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Planetary Motions
, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

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Sunday, September 1, 2019

Suburbs

     I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, closer in distance or travel time to the Loop than many of the city’s own neighborhoods. Yet Glen Ellyn was a world apart from that sometimes gritty city with its huge black population and its working class ethnic neighborhoods whose boundaries, though unwritten, were fiercely enforced. My own neighborhood, white and upper middle class, had its own rules. In the 1950s, by social convention enforced by real estate agents neither Black people nor Asians could buy homes in Glen Ellyn’s tree-shaded streets with large lots, nor could Jews.
     In the morning my father, like the other fathers of the town, would gather at the commuter train station, each wearing a dark suit with a white shirt, bleached and starched, and a fedora. There were few women. In the late afternoon they all returned.
     Like many of my age cohort, I did not find this an attractive prospect for my own future. I thought blacks had culture, as did every nation and national group. I could perceive cultural patterns in small Iowa towns, but I could not in the suburbs where it seemed size of homes and greenness of lawns were important determinants of social standing.
     There were numerous other standards for judging one’s neighbors. Mine was the first generation for whom orthodontia was the norm, and in Glen Ellyn, one practitioner had an office in the center of the village while the other was situated out on Roosevelt Road with the gas stations and drive-in burger shops. Though unable to compare the expertise of the two, Glen Ellyn’s adolescents all knew which was more prestigious and to which each classmate went. There were two country clubs, one more impressively costly than the other. (My family joined neither.) Many of my friends purchased their “ivy league” style clothing at Bob Horsley’s, the classy little haberdashery in our downtown (most of which was half-timbered neo-Tudor).[1] My closet was full of labels from Sears and Montgomery Wards where my parents felt at home. Frugal they may have been, but at least, I thought, they did not sink to the level of patronizing Thom McAn’s or Robert Hall.
     My home town seemed as tasteless as the bologna on white bread I daily took to school and vapid as a Mitch Miller tune. Though not as well off as many in the town, my family was secure, but I felt alienated and bored, stewing in a very particular brand of adolescent dissatisfaction, even as countless aspirants would have felt they had made it if their family owned a home to a town like mine.
     While I was in high school, the film club founded by a friend showed Eisenstein’s monumental Ivan the Terrible. At one dramatic peak, messengers arrive at the court declaring, “The suburbs of Moscow are burning!” The spell of that beautifully stylized operatic masterpiece was suddenly broken for me, as I involuntarily imagined the wanton destruction of golf courses and shopping malls.
     Another film club program featured a program of 30s documentaries including The City, a film made in 1939 by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke with a prestigious crew of progressives participating. [2] After depicting an early New England town, the film focused on urban pathologies, depicting the poor living in tenements and crowded apartments on unclean streets. The third section of the film portrays a more desirable alternative: garden towns with open spaces where residents might enjoy short commutes to nearby workplaces and could shop at convenient shopping centers. It was a vision of the suburbia of the future based on a few planned communities already built, though the real demographic shift did not occur until after WWII when the GI Bill allowed many veterans to purchase homes and developments like Levittown sprang up across the nation. Between 1948 and 1958, 85% of the new homes built in the United States were located in suburbs.
     The rosy hopes of the progressives of the thirties did not long survive. Lewis Mumford, who had contributed to The City came to believe that “the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion,” producing “not merely a child-centered environment” but a design for living “based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.” [3]
     Pejorative use of the adjective “suburban,” however, predates Mumford’s reversal. According to the OED the first recorded use of the word bearing an implied negative value is in Byron’s Beppo in which the lovely Laura criticizes one of her associates for an unfashionable look, “vulgar, dowdyish, and suburban." As an urbanite and, in fact, a resident of Venice, a notoriously sophisticated place, she looks down on the suburbanites even when they are wealthy. [4]
     Ralph Waldo Emerson continued the tradition in "The Conduct of Life," where he wrote, "If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house." I think his terms could apply to the treeless, sidewalkless developments full of homes lacking character but containing numerous bathrooms which sell for over a half million dollars. In such would-be neighborhoods parents drive their children to a bus stop a block away and the dogs will go berserk when they descry a pedestrian.
     Born in the first wave of postwar babies, I grew up in the Eisenhower fifties, famous for the conformity that so characterized the suburbs. Yet voices of protest emerged and found a place on the best seller lists and, in the great American tradition of cooptation, even into hit movies: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman with (Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney), William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The alienated became anti-heroes in such movies as The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause, and a series of films of Tennessee Williams’ plays, albeit softened for cinema. Further out the were the Beats, visible to everyone in Life magazine, and, at the decade’s beginning Neurotica, founded by Jay Landesman, edited after the third issue by Gershon Legman and, at its end, Paul Krassner’s The Realist.
     When I was in middle school, my brother’s high school English teacher risked, I have no doubt, his job by giving my brother a copy of The Realist. Though I lived in what seemed to me the emptiest of environments, I visited Hyde Park and Old Town in Chicago, seeking alternative spaces and wrote the small presses in the back of The New American Poetry 1945-1960. At school I ostentatiously carried this volume though, of course, it was not part of the curriculum. [5] I reached out to what I could find of the Other, visiting Old Left offices in the city, gratifying the aging radicals with a younger face and joining the handful of people who attended their demonstrations. I wandered Chicago’s great South Side, walking miles along 64th Street before returning to look for a used book store or a coffee house near the university of Chicago. I sought out restaurants like Diana’s in the old Greektown when the place was a small room in back of a little grocery with a stunning variety of olives, the Assyrian-American restaurant on North Halstead where old men stirred their pickled cabbage and gambled in the back room, or the Warsawianka which served such homely fare as boiled chicken and blood soup.
     My mind had rambled far from the suburbs, and once I left, I rarely looked back. I lived in college towns and big cities, often in more-or-less voluntary poverty, until moving from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley where it might seem to an observer that the suburbs never let go of me and that I have come to rest after a gypsy career in a village not so very different from the one in which I spent my schooldays.




1. All things devolve. Cheap housing developments tend to have British-sounding names like Bonnie Brae or Pickwick Estates.

2. The film included planning by Pare Lorentz, writing by Lewis Mumford, music by Aaron Copland, and narration by Morris Carnovsky and was considered sufficiently au courant to be shown at the World’s Fair in New York that year.  Steiner and Van Dyke were leftists, members of the agitprop film group Nykino, inspired by Vertov’s Kino Pravda and similar work in the Soviet Union.

3. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), 494.

4. Stanza LXVI, line 524.

5. My wife and I were visiting a very affluent and very Southern Californian relative whose surly teen-age son could hardly be coaxed from his room from which one could constantly hear the sounds of Kurt Cobain. When his parents tried to persuade him to join us for a dinner out, he used what he surely thought a solid excuse. “Aww, I got to write a paper for English class.” When asked what topic had been assigned, he said, “Oh, just some stupid boring book my teacher made us read.” “What’s the title?” I pursued him. “Oh, it’s so dumb. On the Road.” Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

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