BRIGHT LIGHTS AND PROMISES; or, THE STYLISH URGENCY OF SECOND PERSON PRESENT TENSE, part 2

and lo, it came to pass that something on the summer reading list was read. the list, it would seem, although still fated to near fatal procrastination, was not destined to pass the season as just a convoluted "gossip girl" reference and an even more abstruse paean to the better half of moniquipher's detour away from new york. ultimately, though, and judging from our list of bibliophiles, speculators and devotees, bright lights, big city is a book that people like ourselves should certainly want to read, or at least a book that people like ourselves would be assumed to appreciate, an assumption which was reified when a friend of mine recently returned to me "my" copy of the book with another one that i had actually lent her. and i decided to interpret that event ominously, if only so as to free myself of responsibility for neglecting this year's published reading list out of sheer laziness. in other words, i had the book so i read it.

read from the midst of the creative cultural crisis that is the city of portland, oregon in its twenties, bright lights, big city is an interesting bit of nostalgia. jay mcinerney's boozing, vacuum nosed, twenty-four year old fact checker would rather be in the fiction department, but at least he can conflate his own name with the name of the esteemed magazine where he works -- or at least until the boozing and the coke snorting and the party going get completely in the way of his being able to show up at the magazine's offices near times square. the opening of his story, which he tells (about himself) in second person present tense, shouldn't be all that unfamiliar to the creatively ambitious twenty-somethings playing the game of going-out-informs-artistic-experience in america's contemporary hot spots:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy...The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.

indeed, the narrator of bright lights, big city is the quintessence of the quarter life crisis that has, over the past few years, been so frequently cited as the endemic affliction of the current generation of emerging adults (wherein that emergence might last until the early thirties). but whereas the sense of looming existential catastrophe that the narrator tries to ride out on a succession of fat lines is itself the central revelation of the book, it would seem that the sympathy that contemporary young readers feel for the narrator is more akin to aspiration. the disillusion that the "you" of bright lights, big city experiences is now an admirable and artistic mode of disillusionment. "You could start your own group -- the Brotherhood of Early Unfulfilled Promise," has become, instead of a statement of reflexive sarcasm, a proud motto for the self-designated initiates of that very group. delusional hipsterity: the glorious martyrdom of wasted talent.

or maybe it's just here in portland that over-intoxicated bar talk about lack of opportunity has become ambition itself. for all you know, as it were, this post could be nothing more than a statement of reflexive sarcasm. ("Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel.") brooklyn may be dressing itself in our love more than ever, but i hear that brooklynites still go in for interviews -- and unemployment where they're trying is even higher than it is here. plus, they're right next to that big city. inasmuch, maybe the promise of the dream is, for them, tangible beyond the pages of a work like mcinerny's and doesn't, as a result, end with just the dreaming. or maybe they're just as desirous of a beautiful reason to soak themselves in dopamine as we are and we're actually all just nostalgic for a new york that's been long since impossible, except that the brooklyintes just have more expensive rent.

so, again, no "new york" for us (just yet?), be that for expense or other impossibility...but less and less portland either. that's a somewhat painful recognition, but maybe to acknowledge that is the better exegesis of mcinerny's book, a book that we can regardless keep on our bookshelves, and maybe visitors to wherever those bookshelves are will give us the benefit of the doubt. after all, "You read the bookshelves. In the examination of personal libraries is an entire hermeneutics of character analysis."

against delusional hipsterity -- or not.