Middlesex Update

All my kvetching of a couple days ago notwithstanding, I'm continuing to read Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and getting quite a bit out of it. Admittedly I'm skimming over the bits where J.E. tries to get all literary on us, but now that he's managed to transport his first couple of protagonists to 1920s Detroit, there's enough period detail to keep me enthralled.

I especially liked his introduction of the Ford Rouge plant, or the Rouge, as it was known then and during my own 1950s childhood, when it continued to tower balefully over Downriver and with billowing clouds of black, acrid smoke blot out the sun and the sky and most other signs of life, love or hope.

I never actually worked at the Rouge, though I was taken there several times on school or Scout tours. Since it was assumed that half or more of us would probably end up there, I suppose they thought it made sense to get us used to the idea. If you ever get a chance to see the Diego Rivera murals in the entrance hall to the Detroit Institute of Art - the Sistine Chapel of the factory classes, I always called it - you'll notice the portrayal of tour groups who from balconies observe the assembly line workers who in Rivera's rendering have begun to inelectuably merge with the machinery. Local auto magnates tried to have the murals erased when they saw that implicit message, but in one of the rare times in Detroit history where art triumphed over philistinism, were unsuccessful.

Another aspect of Eugenides' portrayal that rang true - despite it being obvious that it had all come from assiduous research and that he himself had never set foot in the factories except possibly as a tourist - was that of the black workers being consigned to the hellish environs of the foundry, where they worked mere inches away from flames that blazed high above their heads. By the 1960s, blacks had made their way onto the assembly line and other less dangerous and more comfortable positions on the factory floor, but in the steel mill where I worked in 1969, the crew shoveling coal into the ovens was still almost uniformly black, and I remember marveling when I learned that for this work - which almost no white man, even the most recent immigrant, was expected to do - they were actually paid less than those of us who did the somewhat cushier - "cushy" being an extremely relative term on Zug Island - jobs upstairs.

Anyway, while I'm still slightly bristling over the Briggs Stadium/Thanksgiving Day parade cockups, I must give credit where it's due: Eugenides has done his homework and looks to be constructing a mighty fine portrait of that often less than mighty fine city (but we love her anyway), Detroit.

A Sense Of Place

One of the things that can almost immediately spoil a piece of writing for me is a wrong place name. I can put up with paper-thin plots, cardboard characters, even - though with great reluctance - playing fast and loose with tense and perspective, but tell me that the action is unfolding on such-and-such street when I know perfectly well it's an avenue, and you're well on your way to losing me.

I'm not alone in this: at least two writers I admire greatly, Aaron Cometbus and John K. Samson have told me how important an accurate sense of place is to them. Aaron in particular can get extremely exercised when someone who purports to know his or her way around Berkeley misspells the name of his favorite cafe, and I don't blame him. It's bad enough when you're dealing with a memoir or a history: the immediate reaction is to wonder whether the writer was even there, or if we're just reading extrapolations from research that could have been conducted on a laptop parked in some cafe thousands of miles away.

But where it's really damaging is in a work of fiction. Unless a writer is an absolute master of the craft, he or she is depending on a certain willingness to suspend disbelief on the part of the reader. A single misspelled or misidentified place name is like the sour note that reduces an orchestra's otherwise sublime and soaring moment to bathetic farce, or when Romeo's impassioned declaration to Juliet is interrupted by a stagehand's cell phone going off.

It's probably why many of the best writers, even when they're clearly writing about the towns where they grew up or currently live, substitute a simulacrum or doppelgänger town. It's also why I've always been hesitant to write about London or New York, despite all the time I've spent in those cities: although I'd like to think I know them both reasonably well, there are always likely to be bits of knowledge that I'll have missed by not growing up there. Hell, I'm even afraid to tackle Detroit, even though I did grow up there, partly because it's been so long since I left, and partly because the city has changed nearly beyond recognition since that time.

Which brings me to my original point: for the last several years people have been telling me that since I was from Detroit, I "had to" read Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Even the Free Press, Detroit's approximate equivalent to the San Francisco Chronicle (figure out for yourself if that's a compliment), got in on the act: "At last Detroit has its great novel," it proclaimed, going on to compare it to Joyce's treatment of Dublin.

Well, that may be, but I'd only got to page 12 before the flowery if not downright rococo narrative delivered a distinct clunker. It was 1959, according to Eugenides, and the priest at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church regularly had to shush the parishioners because they "treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium." Only trouble is that in 1959, THERE WAS NO TIGER STADIUM. A small point, you say? Not to a kid who grew up attending games at Briggs Stadium, which was the name of the place until 1961 (and long after that to those who grown up under the old regime; it had taken my father at least 20 years to start calling it Briggs Stadium instead of Navin Field, and he wasn't about to change again).

