|
Front Porch Nonfiction
Issue 1.0
- 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
|
