Meditation on a Rusty Bicycle
Dec. 30th, 2014 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThere’s a rusty bicycle that’s been chained to a streetlamp on the northwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street for the entire time I’ve been kinda, sorta hanging out in Greenpoint – what is that? Almost two years now?
I keep wanting to take a photo of it, but every time I try, all I ever get is a picture of a rusty bicycle.
But really, that bicycle is an interrupted story.
Who locked that bicycle so carefully to that street post? Why didn’t they ever come back for it?
I suppose that’s why I like cities so much. They’re just crammed with these totem objects, each one a layered narrative begging to be deciphered.
###
I’m crashing once again in BB’s fantabulous apartment, and I passed that bicycle on my way to the subway, which I took to the upper West Side because yesterday, I was seized by a sudden longing to go to the New York Historical Society.
As an orphan human child being raised by a wolf on the Upper West Side, my weekends had a set pattern. On Saturdays, I would hang out in museums, generally the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art – but every once in a while, the New York Historical Society, which is right across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. On Sundays, I would hang out with my best friend Roberta, and we’d walk to Greenwich Village and back. Greenwich Village had no particular significance; it was just a place to turn around. Roberta and I played a game, and that game was to make up stories about the interesting people we would see en route. These people were given names like Roderick and Maximillian and Allegra and Violante, and their stories inevitably concluded in horrendous acts of matricide. We were ten, eleven, twelve years old at the time and neither of us had heard of Freud.
Anyway, the New York Historical Society was an interesting place, filled with dusty glass cases crammed with interesting things like miniature portraits of people left over from the days when people were flat and had no third dimension as well as looming paintings of bucolic scenes that purported to be Manhattan Island, though since one could dimly make out trees and shepherds through layers of yellowing varnish, clearly they were not Manhattan Island: Where were the skyscrapers?
The New York Historical Society, I’m sad to say, has succumbed to contemporary curatorial mandates. These days, the majority of museums keep most of their artifacts locked up. The few they deign to put on display have spotlights and helpful annotations: In the late 19th century, Five Points was one of Manhattan’s most notorious slums…
I hate this.
I think museums should be one big dusty jumble where you can free associate.
Plus the New York Historical Society is in the process of using dead Henry Luce’s money to redo its fourth floor, which means that very little of its permanent collection will be open to the public for the next two years.
They were hosting a few traveling exhibitions – one on the history of Chinese immigration, another an Annie Leibowitz portfolio of non-portraits.
The Chinese immigration exhibition made me flash on the fact that I’ve actually written what’s essentially a 500-page novel on Chinese immigration.
My Steinbeck novel.
Which is all about how in the winter of 1932, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell encounter the ghosts of the Chinese who established a fishing village along Point Alones in the 1860s and who were subsequently burned out by Italian fishermen in 1906. Highjinks ensue. Some of the highjinks involve William Randolph Hearst. I invented a kind of vengeful supernatural spirit, a female wraith, through whose enchantments Steinbeck and Campbell find themselves traveling (cue woo-woo muzak) Back In Time!! At the end, the Chinese ghosts are pacified and Our Heroes go on to write Nobel Prize-winning novels and follow their respective blisses.
In real life, this was the winter that Campbell fell in love with Carol, Steinbeck’s first wife. I think part of the problem I had with writing the damn thing was that I liked Carol and I liked Ed Ricketts, but I didn’t like Steinbeck and Campbell – and they were the main protagonists.
Anyway, wandering around this exhibit, I thought, Damn, girlfriend! Commercial hook! And you’ve already got the first draft!!
So maybe I should take the MS out of the drawer?
The first draft needs revisions. Plot is waaaaaay too convoluted. Dialogue is waaaay too Aaron Sorkin ‘cause that’s actually the way I talk! But, you know, The Grapes of Wrath ain't The Social Network.
The novel was what kept me sane when I was so-o-o-o miserable and beaten down in Ithaca. Possibly that’s why I never felt impelled to go on working on it when I got out of Ithaca – I didn’t want to be reminded.
The Annie Leibowitz exhibit was interesting in its own way, too. She would be able to take that photograph I long to take of that bicycle on the northwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street! The exhibit was of totem objects belonging to people who were meaningful to her in some way – or so the exhibit notes say. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that Annie Leibowitz is inspired in any way by, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But what do I know? Leibowitz’s lighting, her composition, were all pretty interesting. Though I did have to wonder how much of that was Leibowitz’s eye through the camera, and how much of it was her eye manipulating Photoshop.
