Reading The Great Gatsby, again. Jonathan Franzen on NPR says he revisits the book every year or two. I’ve always leaned toward This Side of Paradise, though Gatsby is possibly, as the people on the radio had been proposing, the American Novel. More true lately, with the rise and fall of big things. The stock market, gangsters, bond-traders, “self-made” people, indulgence, arrogance, and tragedy shared, or not.
A good story tendrilled to today, Gatsby props up American myths to stand or fall against the winds of human frailty and liability. The land of opportunity; to do what? Somewhere to re-invent yourself, start over. That’s kind of what Agniezska, my friend, recently-citizened, whose validity I gladly vouched for to the proper authorities, said. Besides the, perhaps, more common conflation of “opportunity” and money-making, she says, to leave all you’ve known and what’s been expected of you can too be a compelling a reason to come to America.
I’ve decided to stay put today. I’m staying on the block. Not as much action as I would expect, but it’s still early. 1:52 pm.
A Louis classic is playing, a slower romantic one. He’s singing something about giving him your lips. “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” that’s the Armstrong title.
On the corner of Gates and Marcy, the next cross street up from here at Monroe, stands the Louis Armstrong Public Houses. I wonder if anyone over there is listening to this sweet, indulgent daylong-plus retrospective of the erstwhile jazzman. It’s one of the least attractive, though they’re still common, places I’ve seen in Bed-Stuy; at least that’s within spitting distance of my place and sometimes crossed in normal route.
Firecrackers and some small fireworks have been going off for days. Today there are more, gladly. Just a bit rebellion, and not just for the metaphor of artillery, fireworks that fit well with the underlying ethos of the day: don’t tell us what to do. A silly law easily broken, a way to, more than just let off work-a-day-steam by indulging in ritual, convenient and relatively safe. We need this. For America, born of rebellious teenage-logic—like, the battle of attrition—law breaking for the sake of it, anti-authoritarianism just because, is part of its creation myth.
Triangulated by a milk-mouthed jazz radio voice, car stereos throbbing whoomps, and the tinny jangle of tiny speakers in windows turned street-ward, I woke up from a nap. Then a new theme is introduced: the ice cream man’s Scottish-jig-something-or-other-ditty playing on and on, and forever; just beneath, an aftertaste of subtle but substantial lawnmower-roar of the truck’s refrigeration.
Black Power-fists exchanged for Barack Obama portraiture on t-shirts, the now iconic image made by a white man of a man half-white. Beneath the shirt still angry, but anger more stilled, more patient and, perhaps, more optimistic; perhaps there’s more reason to be.
Fountains of silver and orange fill front steps of brownstones, whistle-crack. Night has come. Whistle-boom. The sun has gone. Whistle-crackle-fizzle. Darkness only broken up occasionally by—crash, like metal doors thrown off rooftops onto sidewalks below.
Thunder? Or the low rumble of far dark sky disturbed. Pop, pop: go the smaller firecrackers kids get to set off.
Momentary anarchy. Insurgent ritual. Rebellion distilled.
Yes, that's an Hassidic cop.
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