7.
Next Episode, Chicago: The Official Wizard of Books
pause.
Something that stops time, suspends it.
John-Esther Greengrass has just left his mental universe to reappear among the natural chaos of beings. He is walking alone on a street in Chicago’s Loop. He’s carrying his dernier cri eReader.
Tired of his own company, the way we get tired of keeping death company or visiting family, Greengrass has little tolerance for a lack of social density. It’s summertime in Chicago, and no one notices summer when the sun is shining. Greengrass doesn’t notice it. He is wandering around without thinking. He is wandering around convinced that wandering involves nothing better than alleviation. He is wandering around with the carefree attitude of people who know nothing better than themselves, in a world where the Great Self sums up life.
He’s a fine man, tall and handsome, elegantly muscular. A neutral haircut, dyed when needed. Energetic and impatient, charming in society, he quickly irritates those he makes more or less affectionate targets. He doesn’t accept the natural mediocrity of things and beings. In general, nothing aligns with his very classy vision of life. He only reveres stereotypes. In a comic book, he would have played the role of the melancholic womanizer, a sort of chic geek. Actually, Greengrass is an architect. He has money and spends it on prostitutes. All in all, he is an excellent specimen of the era.
Greengrass likes his city and everything in it that relates to the water, to its flow. Chicago is a city of water, a strange Venice of the Great Lakes.
He has developed a theory about interpersonal relationships, a kind of barometer for measuring interactions with others. He tells whoever will listen that every human being functions according to a different relational programming code, that each of us has asymmetrical relational abilities and that, to survive decently in society, we need to learn to understand and anticipate each person’s level of relational tolerance. From fifteen seconds to a whole lifetime, the spectrum is vast! But it is possible, according to his theory, to get along with anyone if we can discover the ideal length of interaction with that individual.
Still walking at a fast pace, he watches a video clip on his cell phone. Thirty seconds of a magnificent Moroccan woman belly dancing in his apartment. Too much of a turn-on to look away. A night’s experience duly archived.
His good friend (but what could this mean in his case?) Hubert Lucrecios, a bookseller at Barnes & Noble, never tires of seeing this refined young woman with pointed breasts and the fertile hips of a professional.
Greengrass feels some pride in this sudden infatuation.
* * *
In a huge bookstore, we can hide out and be forgotten.
Hubert Lucrecios is serving a woman who accompanies him to the esoteric books department. All these books answer or seem to answer essential, serious, sad questions. Who are we? Why do we suffer? Why is life so difficult? Why am I not important to others? Are we lizards or the children of extraterrestrials? What is the secret of life? Can an incurable disease be cured by will alone? Can stones protect us against negative spirits and bad energy? How many times will we be reincarnated? Can our previous souls teach us about what we will become? Can we communicate with our ancestors’ ghosts? How many spirits are able to speak through me? Will I too discover the master key system? Can I change my life and become someone else by reading a book that promises so? Can I communicate with my plants and my dead daughter?
Lucrecios would gladly burn down these con jobs. Every time he brings customers to the esoteric section, he feels as though he’s vaporizing their brains with an acidic and corrosive substance.
No one seems to glimpse even the barest minimum amount of healthy hope in the uncertainty principle. When Lucrecios deigns to offer some pertinent advice, he recommends to the most alert of these book zombies that they read The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts. The author’s harsh but clear statement, his intelligent way of getting people to consider uncertainty and insecurity as beneficial objects of thought rather than obstacles to meaning, aligns in every respect with the problems posed by today’s godless reality, this ambiguous reality beset by the scientific uncertainty principle. What we know today will be obsolete tomorrow. The author of this book (which was published in 1951) urges us to relativize, to deal with reality within the limits of our knowledge without hoping to draw out much more.
Chicago, 2006. No one believes in anything anymore, except in Oprah Winfrey, architecture, and sex.
Religion is no longer established around a book and various commandments, but around lobby groups, when it’s not working to create itself. Today, opinion conveniently replaces belief, and thus acts as scientific belief because it is quantifiable and falsifiable all at once (see Karl Popper’s principle). Being religious today means checking the boxes on an electronic form; it means answering a computer voice in mono-syllables and getting satisfaction from completing a task without understanding its importance and why we always feel a grotesque sense of serious purpose in accomplishing it.
Ultimately, it’s difficult to sympathize without also feeling contempt for all these good people looking for an easy answer. One that resolutely draws a veil over the world.
Lucrecios quickly returns to his workstation to do another search. He blows his nose, then carefully crumples up the dirty tissue and throws it in the garbage can under the counter.
Embroidered in his duties like a glass bead in a large hooked rug, Greengrass’s friend sometimes finds the time long and gets annoyed at the smallest thing, yet also keenly understands his role in this noble business dedicated to books. A bitter low-wage earner and an idealist convinced that he is anything but, Lucrecios doesn’t really know how to envision his future, but he knows that today he will complete his bookseller tasks and punch out his card as an average employee, without the risk of lending his name to a street or park.
In the evening, he returns to his computer, his tender window. He has learned to forgive thanks to technology. At the moment, his outlet is The Official Wizard of Books, which keeps him extremely busy.
