Thursday in Paterson

". . a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress."

2 Poets, 2 Assassins

Film theorist Phil Rosen (born in Paterson) suggested I read About Paterson: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (1974). The book starts like a noir thriller: “Main Street is paved in the torment of all roads that stretch between an unusable past and a future unfounded” (28); “Most revealing of Paterson’s character, the city has been home to two major American poets and two assassins. [Angelo Bresci and Talmadge Hayer] While there is no Bureau of Vital Statistics on Poets and Assassins in Washington, it seems safe to say that Paterson is the only American city with this distinction. Nor is it an accident. For Paterson is a prototypical American city, reflecting the fierce strains of hope and despair, of triumph and defeat, of myth and reality that are the enigmas of the American dream.”(13) The author Christopher Norwood seems a noir hero herself; yes, dude is a chick, and to see her photo on the back after reading the hard-nosed, brutal details inside is surreal (she was in 2005 nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with AIDS in the South Bronx). Even though she admits that Paterson is a sort of impossible object, “probably beyond description,” she gives deep detail of backroom deals, machine politics, mob control, and the city left behind (“sliced in half by the Passaic River, like a piece of old toast”—hey, I thought it was beyond description!). Placing Paterson in the sixties and seventies at the ass-end of a long history of urban neglect that goes back to a particular prejudice of the founding fathers for the rural, Norwood shows how Paterson is just the most extreme case of how the focus of money and resources in the suburbs, where there is less need of them, rots out the city and turns it into a human rights nightmare. Most interestingly, Norwood describes the accompanying problem of hysterical pride that has tended to blind people to the deep problems of the city, or is perhaps a calculatedly ideological blinder. She writes that between the Great Strike of 1913 and WWII, the only attempts to make the city a better place to live included absurd measures like the Women’s Republican Club vowing to knock the hats off of anybody who didn’t salute the flag (sound familiar?). When she starts to describe her contemporary moment, this almost rosy-noir past becomes tragic and ponderous, and we see Paterson as a trap; it may even be a black hole into which all of America has been sucked. Of course, I don’t know the gritty details of what’s happened in Paterson since 1974—I-80 did eventually get built through it and this long-awaited last link of the transcontinental interstate was supposed to be a deliverance.

In general, though, there is certainly a lot of hysterical hat knocking going on everywhere, the Sopranos have become pop cultural heros, and well, given that Paterson was home to the 9/11 assassins, I’m waiting for my quota of major Patersonian poets to even out the score once again. But if Norwood’s history is any guide to the future, don’t hold your breath. (Note: Bernard Kerik does not count.)

White Flights

Word is that Updike's new novel Terrorist is set in a thinly disguised Paterson and that his research consisted of cruising the city in a taxi cab. (NYT 5.31.06) Even though Williams said "WALK in the world/ (you can't see anything/from a car window, still less/from a plane, or from the moon!? Come/off of it.)" I don't entirely begrudge him his distance. Paterson is difficult, and Updike’s not a documentarian after all (still less a psychogeographer, even though he claims that the Reading, PA of his youth was, in a sense, his map for the Paterson of today). However, if anything, Paterson needs a truer document of itself or maybe just a better map. Since Paterson was the home to the 9-11 plotters--an extremely small minority in a primarily non-white city--sources such as the NYTimes, finding Northern New Jersey to be a “hub for hijackers,” (see Lunberry 653) have undoubtedly given Paterson a new place in public consciousness; it may be that this place with its “72 identifiable nationalities. . . in 8 square miles” (NYT 9.27.01) has become one in which diversity and multiplicity is suspect. Updike details the diversity and plays with the misrecognition of Islamic fundamentalism as an implicit political threat; he’s clearly appreciative of the power and beauty of its philosophy, as if its righteous clarity puts to shame the duffer Protestantism that runs through his oeuvre (the only WASP in this novel is a morbidly obese librarian). As he turns the fear of a black city into fodder for his particular brand of Pennsylvanian realism, however, his view ultimately seems too west of the Delaware and east of the Hudson. I still can’t verbalize completely (at least in the form of the blog) what I felt and why stopped reading when the “plot” kicked in and the money showed up in the ottoman (p. 194). Maybe I’d rather the title have been a conceptual joke (surprise! Just a story about a teenage boy), or maybe I was tired with Updike’s descriptions which started to seem more and more like pronouncements, and lacked, or maybe had too much of, the authority needed to tell a story of political extremism. The novel is a well-fed form, which has had a long-term fascination with the forces of terror and the fictions of fear. But Updike’s mistake is to take these fictions too seriously, no matter how much he travesties Tom Ridge. The best fiction about terrorism challenges the suburban urge to construct the tale in the first place (e.g. Delillo’s The Names or Mao II). In comparison, Updike does not seem to have any qualms about walking the borzoi in this neighborhood. Updike could have taken a productive cue as well from those novels in which the most violent pitch of political action is turned into an opportunity for the comic appreciation of representational and metaphysical abysses (Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; James’ The Princess Casamassima; R. L. Stevenson’s The Dynamiter). There are of course more “serious” novels of political extremism, but a writer such as Updike, by taking himself too seriously on such a subject risks making a joke of himself. . . . better to delight in the dysfunctions of white privilege or the idea of the terrorist as impossible subject (the ostensible themes of the above novels) than to attempt capture of the real. Rather than be introduced to the heart and soul of the terrorist-manqué (OK, I did read ahead a little), let’s introduce Terrorist to its new companions: Updike’s Couples, Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, and the Firestone Christmas Album . . . those perennial darlings of Salvation Army bargain bookshelves everywhere.