It’s a black and white, high contrast afternoon. I have a half hour at a local cafe before I go pick up the kids from school. I want to write something and dignify the place of the writing with images. I am capturing photos with my iphone. With the same phone, same finger, I compose a blog post as an email that will be sent to me for later revision.
The cafe I am sitting in, The Palio, is in the Ladd’s Addition. The Ladd’s Addition is one of the oldest residential districts in Portland. It is built in the shape of a wagon-wheel with wide, diagonal, elm-lined streets that converge on a central traffic circle. Where I am now. The circle is quiet with more bikes and pedestrians than cars. Massive rose bushes in the park have little nooks for lovers to sit and talk. The only shops on the circle are a cafe, a bike repair shop and a salon. All of this makes for a certain kind of quiet, steady attention.
I remember boredom. The feeling that there was no place to put your attention. But then albums and movies and books and TV started filling that empty space. Now the internet. The irony is that the commercial success of these arts grew out of a need to fill chunks of dead time – “leisure time” – and cure its inevitable boredom with novel forms of attention. Conversation pieces. Now “art” sits next to other information categories in an rss reader. Personal databases of curated forms of attention are carried around next to our bodies. We are walking museums.
I’m not sure artists and writers are facing a publishing crisis. Publishers have a publishing crisis. Artists have a deeper more complex problem. How to create the kind of attention that is not the same kind of attention that we see all around us at the workplace, the gym, the cafe, the home? There is always live performance or the unique object in space that can break up our plugged-in-screen habits. The live venue, like the ecology of this residential circle, will always capture attention. But what to make of the virtual forms of attention – the books, the movies, the music, the interactive games? How do these fit into our lives when we are already filled with more forms of attention than our lives have time for? Here is a book that has consumed a good portion of my attention:
<Paris Stories by Laird Hunt. I found it at Powells last year for a bargain $7 (it was listed on Amazon for $50-100) and it has been close-by ever since. I cannot tell you what it is about, except that it is the observations of an American writer in Paris. I can only say that its syntax and the way prose flows vertically on the page awakens a certain partially dormant part of my brain. It makes me pay attention in ways that are both familiar – I have also been alone in a foreign, barely decipherable, city – and completely novel. It is of the Gertrude Stein family of literary arts, but still something entirely its own.
I just finished this trimmed down novella and plan to read it again very soon. It was quite an easy read. It flowed sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter, effortlessly. A love story with a tragic ending. In fact, the novel begins like this:
Then it takes off on its story of the lovers. Other characters emerge and disappear. The reader isn’t sure of some things, like why certain details and not others? It is elliptical but has a graspable shape. The plot is neatly pruned. That is the problem. The reader must look to the pruning, the negative space, for the story to resonate on deeper levels. That is why I need to read it again. Both of these works have an emptiness at their center. They ask you to sit down at some quiet center of your being and observe with rapt attention. But now I have to place my attention on the time and my kids.