"This city of stone and stridor is not a sentinent perpetuation of Old New York...it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life." --H.P. Lovecraft, "He"
November 5, 2004
A middle-aged lady comes into the bookstore looking as if she had just spent a night in a damp room with a flour sack over her head. Everyone sort of looks that way. She's one of these admirable older New York women, middle-class, accented, and dressed in an inexpensive but nice-looking coat and a delicate earth-toned scarf, presumably bought after close reference to a scale opposing budgets versus necessary luxuries. "It's a terrible day, she says. Out there they hate us, they hate New York. 9-11? 'Couldnt've happened to a nicer people...'" She shakes her head. I tell her I'm from the Midwest, but from Michigan. "Oh really, how did Michigan come out," she asks. "Blue? Good for them, but just barely, I bet. They hate us. They think we're Sodom and Gommorah, don't they?" I was at a bar until 3:00 in the morning watching images of Ohio swim around on the television screen, moving from white to red to blue, pulling back to show the state in context, surrounded by its midwestern neighbors, then going into deep focus and breaking it down county by county, deep blue veins creeping from Toledo and Cleveland into the red backwater counties. Coming from a state as recognizable as a hand, I always get a little seasick looking at the shapeless states, those conservative little blobs of geographic spit. Last night, it was worse. After a while, when it started to not look so good for Kerry, I just waited to see how Michigan would turn out. I couldn't believe it could remain undecided for so long, That was a real blow. Around the time Wolf Blitzer said, "This is unpecedented! CNN has just declared Ohio a green state! Ohio is too close to call!" I went home. I like Bob Dylan, but his superiority to Donovan has been wildly exaggeratted. He's preeningly obsessed with self-definition, and with locating something pure within the baffling American debate over freedom. In other words, he speaks for the fat strain of adolescence that defines American adulthood these days. His lyrics deflate more often than not, and consistently short of great poetry. He's the hero of rock critics who have never had the patience to actually read Emerson or Whitman, and increasingly of literary critics who will take the closest thing alive. George Orwell, on the eve of World War 2: Just woke up from a strange dream:
I try to explain that the religious nutjobs are in the minority, that otherwise reasonable people are just afraid of the future and that the Midwest isn't a bizarre alternate universe where the bodies of sex offenders are nailed to telephone poles on the way into town. But New Yorkers have as little perspective on the Midwest as Midwesterners have on New York.
New Yorkers are in a terrible position right now. New York has the double burden of being distrusted by America and of being its most visible representative. Bush being in power increases the chance of that attack happening while guaranteeing that anti-terrorism funds are going to be diverted out of New York and into Iraq and those solidly Republican states that obviously don't need them. Secular New York is caught in the middle of a religious war. The Midwest from this perspective is some wattle-throated old Christian matron safely ensconced in the middle of nowhere, clucking her tongue at an image on Fox news of a smoking crater in the center of midtown Manhattan and chalking it all up to "God's Plan."
Anyway, I tell the lady, "Life sucks, huh?" For now, she says.
12:26 AM
12:25 AM
Reading Dylan's Chronicles, it becomes apparent that Dylan did once have the kind of patience his critics lack, in a off-the-cuff, Cliff's Notes sort of way. Dylan has a pretty engaging style in his memoir, more Twain than Whitman, which seems about right to me. Whitman still is the representative American poet whether you like it or not--not even Eliot or Stein can stand next to him. He was self-obssessed too, but wanted that self corrupted and subsumed by a impure America in the spirit of experiential play. Dylan's self-obsession is not of this order. Dylan prescribes and adapts, but never experiments. He is in most ways Whitman's polar opposite. Whitman wanted to lay down with his hypothetical Mr. Jones and point out the constallations. Dylan's worst tendency, which he indulges repeatedly, is to condemn with adolescent fury any Mr. Jones who dares to wear a mask. Then he tries them on with supreme and unexamined hypocracy:I was never any more than what I was--a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze...Eventually different anachronisms were thrust upon me...Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite)--stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior--those are tough ones.
I really do like Bob Dylan, and prefer A Hard Rain to Howl for all that they are. But what bullshit. I found myself having to put down Chronicles to pick up Hammer of the Gods, the great biography of Led Zeppelin. The televisions went next. Watching a big color TV exploding on pavement from a great hieght was a favorite Zeppelin pastime. The previous year at an old battle-ground, the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Led Zeppelin had thrown all their televisions into the sea below. As Peter Grant was paying the bill, the hotel manager wistfully remarked that he had always wanted to chuck a TV out the window himself. 'Have one on us,' roared Grant, and peeled off another 500 dollar bill. The manager went right upstairs and heaved a big Motorola off the balcony.
It would be nice to have a few more geniuses like that running around, and a few less like Bob Dylan.
12:24 AM
"Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny strem of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period--twenty years, perhaps--during which he did not notice it."
12:23 AM
Those who went to school did so by lottery. Some went later and some went earlier, based on a test you'd been taking your entire life, watched and graded by an oligarchy of the omnipotent. I went at the age of 31. The first thing that was determined for me when I got to the city-sized and bleach-white mediterranean campus was who I'd be married to and where I'd live.
The house was full of painters and carpenters when I got there and I got the impression that they hadn't done well on their tests. The plastic tents they worked beneath looked depressingly well lived in. They were all much younger than me and looked at me as if I were an old man, with bewildered resentment. As they watched me, I grew equally resentful. A bunch of nu-metal creeps, I thought.
The wife chosen for me was amiable but dull. I considered myself fortunate that the house chosen for me was on a street lined with fast food restaurants, stretching out to the horizon.
My wife and I had an omnipotent kid. He was constantly losing his temper, calling for his dinnerin languages neither my wife nor I could understand.
One night I attempted to escape from the house, from my family. The world loooked huge and I was struck down to my knees with an agorophobic sledgehammer, equal parts guilt and terror. Then I woke up.
12:20 AM
Greg Purcell | noslander2006@yahoo.com
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