This post is a brief one.
I am putting some writings together and looking for people to proof-read the manuscripts. Thoughts, questions, grammatical corrections and criticism are appreciated.
If you would not mind reading these through as I finish them, then please email me at cirrus.of.the.forest@gmail.com . I would be grateful for the help.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
The City of New Orleans: Paper Territory
Some recent events had caused me to wonder if I were by nature a good man, or good only by restraint.
So I left Chicago, fleeing south on what is probably the most famous train in the amtrak system. The skyscrapers receded into the lake, and there was nothing more but the streaks of small town lights. The train rocked as though it ran on wooden rails, giving pops and starts like backfire. My sleep was uneasy, troubled and dreamless. Then the sun rose on Memphis.
Coming into Tennessee and then Mississippi. I saw flat clay roads, cypress swamps, and tin-roofed towns with folks slouching around the corner store watching the train go by. I had entered the territory of the small Black town. Places where Blacks held the high offices along with the low. Black doctors and Black mayors were nothing unusual to me. Nor Black laborers and Black delivery men. I've been to Oakland. But those in the median line of small town work - Black bar tenders, Black mechanics, Black farmers - was something I had yet to encounter. No matter how much of the country I see, there's always more to it.
I realized, passing those towns, how little I had yet seen. That a new event could seem in some way a departure of my idea of my own country. That each new place challenged my assessment of national identity until I could touch it, smell it, run my feet over the curbs, then, add it to my vocabulary of experience, saying This too is America.
I've traveled a bit, but the greatest portion of my geographical knowledge has been learned second-hand. Rand Macnally and Google have let my mind wander over the earth when the rest of me couldn't follow. But places like Australia and Alaska, though I can locate them and even without reference describe their general contours, remain places on paper. Flat, two-dimensional kingdoms written over with names I've read. Even citizens of those countries, when they have tried to prove something about their native land, have shown me papers.
I can draw a map of the US free-hand, even tricky states like Washington, and I don't confuse which square state is which. But I realize that for me there is yet a large stretch of paper-territory within my own country.
Internally I have my own map, which if drawn out would look nothing like the shape of the country, but a maundering procession of vistas arranged several thousands of miles long. A line of trees, parks, canyons, mountains, shores, and city blocks all knit together to a single string, but which together would still not comprise even forty states.
The train kept on southward. The dialogue was changing along with the humidity. The train population was split roughly fifty-fifty of whites and blacks who were oddly genteel with each other though both spoke with equal vulgarity amongst themselves. Albeit with different cuss words - the white 'cracker-ass' and 'sonofabitch' to the black 'motherfucker' - and more quietly than their northern brethren. Speech was becoming more slurred. I overheard the man behind me speaking what I thought might be Creole till I realized he was speaking English without the added encumbrance the letters R and L. I expected an elderly man with an underbite, some bayou relic en route to the big city, yet instead there was a trim-looking high-school boy, maybe 18.
The cultural shift was showing in other ways. The men's preference for suspenders. The above ground cemeteries. The iron work.
Great boiling cumuli came up out of the south and knock-kneed cypresses tottered up from the muck, veiled in clinging moss. An interminable swamp stretched onward to Ponchartrain. The train crossed an inlet, scaring up great flocks of white birds as we crossed the waters and onward to the clouds. I looked out the window, hoping childishly for an alligator. Egrets stalked the rushes, patiently. Hanging above us was Cloudland National Park, a suspended Yosemite, Denali in vapor. I had missed how the wamth of a rolling grassland or shallow sea can make these Maxfield Parish sky-scapes. Those clouds were glorious.
The air felt like being held in the mouth of a dog, exhalation curling in under the collar, saturating the neckline and underarms with the heat of its breath. Even still on the train, my undergarments were gradually moistening with sweat.
What the hell was I doing? Who goes to New Orleans in August?
