In the future these will be funny stories
April 20, 2024 12:17 AM Subscribe
It’s 2008. Though a San Francisco resident, I crave “Girl in New York” stories. Felicity Porter, Lena Dunham, Eileen Myles—in books and TV shows, I’ve watched them come of age in their frothy version of Brooklyn. As a black man, I have to tell myself this fascination isn’t me idolizing whiteness. No, this must be, like Venus Xtravanganza before me, a rational envy for those society deems valuable. A desire to chase my dreams through a maze of hangovers and strange lovers and suffer mere embarrassment for my mistakes. It seems I’ve found another such fantasy in this Reagan-era relic about itinerant artists—provided I steal it. Bohemian behavior for a bohemian book. So, Slaves in hand, I keep walking. from The Time I Stole Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Couldn’t Stop Reading It by Elwin Cotman
It’s also possible that she writes her elitist gentrifiers too well for a left-wing youth such as myself, he writes from his hotel on Boulevard Saint-Michel.
Is this a bit?
posted by leotrotsky at 6:10 AM on April 20 [5 favorites]
Is this a bit?
posted by leotrotsky at 6:10 AM on April 20 [5 favorites]
Those bits are 14 years apart, leotrotsky.
posted by epj at 8:14 AM on April 20 [1 favorite]
posted by epj at 8:14 AM on April 20 [1 favorite]
Janowitz is an amazing writer and almost all her fiction and non-fiction is transcendent. It's weird to me to think that liking her work is now "weird."
posted by jabah at 5:24 PM on April 20 [2 favorites]
posted by jabah at 5:24 PM on April 20 [2 favorites]
I also think Janowitz is an amazing writer and kinda under-rated nowadays. (Wow her dad was a real dickhead). 1989 film version of her famous novel is actually pretty entertaining if you just take it in stride.
posted by ovvl at 9:32 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]
posted by ovvl at 9:32 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]
i enjoyed reading janowitz & gaitskill & others throughout the 90s & oughts who wrote about 80s NYC art scene. i was tangentially there, but with a worm's-eye-view (such as seemed the only view possible at the time) i only could suspect that there was great stuff going on all around me--just never when i was in the room. it all felt self-consciously sordid & not as desperate as people let on. decades later it seems like a lost utopia.
posted by graywyvern at 12:46 PM on April 21 [1 favorite]
posted by graywyvern at 12:46 PM on April 21 [1 favorite]
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posted by mittens at 4:19 AM on April 20 [7 favorites]