The sidewalks are wobbling in the god-awful heat.
Ninety-eight in the shade,
Where there is shade, as New York lies locked under
Layers of high pressure
That trap the thick atmosphere (ozone, exhaust, smog
Drifted over from Jersey,
Infernal dampness: “It’s not the heat, it’s the whatchamacallit,”
Said a fat girl in the elevator,
Too hot or too humid to get a grip on her clichés),
Clapping it over your face:
Today, Independence Day, on the verge of moving to the burbs
(7 rms, 2 bths, occ. negotiable),
I walk to the window (how the black dust seeps in!) and look
Upon the city I am losing;
Lines for everything, jack-hammers, crime, garbage,
Rent out the whazoo,
Air pollution, noise pollution, rush-hour traffic, dope,
Payola, beautiful people,
Bag people, a new disease every day, cyclical poverty.
Mayor Koch (yech),
Donald Trump (yech, yech), Leona Helmsley (STOP!):
Why even Sandy McClatchy,
Who, let’s face it, is a man at pains to appear urbane,
When he got back last time
Said this town seems more and more like Calcutta,
So why, can you tell me,
After ten years of such dreck should I be sorry to go?
I mean, should I care?
Because, excuse me, fresh bagels all by themselves
Can’t make up for it all,
Not even from H & H World’s Best Bagels, where the sign says
“You’ll Be in Heaven-Share Them!!!”
(O.k.: oh to be standing in the March A.M. with a hot bagel
In your hand, its soft flesh
Yielding to your fingers and the steam rising into your face…
Mmmm, make mine with raisins).
But today, Independence Day, as a huge, hazy, orange sun
Sets over the Bayonne swamps
Like an industrial disaster, like gas flaring over an oil field,
Why give a second thought,
Can you tell me please, to the notion of kissing goodbye
Cabbies who know everything
And got off the boat just last week? of leaving behind
Cops with that big-city attitude
And that high school education? of bidding a final adieu
To the Eurotrash crowding midtown?
Why is the heart downcast to think I won’t be seeing
The promenade along the Heights
(Alright, I don’t go there all that often, but I could),
Where I chatted with Ben Gardner
The third time he got off the ward? We availed ourselves
Of that view and spoke of how,
Statistically considered, the odds were his mind would now
Never really be right again.
And what of the old-world roses in back of the Brooklyn Museum?
If you time your visit right
(The 4th of July is too late, early in June would be better),
You can take in Albert Bierstadt
And then find Coral Creeper in bloom, pale apricot and smelling
Sweeter even than oil paint.
Or if that seems too out-of-town (those Japanese tour groups
Just love botanical gardens).
We speeding bedlamites might cross the bridge and drop
By Chumley’s for a drink:
Left over from prohibition, Chumley’s is all a bar should be,
Dark and cool, even in July,
And decorated with book jackets by authors famous in their time.
Let’s have gin gimlets
(Just gin and lime juice, no additives—New York bartenders
Will try to be original)
And look around the place, at the wood paneling and stone hearth
And two inconspicuous exits,
Still a handy feature if you see someone you’d rather not.
Now that we’ve started
Who wants to stop? Let’s do them all, let’s hit the White Horse
Where Hudson St. begins
(Only, please, this once, could we get in and out without quoting
His Welsh and blottoed self?);
Let’s taxi up Park Ave. to the lounge at the Mayfair Regent
And sit in wing-back chairs
While the girls in Victorian garb bring us exotic rum punches;
Let’s take the tube to Tribeca,
To Puffy’s on Varick St. (yes, I know Puffy’s is all yuppies now—
Too close to the exchanges.
And besides, artists can’t afford Tribeca anymore—but today
Everyone’s left for the 4th
And we can drink in peace as the trucks coming out of the tunnel
Rumble past warehouses outside).
Look, let’s really celebrate—come on, I’m leaving this town—
I know an opium den
Not far from the Manhattan Bridge (that engineering embarrassment,
That rickety hodgepodge,
That architectural macaronic of gothic arches and filigree finials
And some sort of Brandenburg Gate
Providing triumphal entry to the stoplights along Flatbush Ave.),
And if we beg at the door
We might just get in, even though we don’t speak Chinese
And have big noses and smell bad.
What do you mean you don’t want to? What else is New York for?
Costly hangovers and cheap ennui,
So come on, and since we’re half-drunk and headed that direction,
Let’s stop at Diamond Lil’s,
The joint on Canal where Rick Tilton used to get flat polluted
As he drank and drew the dancers
(All the models a painter could ask for, right there on the bar,
And striking most unusual poses),
Only—damn!—I forgot. Diamond Lil’s became McDonald’s, and that
Is the trouble with this town:
Just when you get used to it, get to know your way around.