So I left Chicago, fleeing south on what is probably the most famous train in the amtrak system. The skyscrapers receded into the lake, and there was nothing more but the streaks of small town lights. The train rocked as though it ran on wooden rails, giving pops and starts like backfire. My sleep was uneasy, troubled and dreamless. Then the sun rose on Memphis.
Coming into Tennessee and then Mississippi. I saw flat clay roads, cypress swamps, and tin-roofed towns with folks slouching around the corner store watching the train go by. I had entered the territory of the small Black town. Places where Blacks held the high offices along with the low. Black doctors and Black mayors were nothing unusual to me. Nor Black laborers and Black delivery men. I've been to Oakland. But those in the median line of small town work - Black bar tenders, Black mechanics, Black farmers - was something I had yet to encounter. No matter how much of the country I see, there's always more to it.
I realized, passing those towns, how little I had yet seen. That a new event could seem in some way a departure of my idea of my own country. That each new place challenged my assessment of national identity until I could touch it, smell it, run my feet over the curbs, then, add it to my vocabulary of experience, saying This too is America.
I've traveled a bit, but the greatest portion of my geographical knowledge has been learned second-hand. Rand Macnally and Google have let my mind wander over the earth when the rest of me couldn't follow. But places like Australia and Alaska, though I can locate them and even without reference describe their general contours, remain places on paper. Flat, two-dimensional kingdoms written over with names I've read. Even citizens of those countries, when they have tried to prove something about their native land, have shown me papers.
I can draw a map of the US free-hand, even tricky states like Washington, and I don't confuse which square state is which. But I realize that for me there is yet a large stretch of paper-territory within my own country.
Internally I have my own map, which if drawn out would look nothing like the shape of the country, but a maundering procession of vistas arranged several thousands of miles long. A line of trees, parks, canyons, mountains, shores, and city blocks all knit together to a single string, but which together would still not comprise even forty states.
The train kept on southward. The dialogue was changing along with the humidity. The train population was split roughly fifty-fifty of whites and blacks who were oddly genteel with each other though both spoke with equal vulgarity amongst themselves. Albeit with different cuss words - the white 'cracker-ass' and 'sonofabitch' to the black 'motherfucker' - and more quietly than their northern brethren. Speech was becoming more slurred. I overheard the man behind me speaking what I thought might be Creole till I realized he was speaking English without the added encumbrance the letters R and L. I expected an elderly man with an underbite, some bayou relic en route to the big city, yet instead there was a trim-looking high-school boy, maybe 18.
The cultural shift was showing in other ways. The men's preference for suspenders. The above ground cemeteries. The iron work.
Great boiling cumuli came up out of the south and knock-kneed cypresses tottered up from the muck, veiled in clinging moss. An interminable swamp stretched onward to Ponchartrain. The train crossed an inlet, scaring up great flocks of white birds as we crossed the waters and onward to the clouds. I looked out the window, hoping childishly for an alligator. Egrets stalked the rushes, patiently. Hanging above us was Cloudland National Park, a suspended Yosemite, Denali in vapor. I had missed how the wamth of a rolling grassland or shallow sea can make these Maxfield Parish sky-scapes. Those clouds were glorious.
The air felt like being held in the mouth of a dog, exhalation curling in under the collar, saturating the neckline and underarms with the heat of its breath. Even still on the train, my undergarments were gradually moistening with sweat.
What the hell was I doing? Who goes to New Orleans in August?
Monday, September 3, 2012
Chicago Union Station
I was enjoying myself, and was having difficulty finding my next host thru Couchsurfing that I stayed in Minneapolis a few days beyond my rail reservation and ended up taking the bus to Chicago. My directions guided me to a parking lot between Washington and 3rd street outside the downtown for a midnight ride which showed up at 1. The passengers, irritated by the delay swore blue murder at the service of the Megabus company and offered their own thoughts on the superiority of Greyhound. The driver, understandably distressed by the delay and the treatment he now received, cussed them back. He was African-American, a fact a woman, black herself, felt compelled to indicate when she shouted, "Nigger, I got two boys, a son and a nephew, 6 foot 3 and 6 foot 1, at home, and I can beat their black asses so don't think I mind taking down a shorty-stubby like yourself."