His meal finished, he spends time scribbling his bibliophilic reflections in the void.
On this website, Lucrecios predicts the titles of books to come, books that will be published in the near future, within a maximum of five years. For fans of bibliophilic sites, he has literally become the Nostradamus of the publishing world. As he has been working on this project for only three years, some of his literary prophesies have not yet come to pass. Some remain to be proven. But as soon as ten or twelve of his unusual predictions came true, his reputation flourished throughout the American literary web.
The following is a list of Lucrecios’s predictions that came true, books whose subject or thesis he had identified, or, in some cases, the almost exact formulation of the title:
The Cell Phone Cure: A New Urban Ethics by Michael Von Bullow, published by McCormick Medicine
Predicted on October 11, 2004
Published on May 7, 2006
*
TV Series Come to the Rescue of the Seventh Art by Emily S. Watson, published by University of Toronto Press
Predicted on April 10, 2004
Published on October 8, 2005
*
Weather Wars, New Weapons of Climate by John Parranditi, published by Soft Fiction
Predicted on September 2, 2004
Published on July 9, 2006
*
A Baby Named “Oil” by Lily Applegate, published by Picador
Predicted on May 18, 2004
Published on February 7, 2006
*
The Foolish Life of Joaquin Phoenix by Chris Birmingham, published by Altar & Wickermann
Predicted on August 2, 2004
Published on March 4, 2006
*
The Cynical Despair of Chuck Palahniuk by Mick
Adler, published by the University of Illinois Press
Predicted on September 6, 2004
Published on July 25, 2006
*
I Killed My Mother’s Fifth Clone by Aristid de la Toussaint, published by Perennial
Predicted on July 23, 2004
Published on January 8, 2006
*
Everyone Is “Security” by Abigaël Larivée, published by Random House
Predicted on August 23, 2004
Published on March 2, 2006
*
A Vampire in Kabul by Richard C. Newman, published by Tabloid Horror Country
Predicted on May 6, 2003
Published on October 16, 2006
*
The End of Movie Theatres by Tristan Butterfly, published by New York University Press
Predicted on January 9, 2004
Published on October 3, 2006
*
Textbook of a Young Serial Killer by Catherine Corner Rose, published by Public Press
Predicted on May 8, 2004
Published on July 11, 2006
* * *
No insider information. No particular contact with up-and-coming authors. No vigil in front of publishing houses. No secret line. No trivial advertising. No sales of banners, ad space or pop-up shops. No advisors recruited in university back rooms. No friends in print media. No friends in electronic media.
(No friends.)
Only a hundred subscribers. Only a hundred fanatics of bibliophilic predictions. Only aficionados of the printed page. Only comical cynics bitten by the contemporary bug of book madness. Only enlightened fans practising divinatory sociology.
Greengrass doesn’t take this endeavour seriously, in so far as Lucrecios accepts the publication of titles that are similar yet not exact. What matters is that the agenda of the title announced, predicted, comes to pass.
* * *
Lucrecios lives near Washington Park and the University of Chicago. A property inherited from a very good grandmother.
He lives at the corner of East 54th and Blackstone. An affluent neighbourhood, university residences, a British campus atmosphere, everything to signify the old-fashioned presence of books, the bygone indolence of the upper class, of professors in boaters and ladies with parasols.
Chicago welcomed jazz with its majestic parks, its urban forests woven by Olmsted, its grandiloquent sculptures celebrating the city’s development.
Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time stretches out its concrete procession in homage to the fanatical ideology of progress as first imagined. A long series of eras, key figures, men, and women march, melted into one another, all turned towards the future, carrying their dreams in tow, biting into the fluid reality of time.
Lucrecios reaches Cottage Grove Avenue, greets the parrots in the park, a small colony of Myiopsitta monachus, cackling and whistling on the power lines at the corner of East 54th Street. The remnant of a university anomaly or an aviary escape, the presence of monk parakeets in the middle of the city has created an attraction. Unlike the inhabitants of Cottage Grove and 54th Street, Lucrecios finds them picturesque and sees in them a sense of liberating and ironic psittacism.
He would gladly transform Greengrass into a parrot and fucking leave him on a perch in a pet shop window.
He would do the same with Christina Baldacci.
How to get rid of an ex without coming off as a psychopath?
Ah, a good title.
He sits on a park bench to write it down. The world of ideas resembles a fountain of time, and Lucrecios stuffs himself with ideas.
He will post this new title online. His Montreal friends will likely approve of his latest finding.
After his walk, he adds the title to his list of predictions: How to Get Rid of an Ex Without Coming off as a Psychopath?
He sees no reason why someone wouldn’t write this book within two years.
A conservative estimate. Amusing titles are always the easiest to predict.
But, for reasons of conscience, and because he doesn’t want to be pretentious, he indicates in the appropriate box next to the prediction: Within three years, then the date.
The phone rings. It’s Greengrass. He doesn’t answer, closes his shutters, turns off his computer, and goes to sleep.
* * *
— Fuck you, poodle ass!