The city you have learned is gone,
Torn down and made over according to someone else’s blueprint
Of how New York should be,
The landscape of your desires replaced by one more up-to-date.
By something more profitable
(Building New York making politicians so much money they elect
To repeat the effect regularly),
So that if you go looking for McFeely’s, in the Terminal Hotel
At the west end of 23rd,
Where Dan Halpern and Stephen Spender came in to eat one night
With a copy of Schuyler’s poem
Called “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” which takes place there,
And started reading it aloud
Without even noticing—dumb bunnies —that sitting right next to them
Were Doug and Frank in the flesh,
You’ll find it’s closed, kaput, in renovation, i.e. done for;
And if you go looking
At the head of Macdougal for the Eighth St. Bookstore,
Where my poems will never stand
Between Byron and Blake (and right next to Charles Bukowski:
Sometimes life is pure bathos),
You’ll find it’s disappeared, vanished like volumes out-of-print,
Literally gone up in smoke,
And if New York has its bookstores still, still none of them.
Not Gotham Bookmart
(It’s clubby and confuses literature with rock ‘n’ roll, but has
Plenty of poetry anyway),
Not Books & Co. (spruce, with a so-so poetry selection unaccountably
Interspersed with prose),
Not the Phoenix, Gryphon, St. Marks, not Coliseum, not the Strand,
No none of them approach
That paragon, that platonic ideal, the paradise of bibliophiles,
Eighth St. Bookstore of my mind!
And that, of course, is the landfill it’s all been dragged to,
The suburb it’s all moved into,
The city of my recollection become the province of idle thought,
Its buildings suddenly transported,
Transformed into an imagined land, a half-visible locale
Where Kim Rogal and David Kalstone
(Each genial, myopic, bemused) may still be found at parties;
Where some celluloid obscurité
Still shows nightly to the faithful lined up outside the Thalia
(Inside are popcorn-eating mice
And the feeling of being between decks on a tramp steamer);
Where those old synagogues
On the lower east side, with their snakey, oriental motifs,
And those upper west side churches,
With their quasi-military towers and turrets, all still stand
(Churches are like women for me .. .
Worship seems a bit excessive, but I do like to look at them),
And the trashy condos
That replaced them are stripped, gutted, dynamited, razed;
Where the Day Line still plies
Hudson’s River, pushing upstream all the way to Poughkeepsie
To return among green prospects
Past Storm King and the Tappan Zee, past the Palisades
(That beetling escarpment
In which geologic time is evident as writing on the wall),
Back to New York, Sin City,
Wick to the wicked and home to eight million aspirations:
City of unnatural light,
City of squalor and big ambition, O infinitely human city,
Your every aspect I have
At heart from this day Fourth as the secret that defines me,
A Central Park of the soul,
Composed of all the beauty and violence that is the past,
A darkening confine from which
Patterns of memory will rise like poems, like the explosions
That have now begun to burst
Above the Park, above the Battery (when I lived in Brooklyn,
In a factory in the ghetto,
Holidays would bring fireworks over Manhattan and brisk reports
Of gunfire throughout Fort Green),
In radiant showers of red and white and blue, a first-class farewell,
A really super send-off,
The simply dazzling evanescence (“one lollapalooza of a show!”
“Rip-snorting entertainment!”
“Mesmerizing, jaw-gritting excitement!”) that is what I take away
On July 4th 1988, Independence Day.
Suggested Reading
Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship
By Javier Cercas“Our friendship lasted three and a half years and one day, or one night. It was not a long friendship, but it was an intense one.”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Fiction No. 85
By J. G. Ballard
Photograph by Fay Godwin
The son of an English businessman, J. G. Ballard was born and raised in Shanghai. For the past twenty-odd years, he has lived more or less anonymously in Shepperton, a dingy, nondescript suburb of London lying under the approach to Heathrow Airport. Ballard’s writing is so often situated within the erotic, technical, postholocaust landscape, and so often concerned with the further reaches of postmodern consciousness, that it is inevitably rather droll to come upon the man himself. On first meeting, Ballard is standing somewhat shyly in the doorway of a modest two-story dwelling similar to all the others on the block; one would take him as a typical suburban lord of the manor. He is wearing a brown sweater over his shirt, protected against the faint chill of a summer afternoon.