The driver, in response, laughed. As did the woman. I sat there, baffled and feverish, delirious with some malady that made my head feel like it was full of bees all busily filling every sinus with the comb and wax of their horrible hive. They went on shouting and laughing across Wisconsin, the initial anger at the late departure replaced with jabs at the others ethnic background and sexual history. How is it that Black people can make racial slurs and assaults on preference seem so normative? That "motherfucker" could almost sound complimentary? The thoughts rambled through the mucus clogged chambers of my addled head.
The bus pulled up to the corner of Canal and Jackson, not far from where the rail would have brought me. I stumbled out, my sole objective to reach the hostel I had booked. Really, no rail trip across the US would be complete without a stop at Chicago Union Station. The monument to art deco decadence and enviable acoustics that is the Great Hall, the shy Amish passengers dandling babies, the hurried business suits. Penn station in New York is busier and has a better bistro selection, but can't offer so glamorous a backdrop.
I would have liked to have explored more, but this was a lay-over for me. I had been to Chicago before and besides was deeply engaged by a program of phlegm, hacking, and fever dreams. The following day I was to be out of town, southbound on the City of New Orleans, the train ride being the real reason I had arrived at all. My only grand experience of the city came as I left it, watching the towers drop into Lake Michigan, folding up into the dark of night, realizing that my sum experience of Chicago comes to a tally of roughly 10 days yet I've been homesick for it.
I don't know where this love comes from. It could be the old-fashioned modernism - as if steam-punk updated itself by a half century - the neighborhood feel, the home-town pride. And, despite those magnificent sky-scrapers, there's a real modesty towards accomplishment. There's money alright, but fewer pretenders to it. I've never encountered the same sort of outrages of excess walking the Loop as I have on a Manhattan stroll. Maybe it has something to do with being from a state whose primary export is still a palpable, exchangeable commodity and not an abstraction. Whose own creation story isn't founded off a mythic real estate deal or a water-rights swindle, but off the good, solid swing of a sledgehammer between the eyes of a prairie steer. This feels like a good city, with the stones and stenches all in just the right places.
The driver, in response, laughed. As did the woman. I sat there, baffled and feverish, delirious with some malady that made my head feel like it was full of bees all busily filling every sinus with the comb and wax of their horrible hive. They went on shouting and laughing across Wisconsin, the initial anger at the late departure replaced with jabs at the others ethnic background and sexual history. How is it that Black people can make racial slurs and assaults on preference seem so normative? That "motherfucker" could almost sound complimentary? The thoughts rambled through the mucus clogged chambers of my addled head.
The bus pulled up to the corner of Canal and Jackson, not far from where the rail would have brought me. I stumbled out, my sole objective to reach the hostel I had booked. Really, no rail trip across the US would be complete without a stop at Chicago Union Station. The monument to art deco decadence and enviable acoustics that is the Great Hall, the shy Amish passengers dandling babies, the hurried business suits. Penn station in New York is busier and has a better bistro selection, but can't offer so glamorous a backdrop.
I would have liked to have explored more, but this was a lay-over for me. I had been to Chicago before and besides was deeply engaged by a program of phlegm, hacking, and fever dreams. The following day I was to be out of town, southbound on the City of New Orleans, the train ride being the real reason I had arrived at all. My only grand experience of the city came as I left it, watching the towers drop into Lake Michigan, folding up into the dark of night, realizing that my sum experience of Chicago comes to a tally of roughly 10 days yet I've been homesick for it.
I don't know where this love comes from. It could be the old-fashioned modernism - as if steam-punk updated itself by a half century - the neighborhood feel, the home-town pride. And, despite those magnificent sky-scrapers, there's a real modesty towards accomplishment. There's money alright, but fewer pretenders to it. I've never encountered the same sort of outrages of excess walking the Loop as I have on a Manhattan stroll. Maybe it has something to do with being from a state whose primary export is still a palpable, exchangeable commodity and not an abstraction. Whose own creation story isn't founded off a mythic real estate deal or a water-rights swindle, but off the good, solid swing of a sledgehammer between the eyes of a prairie steer. This feels like a good city, with the stones and stenches all in just the right places.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Grinning, hollering, flapping my mit...
