The Conventionalist
Destruction Under Construction
Pittsburgh's Past May be Portland's Future. But Does Criticizing a city reveal more about the City or the Critic?
o this Stefan Lorant guy: at bare minimum, you’ve got to give it to him that he was a survivor. Born in Budapest in 1901, he left when the Hungarian government ceded to fascism. Franz Kafka (that one) helped him find work playing the violin in Czechoslavakia, and by the time Lorant was nineteen and living in Vienna, his film The Life of Mozart had helped him achieve a certain level of notoriety as a European filmmaker. He would make fourteen films and eventually find himself in Berlin, where he began a career in journalism. By 1928 he was chief editor of the Munich Illustrated Press, a weekly considered to be Europe’s first modern photojournalistic paper, one that Life magazine would crib from pretty dutifully. As an editor, Lorant sharpened his political commentary. He grew an audience. And in 1933, when the Nazis crossed into Bavaria, it was Hitler himself who cast Lorant as a rebel and recreant, ordering that he be taken into "protective custody.” Lorant never saw a court, let alone a list of his perpetrations. What he saw was a jail cell, nearly a years-worth of it. The Hungarian government came to his rescue, and soon after his release, he carried his experiences in the form of a manuscript, which he took with him to London. It was published as I Was Hitler's Prisoner in 1934.
I knew only this last biographical tidbit when opening Lorant’s Pittsburgh: The Story of An American City (1964), a pictorial and essayistic history Lorant edited and to which he contributes several chapters, along with other scholars and writers. I was unaware that he had edited and founded several British “picture magazines,” cementing his role as the “godfather of photojournalism.” I did not know that he was friends with Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Carter, and the Kennedys. I did not know that he had published Lincoln, His Life in Photographs (1941), an illustrated history of U.S. Presidents called The Glorious Burden (1968), and Sieg Heil!: An Illustrated History of Germany from Bismark to Hitler (1974). What I knew about the guy was that he had criticized Hitler, had been jailed by him and survived, and that he had translated the experience into a book.
Which made his transition to a new paragraph in an early colonial section of Pittsburgh a real doozy: “If only the Indians could be subdued!”
On the whole, Lorant’s 700-plus page picture-laden book takes a slow, serious look at the germination of American society upon a fixed terrain, and yet the above line delivers real ache in a way that’s far too familiar to those who read the 20th century: one groans not merely at the historical record, but at the representation of it. The transition comes out of nowhere, a true seat belt in a car door of a sentence, the added injury being that we cannot remove it. “If only” is the language of the infomercial—can’t you see him? The colonial merchant, blue-suited and three-cornered, his face frowny, hands upturned—if only there was a product to exterminate these pesky Indians! I’ll grant that “subdued” does not leap to as rageful a register as my substitution (“exterminate”), though the characterization in the next line—“They were a constant menace to the growth of commerce, a steady threat to the lives and possessions of the inhabitants”—begins fingerwalking up those white keys. We can be generous and note that the appearance of “Indians” in a 1964 text predates, by perhaps a smidge, the Civil Rights movement and the preference for the term Native Americans. Generosity is hereby barred in all instances wherein an exclamation mark is used as historical record, or as a transition, or as a capper to a line about mass murder.
If you should ever need an example of the smoke-and-fire relationship between poor syntax and poor moral reckoning, you could certainly do worse than “If only the Indians could be subdued!” The counters are obvious—whose advance is more in need of subdual: the settlers or the “Indians?” Who is the true menace here? Which race is it, exactly, that poses a greater threat? Like I said: these are fairly standard replies, ones encouraged (I would hope) by any decent high school history teacher. Lorant’s sentence provokes more complicated questions than just those, though. For instance: how does a man once marginalized by Hitler wind up marginalizing Native Americans in print?
A spread from Lorant's book "Chamberlain and the Beautiful Llama and 101 More Juxtapositions."
n short: I have no idea.
The longer answer is that I have some kind of idea, though it’s more of a hopeful guess. This circuitous semi-answer must address the difficulty of Lorant’s task and also acknowledge that the method above, i.e. the gassy syntactical examination, is potentially a really dumb way to read history. Yes, our nation’s historical record is a fluid, many-paged document worth constant attention and stress. Yes, my convictions tell me that whatever grammatical fire I can bring to a fight against moral oversights is worth summoning, every time.
