Propellers of Inspiration

My fan is very old. It may be from the 1960s or 50s, or earlier. Where modern fans employ elaborate grates to keep even a pen from reaching through to the moving blades, my fan has only four squiggly metal abstractions of protectors. The squiggles seem intended to suggest the motion (which one can't quite see while the fan is on--which is whenever I'm home, in the summer) of the blades behind them. Having been bred on modern fans, it now appears inevitable that at some point I would misinterpret the interpretive protectors and injure myself on this machine designed to ease my discomfort. And this is precisely what I did, about five minutes ago, while trying to move the fan. (For anyone who thinks this post departs from the usual subjects of the blog, I would argue that, to the extent this blog has a subject, it is always, secretly, about me moving things around my apartment.) I sliced the tip of the middle finder on my left hand, which makes this post more difficult than any other post I've written. Needless to say, I did not turn the fan off before trying to move it.
A few days ago, I read in Bookforum that Nicholson Baker is coming out with a new book about the lead-up to World War II, how the war could have been avoided, and, in Baker's view, why it should have been. The book is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Put another way, Baker's book is about how our misreading (in his view) of certain signs lead to (in his view) an avoidable, mechanized shedding of human blood.
I had to read another book by Nicholson Baker for a writing class in my final year of college. To the extent that this blog has an initial inspiration, it is that class. The book was The Mezzanine, whose central theme (as much as it has one) is "the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects," especially "propellers or desk fans." The narrator announces his obsession on the novel's very first page (in a footnote): "I love [how fans] will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on the circuit and then hands it off to its successor."
I seem to stand at a strange intersection between these two books of Baker's. Hopefully my finger will not find itself at a similar intersection between the blades of my fan anytime soon.

Living With Boxes (Three Metaphors)

I. (It's Not The) End of the World

[Invitation for a party that never happened]

"A long time ago, when we were young and naive and the winking lights of Bushwick Avenue filled our sight long after the bodegas were closed, this is how we viewed our (then-new) neighborhood. The walls of our building were unfinished and the nearest movie store didn't even carry Herzog's Nosferatu. Looking back, I wonder at how we survived those first harrowing weeks. But survive we did. One could even say (thought the evidence is dubious) that, for a time, we thrived. Alas, we thrive no longer. So we move on, inevitably dispersing the empire eastward. And in our process of ceasing to thrive we learned that, in fact, this not The End of the World."

II. Packing

I found a place a few stops further on the subway, on the border between Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and Ridgewood, in Queens. I packed my books in liquor boxes. That looks like a very sharp metaphor, so I will leave it alone for the moment, to avoid injuring myself.
During a recent trip out of town I met a dog with the singular name of Arrow. Her singularity increased in my view when I found she was named after the dog Arrow in the movie The Point. The movie tells a bedtime story about a town where everyone is born with a point--literally--on their head. When a boy without a point is born in the town, he is banished (along with the faithful Arrow) to the wastes of the Pointless Forest, and told not to return until he has one.

Anyone who has seen The Point knows its story balances on the idea that one man's Pointless Forest is another man's Ridgewood, Queens. I thought about that, and packed my books into liquor boxes.

III. Arrival

For the past year, a page ripped from a German magazine hung above my desk. It says "Andreus Leikaufs Bilder handeln nich vom Boxen und vom Jazz auch nicht." I don't know what this means. Above the text is an image of a green and black painting of a desk. Inscribed in the middle of the desk are the words "NOW WORK!" When I took the page down from the wall I found a cockroach had made its home on the wall behind it.

A burnished recognition

I was polishing my shoes tonight (they had gotten stained and scuffed after a rainy weekend in Montreal) when I noticed I had uncovered the figure of a smiling face in the bottom of the polish tin. I decided it must be a sign.

I went to Montreal to visit a friend from high school. In middle school, before we were friends, the two of us were teammates in Odyssey of the Mind. By the first round of local competitions my teammates and I had convinced ourselves we would go to the final round, taking various signs and omens as evidence. For instance, in The Simpsons' episode that aired the night before we competed, the cartoon family travelled to Australia; the final round of competitions was to take place in Australia. Our team never made it past the first round of competition, despite the potency of the signs.
When I finished polishing my shoes I put the lid with the picture of the kiwi bird back on the tin. By that time I had rubbed away the shining, smiling face; I am still confident it was a sign.

King Shag in Venice

Salman Rushdie: "There was a lot of sex in the 17th century."
Stephen Colbert: "Well otherwise there wouldn't have been an 18th century."