Granted, Eugenides had barely been born at the time of the name change, but you have to wonder if he ever attended a game there or had any interest at all in Briggs/Tiger Stadium other than as a cheap and not particularly accurate simile: unlike some other towns, Detroit wasn't renowned for the antics of its bleacher bums, at least not in those days. But I do know that as a kid, I could have told you the entire history of the stadium, from its earliest beginnings as Bennett Park, when Ty Cobb led the Tigers to three consecutive pennants, and I wasn't half as nuts for baseball as some of the kids on my block. You'd think someone setting out to write the epic novel Middlesex is supposed to be could have at least checked with Wikipedia.

But never mind; let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was only off by a couple years, and as a prep schooler off in wealthy suburban Grosse Pointe probably never set foot anywhere near Michigan and Trumbull. But before he's even finished that paragraph, he unleashes an even more jarring solecism: something, he tells us, is "as big as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade."

Okay, Eugenides, I know your biography says you were born in Detroit, but did you ever actually live there? If you had, wouldn't you know that Detroiters, at least not back then, did not think in terms of Macy's when it came to Thanksgiving Day parades? Why would we; we had our own J.L. Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade that was as big and wonderful and magnificent as any kid could ever hope for. What did we care if they had some other parade at the same time in far-off New York, sponsored by some department store we'd never heard of?

Oh well. I've now read another five pages without encountering any egregious errors. And, as no doubt or more of you may take pains to point out, Eugenides wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and I'm writing a blog for a few hundred readers, so let's keep things in perspective. Also, all this fulminating has no doubt virtually guaranteed that if I ever do write something about Detroit, I'll make an ever bigger and more obvious mistake.

So I'll plow on with Middlesex and hope to be so wowed by its overall scope and excellence that my present indignation will be completely assuaged. Or nearly so, anyway. But based on what I've read so far, Eugenides is going to have to step up his game when it comes to painting a true picture of Detroit; as of now, Eminem's Eight Mile pisses all over it.

Michigan Seems Like A Dream To Me Now

I swear I've used that title before, but what the heck, all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and my mother woke me up just past noon calling from California, which is just as well, as in my dream I was having a unending argument with this very exasperating person on the beach.

How's that for a scattershot opening? No? It'll have to do, because while I've been carrying around an outstanding first sentence ever since last night, it seems to have flown away on the wings of sleep and though I still have a number of things to tell you, I can't for the life of me remember how I meant to begin telling you about them.

Never mind, then; I'm holed up in a chilly but otherwise cozy little motel room outside of my ancestral hippie home of Ann Arbor, where I came last night to see my old friends, the Weakerthans, who in addition to the usual gifts of fellowship and great music, presented me with this outstanding t-shirt seen on the right. The show was at the Blind Pig, which I remember complaining about when it opened because it was "commercializing" our hippie culture. This was in 1972, apparently, but by 1973 I was visiting it regularly because it was one of the only places in town where you could get the cappuccino I had grown used to out in California.

Anyway, I'm apparently over any issues I might have had with the Blind Pig, fortunately, and I thoroughly enjoyed the show except for the fact that, as I discovered to my chagrin, Michigan is one of the only places left in the (allegedly) civilized word that STILL allows people to smoke indoors in public places. I mean, come on, people, what century is this already? Also very much enjoyed the opening acts, Christine Fellows (who's also joining in as the fifth Weakerthan on this tour, and one A.A. Bondy, who in the past several decades is the first and only Dylanesque singer-songwriter (well, unless you count J. K. Samson in his solo persona) that I have ever been fully impressed by. I was also excited by the opportunity to introduce him to all of you, on the premise that if I had never heard of him before, nobody else had either, but I see he's playing on Conan O'Brien April 11, the same day he'll be appearing with the Weakerthans back home in Williamsburg. Back home for me, that is, not him.

So, flying to Detroit was a bit depressing. For some reason, tucked in among my keepsakes and memorabilia I used to have a flight schedule from 1966 detailing the flights between Detroit and LaGuardia (including the fare: $16). Back then, when I made my first visits to New York, there were flights pretty much on the hour, and they were in full-sized airplanes packed full of people doing (presumably) important things in both places. Now there's only a handful of flights per day, they're in those little toy airplanes where they don't even have room for overhead baggage, and even then the plane was only half full.

And landing at Detroit Metropolitan (do they still even call it that?) was like time traveling back to the 50s or 60s; at least the terminal they dumped us off at (outside of, that is; we had to walk across the tarmac just like in those old time movies) had scarcely changed at all since the first time I came through there in 1964 or so. The rent-a-car guy told me he was upgrading my compact car to a luxury convertible at no charge, which I didn't see any advantage to, since it's about 40 degrees and fitfully raining and snowing outside, but unless convertibles now have metal tops that don't open, I think he was confused. Pulling out of the airport, I impulsively turned right instead of left and headed toward my old Downriver stomping grounds, where I was strangely appalled at how small and desperate all the houses looked.

