5/11/2023 0 Comments Reconnect to isnapWhat else is New York, after all, if not New York? It may be true that disaster can transform a landscape, but it is also the case that cities absorb their tragedies, that, as London did after the Great Fire or San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, they not only survive but also move on. There is, from the perspective of the present, something glib about such analysis, something too easy, somethingnot quite right. This, it seemed to him, was the crux, the point exactly – that, at the moment of the devastation, the city we knew had stopped existing, leaving in its place a new New York, not yet defined, embryonic in its terror and its loss. It was impossible, he suggested, for anyone who hadn’t been there when the planes cut through those buildings ever to understand the impact, not just physical but psychological: what it meant to be a New Yorker now. A third took the idea even further, reflecting on how we interact with cities, the relationships we share with public space. For another, it meant thinking about friends, what they had seen, what they had experienced, and our inability to imagine what that was like. For one of us, this meant recalling scenes from childhood. One after the next, we got up and discussed what had happened, setting aside Los Angeles to reflect on where we used to live. We talked about it that night, the contributors and myself, once our audience – a dozen or so shell-shocked readers, uncertain, like us, of how to react to a catastrophe a continent away – trickled in. If you had asked me then, what I would have told you was that this felt like the moment New York disappeared for me. Once I had lived in the shadow of the World Trade Center, had eaten lunch in its plaza and relied on it to orient myself when I got out of the subway, but on this uneasy evening in West Hollywood, all that seemed a very long time ago. How were we to respond to a tragedy that seemed both of us (as it turned out, we had all lived in New York at some point) and not of us, that was, at once, immediate and indistinct? I remember sitting in that bookstore, wondering if anyone would come to a reading on such an evening, looking out at the quiet twilight, at the traffic on the Sunset Strip. Yet here we were, on this night after the worst disaster ever to befall New York – not just myself but several contributors to the collection, all of us looking backwards, looking east. Another City had been constructed to present that, with diffuse work adding up to a fractured whole. I’d spent much of that time reading and writing about the city, and had found, in its literature, the substance of a vast collage, not one narrative but a thousand, all existing just below the inexpressive surface of its streets. I had started thinking about this before I’d left Manhattan, reading Joan Didion, Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Richard Meltzer, imagining LA as a literary landscape, in which the most important stories were the stories we created, but in the ten years since I’d come west, that sensibility had only grown more pronounced. This was the point of the anthology, which represented what I saw then as an attempt to inhabit the soul of the city by getting to know its writers, to frame a narrative, or set of narratives, in a place where, conventional wisdom told me, there was no narrative to be found. But for me, born and raised in Manhattan, the act of moving west – I left New York in 1991 – had provoked an interior dislocation that, a decade later, I was still trying to understand. Much is made of this, of course, the difference between New York and Los Angeles, although in many ways (arrogance, ambition, self-absorption) they are more similar than not. I had put the book together as part of an ongoing process of transition: to remake myself from a New Yorker into a Californian, or perhaps more simply, to come to terms with the city where I had settled, a city that required me to exist in a nearly constant state of translation, as if it were a text I had to learn to read. ![]() On the evening after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I was in a bookstore in West Hollywood, scheduled to MC a reading from Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, an anthology I’d edited featuring thirty seven Southern California poets, essayists, and fictioneers.
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