note, a sustained shout he threw in anywhere he wanted to: at the end of "New York, New Yo--------k," or in the middle of some other jumbled line. He sang,

If you can make it there
You'll make it anywhere
It's up to you - 8 fucking million
You---------------------

He wore a wool Yankees cap and jean jacket and carried around a jug of chocolate milk he drank from in between songs. He was drunk, but I wasn't sure it was permanent or temporary. For all I knew this guy had a house with a backyard in Queens; he had work boots on; he could have been a contractor or the owner of a trucking company or a lost beat poet, the one in Tangier, sitting slumped in the corner of the room, ignoring the others, picking away at his guitar, mumbling to himself, "If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier." What I know for sure, what we all remember, is that this man was compelled to sing and he was making it up as he went along.

Summer and Smoke; or, the Muppets of Tangier

Remember that party back at the beginning of the summer, or maybe it was the end of the spring, the party where at one point I was talking about how I misremember facts, get details fogged and discombobulated, maybe especially when it comes to the biographies or writers, like how I remember the story of Carson McCullers out on Nantucket in the summer of 1946 with Tennessee Williams and his companion, Pancho Rodriguez, and the two writers would sit every morning, all summer long, on opposite sides of the dining-room table, kitty-corner to one another, Tom with his typewriter and Carson with hers and a bottle of whiskey between them, during which stay she wrote The Member of the Wedding and he wrote The Glass Menagerie—except, reading McCullers's biography I realize I've got it wrong, that summer she wrote a play based on her third novel, and he, rather, was working on Summer and Smoke (in a year when Menagerie was still running on Broadway); except, come to think of it, I might not have mentioned that story at all at that party (and I might actually be accurately remembering an old, pickled creative writing teacher's inaccurate recounting of the story), but I think I did talk about my memory of Allen Ginsburg showing up at William S. Burroughs's house in Tangier, finding Bill anesthetized and inconsolable, sprawled on his bed like a lovesick nihilist with a monkey on his back, pages upon loose pages, stained and trampled typescript, strewn about the apartment, which Allen picked up and started to read, and maybe Jack Kerouac was there too, and somehow, in the retelling, Jack and Allen took on the voices of Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, if I'm remembering right, and Bill had the voice of Sam the Eagle, and Kermit and Fozzie thought some of Sam's pages were pretty good, maybe they could put them together in some kind of order, like a novel, and Sam said no, no, it wasn't worth it, life was misery and romance was a crock and boys were fickle and besides, there was no more decent hash to be had in all of Morocco, but Kermit and Fozzie gathered all the pages together and put them in an order that made sense and took them to a publisher in Paris, and that became Naked Lunch (although maybe I didn't mention that story at the party either, maybe it came up that afternoon back at the beginning of the summer when we were talking on West 4th Street, not far from the library, while a bum sang variations on the old jingle our city used to use to advertise itself to the world, "I Love New York," at us)? Anyway, that was a fun party.

The Last Gatsby

One of the bittersweet pleasures of the end of summer is the nostalgia one feels for the promising days only a few months earlier, back at the beginning of the season before the deep heat had settled in, back when the dogwoods and pear trees were still in bloom, and people asked each other about their plans, and all of life seemed projected forward towards the prospect of those three golden months. On a breezy day in May, drunk on my own utopian schemes for the summer, I walked into the library looking for Gatsby. I wanted a summery book, something alluring and corruptible, and apparently I was not alone. The only copy of the book left on the shelf had been thoroughly annotated. The corners of the book’s green hardcover had been thumbed down and some of the pages were missing corners. The body of the text itself was a palimpsest of misreading, layers of ill-conceived attempts at exegesis composed for years of last-minute assignments. Each reader had left signs of his or her ownership of the text: underlinings, coffee rings, phone numbers, questions in the margin – (Symbolism? Sexism!), a haphazard to-do list. One generous scholar had taken the time to provide his fellow readers with Chinese translations of the tricky words: vista (境界), buoyed (纽约), murmur (私语), divan (烟)… I reread Fitzgerald against his readers, pausing occasionally to look out the window at the people strolling through the park below. What struck me this time was the way that Fitzgerald introduces Daisy and Gatsby, the line for line beauty of the descriptions, the forward momentum, especially in this passage:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragiley bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of the picture against the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out in the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

According to his notes, the Chinese scholar read this brief introduction to Daisy, which contains in miniature the action of the entire book, as an example of foreshadowing color symbolism. Rose, he wrote in the margin, is not a real color. Rose = red+ white. Prepain [?] and bleeding. Red = anger. Represent blood. White = weak. It seems appropriate that this novel on the tragic results of willfully misreading each other – projecting our own desires onto that green light on the horizon – should be so variously and consistently misread. Without disputing whether rose is a color or whether red really equals anger, we can agree that prepain seems a strange and apt term, both for the moment when Tom Buchanan first slams the window shut and for these early days of September when we feel the sobering postpain of the summer and the prepain of what’s to come.