In the future these will be funny stories

April 20, 2024 12:17 AM

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
posted by chavenet (6 comments total)

I don't know if it's strange that a book you read in high school and fall in love with, could just sort of--go blank? Slaves of New York is one of those books for me. I was reading it and The Andy Warhol Diaries and Ultraviolet's autobiography all roughly at the same time (it was a busy couple of years because around that time I also discovered Anne Rice and so there were these two poles of artistic decadence, two unreachable places, like my little job at the bookstore was an observatory with telescopes pointing out to all these places I'd never go)--and anyway I had the copy with Bernadette Peters on the cover and that is literally all I remember about it. I loved it, and then it slipped completely out of my memory. And sort of assumed it slipped out of everyone else's memory as well, so how strange to read about someone reading it now (for a particular definition of 'now'). I don't think I've even heard anyone mention it for twenty years!
posted by mittens at 4:19 AM on April 20 [7 favorites]

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]

Those bits are 14 years apart, leotrotsky.
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]

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]

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]