Things were beginning to look familiar in Minnesota. Trees and corn and cows, just like home. I grew up in New York, though I rarely say that's where I'm from. Not because I grew up in the unexceptional hills and holsteins part and I'm avoiding the 'no, not that one' conversation, but because I have no particular loyalty to it. I'm from wherever I got on the train, wherever I've thrown my bag. You can't go home again. I don't even seem to be trying.
My host in Minneapolis took me around on a motorcycle, showing me the holes in the various walls, setting me up with friends of his for drunken spelling bees, pointing at the giant spoon. Honestly, I was just glad to be on a motorcycle. My first time and I was doing a poor job of being cool and reserved - grinning, hollering, flapping my mit at passing motorists. I looked like the kid who had just come from the Lone Ranger's birthday party. And in the Twin Cities at midday during the week, one has the feeling of being in a racing arcade game: the generic sky-scrapers, the token and interchangeable pedestrians, the sky the shade of tv-screen blue. There was hardly anyone outside, either walking or driving on the spotlessly paved streets.
"Where is everybody?" I shouted over the wind and the motor.
"This is everybody," he said.
My host in Minneapolis took me around on a motorcycle, showing me the holes in the various walls, setting me up with friends of his for drunken spelling bees, pointing at the giant spoon. Honestly, I was just glad to be on a motorcycle. My first time and I was doing a poor job of being cool and reserved - grinning, hollering, flapping my mit at passing motorists. I looked like the kid who had just come from the Lone Ranger's birthday party. And in the Twin Cities at midday during the week, one has the feeling of being in a racing arcade game: the generic sky-scrapers, the token and interchangeable pedestrians, the sky the shade of tv-screen blue. There was hardly anyone outside, either walking or driving on the spotlessly paved streets.
"Where is everybody?" I shouted over the wind and the motor.
"This is everybody," he said.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Prairie Drifters
Roads, rails, rivers - I have to have something moving underneath me.
I bought a rail pass in Portland which was good for 15 days and 8 trains, anwhere I might want to go served by Amtrak.
Granted, that put some limits on destinations, but that didn't really matter very much given my purposes. I like motion, the rocking chassis of a machine conveying me onward over the continent. I like the manageable, packable life. I like the ever-changing background of faces. I like the many inconveniences and delays. The unexpected turns and accidents, the fervent possibility of mild cataclysm. A few nights before leaving, I heard a second-hand story of a cross-country train re-routed thru Wyoming, where the old lines buckled under the carriages and the engine jumped the line. Miles from any platform and hours from a relief train, the passengers had to disembark onto the prairie and pass the night inside a cattle shed. The lucky devils.
Many people say they like travel when in truth what they really like is arriving. I like the process of getting there moreso than the place itself. I would go to India if I could find a compelling enough means of conveyance. So I chose a city I had never been to - Minneapolis - and set course. There was really no great reason for being there, only for going.
The train crested the western slope of the Rockies and began its descent to the plains. I feel accomplished whenever I cross the continental divide. It is like coming into another country. Or rather, it is coming into another country. The plants and animals are different, the waters flow the other way. The land of origin is now irrevocably behind, and before you is an open scape of grasses, wheat, sheet metal towns and fence wire loping off to the horizon.
The Great Plains, are sometimes contemptuously viewed by those who favor sudden shifts in altitude as a bland and featureless place, like the middle chapters of a period romance novel, best skipped over so as to get to the more exciting parts. Point your finger out directly in front of you and sweep your arm in a long arc. There, you have traced the horizon.