But sifting for inadequacies and prejudices in the men of yesteryear is an easy game (and it is seemingly always men when it comes to these obsessive, historical books). It is dramatic irony devoid of any sympathy or intrigue, and though it’s tempting to label my motives in this exercise as simply flimsy or casual, I fear that they are actually quite strong, calcified as they are within the sturdy apparatus known as “bad habits.” Why is it that I read history this way and do it so often? Why is it really? More and more I think: because it is good fun to live in a state of perpetual, guaranteed superiority. It’s good sport to take hard, two-handed critical swings at The Oversights of Dead White Men, men who—and this is key—cannot fight back. There is a deep, reprehensible quality in me that, above all other appearances, privileges an aggressive intelligence, that likes a fight I can win, that wants to conquer lines from Lorant not on behalf of any slighted minority group but on behalf of myself, so that I may “figure him out” and then lord over him with this approximation. This is a bad impulse, and I’m learning not to trust it.
(I did not walk to my middle school each morning, a sad fact I’ll occasionally feel shameful about whenever I see a bold young gradeschooler heading toward an intersection at a good clip. Each morning, when the little heads and backpacks of my younger siblings would shrink up the hill to Foster elementary—and then up another hill; two hills! you can look it up!—I would turn and leg up into my father’s truck. It was always snowing. My memory has made it so. How else to justify accepting the seven-minute ride? This was Pittsburgh, a town where our grandfathers’ grandfathers saw twelve-hour shifts as a godsend, given what and where they’d come from. A town where men had worked six days a week, uniting daily as (perhaps) the most overworked group of non-slave humans in the history of civilization. These were men who approached not ramshackle or husked-out or hey-isn’t-that-old-thing-beautiful factories, not Jesus-you’d-think-they-fought-the-war-here factories, but who stood before flaming, smoldering pumps, a veritable tabagie, pronged and still, the pores of these men no doubt weeping just looking at the huge things, lavaflow soon to be inches from their hair and flesh, and somehow—and God, doesn’t it just detonate whatever personal high mark for pluck you’ve achieved—marshaling some deep religious faith or guilt, thoughts of family, children, maybe mortgages, and yielding to whatever self-supplying drug it was that worked their veins from the inside out, they went inside.
And meanwhile I took rides. Cozy ones. My father’s office was next to my school, and what I remember most—what I remember really, really enjoying—was flicking on 1990’s sports-talk radio, a pre-internet forum which allowed me to enter a discussion that was 1) full-throttle in media res regardless of the hour, and 2) a fighting ground on which I was undefeated. I could out-argue the stated position of any caller or host. No, dummy, they can’t trade the sucky shortstop because nobody else wants a sucky shortstop. You idiot—they’re not going to immediately fire a coach they just gave a new contract to. Go find me the police records if you really believe that the black quarterback got arrested for giving a handy in Schenley Park (this anecdote, unlike those offered by the callers, is one-hundred percent true). If you aren’t familiar with the genre, I apologize—not for your lack of familiarity, but for my refusal to explicate my way any further into those foul rhetorical swamps.
At any rate, some kids smoked at smoker’s corner to gin themselves up before school. Some checked mirrors and gelled hair and strategized chance encounters with the opposite sex, plots I was still a term or two from hatching. In middle school, I fought the hard morning voices of strangers and did so silently, in my mind and indefatigable. I carried my victory with me through the sometimes-snow. The doors were tall. The school was named for an industrialist.)
And so I’m doing my best not to be a petty, argumentative child when it comes to some of the cringers that pop up in Lorant’s Pittsburgh, or when Capital-p “Providence” makes a quick appearance to I guess let us know that this city’s story was “Based on a True God.” These quick hitters result in some bad, bad lines, no doubt about it, ones celebrating their fiftieth year in print, but they are hardly the genre’s worst offenders or the oldest. Or worse, the most recent.
Howard Zinn recognized he had given minimal attention to gay and lesbian rights due to personal bias.
