19 February 2010
The Art Student’s War
I got scorched for not watching the opening ceremonies by more than one of you alert readers.
You know who you are, and you are correct and I was all wrong. Not for the first time, as you know. They key to the ceremony was the human scale of things, and the celebration of the diversity of the one-time Great White North.
Shoot, I like Canadians. We considered ourselves sort of honorary Maple Leaves when I was a kid, since we had Canadian television and radio as our basic staples, back in the days before there were 7,000 channels and no dial.
That was one of the things that was so unique about Detroit, the magical burning city, back in the day. We were positively international there on the boarder in a way that no other great American city was. The wily Canucks and their fiercely independent Canadian Broadcasting System were right there, 80,000 watts of power at CKLW AM radio and television, and provided a completely different view about what was going on in the wide world than what anyone else got.
Plus, it was in English!.
There were stories about the Commonwealth and the Queen, and televised curling and Hockey Night in Canada with the real original six teams of flying artists.
I never experienced anything like it in my life until I listened to All-India Radio on the shortwave. It was in English, I knew that much, but the world as depicted in those round vowels was very much a different place than the one I inhabited, much like getting the news and weather from Mars.
I have slipped back into a sort of grim fascination with the Olympic coverage. The folks at NBC can be forgiven for a certain American bias, I suppose, and thus the coverage of the dozens of activities are channeled toward those with local interest.
Not all of it interests me, and I have been reading a book for a change so that I do not have to contemplate the falls on the slopes or ice that cast such hard working athletes into despair.
As you know, my taste in literature runs to either the more historic or more salacious in literature. But old Detroit is the major character in “The Art Student’s War,” and it had been recommended to me by a source of impeccable taste.
Brad Leithauser is the author, and I have not run across a better turner-of-phrase in a long time. It is his sixth book, and it is a treat to read the product of a master craftsman of the language.
Each paragraph able to cut like a knife. I could tell you about the intricate plot turns, but the star of the book is burning Detroit in the war years. It was the city that generated the weapons that won World War II for the Allies.
There is an intricately constructed portrait of a young woman of beauty and talent from a troubled family. I have always admired those who can carry off authentic-feeling accounts of the opposite sex, and in my experience that is normally the strength of women authors, since men are so much less complicated. Leithauser not only writes convincingly of the young Bianca Paradiso, but he also renders a sensitive and affectionate portrait of the real doomed heroine, the city that was destroyed as utterly as Berlin in 1945.
God, it was a cool place in the day. Some of the things are still there.
Canada sits to the south, and is just fine. The wreckage is all on the American side of the Ambassador Bridge and the Tunnel.
One of my pals who enjoyed the opening ceremonies is a traditionalist. He complained about the new sports that have been added to the tradition canon of winter athleticism.
I had to write back to him that the revulsion he felt was quite common among yachters. There are people who harness the wind and art of navigation to pass through the world on its terms and rhythms, like those who belonged to the Detroit Yacht Club; then there are stink-boaters from the Detroit Boat Club; wasters of energy and drunken creeps.
I had to elaborate, connect the old Michigan winters with the sparkling water of summer. “There is the joy of the carved edge in Skiing, speed and grace challenging the force of nature, and then there are iPod-wearing wastrels whose boards require powered lifts and industrial infrastructure to tromp nature below their edges.’
A snow board cannot climb hills. It can only attempt to crush them. They would use a snow-mobile to get up there if they could.
“You despise louts,” I concluded in a crescendo, and with Leithauser’s book in my lap last night took a certain grim satisfaction in the crashing of the stars of the American snow-board team.
I finished the book not long after a very intense looking Chinese man crashed onto the ice attempting a quad jump. Pity. The rest of his program had been superb.
The skating and the venue had focused me on Canadian dreams of long ago and tossed it onto the pile of magazines I do not have time to read. Canada was not the focus of the novel by any means. Windsor, Ontario, was a walk-on player in the love-note to now-dead Detroit.
It was a city in full driving astonishing energy. It was a bustling metropolis straining at the seams, working around the clock, with the flames of the blast furnaces shooting up into the sky.
It was about my town, and the streets of the city that still had trolley-cars, and the canyons of the John C. Lodge and the Chrysler and Ford Expressways had yet to be gouged through the neighborhoods.
The Northland Shopping Center is a concept in this book, as is the death of the Grand Boulevard and Jefferson and Kercheval Street, and the loss of the University District and the Cass Corridor and the Indian Village.
There is no violence in Leithauser’s tale of a period that was slipping away from us, or rather, the violence happens off-stage, where the Ford-built bombers are doing their work, or the Chrysler trucks are landed in Murmansk to scourge the Germans.
People go elsewhere to be killed in this book. To the Pacific, or sometimes they come home to die in a dying city.
Characters disparage the place where my parents fled from this very time, and I found myself a refugee along with all the characters who ran or stayed. History was going to run right over them, even if the coffee in the Kresge Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts was as serene then as it might be now.
But of course there was a city around the art museum in those days, fourth biggest in the land, and the one whose sweat and tireless energy won a war.
Loved the book, by the way, and if you have an occasional interest in something that is gone in the urban wind more surely than the Confederacy, you might want to check it out.
To see Detroit alive again gave me a rush. She was a lovely lady, in her way, that wonderful enigmatic cosmopolitan city that once lay just north of Canada.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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