Growing up, some of my best friends were trees, which gave me the notion that happiness involved being rooted to a place. Why anyone would choose to live somewhere a tree could die if left unwatered mystified me.
However the prairies, far from a lack luster footnote of geography, are the defining feature of the continent, and hold no small sway over what it means to be of this land. Think of 'America the Beautiful.' Sure, there's the sea-to-shinging-sea part, and that bit about purple mountains, but think of the amber waves, spacious skies, fruited plains. If we were an island - like Britain or Hawaii - we might have had a national identity allied with the sea. Yet I've been to towns within spitting distance of salt water - Orick, California, Sedro-Woolley, Washington - where the bars still hung with rodeo memorabilia and patrons swaggering under belt-buckles. These men who drank gawdawful beer and never called home anywhere near a roaming buffalo, yet whose speech was of cattle and diesel where geography would have suggested winds and tide. The pattern may be seen again in mountain towns and hill towns, and towns wrapped up in forest. If there is a town in North America that does not have its bar of wrangler wannabes I've seen it on no map.
The comparison is frequently made between the prairie and the ocean. I can see it, and I agree that my sentiments are largely familiar to those I have felt at the shore. They do have some commonalities. The spareness stirs wonder at what lay across and no matter how far back one pushes the horizon, yet it goes on. My childhood opinions have changed. Those early ideas based off arboreal contentment I've realize are ill-suited to the bipedal. I no longer see the plains as territory to get across - a long stretch between good lattes - but to enjoy the crossing. Everything that ever thrived here survived because it moved when the season required. The buffalo, the Indians, wild horses, antelope, wolves, even the grasses themselves, scattering by wings, burrs, and fire and shifting stalks in the wind.
The train comes to a stop in Havre for several hours to let a freight train pass. An old, coal-fired engine sits beside the tracks in a fenced-off area. The thing is an industrial behemoth, all wheels and gears and black with the promise of manifest destiny. Compared to it, the amtrak passenger service looks like a line of over-size lunch tins. The passengers go about the station, chatting, stretching their legs. One particularly fit traveler pulls out some sort of excerise device and executes an abdominal workout on the pavement. There are a surprising number of smokers, who enjoy a first then a second cigarette until the crew drains the septic and the stench drives us all aboard, save the few for whom this is the final destination.
I've come to enjoy the plains, yet am still surprised when a train pulls into a prairie town and people get off. I always expect the reverse. There's that old-rooted prejudice coming out again.
The train goes on, eastward over the prairies, and I sit and watch the darkness go by.
I bought a rail pass in Portland which was good for 15 days and 8 trains, anwhere I might want to go served by Amtrak.
Granted, that put some limits on destinations, but that didn't really matter very much given my purposes. I like motion, the rocking chassis of a machine conveying me onward over the continent. I like the manageable, packable life. I like the ever-changing background of faces. I like the many inconveniences and delays. The unexpected turns and accidents, the fervent possibility of mild cataclysm. A few nights before leaving, I heard a second-hand story of a cross-country train re-routed thru Wyoming, where the old lines buckled under the carriages and the engine jumped the line. Miles from any platform and hours from a relief train, the passengers had to disembark onto the prairie and pass the night inside a cattle shed. The lucky devils.
Many people say they like travel when in truth what they really like is arriving. I like the process of getting there moreso than the place itself. I would go to India if I could find a compelling enough means of conveyance. So I chose a city I had never been to - Minneapolis - and set course. There was really no great reason for being there, only for going.
The train crested the western slope of the Rockies and began its descent to the plains. I feel accomplished whenever I cross the continental divide. It is like coming into another country. Or rather, it is coming into another country. The plants and animals are different, the waters flow the other way. The land of origin is now irrevocably behind, and before you is an open scape of grasses, wheat, sheet metal towns and fence wire loping off to the horizon.
The Great Plains, are sometimes contemptuously viewed by those who favor sudden shifts in altitude as a bland and featureless place, like the middle chapters of a period romance novel, best skipped over so as to get to the more exciting parts. Point your finger out directly in front of you and sweep your arm in a long arc. There, you have traced the horizon.
