Back By Popular Demand
Enough people have asked me where the blog has gone that I've decided to resurrect it. Honestly, I was surprised that anybody cared, but really, I am flattered. I had some requests to encapsulate the weekend I spent in New York, so here it is. A pulp story in the making.
On a low rise above a T & A gas station, which always makes him think of Tits and Ass, not gas, he waits in a long overcoat that is not warm enough for the weather and a gray scarf that his mom made for him. This low hill has the dubious distinction of being part of the Baltimore Travel Plaza, a godforsaken land with a lovely view of I-95, which rises on concrete girders above the city as if it might ascend to some heavenly plane. I-95 leads to New York, and here the heavenly references must end. Heaven, though free of strip malls and cul-de-sacs, is tangential, merely a suburb of that great heathen city which waits to be submerged, once again, in a great biblical flood as the polar ice caps gush forth.
Let us return to our hero, who is out of place here. He looks like one of those pretentious Hopkins students who are always writing dissertations about the participal form as elucidated in Ulysses or the life cycles of squid. In fact, he is one of those fucking students, removed from his ivory tower only to go to that great heathen city in the hopes of meeting with other writers to pretend that his existence is not a mere gaudy bubble upon the surface of this beseiged planet.
He is taking the $20 Chinatown bus because he has better things to spend money on than Greyhound or Amtrak. For example, wine, drugs in abundance, overpriced avant-garde performance art, perhaps even a brief parlay with god at 3.99 a minute.
He arrives in Chinatown an hour late, and, because he is not good at reading maps and does not want to ask anybody for directions, wanders aimlessly in the vast reaches of the Lower East Side. He makes his way around bags of trash and porno shops and storefronts that are little more than garage doors pulled over faceless brick buildings. He finds a refrigerator box and gets to work, carving a small window on one side and then spreading the clothing he has brought for the weekend over the cardboard floor beneath him. This will be his bedding. Through his little window, he watches the great heathen city beyond him. At this point, the reader is wondering what nefarious gases might have been piped through him on the Chinatown bus or at the Tits & Ass gas station. In reality, his behavior can be quite clearly delineated.
He is a writer and he has recently read the first novel in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, "City of Glass," a metaphysical pseudo-murder mystery in which the main character becomes homeless and crazed in his inadvertent search for the original language of god. And so our writer watches the world go by through his little window, and he waits for a sign.
****************
My weekend began with congee in the Lower East Side, an authentic Chinese rice porridge with fresh ginger and mushrooms, and ended with cream puffs in the Village. I had a great time with Meredith, a good friend of mine and a first year fiction student in Cornell's MFA program. We had a good time philosophizing, talking about fiction and literature, being crude and ridiculous, and talking shit. I met a lot of great people, including a brilliant pianist and composer, a dancer from Montana who is also an environmentalist, a guy who designs bondage jewelry, and one of the first year poets from Cornell. I went to the galleries in Chelsea and tried to figure out how the hell some of this art could sell for ten grand. We ate delicious food, we spent hours on the subway, we walked until our legs were tired stumps. We lay on the ground in Grand Central Station in the middle of the night, and I pointed out the artifiicial constellations to Meredith, who is blind, until a security guard shooed us away. We ate a half-eaten, abandoned bagel at a coffeeshop in Williamsburg. We had brunch in the Village. We met up with an old friend of mine from a writing circle in Portland who is now an editor at Picador. I watched people with insatiable hunger, whether they were beautiful women or madmen, artists or bricklayers. I should buy one of those tacky tee shirts that says I heart New York, but no amount of hipster irony can really summon that cliche turned hip turned cliche back from the dead. I wish I had remembered to bring along the shirt that Meredith got for me, which says: Nobody Knows I'm a Deaf Lesbian. That explains everything I'm feeling in a nutshell.
On a low rise above a T & A gas station, which always makes him think of Tits and Ass, not gas, he waits in a long overcoat that is not warm enough for the weather and a gray scarf that his mom made for him. This low hill has the dubious distinction of being part of the Baltimore Travel Plaza, a godforsaken land with a lovely view of I-95, which rises on concrete girders above the city as if it might ascend to some heavenly plane. I-95 leads to New York, and here the heavenly references must end. Heaven, though free of strip malls and cul-de-sacs, is tangential, merely a suburb of that great heathen city which waits to be submerged, once again, in a great biblical flood as the polar ice caps gush forth.
Let us return to our hero, who is out of place here. He looks like one of those pretentious Hopkins students who are always writing dissertations about the participal form as elucidated in Ulysses or the life cycles of squid. In fact, he is one of those fucking students, removed from his ivory tower only to go to that great heathen city in the hopes of meeting with other writers to pretend that his existence is not a mere gaudy bubble upon the surface of this beseiged planet.
He is taking the $20 Chinatown bus because he has better things to spend money on than Greyhound or Amtrak. For example, wine, drugs in abundance, overpriced avant-garde performance art, perhaps even a brief parlay with god at 3.99 a minute.
He arrives in Chinatown an hour late, and, because he is not good at reading maps and does not want to ask anybody for directions, wanders aimlessly in the vast reaches of the Lower East Side. He makes his way around bags of trash and porno shops and storefronts that are little more than garage doors pulled over faceless brick buildings. He finds a refrigerator box and gets to work, carving a small window on one side and then spreading the clothing he has brought for the weekend over the cardboard floor beneath him. This will be his bedding. Through his little window, he watches the great heathen city beyond him. At this point, the reader is wondering what nefarious gases might have been piped through him on the Chinatown bus or at the Tits & Ass gas station. In reality, his behavior can be quite clearly delineated.
He is a writer and he has recently read the first novel in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, "City of Glass," a metaphysical pseudo-murder mystery in which the main character becomes homeless and crazed in his inadvertent search for the original language of god. And so our writer watches the world go by through his little window, and he waits for a sign.
****************
My weekend began with congee in the Lower East Side, an authentic Chinese rice porridge with fresh ginger and mushrooms, and ended with cream puffs in the Village. I had a great time with Meredith, a good friend of mine and a first year fiction student in Cornell's MFA program. We had a good time philosophizing, talking about fiction and literature, being crude and ridiculous, and talking shit. I met a lot of great people, including a brilliant pianist and composer, a dancer from Montana who is also an environmentalist, a guy who designs bondage jewelry, and one of the first year poets from Cornell. I went to the galleries in Chelsea and tried to figure out how the hell some of this art could sell for ten grand. We ate delicious food, we spent hours on the subway, we walked until our legs were tired stumps. We lay on the ground in Grand Central Station in the middle of the night, and I pointed out the artifiicial constellations to Meredith, who is blind, until a security guard shooed us away. We ate a half-eaten, abandoned bagel at a coffeeshop in Williamsburg. We had brunch in the Village. We met up with an old friend of mine from a writing circle in Portland who is now an editor at Picador. I watched people with insatiable hunger, whether they were beautiful women or madmen, artists or bricklayers. I should buy one of those tacky tee shirts that says I heart New York, but no amount of hipster irony can really summon that cliche turned hip turned cliche back from the dead. I wish I had remembered to bring along the shirt that Meredith got for me, which says: Nobody Knows I'm a Deaf Lesbian. That explains everything I'm feeling in a nutshell.
posted by Franz K at 1:27 PM
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