Daniel Drennan's Blog
October 25, 2009
Moving on....
New York Diary began as a section of my print zine Inquisitor, and later stitched into the 90210 Weekly Wrapups which are at the magazine's web site incarnation, Mediarama. Long story short: the various stories caught the attention of certain people whose encouragement and support resulted in a book, entitled The New York Diaries, published by Ballantine in September 1998.
The problem: Whereas the web presented a bottomless page that could never be filled—although I tried—moving all of that to print (ironically when everything else was moving online) was difficult, and required no small toning down of the original. I am not convinced it was very successful.
Looking back, I regret the book. Glossed over are some of the strongest memories I have—riots in Thompkins Square Park; a voracious real estate industry and humanity-negating corporate culture; the ravages of HIV/AIDS and a government bent on murder; attempts at unionizing various workplaces I worked at against all odds; the Disney-fication and violent replacement of a vibrant community-based urban culture with its bereft-of-life Doppelganger Seinfeld-esque self.
I also regret any secondary negative role I played in any of the above by writing a book that was too subtle in evoking what was going on, though I appreciate the fact that many readers and reviewers got it. To blame, perhaps, is the fact that surviving in a place like New York means endlessly attempting to attain the luxury of somehow managing to escape the hard reality of the City, as opposed to channeling that energy in an activist manner, actively going up against the anti-human tendencies of neo-liberal/capitalist culture. But this is not an excuse, and I do not excuse myself. Hindsight, and all that.
Finally, the person who wrote that book no longer exists. It reflects more expected affectations of a particular person from a particular class catering to those likewise of such a mindset. Minorities as well as adoptees spend much time trying to "fit in", and in categorizing themselves, and in writing a book that attempted to make people laugh about rather serious issues, I worry now that I was simply performing some strange minstrelsy; acting as court jester. I regret this very much.
The communal/cooperative/collective nature of New York that I remember, and that I remember from my father's stories of his City, and from the literature about New York from the past, that I tried to seek out and that I wished to evoke somehow in this book needs now to be seen as the target of an economic system bent on killing all aspects of this nature in American society, historically speaking. That such a way of living/being finds itself primarily in immigrant populations' cultures then makes sense in terms of gentrification, anti-welfare legislation, and anti-immigration stances, which New York unfortunately is no stranger to. This book was an attempt at maintaining a myth about the City that in fact wasn't true; that in fact stopped being true decades ago.
Were I to write the book again, this is what I would focus on. I say this now that I've left New York and have moved back to Beirut; now that I have a remove from the City and the country and have found a much different life here—and one closer to what I was trying to find in New York—despite the fact that even moreso than the States, Lebanon has lived nothing but a full-on neo-liberal nightmare since its creation last century. This speaks highly of the social structure here, though I am daily witness to this slowly being eroded away, speaking of "urban trauma"—hence Beirut Diary Online .
For those who may still be interested in reading the book, thank you; for those who read it and enjoyed it, thank you too. Perhaps the book had its time, but honestly, it should have disappeared off of the radar a long, long time ago.
The problem: Whereas the web presented a bottomless page that could never be filled—although I tried—moving all of that to print (ironically when everything else was moving online) was difficult, and required no small toning down of the original. I am not convinced it was very successful.
Looking back, I regret the book. Glossed over are some of the strongest memories I have—riots in Thompkins Square Park; a voracious real estate industry and humanity-negating corporate culture; the ravages of HIV/AIDS and a government bent on murder; attempts at unionizing various workplaces I worked at against all odds; the Disney-fication and violent replacement of a vibrant community-based urban culture with its bereft-of-life Doppelganger Seinfeld-esque self.
I also regret any secondary negative role I played in any of the above by writing a book that was too subtle in evoking what was going on, though I appreciate the fact that many readers and reviewers got it. To blame, perhaps, is the fact that surviving in a place like New York means endlessly attempting to attain the luxury of somehow managing to escape the hard reality of the City, as opposed to channeling that energy in an activist manner, actively going up against the anti-human tendencies of neo-liberal/capitalist culture. But this is not an excuse, and I do not excuse myself. Hindsight, and all that.
Finally, the person who wrote that book no longer exists. It reflects more expected affectations of a particular person from a particular class catering to those likewise of such a mindset. Minorities as well as adoptees spend much time trying to "fit in", and in categorizing themselves, and in writing a book that attempted to make people laugh about rather serious issues, I worry now that I was simply performing some strange minstrelsy; acting as court jester. I regret this very much.
The communal/cooperative/collective nature of New York that I remember, and that I remember from my father's stories of his City, and from the literature about New York from the past, that I tried to seek out and that I wished to evoke somehow in this book needs now to be seen as the target of an economic system bent on killing all aspects of this nature in American society, historically speaking. That such a way of living/being finds itself primarily in immigrant populations' cultures then makes sense in terms of gentrification, anti-welfare legislation, and anti-immigration stances, which New York unfortunately is no stranger to. This book was an attempt at maintaining a myth about the City that in fact wasn't true; that in fact stopped being true decades ago.
Were I to write the book again, this is what I would focus on. I say this now that I've left New York and have moved back to Beirut; now that I have a remove from the City and the country and have found a much different life here—and one closer to what I was trying to find in New York—despite the fact that even moreso than the States, Lebanon has lived nothing but a full-on neo-liberal nightmare since its creation last century. This speaks highly of the social structure here, though I am daily witness to this slowly being eroded away, speaking of "urban trauma"—hence Beirut Diary Online .
For those who may still be interested in reading the book, thank you; for those who read it and enjoyed it, thank you too. Perhaps the book had its time, but honestly, it should have disappeared off of the radar a long, long time ago.
