Arts

Eastern Seaboard sounds

Penelope GilHatt

New York New York, the city of strange sayings muttered to the air: as though the city's infamous pollution absorbed speech, as though strangeness were the orthodoxy, and as though a place so polyglot had no hope that understanding were likely : In an elevator, full of dead silent people, a black woman suddenly says: 'I always enjoy to have aphotograph of myself in a place so I can see where I was standing. Not somewhere famous like the Lincoln Memorial or Watergate. Just somewhere like a hotel room or a motel room. People suggest postcards to me but postcards aren't the same because I'm not in them.'

The family feeling that closely includes aunts, uncles, all relations, however hypocritical. 'My brother .,' says a Jewish shop assistant, '. . . such a good man. You've never met such a good man. You'll start to say something bad of someone and he'll stuff his ears and say "Please, I don't want to hear".'

Mistakes in English, always amiable, made endlessly in multilingual New York. A Greek taxi driver looking at the turning leaves says: 'What lovely weathers. Just like springtimes.'

New York City, always in a state of demolition. Major mid-town Avenues paved with planks, like London before the Great Fire of 1666. An American of Russian origin looks at an ice-cream parlour and a boarded-up pet shop reading 'Gold fish in back !' and says, `St Petersburg is the most abstract and premeditated city in the world. I like New York better. Such shambles. Where else? Such promise.'

Regulated mayhem. A hippie journalist :

'Like, one day early when I was going to work—I enjoy being on time—I saw a mailman burning a truck. Just burning it. I went on and then I thought I'd better go back and he was burning bags and bags of mail and holding his hands Over them. He kept saying he wanted to keep his hands warm. So I humoured him and said he was only going about his business, of course, but what about all the mail ? He said that was all right, he was being psychoanalysed. He does scream therapy. His doctor is paid for by Social Security. I guess I'm in the wrong job. My analyst takes forty dollars a session off me and I only get twenty of it back from my paper.'

Objects taking over people. An assistant in the New York branch of Cartier looking lovingly at his own firm's ten-year-old watch, which is not working, and then glaring at the owner, and saying severely, 'Has this watch been doing a lot of flying?'

In a bar, an Irishman and a Greek singing Negro spirituals to blues played on the piano by a white man, very slowly, while two English girls sing 'Any Old Iron,' holding hands with the Irishman and the Greek.

A doctor who charges 35 dollars for six minutes' consultation: Wheat doesn't work, try ice.' On his secretary's desk—his secre tary is a Bulgarian—there is a perfectly spelt list of prescription drugs, and then a line drawn down the paper to make a space headed 'Personel Shooing List,' beginning 'cheep white wine.'

Pedantry.

In an academic drawing room, a professor saying severely to an editor of Rolling Stone who reported the funeral of Duke Ellington : 'People didn't understand what you meant because you wrote "Fats Waller." All the source books give his real name. It should have been "Thomas parentheses quotes Fats unquote close parentheses Waller".'

Intellectual brilliance mixed with the comedy of the distractable, often masquerad ing as over-solemnity rather than the wit of the nonsensical. 'What would you like to drink ?' says a pretty spinster with a PhD.

'Well, I haven't got much choice, have I?'

says her best friend (who is the head lawyer at a famous New York museum): 'I mean, as far as what I like goes.' My wallet was snatched yesterday on Fifth Avenue,' his girl continues. 'When I was bending down to look at some worry beads.' Worry beads are for the businessman who has too little to do,' intervenes an analyst. 'A snatched wallet ?' says the lawyer. 'Can you prove it ?"Well, I don't have it, do I?' says the girl. 'Doesn't that prove it ?'

A telephonist who, on being asked whether the telephone dialling code for the City of Washington is 203 or 202, said 'Where is he located?'

'This country is impossible,' or 'This country is having a national nervous breakdown,' Americans continually say.

Non-Americans are asked: 'Why do you stand it here?' The answers are obvious; that America is the crux of capitalism, where capitalism is going to be tested and where foreign criticism of the US is repeated with greater insight and bravery by liberal Americans themselves, who go to jail for their beliefs. America is a land longed for and dreamed of in political distress, even if immigrants do have to contend with the Statue of Liberty's poem by Emma Lazarus, which greets newcomers as 'huddled masses' and 'wretched refuse.'

A woman of forty-nine sobbing because her husband has forgotten her birthday. 'I gave her a little kiss,' he says, bewildered. 'I thought that was what she wanted.'

The sophisticated and apolitical take

refuge in a particularly American style of deadpan exposition about themselves. 'MY father has always been very fatigued,' says a lawyer's spirited daughter, who actuallY works almost without stopping, as he does; 'We have always been .a very tired family, she insists. But the family is one that comprises a brilliant, inquiring scientist son who truly believes his inventive life to be over at forty; this clever daughter; and a scholastic, vicarage-dressed mother who speaks four languages. Like them, the osophisticated and the politically-minded work themselves to the bone, with a forthrightness and clarity not acknowledged by many Europeans. The common law is still defended in America with a tenacity known in few other countries. America defends to the hilt our ancient law of stare decisis, or the rule of precedent: 'let decided matters stand.'