Christina Baldacci is screaming at the top of her lungs, swaying on a wobbly chair, shaking her fists in the air, brutally twisting her neck. Green Mill, 4802 North Broadway, the Uptown Poetry Slam.
Nobody’s here, when I was born, I knocked on the door, gave the postman my car keys and the stray bomb I hatch under my shirt like an extra breast.
The spoken word poet leaves the stage under the deranged screams of drunk young men and young women in the grips of total paradoxical delirium. Everything unfolds by the book, in a fanatical meltdown, the school of “clash.” Baldacci is tired of the awkward clichés of spoken word poets, though she slams on a regular basis, always repeating her “Fuck you, poodle ass!” without an employee ever putting her in her place. It’s a colossal carnival of urban myth delivered by the labourers of a vulgar and common idiom, without affectation, devoid of any aesthetic concerns. It all unfolds on the fringes of Samsonites and BlackBerries, in a jazz club determined to resist good taste.
Baldacci gets the audience wrong.
People rush to Marc Smith’s poetry slams with the same fury as to Wrigley Field.
Baldacci gets the audience and her body wrong. She frowns at the back of the room, yelling “Fuck you, poodle ass!” over and over, as though launched inside a panicky torpedo. She constantly pulls up the sleeves of her black fleece.
She broke up with Lucrecios because everything bores her: excitement bores her, egotists bore her, the media bores her, the Chicago Tribune bores her, slams bore her, poetry bores her even more, bad books bore her, good books bore her just as much, good sex bores her, acrobatic sex and tenderness bore her, large boulevards bore her, reversals in the water flow bore her, indigenous people bore her, colonialism bores her, educational comic books bore her, professors bore her, young pickpockets bore her, ditto Bresson’s Pickpocket, literature in general bores her, Salinger with his reclusiveness and renown bores her and not just a little, Chicago’s history bores her, democracy bores her, totalitarianism bores her, others bore her, gingerbread cookies bore her, Native Americans bore her, cynical people bore her, people bored by cynical people bore her, like super-mystical people, the monsoon season in Southeast Asia bores her and the one in Southwest Asia as well, religions bore her, work and lack of work bore her, electric crankshafts bore her, the Statue of Liberty bores her, The Simpsons bores her, Ben Stiller bores her, Emily Dickinson bores her, Hillary Clinton bores her, the Republicans bore her, convention delegates bore her, the voiceless bore her, the homeless too, Chicago’s parrots bore her, Chicago’s aquarium bores her, Chicago bores her, eating bores her, laughing bores her, toothbrushes bore her, old professors except Ms. Bartleman bore her, her cousin bores her, her birthday bores her, seduction bores her, her beauty and her breasts bore her, menstrual cramps bore her, truth bores her, lies too, ministers bore her, lobbyists bore her, mountain climbers bore her, confident people bore her, pop machines bore her, her house bores her, her clothes bore her, her teeth bore her, and her stainless steel refrigerator bores her.
In other words, Christina Baldacci is really bored.
Christina Baldacci gets her body wrong.
Yet Christina Baldacci never gets her organs wrong.
Everything leaves her liver to descend through the small intestine. To each their life.
* * *
Greengrass doesn’t lie; he copulates with his daydreams. Not the same thing.
In his spare and clean apartment, he’s playing with a rubber ball. The ball bounces off the
grey-white wall, hits the floor softly, then lands back in his hand and makes him happy.
He’s waiting for a prostitute.
If only everything were this simple.
“Perhaps the most exasperating thing about ‘me,’ about nature and the universe, is that it will never ‘stay put.’” Watts wrote this statement, which Lucrecios had already formulated using the words “room” and “drama” or “tragedy.” Sharing in the restlessness of the world means sharing in its success, in the important trajectories that will reshape the future, dishearten as many generations of human beings as possible, debase the new millennium with the force of dominant ideology.
* * *
The Chicago Spire, an immense spiralling drill bit, a twisting skyscraper of 150 floors, 610 metres high, will be for Chicago what the Lighthouse of Alexandria would have been to the metropolis of ancient Egypt: a new symbolic flame. The twisting structure will evoke a smoke spiral coming from Native American campfires along Lake Michigan, the first indigenous village established on its shores.
Projected cost: USD$2.4 billion. Architect: Santiago Calatrava. A Spanish master who will make his mark in the permanent exhibition of skyscrapers in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper as we know it today—industrial spearhead in the geographical centre of the current economic empire. In other words, he will get his chance to build Rome.
Greengrass works for the major architecture firm Perkins+Will, who received the commission to build this unusual structure, to buoy the construction of the twisting drill bit that will rest on immense caissons of reinforced concrete. Among hundreds of architects, he designed the building’s fenestration. Construction is set to begin in 2007 and be completed sometime in 2009.
Greengrass’s work for the Chicago Spire was that of a dedicated employee. The noble task of an accomplished underling. But the project that’s closest to his heart—the one for which he has been given real creative latitude so that he can add his own curve to the catalogue of walls in the world, a unique perspective that will make his name renowned, the project that motivates him and makes him smile, the one that consoles him in his dreary and repetitive life—is the Dykhouse project.
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