-On the Colbert Report last night

Old Cars

There are two old cars parked on the block where my office is located. They are there everyday, but I don't know who drives them. One is a Volvo, the other is a BMW. These are the only cars on the block I ever notice--the only ones I like. New Volvos are some of the ugliest cars around, but I would rather drive this old one than almost any new car. Why are new cars so ugly? Ads like that one that tries to entice the customer by putting the new Jaguar alongside a vintage Jaguar just make me think "Yeah, where can I get one of those old Jaguars?"

Old cars were made with an idea of what they would look like on a street--an accompaniment to architecture around them. New cars seem made to keep the street out.

One more thing about Stevie Nicks

How perfect is this quotation?:

I think they all went too far. Their jeans got too low, their tops got too see-through. Personally, I think that sexy is keeping yourself mysterious. I'm really an old-fashioned girl, and I think I'm totally sexy.

1. In typical bohemian fashion, she is nostalgic about her youth.
2. In typical bourgeois attitude, she derides the immorality of the younger generation (marking her passage into a full-fledged symbol of the present middle-aged middle class).
3. In typical bourgeois-bohemian fashion, she disparages the very ideal (sexual openness) she once purported to stand for.

48/68/08

Around 1948, a young man from New Orleans named Anatole Broyard began to gain prominence in the bohemian environment of Greenwich Village, then went on to become a revered critic for the New York Times. Now he is considered one of the "lights" (or perhaps "darks"), of post-war American letters. Aware that an African-American writer, no matter his talent, would always be "a black writer," and never simply "a writer," Broyard hid the fact that he was black for his entire adult life. His relatively light skin allowed him to pass, and he eagerly settled into the kind of white bourgeois milieu that blacks were denied. I think his stint in the Village was essential to constructing the narrative of whiteness that eventually delivered him into the upper echelons of American intellectuals.

In mid-19th century France artists and writers began moving into the gypsy neighborhoods of major cities as a way to avoid high rent and high-nosed morality. These transplants earned the name "bohemian" out of a mistaken idea that all gypsies came from the Czech region of Bohemia. Bohemians idealized what they perceived as the gypsy's pre-modern enlightenment, as well as their ability to live outside of modern culture's strictures. Of course, the bourgeois artists drove the group they feigned to admire out of their former neighborhoods.

This kind of emulation, which at the same time parodies what it seeks to emulate, parallels the relationship between artistic whites and the black community in America. The gypsies, after all, were not just different because of their social practices, but because of the color of their skin; their relation to the rest of modern Europe was the result of that racialized difference. It's no mistake that Jimi Hendrix, probably the most influential black performer of the 1960s (that most "bohemian" of decades), called himself a "gypsy".

For the past year, I've lived on a certain street in Brooklyn that lays claim to being an incubator of contemporary bohemianism. But the attention of a wikipedia article, coverage in Gawker and
yesterday's New York Times, and rivaling MySpace pages lead me to believe that its heyday had passed before I arrived. Nevertheless, my stay here has reinforced some of my ideas about the hipster aesthetic--that contemporary, commercialized bastard of bygone bohemianism(s). To better understand the hipster attitude, I've developed a matrix of four essential attributes on which any hipster can be placed. The matrix has four axes, each corresponding to one of the essential attributes, which are: 1. hippy 2. hip-hop 3. punk/hard rock 4. preppy. Notice that three of these categories associated themselves with (and fetishized) a specific group of racialized others: Hippies had their blues musicians, Black Panthers, and--via their predecessors, the Beats--black jazz musicians. Hip-hop need not be explained. Punks drew original inspiration from the West Indian subculture of urban England. The fourth attribute, preppy, represents the bourgeois aspect that cannot be eradicated from the bohemian and may itself become fetishized, perhaps as a compensatory effort.



A coworker of mine recently suggested that the song "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac (whose first album came out in 1968) might be a satanic anthem. I'm not sure if I agree, but it made consider their song "Gypsy"--the lyrics of which link the return to a child-like state of creativity with the gypsy--as a concise (if vague) expression of postwar American bohemianism. Not surprisingly, I'd say Fleetwood Mac would rank high in the "Nostalgia" category on a list of favored hipster bands (nostalgia being a key operating sentiment in the bohemian world-view).

As much as it disappoints me (and somewhat deflates the impact of this post), I can't find anything to biographically link Anatole Broyard and Stevie Nicks. While Nicks eagerly embraced a "gypsy" mystique, Broyard's relationship to bohemianism was more complicated. He did a sort of double-reversal, adopting the attitude of white, bourgeois "bohemians" in post-war Greenwich Village as the first layer of erudite WASPy-ness that masked his racialized background. It makes this quotation from him at once more apt, and more ironic:

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.