Reading Notes

Charles D'Ambrosio. "Loitering: New and Colected Essays".

Tin House Books. Portland Oregon, 2015 printing. ISBN 978-1-1935639-87-9

Unrelated photo illustrations provided by me, a guy taking pictures from the top of a snow hill that was created by plows in a parking lot.

Essay on "Loitering"

The essayist describes a media circus at the scene of domestic violence where police respond.

"This whole aimless scene badly needs a plot, and nothing emphasizes that more than these journalists, these TV people, standing around in a parking lot scattered with expensive equipment that now waits idly for... something.

... [There is] a sense of collective anticipation, a weird hope. Really it would be a relief if that gun would go off."

"It's weird to watch what amounts oxymoronically to a rehearsal of urgent news, especially without sound, emptied of content, because this pantomime of immediacy is patently fake, a charade, a fine-tuning, not of emotions, but the reenacted look of emotions. It's method acting or something. In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit. Previously I thought the TV news had a certain endemic phoniness because all the reporters were sorority girls who'd majored in communications, but it never occurred to me that the fakery was intentional."

"Every time I turned around [the TV reporter] he was chatting up another secretary, then he'd rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors. To look at his on-camera face you'd think Godzilla was eating lawyers off the Winslow ferry."

Those TV news gigalos and prostitutes are in the lucrative business of perpetuating a lie. That's why their hair needs to be crisp and suave, despite a downpour of rain. Why their tragedy and concern and sympathy and outrage are vapid and as interchangeable from story to story as parts are on a broadcast news assembly line.

They are paid to tell and re-tell a consistent story. A well-rehearsed and cliche script with directed intent. A story that creates an atmosphere of fear and obedience. [See the movie Nightcrawler, 2014). An alternating entertaining and unsettling narrative to keep you distracted, grateful to make money for your employers, pay your share to the credit card and the rest to taxes. Keep you scabbing ( The modern strikebreaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children and his fellow men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust or corporation. - Jack London) in pursuit of superfluous sensations like new car smell, a French aroma, the tactile pleasure of thick cloth napkins, a Bourbon, a potable fashion accessory to dress up your morning commute (Starbucks).

Reminds me of a student I saw recently. A yuppie-wanna-be tool board the university shuttle wearing bright yellow translucent rimmed sunglasses (Rockrimmon' y'all). He had on a half faux-leather half-polyster motorcycle jacket, white iPod earbuds, a Starbucks attached to the end of his arm like a woman carries a purse, a messy hair cut carefully arranged with product. And... OH YEAH! Of course, he's too high society to wear a (scornfully childish) backpack, so he's touting one of those wide, leather shoulder-sling bags at the mall that cost $300 for their worn down look. I wanted to let out a hearty "HA" when I saw this ridiculous consumer billboard take a seat in front of mine.

Essay on "Seattle, 1974"

"A reading list - Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et al. - that was really little more than a syllabus for a course on exile. You could probably dismiss this as one of those charming agonies of late adolescence, but let me suggest that it's also a logical first step in developing an aesthetic, a reach toward historical beauty, the desire to join yourself to what's already been appreciated and admired. You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance."

The idea the essayist presents of belonging to an admired community is kind of ironic. The individuals who we remember in history tend to be people who stood out from their time and said the things others wouldn't, thought the unthinkable, dared the impossible. That belonging to their lot requires a detachment from the conventions, the thralls of their society, the fears and safety of belonging to their generation. It's a community of people who don't belong.

The narrator see this affinity toward great authors as a form of belonging, but it is actually an antithesis to belonging of or by their society. The following statement may be kind of obvious, not needed to be said. But membership into this admired community, does not allow one to get in a room with all the past historical heroes and share a drink. I think this pursuit of fame or praise will never be an adequate substitute to the psychological need for real social belonging.