a letter, not a story, about chicago in March

I took a walk today. A walk! In Chicago! The first real walk -- the first stroll for stroll's sake -- I've taken since I got back, on almost windless, sunlit streets, almost like you'd get in a normal city where people actually lived, but a bit colder. One of the freaky things about Chicago to me is the way it will suddenly, technically in the middle of the city, turn into something that is not a city at all, and then in a minute turn back to city, all too city. You walk down Fullerton, falling slightly apart what with the imminent sale of Los Recuerdos ("For sale: nightclub and real estate") but keeping it real with the Missionary Mission of Jesus Christ, Inc., and when you see the highway passing by you in all its diagonal glory you take a left, join a couple of girls rolling along in extremely tight jeans as they make their way under the highway overpass. It still feels a little open, a little spacious, but gritty, city. Then you take a right on Elston and suddenly you are in Park City Mall, the enormous shopping mall outlet hell near my parents' house in the part of Pennsylvania that didn't really need to destroy its gorgeous Amish farmland to build concrete blocks of consumer exhaustion but did.

After a while of this -- as you consider whether you need electronics, household goods, pet supplies -- you take a right and are plunged into something pukifyingly precious, so precious in comparison to where you just were that it seems not quite real, all mauve silk babydoll dresses and bureaus out of Anne of Green Gables, with names they probably paid some designer fifty thousand dollars for before the thing even opened. And then there's a section of nothing in particular -- also a Chicago specialty -- and all of a sudden you are in the land of red and blue hair glued straight up, signs advertising piercings and tattoos, girls with something between a purse and a bike messenger bag standing outside, flicking a cigarette, rolling their eyes into the cell phone: "I'm like right outside of fucking Filter, like where the fuck are you?" I slip inside of fucking Filter to see if my temporary roommate is there (he said he might be) and run almost literally (in case you thought leaving hyde park meant, like, leaving hyde park) into his ex-girlfriend.

And then finally out, and back up Milwaukee, through something a little broken-windowed, a section of the sidewalk run to mud, a man standing by his bike at a pay phone outside a White Castle yelling as the El kachunks by but in a way that makes it clear that he's not yelling because of the El -- there's a cadence and intonation to cursing that you can hear even when you can't make out the words themselves. But it gets livelier from there, until it almost seems like a neighborhood, and the girl in the Mexican grocery is nice, and across the street there are six dollar haircuts, and there are kids playing basketball at the do not enter end of my block, and in the apartment the cats are draped pretty much where I left them, and my roommate is taking a nap.

It's not exactly Whitman, this feeling, it's not exactly ecstatic; but it's heightened, it's the feeling you get from a city, from life and lives teeming and streaming and paying no attention to you, your one small square of home anchoring your movement through it, with the comfort of feeling that anchor and the excitement of knowing that everyone else is anchored somehow else, somewhere you don't know about and in some other way.

the next step in

the wanderings of

the wandering jew
Posted by: blahgstein.

view out my window

view out my window
Posted by: blahgstein.

green living room

green living room
Posted by: blahgstein.

green room with matching cats

green room with matching cats
Posted by: blahgstein.

behind the green room

behind the green room
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my ceiling

my ceiling
Posted by: blahgstein.

kitchen + sunroom

kitchen + sunroom
Posted by: blahgstein.

next up in Jakobson:

When you've got nothing more to not say about the phatic function of language, sometimes you start tapping your feet and looking around and stumble on some pretty cool naturally occurring demonstrations of the poetic function.*
(courtesy of HB)



* Poetic function: "The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake” (69). Not to be confined to (or confused with) poetry; “The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent” (69). The poetic function depends on selection and combination. “The selection is produced on the basis of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. ...in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence” (71).

fits, starts, and ends

fits

Yesterday I saw the last remaining apartments in Hyde Park. I’ve been through every management company list I could get my hands on, and I think I’ve seen pretty much everything in my price and size range that there is. I’d even started the application procedure for one decent place, before waking up one morning worried about the sky not falling down: the apartment faces out onto the neighboring building and gets virtually no light. Just the thought of it started to depress me, and I resumed my search. After planning an engagement to one place that turned out to be out of my league—the price was incorrectly quoted to me—I pursued, in what seemed to be an increasingly comic situation, my last opportunity for my very own Platz-an-der-Sonnenhütte (as they say in Der Besuch der alten Dame) by pursuing the word “various” next to an address that is not exactly on, but is within walking distance of, the fashionable side of the street (as they say in The Importance of Being Earnest).

