I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms
But now you’ll find me with the baby, in the bathroom,
With that big shell, listening for the sound of the sea
- Billy Bragg, Brickbat
In my business, many of the people you know end up working in relatively isolated locations, Giant State Universities and Smaller Schools all across the country. And when they bump into me, they often say “You’re so lucky to live in Chicago,” to which I usually respond, “Why, they don’t have Blockbuster Video and pizza where you live?” Because the truth is, we very rarely get to go out, partly because babysitting is a ridiculously complicated sort of affair, and partly because, well, we’re like old and stuff. This was at no time more clear than on our odyssey last night.
We dropped babygirl off with some friends who also have a 3-year old; we swap babysitting nights with them to reduce costs. Our destination? Quimby’s bookstore in Wicker Park, where our friend from Giant University Town had organized a reading from his literary magazine, PANK, to coincide with the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which is here in Chicago this year. Quimby’s is a cool little independent bookstore that she and I took to calling the Porn Comix store on account of all the porn comics, but that’s just because we’re like old and stuff, and nowhere near hip enough for the place, or for porn comics. So I parked myself next to the anarchist and Chomsky books and directly in front of the sadomasochism erotica rack, while she sat on the floor, ready to meditate. We met Work Colleague there: I think he was expecting drinks! I’ll have to admit that, though I’ve been to a lot of such readings, I never know quite what to make of them. I think fairly visually when it comes to text; I will generally know where on a page a particular point appeared, even in long books, so there’s something about written text that just resonates with me. It is, of course, a common conceit that poetry and literary prose are better when read aloud, spoken, uttered, but I’m not convinced that there isn’t a bit of the old Platonic disdain of writing itself involved in such judgments, as though some degraded second order signifier had usurped the close relationship between speaking and thought, and we’re trying to recapture it through spoken readings. I’m enough of a Derridean to at least be suspicious about such pronouncements. So I think when I hear writing spoken, it throws me off, and I spend too much time trying to envision it on the page, trying to catch the poetics by reconstructing the visual text. But the bottom line is that my judgments are never clear (or probably reliable) on these things, because I have difficulty encountering language in these ways. I don’t want a writer to have a “voice.” I want a voice to have a text.
In any case, there were some memorable parts of the readings that I managed to process despite my general incapacity to get into the rhythm of such things. Jennifer Pieroni read an unpublished poem called “Unlucky Babies,” the point of which seemed to be that all the qualities considered admirable by literary bohemians (poor hand-eye coordination, the capacity to see the strange and beautiful in the ugly, and the like) are generally considered “unlucky” in culture. It’s a poem about eugenia, in other words, the “well born” and “beautiful,” but quibbling on the point of a poem always strikes me as missing the point, so to speak. Pieroni created an interesting list poem, and the rhythm sticks with me. Rachel Yoder then read an epistolary essay titled, I think, “Letters to My First Love,” in which the narrator (R.) sends a series of unanswered notes (I almost said “missives,” but resisted the urge) to her first love (M.) at the instigation of her professor – a curious set up that I would have liked to hear more about. As the essay stands, it is like a self-conscious contemplation of self-indulgence, complete with references to Jacques Lacan and the general problematic of the adequation of words and things. The clear tension that then emerges between the self-conscious and the self-indulgent was its most memorable quality. At one point, for example, the narrator notes that she used to think people who claimed to like Jim Jarmusch films were pretentious assholes, but now she likes them, and maybe thinks that she is herself a pretentious asshole, etc. About that speed throughout. Personally, I found the repetitions of M. and R. (the address and signature) for each letter to be somewhat disorienting, but maybe that’s what she was going for. Perhaps dates would have separated the letters without introducing this odd repetition (we know M. never replies!). My favorite of the night was James Grinwis’ poetry, largely because I don’t remember its content at all, but remember it to be really jarring and cutting. This is an exception to my usual incapacity to be struck by spoken language; I’m not sure what he did poetically, but it was aggressive and dark and sumptuous – I really dug it. He was also the most understatedly funny speaker of the night in my view: he described how his sister-in-law had bought him a writing journal which required daily entries (and the fullness of that story was just wonderfully suggestive: one imagines the sister-in-law bemoaning the bohemian existence of her executive husband’s younger ne’er-do-well brother, whom she refers to sardonically as “The Poet,” until her thoughtful friend – a sorority sister from her college days, perhaps – suggests that she encourage him in his writing career, advice she takes to heart by buying him a writing journal in an expensive luggage store, and presenting it with a self-satisfied if pitying grin on Christmas morning, in front of the whole family…). So he had filled out many dates early on, jumping well ahead of the actual date, but was now well behind. This struck me as glorious revenge on the sister-in-law, and her real scheme, which would be to enforce some discipline on his writing practices, if he was going to be a writer after all. Grinwis conveyed all this in a kind of dazed, drunken deadpan. Hilarious.