Inside, two shiny silver palm trees, bending amiably over a reclining aluminum lawn chair, inject the only note of fantasy into an otherwise quite normal-looking household. Until a few years ago, Ballard, a widower, raised his three children here as a single parent.
We sit down in his study, which appears to have once been the living room. Ballard works at an old dining table against the wall, upon which sits his middle-aged typewriter, surrounded by fairly tidy stacks of letters, books, and papers. The bookshelves are overflowing, packed every which way with an odd collection, including a thick, illustrated anatomy text called Crash Injuries, the complete Warren Commission Report, the collected works of Shakespeare, and many books on surrealism, dadaism, futurism, and pop art.
An extremely articulate and wide-ranging conversationalist, Ballard expresses his ideas, speculations, and concerns with considerable force. A serious sense of humor is also evident, and one often has the feeling that he is continually amused, or at least bemused, by the sheer fact of existence.
At the time of this interview, Ballard had just finished the first draft of his latest novel, Empire of the Sun, which was published in October 1984 to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. “It’s my first good review in the States in fifteen years,” comments Ballard, referring to the generally indifferent reception his books have received here to date. This is a situation which has long been puzzling to Ballard, who consciously draws on specifically American iconography in much of his work. Yet, within just a few weeks of publication, Empire of the Sun has already become his most commercially successful work. This “nonfiction” novel—a great departure in subject matter for Ballard—details his own adolescent experiences, first in war-formed Shanghai as the son of a British merchant, then, after Pearl Harbor, as a fugitive-then-prisoner-of-war in the Lunghua Assembly Center. “I assume that it took me a long time to forget, and then a long time to remember,” Ballard recently told an interviewer who asked why he had only now attempted this reconstruction.
After an hour or so of talk, Teacher’s Scotch and sodas are served, and Ballard discourses briefly on the virtues of Shepperton water (several low-lying reservoirs are nearby). While the sun is setting in the shady green backyard, visible through French windows, a moment of suburban quiet prevails. “I don’t know why I ended up here, really . . .” Ballard comments. “Actually, the suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one’s got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one’s freedom. It needn’t be much; kicking the dog will do.”
INTERVIEWER
Are you ready to risk the fate of the centipede, who, when asked exactly how he crawled, shot himself?
J. G. BALLARD
I’ll do my best to examine my hands in the mirror.
INTERVIEWER
So, how do you write, exactly?
BALLARD
Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan . . .
BALLARD
I think you’re completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.
INTERVIEWER
So you rely on the magnetism of an obsession as a way of proceeding?
BALLARD
Yes, so the unity of the enterprise is forever there. A whole universe can be bounded in a nutshell. Of course, why one chooses certain topics as the subject for one’s obsessions is a different matter. Why was I obsessed by car crashes? It’s such a peculiar idea.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, why were you?
BALLARD
Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
INTERVIEWER
Your work does at times seem to possess a sort of prophetic quality. Are you aware of this as you write?
BALLARD
It’s true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead. I don’t mean anything too portentous by this. I suppose people—certainly imaginative writers—who consciously exploit their own obsessions do so in part because those obsessions lie like stepping-stones in front of them, and their feet are drawn towards them. At any given time, I’m aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn.
INTERVIEWER
Has this manipulation of your obsessions come to feel at all mechanical over the years?
BALLARD
I do exploit myself in a calculated way, but there again one has to remember the old joke about the laboratory rat who said, “I have this scientist trained—every time I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food.”
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps it’s a symbiotic relationship.
BALLARD
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. Years ago, sitting at the café outside the American Express building in Athens, I watched the British actor Michael Redgrave (father of Vanessa) cross the street in the lunchtime crowd, buy Time at a magazine kiosk, indulge in brief banter with the owner, sit down, order a drink, then get up and walk away—every moment of which, every gesture, was clearly acted, that is, stressed and exaggerated in a self-conscious way, although he obviously thought that no one was aware who he was, and he didn’t think that anyone was watching him. I take it that the same process works for the writer, except that the writer is assigning himself his own roles. I have a sense of certain gathering obsessions and roles, certain corners of the field where the next stage of the hunt will be carried on. I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
INTERVIEWER
I believe I once read—perhaps it was in connection with the Vermilion Sands collection—that you actually enjoyed the notion of cultural decadence.
BALLARD
Decadence? I can’t remember if I ever said I enjoyed the notion, except in the sense of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels, which I don’t really see as places of decadence, but rather like the desert in that I see them merely as psychic zero stations, or as “Go,” in Monopoly terms.
From the Archive, Issue 94
Interview
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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