The day was crisp but not cold, and when the snow started to come down in fattened flakes like little tufts of the wool of clean, happy, well-fed sheep, I was, for once, neither resentful nor apprehensive. I skipped a little as I walked down the street. I thought of hot cocoa. I did not actually think of Julie Andrews, but I could have—that's the kind of snow it was. As I waited by the gate, a man came up with a garbage bag and said, theatrically raising his hands to indicate the sky, “Saint Pyatrick’s day! I yask you!” before opening the gate and collecting some dead flora for his bag.

starts

Instead of the gruff probable-Serb with whom I had arranged the appointment (Hyde Park buildings tend to be managed by Serbs), a friendly Mexican guy a little taller and a little wider than me showed up to open the door for me. The apartment was almost perfect: both rooms’ windows faced out over the roof of the entrance onto the street. The kitchen was big enough to eat in. The closet was big enough to camp in. The only problem was that the oven was about as wide as my hips: an oven for a skinny New York appetite, an oven for heating up frozen bread in.

“The list said various,” I said. “You have anything else? Or is this the only one?” Well, he hemmed a little in his soft, shy way, there’s another one right next door, but it’s the exact same thing. “Why don’t I take a look, since we’re here anyway.” He searched around for the keys and we entered the mirror image of the first apartment. Again he stood at the window watching the snow fall--the key point here being that there were windows to stand at where watch the snow fall--while I made a slow inspection. It was, in fact, the exact same thing, except one bedroom window, which was a little blocked by a brick protrusion, and the oven, which was a healthy midwestern size, big enough for a couple of cookie sheets in at the same time. I was weighing the relative importance of brick blockings and oven sizes when I asked him again, “So, it's these two, huh? Nothing else?” Well, he started reluctantly, there is one more, but it’s not ready yet, we’d have to fix it up, and it’s pretty much the same…

The stairs up to the third apartment were dripping in salsa music—it was running down the walls, spilling out into the hallway, from the door next to the one he opened. The apartment looked like it had only recently and not quite thoroughly been vacated. The curtains on the main windows, a layer of dusty translucent blue lace with an insulating layer of raggedy old blue cotton with a floral pattern, suggested an old lady meshing of prim and tawdry. I almost asked if I could keep them. The apartment turned out to be a corner unit, windows all along two sides, living room and dinette facing out directly onto the street, bedroom facing onto a small parking lot and lots of sky. Even the closet had a window, for god’s sake, covered with another raggedy sheet of brown floral patterning. “I want it,” I said and, opening the bedroom closet, was immediately doused with a bucket of salsa music from next door. “Although, does the neighbor always listen to music that loud? That’s gonna drive me nuts.”

He laughed: “That’s my brother, he’s next door, fixing up the studio they’re renting out. He likes to listen to music when he works.” And with that I felt my fate click into place. “This is great,” I said as he locked up the apartment door, “I’ll go over to the office right now and see about a lease. Hey, thanks for showing it to me. What’s your name, by the way?” “Abel,” he said. I didn’t quite get it. “Ay, bee, ee, el.” A little screw turned and tightened the fit of my fate: how could I, a girl who thinks it is important to be Ernest, possibly not live in a building cared for by a man named Abel? “Abel, hi. I’m Anya.” He smiled again. I glanced over at the wellspring of salsa music. Behind that door worked the brother of Abel. I considered it. I refrained. I can always ask after I move in.

ends

Although there were still some complications to work through—the person in charge of this building at the management company was out sick so I couldn’t formally get started on the lease—I thought I should call and withdraw my application for the sunless room of several days ago. The realtor was, of course, not happy about it—this is a bad time for everyone, renters and rentees—and reacted to my explanation as though he’d never heard of the sky and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to see it. “Sorry about that,” I said. “Yeah,” he said in a voice of such finality that it made me think of Jakobson. In Jakobson’s terminology, phatic, a term he lifts from Malinowski, refers to “messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works…, to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.”* In everyday academic-speak, the part about discontinuing communication has generally been lost, and people use the word phatic to describe that part of an interaction oriented around preserving it or confirming that it is still going on.