Growing up, some of my best friends were trees, which gave me the notion that happiness involved being rooted to a place. Why anyone would choose to live somewhere a tree could die if left unwatered mystified me.
However the prairies, far from a lack luster footnote of geography, are the defining feature of the continent, and hold no small sway over what it means to be of this land. Think of 'America the Beautiful.' Sure, there's the sea-to-shinging-sea part, and that bit about purple mountains, but think of the amber waves, spacious skies, fruited plains. If we were an island - like Britain or Hawaii - we might have had a national identity allied with the sea. Yet I've been to towns within spitting distance of salt water - Orick, California, Sedro-Woolley, Washington - where the bars still hung with rodeo memorabilia and patrons swaggering under belt-buckles. These men who drank gawdawful beer and never called home anywhere near a roaming buffalo, yet whose speech was of cattle and diesel where geography would have suggested winds and tide. The pattern may be seen again in mountain towns and hill towns, and towns wrapped up in forest. If there is a town in North America that does not have its bar of wrangler wannabes I've seen it on no map.
The comparison is frequently made between the prairie and the ocean. I can see it, and I agree that my sentiments are largely familiar to those I have felt at the shore. They do have some commonalities. The spareness stirs wonder at what lay across and no matter how far back one pushes the horizon, yet it goes on. My childhood opinions have changed. Those early ideas based off arboreal contentment I've realize are ill-suited to the bipedal. I no longer see the plains as territory to get across - a long stretch between good lattes - but to enjoy the crossing. Everything that ever thrived here survived because it moved when the season required. The buffalo, the Indians, wild horses, antelope, wolves, even the grasses themselves, scattering by wings, burrs, and fire and shifting stalks in the wind.
The train comes to a stop in Havre for several hours to let a freight train pass. An old, coal-fired engine sits beside the tracks in a fenced-off area. The thing is an industrial behemoth, all wheels and gears and black with the promise of manifest destiny. Compared to it, the amtrak passenger service looks like a line of over-size lunch tins. The passengers go about the station, chatting, stretching their legs. One particularly fit traveler pulls out some sort of excerise device and executes an abdominal workout on the pavement. There are a surprising number of smokers, who enjoy a first then a second cigarette until the crew drains the septic and the stench drives us all aboard, save the few for whom this is the final destination.
I've come to enjoy the plains, yet am still surprised when a train pulls into a prairie town and people get off. I always expect the reverse. There's that old-rooted prejudice coming out again.
The train goes on, eastward over the prairies, and I sit and watch the darkness go by.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Promiscuously reading
The best of insults sting for their accuracy. As evidence I submit the following.
"Are you a handyman?" she asked.
"In what sense?" I said.
"Can you do anything or do you just talk about books?"
I'm sure that I can. I will tally my talents. Let's see:
- I can sing while playing the ukulele, guitar, and if the wind is right, on flute as well
- I can tell a joke twice to the same person and get them to laugh both times
- I consider San Francisco and New York to be within walking distance of each other
- I can say 'yes', 'no', 'please', 'thank you', and 'very large beer' in no less than five languages
I possess, in short, nearly all those talents that make one appear incomparably magnificent to an eleven-year old, and exasperatingly directionless to an employer.
I've never been to the left bank of the 1920s, but I imagine it was probably full of such types as myself. Despondent wanderers, swishing their drinks, talking Art and God and all the other celebrities whose parties we're never invited to. Criticising the bourgeousie because we envy their mental and financial stability. Lamenting that all the good stuff has already happened and there will never again be anything as thumpingly good as Moby Dick, much less the Bible.
In other words, moaners. The sorts of people I can't stand precisely because I resemble them too much. I don't mean to compare myself to the likes of Steinbeck and Hemmingway - the moaner I like the moaner I don't - merely to their company, which must have been rife with scribblers of mediocrity. The lesser moaners, whose wretched stuff exists mostly to justify the less-wretched works of others. The ones such as myself, who failed even as they believed so fervently that literature could deliver them they consider writing as prayer.
