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[...] when you think of the long-standing idea of art in opposition to the dominant culture, if only by keeping its autonomy from the pursuit of money—the only common value great writers from right to left have acknowledged—you begin to sense what we have lost. Capitalism as a system for the equitable distribution of goods is troublesome enough; as a way of measuring success it is useless. When you begin to think the advances of doled out to writers by major corporations possess anything but an accidental correlation to artistic worth, you are finished. Everything becomes publicity. How many writers now refuse to be photographed? How many refuse to sit for idiotic “lifestyle” pieces? Or to write supplemental reading group “guides” for their paperbacks? Everyone along the chain of production compromises a tiny bit and suddenly Jay McInerney is a guest judge on Iron Chef.
This is the diamond of the mind, this ability. A lot of people know about it, but I didn’t know about it.
From then on when the panic crept in I could just push over the thread-thin edge to the other side, feeling the way to joy.
Joy is the knowledge that the thread is there.
A thread runs through the middle of your life, and if you find it, the second half can be comedy instead.
A place can make you want to die and then you can turn it over into the sweetest thing. You can do this yourself, if you have found the diamond in your mind.
I am less interested in zombie stories, though, than I am in this neighborhood’s particular light. The thing I most want to tell you is how the sunlight is here, but I don’t know how to describe it. It’s obviously the same sun that lights the rest of the city, but there is something different about it. Maybe it’s our lack of trees, or the reflection of the river, or the lowness of most of the buildings, or the supersaturated colors, deep reds and greens, the bright wild complicated graffiti. We don’t have the trees of South Brooklyn, the shady corridors of stoops, the tall stately brownstones of Fort Greene or Park Slope. We don’t have cobblestone streets. What we have is this naked golden light. It’s a thin, big-sky light, kind of Western, cinematic. Since the first day I saw it, it has alternately flustered and comforted me. Today its particular quality will have half the people in the neighborhood drinking in the afternoon. By five or six, some of the couples will already be fighting on the streets, one of them wrangling the drunker, more belligerent one home, because there is always a drunker, more belligerent one, and one who needs to feel like he or she is taking care of someone.
At the moment, though, a really tall guy on roller skates is coasting down the long steep slope of the pedestrian walkway with his legs and arms spread wide and the wind in his fingers. He has the biggest satisfied grin on his face. There are always a few people a day who roll like this, on bikes or boards or even just running, arms wide, falling down the bridge into Williamsburg, in the pretty light.
It is important to know that there are things that end. Things you can’t change with your mind or even your body or even chemicals. As spring draws near, the building wins the lawsuit. We’re getting evicted, the tenants who have lived here for ten or twenty years, and the subletters like me hiding out in these labyrinthine halls. “The last of the starving artists who colonized Williamsburg two decades ago and began its transformation into the hipster capital of New York could soon find themselves out on the street,” begins the article about it in the Post. It’s headlined, nonsensically, “W’burg has art attack: Hipsters facing boot.” There’s no chance of an appeal. My neighbor makes a banner to hang on the front of the building: ten homes lost! She’s been here since 1994, like most of the residents of the ten lofts. It’s not a machine or a dream or a crypt for her, just her home, made impossible by money. Police cars come, sirens wailing, to remove the banner. There will be condos.
This is one way to quit: wait until the bitter end, when you have done all you can to make the time machine keep working. You have learned its inner systems, improvised workarounds, carted in the water yourself, but it becomes harder to keep it alive than leave it. What they call hitting rock bottom. The final tragic reversal may be slow, boring, and horrible. The time machine has turned into a crypt, but it is not a crypt if you go inside with the body. If you must raise it from the dead again, know the power it has is your own: bend over it like a vampire, fire it up like Dr. Frankenstein. When you are able to stop, there will be a moment when you have to just walk out of the building. It’s not that living will be the opposite of addiction now; there can be more life because you know how to stretch out time, more joy because you have practiced the art of reanimation. You are a professor of transformation; you just need new tools. There is no outside or inside to it, no opposition, no right way to go, just this new way of seeing.
I was first introduced to the work of Isaac Babel as a college sophomore, when “My First Goose” was assigned in a creative-writing class. The instructor, Robert Cohen, was a melancholy Jewish novelist with a beard, whom I remember primarily for the time he suddenly realized the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “You’re going to die. And you’re going to die. And you’re going to die.” I remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.
amazing
[...] I remember Jakov saying, a bit irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said, also irritably, “he is a double-entry bookkeeper!”
In the course of the next five minutes, we concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he, Jakov, had a fundamentally religious view of history, and then we parted ways, Jakov to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.
lol
But then there were so many problems. First, my copy was sent back to me with a note: “Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters.” It turned out that my copy was lacking in cultural sensitivity toward Cossacks. I tried to explain that, far from calling Cossacks primitive monsters, I was merely suggesting that others had considered Cossacks to be primitive monsters. The coordinator, however, said that this was my mistake: others didn’t consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters; in fact, “Cossacks have a rather romantic image.”
I considered quoting to her the entry for Cossack in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas: “Eats tallow candles”; but then the burden of proof would still be on me to show that tallow candles are a primitive form of nourishment. Instead I adopted the line that the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim. But the editor said this wasn’t the point, “and anyway you never know in California.”
lol
[slightly different in the online edition vs the print edition]
This was great news for my classmate, Josh, who was also working on the exhibit, and who had somehow developed a crush on Pirozhkova, based on the pictures from the 1930s which show her to be, indeed, an extremely attractive woman. Josh’s parents were Star Wars fans and his full name is Joshua Sky Walker; to differentiate him from other Joshes, he is often called Skywalker.
“Man, do I hope I get to pick her up from the airport,” Skywalker said of Pirozhkova.
“I hope so too,” I said, “but you do realize she must be more than ninety years old.”
“I don’t care—she is so hot. You don’t understand.”
Alas, I did understand; one develops strange ideas working in an archive. I had noticed some Cossacks in the Rodchenko book whom I would gladly have picked up from the airport, were it not that, in accordance with my prediction, none of them came to the conference.
heh
“Elif, hello. I don’t know if this is pleasant or a surprise, but, yes, this is Grisha.” Freidin was at the dinner for the conference participants. He was, he said, experiencing confusion due to the total lack at this dinner of any graduate student presence. “You are not here,” he explained, “and Fishkin isn’t here. Josh isn’t here. Nobody is here. It looks—well, it looks strange. It’s a bit embarrassing.”
I considered this for a moment. “But we weren’t invited to the dinner,” I pointed out.
Silence.
“I see. You were waiting to be invited.”
I got into the left lane and made the next available U-turn.
masterful elision
“He is not Chinese!” shouted a depressed-looking historian.
Everyone turned and looked at him.
“I don’t think he’s really Chinese,” the historian repeated.
“He does look—different,” said Lidiya.
“Maybe he is an Uyghur,” Zholkovsky suggested.
“Wha-a-at?”
“An Uyghur, an Uyghur, an Uyghur.”
“When I asked the other Chinese what his religion was,” continued the first scholar, “he said to me, ‘My religion is Isaac Babel.’”
lmao