In my own life the word phatic is defined by childhood phone calls to my grandparents in Moscow, which for me followed an unshakeable pattern: “Hi! How are you? We’re fine! We’ll talk to you next Sunday!” The realtor’s tone, however, was clearly not oriented toward preserving the interaction but toward ending it and telling it not to come back. As I hung up the phone, still excited by my prim and tawdry find, I felt just a pinch of heaviness, a little tint of tiredness, emerging from the conversation. I was thinking that the subset of the phatic function to which the man’s utterance belonged could well be called the dephatic—the fatiguing departure of phatic confirmation that marks the end of one interaction, the impossibility of another.



* Roman Jakobson, 1987. “Linguistics and Poetics” in Language in Literature. Krytyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds. Harvard, p. 69.

the marriage counselor

Did I mention I went to see an apartment yesterday? A two room studio, if there is such a thing -- two equally sized rooms with a fridge, stove, and sink kind of thrown at jaunty angles next to one another in a little tiled alcove. Instead of the usual Hyde Park room plus kitchen plus dinette, this was a room plus room plus kitchenette. Carpeted in a strong, institutional brown that hides the tracks well and has seen everything. As we walked up the stairs, Glen, the super, who had arrived half an hour late after a prodding phone call from me, wondered out loud, "What the fuck?" There was a big empty Coca Cola bottle on the landing and you could kind of make out the brown spots from what must have been in the bottle. The stairs smelled so strongly of bleach that you couldn't really tell where it had gone though. Down the hall as I looked in the apartment a woman was yelling, "Get the fuck out of my house. Get the fuck out of my house and don't come back. Get the fuck out of here." It's always difficult to describe the qualities of people's voices beyond the obvious, pitch, breathiness. Her voice was neither high nor low, neither thick nor thin, strong and clear without being piercing. A normal, actually quite nice, decent sounding, woman's voice.

But there was something about the volume of it: she was yelling to be heard perfectly clearly down the hall and a floor in either direction, without sounding like she was screaming, desperate, at her wits' end. It sounded like it was a normal range for her, on a pissed off day. I remembered walking in Manhattan one time in the middle of the night and this guy started following me down the street yelling something like "Get out of my city! You cunt! Get the fuck out of my city!" What was so striking about it was not what he was yelling (although I don't think anybody has ever yelled that at me aside from him) but just how loud he was going. He was going pretty much about as loud as he probably could. He was not barring any holds. And I realized (as I stepped off the sidewalk to cross over to the other side and turned my head over my shoulder to yell, sharply, like you might at an animal, "Hey! Leave me 'lone!" upon which he started just a little, paused just a little, before continuing to yell, in that same unreally loud voice, from his spot on the sidewalk, now no longer following me, as I walked away down the other side of the street) that I hadn't ever actually heard someone yell like that, yell seemingly without any consciousness that they were yelling at all, or that it was an unusual thing to do. That's what was frightening about that guy, not that the words were aggressive but that he was yelling like someone who really had nothing restraining him, no, for lack of a better word but I mean this rather precisely, sense of propriety. Either really no intention of being anything like proper or simply no sense of there being some proper way to be. Again it's hard to describe the quality of a sound, but after that guy on the street I became aware of different levels of restraint in people's voices. It's relative, of course -- in Taiwan there is a kind of woman, a chubby middle-aged type with grown children, who yells through most of her life, and might easily be heard upon occasion down the hall, and not even for any particularly pissed off reason. But it's considered completely normal, it's not a sign of unrestraint but just of a certain social role being ably filled. The man in Manhattan, though, and the woman in this apartment building, were neither of them middle-aged Taiwanese housewives.

I finished up looking -- mostly just looking out the windows really, the place faces right out onto a busy street and in the not-quite rain of yesterday afternoon it was kind of magical, the people hurrying by in their trench coats -- while Glen the super muttered about "always making trouble." What's that? "Crazy nigger down there always in some kind of trouble." Glen let me go out by myself while he went and knocked on the door down the hall. "What's up now?" I heard him ask, and in response he got, "Get this motherfucker out of my house. I want him the fuck out of my house, right now. And I don't want him back" "What the fuck?" said Glen, again. Poor Glen.