Yes, I talk about books, as priests do God, as old men their vanished youth - obsessively, longingly, enviously.
So I fled for Portland and Powell's, that mighty cathedral of literature, before Seattle and its biting accuracy could get me down any further.
On my first trip to Portland, some 6 years ago, I visited for a week, 6 days of which I spent in Powell's. If I go to Portland and I don't visit Powell's I might as well have never left the rail station, or airport, or however I came to arrive. If it weren't for that bookstore, the city would have very limited appeal to me.
I feel safe, secure within it. A maggot buried in the apple. Wandering the aisles, reading promiscuously from the various titles of which I've never heard, bringing the older copies to my nose and smelling the different odors of paper and binding.
I wish I were a book myself, sometimes. A treasured thing, observed and appreciated, contributed to - as I write in the margins so might others write in me - argued with, despised, dog-eared, quoted, re-shelved, and re-read, appreciating and depreciating, placed amongst other titles with our pages whispering stories, then misplaced, misunderstood, burned or pulped.
Which, in sum, I suppose is not much different than the lives of the aged. In which case I might get there yet, if I can find other things to do to fill my years than just talk about books.
En-route to Minneapolis. More-or-less because it is there, and for no greater reason than that.
"Are you a handyman?" she asked.
"In what sense?" I said.
"Can you do anything or do you just talk about books?"
I'm sure that I can. I will tally my talents. Let's see:
- I can sing while playing the ukulele, guitar, and if the wind is right, on flute as well
- I can tell a joke twice to the same person and get them to laugh both times
- I consider San Francisco and New York to be within walking distance of each other
- I can say 'yes', 'no', 'please', 'thank you', and 'very large beer' in no less than five languages
I possess, in short, nearly all those talents that make one appear incomparably magnificent to an eleven-year old, and exasperatingly directionless to an employer.
I've never been to the left bank of the 1920s, but I imagine it was probably full of such types as myself. Despondent wanderers, swishing their drinks, talking Art and God and all the other celebrities whose parties we're never invited to. Criticising the bourgeousie because we envy their mental and financial stability. Lamenting that all the good stuff has already happened and there will never again be anything as thumpingly good as Moby Dick, much less the Bible.
In other words, moaners. The sorts of people I can't stand precisely because I resemble them too much. I don't mean to compare myself to the likes of Steinbeck and Hemmingway - the moaner I like the moaner I don't - merely to their company, which must have been rife with scribblers of mediocrity. The lesser moaners, whose wretched stuff exists mostly to justify the less-wretched works of others. The ones such as myself, who failed even as they believed so fervently that literature could deliver them they consider writing as prayer.
Yes, I talk about books, as priests do God, as old men their vanished youth - obsessively, longingly, enviously.
So I fled for Portland and Powell's, that mighty cathedral of literature, before Seattle and its biting accuracy could get me down any further.
On my first trip to Portland, some 6 years ago, I visited for a week, 6 days of which I spent in Powell's. If I go to Portland and I don't visit Powell's I might as well have never left the rail station, or airport, or however I came to arrive. If it weren't for that bookstore, the city would have very limited appeal to me.
I feel safe, secure within it. A maggot buried in the apple. Wandering the aisles, reading promiscuously from the various titles of which I've never heard, bringing the older copies to my nose and smelling the different odors of paper and binding.
I wish I were a book myself, sometimes. A treasured thing, observed and appreciated, contributed to - as I write in the margins so might others write in me - argued with, despised, dog-eared, quoted, re-shelved, and re-read, appreciating and depreciating, placed amongst other titles with our pages whispering stories, then misplaced, misunderstood, burned or pulped.
Which, in sum, I suppose is not much different than the lives of the aged. In which case I might get there yet, if I can find other things to do to fill my years than just talk about books.
En-route to Minneapolis. More-or-less because it is there, and for no greater reason than that.
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