Issue 10: Nonfiction
- Seattle, 1974
by Charles D'Ambrosio
When I started this essay I did what I always do when I'm nervous—reached
for a book. I have this idea that I can't write legitimately about my life
without elevating it. My impulse is always to graft something learned and a
bit more edifying onto the embarrassing facts. My original bookish idea for
the essay was to reference Walter Benjamin and work up a fancy comparison
between nineteenth century Paris and Seattle, and then suggest, along the
way, that my aimless wanderings as a teenager made me a flaneur or
boulevardier. I loved the idea. It seemed so—literary. When I got a draft
down and read things over, I realized that the portrait I'd drawn, of a
cornball dandy in waffle-stompers, couldn't have been more untrue. So I
went back to the drawing board. Dropping the High European culture of
books, I found the right energy the minute I started talking about the
small-time celebrities—the clowns and car dealers—of my early days.
After I made this switch a lot of the starch went out of my prose, too—I
found a new, much more fluid music for the sentences the minute I quit lying
to myself.
— Charles D'Ambrosio
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