I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAN DEACON-“Guilford Avenue Bridge” (2012).

I only know Dan Deacon from his “cover” of “Call me Maybe” (in which he layered the song on top of itself 147 times).  Deacon has a new proper album out and while it’s not quite as outlandish as the “Call Me Maybe” cover, it’s still pretty out there.

This is the opening track–a noisy barrage of sound set to a really catchy drum beat and bassline.  But you almost have to listen hard for that beat because it is just a wall of noise that goes on for 90 seconds until the song completely stops and is replaced by a manipulated banjo solo (I think).  This slowly morphs into pianos and then waves of delicate keyboards (all of which I’m sure is some kind of manipulated sound).  With about 30 seconds left the noise comes back and the songs ends much like it started.  Although it ends with a very happy chord.

This is definitely not for most, but the experimental nature is quite fun, and it’s definitely not something you’re going to hear on the radio very often.

[READ: August 22, 2012] “The College Borough”

I hadn’t read any Joshua Cohen before this story (he wrote the 800+ page buzz book Witz, but is NOT the author of a book called Leverage which Sarah reacted very strongly to–that would be Joshua C. Cohen, this one is Joshua A Cohen).  Also, I put it off because it was long.

Before I summarize, I want to state that this story is flipped on its own head by the final line.  The final few words completely changed how I felt about this story.  And I have to wonder what the risk is for a writer to do something like this.  For the entire story we don’t know why the narrator acts the way he does (in the present).  The flashback that the story provided is very thorough and detailed but it does not answer our pressing question.  Even when we return to the present, and the past comes to meet them, it still doesn’t explain it. It is literally the last few words that justify everything.  That’s audacious.

I’ll say more about this at the end.

It also begins with an audacious statement: “I helped build the Flatiron Building though I’ve never been to New York.”  Indeed, it seems that the narrator never wanted to go to New York.  But ow that his daughter, a junior in high school, wants to go to college in Manhattan (they hope she’ll stay in-state), he agrees for them all to go to New York City.

The narrator met his wife, Dem, in college (at in-state college).  They were both in the writing program and they’d had some classes together before they enrolled in Professor Greener’s seminar.

The beginning of the story is mostly the narrator’s complaints about New York.  I especially enjoyed this line: “I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater.”  Back home they have more pools, more StairMasters and their very own Flatiron Building (dubbed the Fauxiron).

Then the story pulls back so we can figure out what the hell this guy is talking about.

Professor Greener was invited to be Writer in Residence at their Midwestern college because of the success of his latest (and only) book.  Greener proves to be a typical New York writer–loud, obnoxious, cocky, mocking, unimpressed.  He also proved to be the first Jew that most of these kids had met.  Greener was not impressed by any of the class’ first assignments.  He tells them that none of them had lived (and by lived, he meant lived in New York.  Because no life could be had in the Midwest).

Greener is disdainful of the students’ writing skills and wants to give them an experience, he wants to give them New York, so he decides to start with the Flatiron Building.  He holds a class in a field that used to be a baseball field but was now just a field and he tells them that they are going to build the Flatiron Building on that field.  There will be no more writing assignments.  He has gotten permission from the school, he needs permission from them and then they will get building.  They have two semesters to finish the building.

After some history of the Flatiron (a lot of stuff which I didn’t know–and I’ve always liked the Flatiron, so that was neat), the kids get to work.  And here is where Greener was a genius–he assigned the kids work based on their writing.  So Rog, who was writing a novel that needed less abstraction and more dense verbs, was put in charge of steel work (there was a closed steel mill in town and they reopened it for this project); Sora gave too many details, overwrote and provided extraneous everything, so she was in charge of windows; Bau’s poems were scatological so he was put in charge of plumbing and Dem’s poems were emotionally empty so he put her in charge of interior design.  And the narrator, his writing was passionate and out of control, so he was made the roofer.

When the story returns to the present, the narrator is hell bent on staying only in downtown and not progressing any further north, but then they get a call from their classmate Tub. Tub was in charge of the project back and school and he fled the midwest for architecture school in New York.  He heard they were visiting and wanted to get together.  He even gives them tickets to a Broadway show.  So they agree to go.  The narrator directs their cabbie to the West Side Highway, but they had to cut into midtown because of traffic.  And the narrator gets more and more freaked out.

And then the story reveals what we’ve been wondering all along.

There were things about the story that I didn’t find believable–the flashbacks are absurd, that a group of writers would undertake building a building?  First off, that any writer would actually want to, second that school would let them!  I also found Greener to be unbearable–a veritable cliché of the obnoxious New Yorker.  And it’s yet another story about writers.

On the other hand, the idea that Greener put these kids to work proves to be a genius idea.  And I can’t decide if it’s because Greener is an insecure author (who is having trouble with his second novel) trying to get competition away, or if he is a genuinely decent person trying to get these kids out of the writing life (a life that he himself knows is a dead end) and into more practical pursuits (all of the kids excel at their assigned jobs and continue to do that work in the future).

And then that last line, that just shocked me into thinking that this story was genius.  Cohen has written something truly remarkable here.