Jonathan Franzen will be here, at the Washington National Cathedral, I think as I run past the icy grounds, three days after DC’s worst blizzard of the year blew through, some people still without power and sidewalks icy and snow-covered, if Thurber didn’t need a walk/run and I didn’t need to get in some miles, only seventy-five days and counting until Boston, I’d be napping with M.
Franzen, the Freedom writer, will pack the place, total capacity: 3,200. Not with me in attendance, I'm afraid. I will read pretty much everything, but I put down Freedom, so many years since The Corrections and I’m out, hard-out, slamming down the long-awaited hardcover that I’d put on reserve at the Brooklyn Public Library in the wake of yet another instance of one of the main characters thinking and talking in voices marked by our current time, language, pastimes and preoccupations. Count me out in being among the throng. Mental note to re-examine The Corrections. How could the same person get something so right then so wrong?
I don’t advise this, running on ice and snow. It’s downhill on 34th Street NW, my pace is easy, careful footfalls and dead-end at Massachusetts Avenue and the US Naval Observatory, now that makes sense, an eye in the sky in the navel-gazing capital of the world, superlatives in everything, and irony in nothing, like the Muslims for Loyalty sign in the subway on wallpaper, in stiff breeze, of course, Old Glory, the thirteen colonies for the stripes and fifty state-stars, known to the simpleton what they signify and what of Canada’s flag, the red bands to the right and left, the straight-edged equally red maple leaf in the middle against a white background, white the absence, more absence than the American one because its interpretation isn’t left to the imagination, and if it is let it be a respectful one or damn you to hell in the land of Melville, the poet of white and its absence who wrote, “Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” and didn’t Rome bring us Virgil long before its fall?
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Love the drawing/sign at Pete’s Diner (pretty much next door is a Federal-style brick: the Native American Gaming Association headquarters, built 1802), scrapple and grits, greasy spoon Asian, a coked-up-looking dog who may or may not have just nibbled at an ATM/credit card is shitting two $100 bills, the American bit words telling you to pay cash although something, evidently, is being lost in translation (Fortune cookie: Patience is your alley), still, relieved, when K and M and I have our bite at Pete’s, that between us we manage to scrounge up some bills and pay.
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Winston Churchill's bathroom smile and “V” for victory, not far from the robin’s egg-blue Islamic Center, moving toward Thurber, downtown along Mass Ave. and to the southeast, beyond Capitol Hill so maybe the mosquitoes won’t be so bad when the humidity hits in a few months, thinking Metro Center, Shady Grove red line to our friends’ place in Cleveland Park and DuPont Circle, the color of flags, tiny Estonia on the ring, and Greece, whose banner I confuse with Finland's, the colors of their national hockey team, and soon, after being told I’m wrongway running, on the mall, after having picked up Thurber and dropped off my small bag change of clothes, museum-closing time, Thurby pulling me along, so often the narrow snow-free passageways of ice and snow thicken with crowds, forcing me into the winter hardpack hardly different from Ross and Shackleton, I’ve shed my windbreaker, am wearing only my Expos short-sleeve, a gift from Kate, as the sun is setting on the Washington Monument, a meringue cloud above, roseate, also the Capitol Building, and now I get it, the Library of Congress is on the hilltop square, the plaza if you will, but none of it is St. Mark’s, or Place de Vosges, more Champs-Elysee, the American Imperium and Police State, each turn, every roadway blocked with curb-barriers and cruisers, imagine 1802, the horse-driven buggies, the walkers, both local and non, carts of food and merchandise, or I can only wonder at what might have been, although probably not because here, real and imagined, the center of Washington, everything free, taxpayer-supported, and there is something to say for not putting down $40 to see art and books and the cacao tree, reading about how chocolate is made, still eighty percent of the means of production owned by small farmers, millions of them, and why hasn’t that been corporatized, the American failure is so complete that here in the taxpayer-supported United States Botanic Garden, a stone’s throw from the Capitol grounds, the value of citizen democracy is upheld, a quaint bygone principle, Paradise Lost this colonial American experiment by our modern court, which has ruled the corporation an individual who (the corporation) is due the same power and respect and protections of statute. So bring on Wall Street in chocolate production, surely margins can be slashed, and profits grown to such a magnitude that this information, gleaned from a little poster at a subsidized flower garden, will pay us Americans back with interest, not We, the People, but I,The Corporation, so stay at home Elizabeth Warren, don’t attend the State of the Union, the giveaway to business, in tribute to GE CEO Jeff Immelt and the Gipper on his centennial, the die is cast, make sport of the idea of climate change, sustainability, green cars and solar-heated work-palaces of tech billionaires but guide our star to naked profit, all bets are on to feed and water aging Boomers, the iron first in the velvet glove of Obama-speak, as I run the final kick of the ten-miler on Independence (!?), the Rayburn House Office Building, circa 1965, hollow steps to a round man in a toga, fig leaf sprig in his bathtub ring of hair.
Running for Your Life: Interstate Imagination
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