Daniel Nester then read an essay about his guitar playing skills, or relative lack thereof, and the many technical devices he had purchased to make up for them, culminating in the dreaded talk box. Nester’s essay was charming and funny, switching between contemporary rock history and self-deprecating autobiography, but I found it interesting, I think, because it really delves into the problem of failing at that which one loves, of capacities. It’s much easier for us to accept the notion of musical capacities than capacities in other areas of activity, and particularly writing. I think this is what the literary people have over the composition studies people: they recognize that writing requires a set of capacities just like anything else, and that some people just cap out at a certain point. Such a conception is anathema to a writing studies that likes to think of itself as democratic: it first elevates writing to the general mode of existing in common and participating in public, and then must derive a universal capacity for good writing that merely requires good teaching. What Nester’s essay emphasizes, I think, is that even a deep love for an activity and years of practice don’t guarantee even moderately passable performance. The capping out of performance capacity would then, a fortiori, come even sooner when someone evinces hardly any interest in a thing. Say, the average student in a first-year composition classroom. If, however, writing is the key to power and voice in a democracy, one simply cannot admit such a thing, because it would imply second-class citizenship. The problem of capacities, in this way, becomes the unspoken (though certainly not ungraded) monster (unlucky baby!) haunting the composition classroom, and more so the more a teacher is trained in the democratic ideology of composition. But Nester’s essay will have none of this. He keeps bumping up against the problem of capacities: his nubby fingers only stretch four frets, he lacks hand-eye coordination (unlucky baby!), and similar insuperable problems prevent him from becoming the guitar player he wants to be. At a pudgy forty, he is rejected by younger, hipper bands, with their floppy-haired lead singers even slamming the door in his face. He wants to “play out,” which is to say, in public, but does so only ten times thus far in his life (a few times with a band called “Fear Itself” – I told you it was funny). And he purchases all manner of device to cover his incapacities, even the talk box, the hideous talk box. There’s much to contemplate in this description. Certainly, one cannot immediately lend guitar-playing the same equivalency with democracy that writing attains, even as an empirical matter: writing, literacy, has a snugger fit with its supposed political twin. But it would be an interesting thought experiment. At one point, Nester notes that if he was as bad a writer as he was a guitar player, the reader (and we were listeners, again) would be reading “jabberwocky” (I like Carroll, so this struck me as off). But why not? Why not consider the writer who loves it, but can’t do it? Why not consider those capacities that stand in the way? Why restrict such incapacities to the musical instrument, the paintbrush, the dance?
Finally, Sheila Squillante read a poem and a short essay. Squillante was the only speaker whose writing I am somewhat familiar with, and, quite frankly, I consider her a brilliant stylist. Again, I’ve seen her writing: I think of it as text on a page, so this may affect my impressions. In any case, by this time, she (who is, let’s remember, 7 months pregnant) was getting a little uncomfortable, so I was a bit distracted from Squillante’s reading. But she won back my attention on the second part of her essay, during which she describes the encounter with a tribe of wild chickens in the Pacific Northwest. The very notion of undomesticated chickens is, of course, resonant in itself: the ultimate in domesticated and bred animal returning to a natural state. That said, I’ll usually key in on some words or image. In this case, Squillante said something like “Those chickens owned that piece of land,” with the real emphasis on owned, just an odd but powerful word in this context. She described their wild tails, completely beyond the range of what we’d consider a chicken, and likened her reaction to seeing her doctor out at the grocery store, or in an airport gift shop: they were at first unrecognizable as chickens. For some reason this just grabbed me, as Squillante’s prose has done before. There’s something lyrical to her prose and images that I just appreciate.
