Phenobarbital

To conserve Power, if not some portion of the fiscal budget, the central library was dimly lit to a warm mucousy grey. The bold patterns of the carpet, newly laid in a nineties remodel of the Neutra design, were upon closer inspection video-game blobs of crochet flowers broken in pieced halves atop dull yellow ziz-zag lines. A perverse egyptian queerness for the madre was preserved in glass and fixture and desk, and combined with the plastic whimsy of graves-inspired design, the entire library made spectacularly apparent the penal barbarism of colonial revival.

He had recently read Alfred Kazin’s autobiography New York Jew because a friend had found the bantam paperback for maybe a dollar and had given it to him to stoke a long-standing racist envy of being exactly what the title announced. White boys make jokes about black dicks because they want to be one. His fetish, rather, was more along the lines of actually leaving mia farrow for her daughter. Anyhow, in the book Kazin begins by recounting his summer as a graduate student at the NYPL, and how after either getting a coffee or beer or donut with Dickie Hofstader, who was then beginning what would become The Origins of the American Political Tradition, he would race back to finish his own dissertation on one American Renaissance or another. There, spared the rapture, he would be filled with wonder by his proximity to such human inspiration.

It all sounded so beautiful to him, or at least charming in the way that all good magazines seem to be. And, in fact, he enjoyed telling people at the end of the day that he had spent his at the central library. But, in truth, it was a depressing place to work, especially considering the very beautiful light in the streets outside. Here was a man who dressed with the rumpled abstraction of a bureaucrat, but who had no job and entirely detested the idea of having one. He was also a man who could be often caught looking at young women not entirely certain of his coeval, but who was dismayed at the report of two dozen boys gangraping an eleven year old in Texas, some of who were at least twenty-five. 

Yet, on the bus downtown he had been thinking of another article he had skimmed over in today’s paper. Scientists had apparently been studying the effects of public fascination with celebrity memorabilia, and had come up with several fascinating hypotheses including, but not limited to, that these celebrity objects were thought to possess a kind of totem power and magic. Moreover, it was speculated that the possession of these objects were thought to give their owners some semblance of the magical powers held by their former owners. The focus of the study, its prompt and thus its publicity worthy hook, was an upcoming auction of eric clapton’s guitars. The fondness for which the yale social scientists wrapped their words around the primitive lust of the black blues of celebrity was barely conceivable. It reminded him of a quip he had heard about the british: their slave trading invented the blues; it only makes sense that the youngest sons of a broken empire would launch a crusade for it. The almost described murmur of native authenticity also reminded him of a teen film he was fond of discussing in public, which features a famous scene of a young social upstart, who when desperate to learn dance moves to impress his popular new escort, mistakenly watches a public television performance of an African anteater ritual. Hijicks ensue, and the masses are revealed to be mindless zombies of Capital.

He wondered, if Clapton’s pastiche of the Candyman, and not to mention the longstanding aficionado status of rock and roll sounds among dentists, lawyers, and other restless men of the bourgeois (the comfortable, if anxious men of the middle class) cloth, could really continue to inspire such phantasmatic investment, there must certainly be a new blues to live. He knew that thousands had tried, but those successive generations were all generic permutations of rock: reggae, ska, psychedelia, punk, the zen phallus of Sting. Sure, he knew that the dominant ideology of US business capitalism, its way of relating to itself, was caught somewhere between Keith Richards and Beyonce. But maybe, the next, the new blues for this century would be found in the search for the new proletariat, a global proletariat. And sitting in the central library, faced with so many versions of the mission flower, he began to wonder whether that force would be a small brown woman somewhere in the global south. The blues begins with a moan that chooses death over the child. Wasn’t this the tragedy of Beloved, and the farce of Oprah Winfrey?