response to Dreamland;
an insane amount of reading, lately.it began with f. scott fitzgerald's "tender is the night", continued with clive barker's "sacrament", and has recently concluded with kevin baker's "dreamland" -- soon, i'm sure, to be continued with either "underworld" by don delillo .. or something else.
something i hadn't noticed : all of these books concerned change, the ripple effect, the undeniable and inevitable sense of erosion. "tender is the night" : a man in bitter peril against the erosion of his wife's sanity - and consequently, the erosion of his while she miraculously recuperates?
"sacrament" : a man teased into a gala of supernatural events, dealing with extinction & love and loss -
and finally, "dreamland" : a neurotic whorl of epic fiction/nonfiction concerning the turn of the century in Coney Island ... gangster, rouged whores, jewish, goyishe, politicians, the city itself ... so much heroism, so much anger, rage - yet not nearly enough emotion, for me. a particularly moving part where the girls (fabrente mayelde) go on strike & are jailed, and treated like concentration camp inhabitants; the whore sadie mendelssohn's sudden repetenance .. her rape --
my head is spinning with the glare of coney island as i imagine it. the leer of lights. the glare of broken glass - whores converging on the marching striker women, seizing their fisted hands in what seemed empathy - the strikers cry out suddenly and jerk away and sadistic smiles blossom on the whores' faces: they had strapped small broken pieces of glass to their palms. the book is not written this way. the prose is cut-and-dry, and oftentimes, much less poetic than the place itself. Dreamland, the centric carnival of the novel, roars & buckles against the confining prose, snarling to be let free. shifting from point-of-views is constricting rather than freeing, except in the interludes where sigmund freud & carl jung are visiting the City ... i needed more, i still do - enraptured in the honey-blossom peril of the celebrations, right in there, jammed thigh-to-thigh with jewish, christians, irish, italians : dirty shmattes of clothing and askews mezuzahs dangling from our necks. sweaty & proud, chanting so loudly that you can't hear your own voice :
and all around, the night is not the night, ablaze as it is with the wizard of menlo park's design, the cataclysm & horror of electricity darting around. there's the real carnival, trapped into a crystal ball, into a jar of preserves, the cavorting spectre of god himself, frenzied, lighting up dim rooms & basements, giant mansions and ballrooms ... i can't imagine. that great unity in the midst of pandaemonium, so tired that you have arthritis at eighteen, bent half-double like old men on walkingsticks. and freud's endless search for a porcupine ...
the damning elation of the ocean, beating, slamming into the beach of pristine sand, eroding, taking away a centimetre, a millimetre at a time, a harsh sizzled whisper of glee as it does, like a cutter in the factory intent on the work at hand .. cut the fabric. cut it down to size, mold it to something new -
tenements like scraggly teeth on the sidewalk. burn them down, excise the old, rotted crowns and replace them with shiny dentures, somewhat bleak in their destruction of the vainglorious -
america is a huge mistake,/ freud says grimly. caterwouls rise up from the carnival. the City thrums like the throat of a panther, a constant growl of warning that no one heeds ...