So, you’re pretty but you’re boring. Obviously, I’m not referring to the readings in the subject line, but to us, Seven Red. And, really, you might split the difference, assign one quality to each of us, and be done with it. Getting back to the theme, in any case, of being like old and stuff. After the readings, we gabbed a bit with our friends, but decided against going out for drinks with the whole AWP crew, largely because we were very hungry, and this was sort of their thing, and we had no confidence that they would be moving in under ten minutes. And this is where the odyssey of being old and stuff begins. We walk out of the bookstore, looking for a place where she and I can eat, but Work Colleague can drink (he is desperate for beer by now, having expected to have been drinking for an hour already – and this is a tough expectation to have squelched). Here’s the result of that search:
- Aberdeen – We start off at the bar directly next store to Quimby’s. We walk into a wall of sonic loud that would knock you down, some real shit techno, awful. It was so loud that I was literally scared for the babybelly. It was so loud in there that even saying ‘It’s too loud in here” was a massive struggle. We walked out immediately, probably looking like those squares who storm out of the theater in the middle of Pink Flamingos.
- Wicker Park Tavern – We find another bar-restaurant, and get an actual table: a miracle. The waitress then tells us that the kitchen, which they share with the restaurant Absinthe, is too busy to make anything but appetizers for us. Well, what are the appetizers? Nachos and fucking wings. Unacceptable. We leave soon after.
- Crossing Damen three times: we then cross Damen three times looking at various places. They are all full, closed, or just dodge. It suddenly occurs to me that everybody around us is under 28 and dressed to the hilts, except the grifters.
- Some Pasta Place – In desperation, we walk into a contemporary Italian style restaurant, which looks pretty full from the outside. Ah, what the hell. We’re optimists. The hostess tells us “Oh, it’ll be about 40 minutes,” as if our car won’t turn back into a pumpkin at the babysitting expiration time we set for 10pm. Yes, ten. We storm out without even saying “No thank you.” What next? First, we have to get the hell out of Wicker Park. she decides that we’ll drive back to our own neighborhood, where at least 40% of the people out in the bars at night are safely in their thirties, and she’ll drop me and Work Colleague off. Off we go.
- Garcia’s – she has given up on the night. She’ll just go get babygirl while we get drinks, and grab something to eat at home. She drops us off by the Western station on the Brown Line, saying “Don’t stay out too late.” And we head for the Huettenbar in Lincoln Square (one of my favorites). Halfway there, I decide we have to eat something, so let’s go to Garcia’s for a burrito and some beer before we go to Huettenbar. Garcia’s is packed: every table is filled, the bar is filled, and twenty people are waiting for tables. Where’s this bad economy? I curse under my breath, determined to drink on a now well empty stomach. Off to Huettenbar!
- Huettenbar – I walk in, show my ID to the grungy looking bouncer kid. But Work Colleague doesn’t have ID! No ID! “I don’t drive,” he says, and tries to show the kid his Unnamed Employer Institution ID card, which states that we are faculty. The kid says no dice. Mind you, I’m in my mid-thirties, and Work Colleague is several years older than me. It would be a strange universe indeed in which we could pass for under 21. But there we are, getting turned away at the door of a bar. “I don’t drive,” Work Colleague says again, apologetically, “I don’t have ID.” How the fuck do you get on an airplane? I mutter. He responds, sensibly, “With my passport.” Hmm.
- Skewers – We truck down Lincoln in the now falling snow, heading to a place called Skewers. We get there: out of fucking business. Welll, shit now. This is starting to look like fate. But right next door…
- Jack Rabbit – We finally get a table in Jack Rabbit, a little nouvelle Mexican bistro operation on Lincoln. I’m exhausted and starving. I eat a fajita (damn good) and drink one – yes, ONE – Negro Modelo, then we pretty much agree that it’s time to head home. I’m in the house before 10:15. Unlucky baby.
So that’s the story of Seven Red’s big night out in Chicago. Luckily, Blockbuster gets new videos every Tuesday.
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