I keep wanting to take a photo of it, but every time I try, all I ever get is a picture of a rusty bicycle.
But really, that bicycle is an interrupted story.
Who locked that bicycle so carefully to that street post? Why didn’t they ever come back for it?
I suppose that’s why I like cities so much. They’re just crammed with these totem objects, each one a layered narrative begging to be deciphered.
###
I’m crashing once again in BB’s fantabulous apartment, and I passed that bicycle on my way to the subway, which I took to the upper West Side because yesterday, I was seized by a sudden longing to go to the New York Historical Society.
As an orphan human child being raised by a wolf on the Upper West Side, my weekends had a set pattern. On Saturdays, I would hang out in museums, generally the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art – but every once in a while, the New York Historical Society, which is right across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. On Sundays, I would hang out with my best friend Roberta, and we’d walk to Greenwich Village and back. Greenwich Village had no particular significance; it was just a place to turn around. Roberta and I played a game, and that game was to make up stories about the interesting people we would see en route. These people were given names like Roderick and Maximillian and Allegra and Violante, and their stories inevitably concluded in horrendous acts of matricide. We were ten, eleven, twelve years old at the time and neither of us had heard of Freud.
Anyway, the New York Historical Society was an interesting place, filled with dusty glass cases crammed with interesting things like miniature portraits of people left over from the days when people were flat and had no third dimension as well as looming paintings of bucolic scenes that purported to be Manhattan Island, though since one could dimly make out trees and shepherds through layers of yellowing varnish, clearly they were not Manhattan Island: Where were the skyscrapers?
The New York Historical Society, I’m sad to say, has succumbed to contemporary curatorial mandates. These days, the majority of museums keep most of their artifacts locked up. The few they deign to put on display have spotlights and helpful annotations: In the late 19th century, Five Points was one of Manhattan’s most notorious slums…
I hate this.
I think museums should be one big dusty jumble where you can free associate.
Plus the New York Historical Society is in the process of using dead Henry Luce’s money to redo its fourth floor, which means that very little of its permanent collection will be open to the public for the next two years.
They were hosting a few traveling exhibitions – one on the history of Chinese immigration, another an Annie Leibowitz portfolio of non-portraits.
The Chinese immigration exhibition made me flash on the fact that I’ve actually written what’s essentially a 500-page novel on Chinese immigration.
My Steinbeck novel.
Which is all about how in the winter of 1932, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell encounter the ghosts of the Chinese who established a fishing village along Point Alones in the 1860s and who were subsequently burned out by Italian fishermen in 1906. Highjinks ensue. Some of the highjinks involve William Randolph Hearst. I invented a kind of vengeful supernatural spirit, a female wraith, through whose enchantments Steinbeck and Campbell find themselves traveling (cue woo-woo muzak) Back In Time!! At the end, the Chinese ghosts are pacified and Our Heroes go on to write Nobel Prize-winning novels and follow their respective blisses.
In real life, this was the winter that Campbell fell in love with Carol, Steinbeck’s first wife. I think part of the problem I had with writing the damn thing was that I liked Carol and I liked Ed Ricketts, but I didn’t like Steinbeck and Campbell – and they were the main protagonists.
Anyway, wandering around this exhibit, I thought, Damn, girlfriend! Commercial hook! And you’ve already got the first draft!!
So maybe I should take the MS out of the drawer?
The first draft needs revisions. Plot is waaaaaay too convoluted. Dialogue is waaaay too Aaron Sorkin ‘cause that’s actually the way I talk! But, you know, The Grapes of Wrath ain't The Social Network.
The novel was what kept me sane when I was so-o-o-o miserable and beaten down in Ithaca. Possibly that’s why I never felt impelled to go on working on it when I got out of Ithaca – I didn’t want to be reminded.
The Annie Leibowitz exhibit was interesting in its own way, too. She would be able to take that photograph I long to take of that bicycle on the northwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street! The exhibit was of totem objects belonging to people who were meaningful to her in some way – or so the exhibit notes say. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that Annie Leibowitz is inspired in any way by, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But what do I know? Leibowitz’s lighting, her composition, were all pretty interesting. Though I did have to wonder how much of that was Leibowitz’s eye through the camera, and how much of it was her eye manipulating Photoshop.