Odd, that, since I've been back many - well, at least 10 - times over the years, and I'd never particularly noticed that aspect. Well, the small part, maybe, but desperate? Maybe it was just the last-days-of-winter malaise that I remember settling over the place every year as a boy just before spring burst into sight. Drove past my childhood home and didn't approve of what the new owners had done, like cutting down all but one of the trees and shrubs, went past the school where I got drunk for the first time (and also, a couple years later, got arrested for the first time), past the spot down by the creek where in April 1961 I met up with my first gang, past the other school where we hung out through the summers of 61 and 62, and the drug store across the street, where they'd finally wised up and removed the bench that we always used to lounge around on.

Then, still not having had enough nostalgia, I headed into Detroit proper, or what's left of it, and strangely enough (maybe because the sun had come out by now), it didn't look nearly as bad as it has the last few times I've been there. Oh, also past the park where I first saw the MC5 play on a tennis court in 1965 or 66, and then out Clark Street and onto Michigan Avenue, where things did start looking a bit more like the ruined, post-apocalyptic Detroit that I've come to know over the past couple decades. But even there I saw signs of life, especially in the form of many new immigrants who were blithely strolling past the wreckage as if it never occurred to them to ask, "I left Chiapas/Baghdad/Sierra Leone for this?"

It was almost dark by the time I got to Ann Arbor, but there was still time to look around at what still strikes me, despite its many changes in recent years, as a beautiful and excellent town. Parts of it look like a living museum to small town America of a century ago, and I stopped in one shop to look at some photo books that showed me that indeed, many parts of town had changed very little in the interim. Also found a photo book full of shots of Detroit when I was a kid, when downtown was a place of wonder, a bustling, vibrant city that resembled Manhattan or Chicago rather than the squalid wasteland it's now become.

The reason I went into the bookshop was an odd one: for some reason, while strolling past, I had a sudden inexplicable impulse to buy a copy of Maximum Rocknroll, a magazine I've only seen once in the last five years, and haven't bought in longer than that. It's not so much that I've been boycotting them, it's more that at some point they made one of those ideologically motivated punker-than-thou decisions to the effect that their distributor was getting too successful, so they started doing their own distribution and subsequently disappeared from the great majority of stores that used to carry it.

But for some reason, I knew this particular Borders (did you know Ann Arbor was the home of the original Borders, and that it was once a tiny cornershop itself? Domino's Pizza had its start here as well) would be carrying MRR, and sure enough it was. Having picked up my copy, I was shocked - and, I'll admit, a little pleased - to discover that they were still talking about me. Well, one columnist, anyway, but last time I perused a copy, about two years ago, I was mentioned in two columns, which led me to wonder in a vainglorious way if this was a bit of odd serendipity or if I was a regular subject in a magazine I hadn't been a part of since 1994.

Apart from that, however, it was interesting to see how the magazine has carried on in the absence of Tim Yohannan, different in some aspects, but fundamentally the same, much as Gilman Street did after Tim moved on. Even if it's no longer a magazine I'd regularly pick up and read, it's sort of reassuring to know that it's still there and still carrying on the struggle for... well, for exactly what, I'm not quite sure, but they're struggling nonetheless. Actually, I'm kind of glad to know they're there in a world where so much of what used to be isn't.

This Is Where Detroit Used To Be

Once they hear I grew up in Detroit, people almost always want to ask me questions, usually along the lines of, "Is it as bad as they say it is?" or "Did you see anyone get murdered?" What really fascinates them is when I describe how vast stretches of what was once the nation's fourth largest city simply disappeared, how where there were factories and shops and apartments and houses, there are now only fields punctuated by the occasional ruin.

Those who've never visited Detroit have a hard time imagining what I'm talking about; those who've been there in recent years have seen the empty spaces, but unless they're my age or older, have little idea what kind of city used to live there. I'm afraid I could never do justice to the sad tale of Detroit's decline into desperate oblivion, but I've run across someone who can: the author of Detroitblog, which combines text and pictures to create a poignant and tragic, yet also strangely touching portrait of the star-crossed city I once called home. I was especially struck by this outstanding piece of photojournalism which shows with devastating clarity what it's like when a city - and the society and social structures that go with it - collapses and begins to return to nature. It's especially fascinating for me because it portrays the neighborhood - or what used to be a neighborhood - where my mother grew up, and which I often visited as a child. I highly recommend it.