Women and Men

Heat in New York City-- the extreme unrelenting kind (not to downplay the life-threatening aspect) is a palpable adventure.  For those of us toughing it out without air conditioning, it feels like a matrix-- a kind of intangible airless box.  I can't help being reminded of the 1977 July blackout, when my neighborhood was not only without power for days, but without water. Yes, there was looting and some violence, but for the young, it was a kind of party... restaurants and bars at first giving away the contents of their refrigerators and freezers, drinking and partying in the streets.  By day three, it got old; the city stank of garbage and sewage.  At one point I hopped on a city bus which had its own little air conditioning system and rode all the way uptown.  I was living with a guitar player who continued to do acoustic gigs in clubs by candlelight with people drinking warm beer and soda from cans. It stretched time. 

I'm sweating through Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.. another of those challenging post-modern difficult mammoth novels. It's so large the contemporary reprinting was structurally unsound and retracted. Supposedly there's a two-volume version, but I'm coping with the original 1980's printing.  Difficult to carry around-- larger than my Organic Chemistry textbook all those years ago--  and nearly as dense.  It's also a quintessentially New York novel, written for the most part in the 1970's.  It occurs as I make my way that I'm going to be the last reading generation who will understand the context of these characters and their behaviors.  We read Shakespeare and older authors and there is a glossary at the back to explain words and expressions, but it occurs that in a few more decades, even the geography here-- the recent vintage urban references-- will require footnotes. 

I wonder too, if people in the future will have a reading list, the way many of our pop icons had their own set of icons-- many of whom were relatively well-read and versed.  Why is it that I feel compelled to read, as though I must continue some kind of literary itinerary with its occasional roadside distractions and off-ramps, unpaved paths and mountainous obstacles? As though someone will go hungry because I overlooked some huge tome, or my destiny will not play out as pre-planned?

As recreation, I picked up a Library of America book of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  I love these volumes for their scrupulous attention to original manuscripts, for their notes and explanations-- biographical insights.  I trust them, in a world where printing errors and typos abound, translations fail authors. Admittedly, I had never heard of this Woolson who is described as perhaps the acknowledged second-best woman writer of the 19th century.  Complete oversight.  So they are chaste little tales which at first bored me, but now I am compulsively going through the entire chronology.  They are narrative and informed with setting and geography-- with characters and religion and informed with a kind of old-fashioned social and moral sense which is comforting and rewarding. Real stories... adventures... people... with air and atmosphere.  A slight wind.  Sea-storms, swamps, Italian hills... old churches and clergymen and orphaned seamstresses... mysteries.

As opposed to Women and Men which has the density and realism of a solid polyhedron.  The details and characters-- the tangents and the interwoven relationships-- the non-narrative difficulty.  It is a kind of five-dimensional novel and one must stay present with each page.  I remember reading Pynchon in the 70's; it was a revelation and a challenge. Decades later I'm not sure I'm quite up to a weighty literary task; at page 500, I'm not even halfway through... but I will keep going. 

Two nights ago I rewatched the 1970's version of The Great Gatsby.  It felt stale and dated; the dialogue was flat-- the  characters were silly and the ironies awkward.  Even the Fitzgerald text felt clichéd.  Am I jaded?  Not sure. I am much more apt to appreciate the outdated language of the Woolson stories. 

I spend hours each day scrolling through gallery exhibitions and auction lots.  One sees scads of old-world academic painters-- people who gave their entire life to the study of landscape or still life or portraits, for little reward.  They looked and observed and self-critiqued and produced; they starved. And here are these millionaire contemporary artists with their rolexes and several residences... bringing home the proverbial bacon.  Others work so hard to become financial and critical failures. To be rewarded for simply being oneself is the supreme prize.  Many of these people are locked in their perhaps non-air-conditioned rooms, struggling to give birth to yet another creation, maybe unseen.  This haunts me.. how to find these people who have no instagram or outlet... but their own brand of greatness. 

I imagine them during these oppressive nights-- the ones by candlelight in older times; the heat even in the Gatsby movie was accurately palpable.  Pre-air-conditioned summers, as the older among us recall them.  My mother took us to Belle Harbor (I thought she was a woman) to cool off in the ocean. When my father earned a little more, we went to Cape Cod or summer camp.  Meanwhile my mother read us 'cold' stories like Jack London or The Little Match Girl and ran our little wrists under cool faucets. The days were long and the nights often sleepless and longer. 

This summer will be marked by the imprint of Women and Men-- slipping back into a 1970's city I remember well.  By the time McElroy published this long novel, it was already perhaps outdated.  It was described as ambitious, difficult, perhaps brilliant... the subject does not strike me as much as the urban whole, the layered complicated synchronicitous and unfathomable, while personally a kind of nostalgia he did not intend engages me. It's a relief that none of the characters have quite seeped into my heart, which leaves space for the Woolson tales to enchant me a little more these hot nights.  

Poor Woolson, I've learned, was something of a literary spinster.  She worshipped Henry James and managed a complicated friendship with him, although James never quite acknowledged her talent. At 53 she suicided-- did not make it to the twentieth century. Perhaps I should reconsider and recall this as the summer of Constance. 

Crossing Delancey

Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks.  No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's.  Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'.  Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy.  People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.

At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my  post-college snobbery.  But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible.  It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol.  And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape.  The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca...  the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt.  The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think;  it seems like yesterday.

These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.  She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore.  Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks.  In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded.  On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me.  A perfect cultural collision. 

The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive.  I have my own.  Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. 

There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film.  I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved.  And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities.  He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... 

I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop.  But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read.  I was simply entranced.  Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune.   The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.

Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things.  Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. 

And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? 

Navalny.  The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story.  The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny.  

The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain.  Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred.  The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows.  Amen.