The thing about these types of books is, they tend to be pretty big. When a single mind walks into a huge chunk of history, oversights will abound. Even Howard Zinn—that careful cataloguer of the crimes perpetrated against Native Americans, that happy pacifist warrior, that anti-establishment grandfather you always wish you had—even he acknowledges the failings inherent in such projects. “There is no such thing,” he advises in A People’s History of the United States, “as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.” In a newish afterword, penned before his death in 2010, he wonders why it is that he didn’t pay more attention to the plight of Latinos in the United States. Was it an East Coast bias? “I suppose,” he writes, that “it was my own sexual orientation that accounted for my minimal treatment of gay and lesbian rights.” It is a necessary postscript. In rereading A People’s History recently, I kept wondering: Does he write about the gay community? Did I even care the first time around? Where is it? He couldn’t possibly forget...not Zinn!
Alas. He was bound by his interpretative limitations, expansive as they may have been. He was human.
As was Stefan Lorant. Lorant, the survivor of Hitler. Lorant, the human Rolodex. Lorant the charmer. The womanizer, according to Michael Hallett’s biography, Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism. Lorant the 59-year-old Harvard graduate student who married a twenty-year-old peer. Lorant, who stole across Europe and bagged a violin gig from Kafka, which, I mean: how farcical is that? Is this person even real? Did he swim the Mississippi in a day? I may as well criticize Paul Bunyan for his inhumane treatment of Babe the Blue Ox.
Stefan Lorant. After escaping Hungary, he found work as a violinist—hired by Franz Kafka.
Smiting Lorant as a potential semi-bigot strikes me as a squeamishly modern move in that it is both harsh and largely pointless. His era is his. And it’s not like the book is exactly scholarly. It doesn’t necessarily want to be treated with this scrutiny. The book is “popular.” Close to 200,000 copies have been sold in five different editions since the original 1964 version, and in one added chapter, written as a conversation between a grandfather and grandchild, the academic and reportorial observations steer toward doddering proclamations, as though the book is entering its third hour at a departmental Christmas party. The entire big-hearted endeavor results in a project that is both serious and jovial. The six-font, tri-column, eighty-four page timeline of the city’s entire history is one of the most wonderfully obsessive endeavors I’ve ever read. There’s also huge spreads that feature women crossing intersections in mini-skirts because...fashion! I guess. It’s a strange bird of a book, one dotted sporadically and darkly with the prejudices of Lorant’s time, and though I cannot imagine discussing it without referencing some of the miscues, I assure you that I will discuss it, as should anyone living within a rapidly growing city.
successful feature of Lorant’s book, in the early goings in particular, is the careful, consistent treatment given to population expansion. “The 376 inhabitants of 1790,” he writes of Pittsburgh’s population in Chapter 2, “grew into 1,565 by 1800.” By 1810 this number would reach 4,768. Population statistics are a through-line of the book’s fifteen chapters, as though Lorant and his other notable writers are asking Pittsburgh to step on the scale for a physical in every decade, if not every year. Workforce data is carefully noted. Immigrant influxes are compared to previous swells as well as national trends.
We’re given a familiar reason for this rapid rise in population: the rise of industry. The city’s output of wagons and glass and then yes, steel, are documented in charts that seem to double or triple by the year. Thirty-seven mechanics worked inside sixteen factories in 1792, and within twenty-five years, there were 1,657 mechanics working in 259 factories. Iron production in 1810 was worth $94,890, it rose to $764,200 by 1815, and if you, like me, have no idea what three-quarters of a million worth of iron resembles, Lorant will usher you along into a more familiar metric: namely, people. In 1830 the city’s population was 12,500, and by the eve of the Civil War there were 50,000 in the city and 100,000 in the outskirts. By 1880, those 50,000 people in the city had become 156,000. By 1920 the number would be 588,343.
The co-dependent relationship between population and production isn’t exactly newsy. Nor is the civic disrepair wrought by industrialization, both spiritually and physically.
But in a book that amounts to an homage, it’s worth commending Pittsburgh for the care it takes to track the ways in which fundamental aspects of society crumble as output and population multiply. Shoemakers were the first to strike in 1799, followed by carpenters, shoemakers again, and boilers. Though uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion were fiercer in name than execution, the Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 were two of the more violent confrontations in the history of U.S. labor. In a three-month span of 1919, streetcar workers, steelworkers, and 42,000 miners walked out, and when they left, they encountered yet more problems at home. Pittsburgh details how the city was lacking in schools, fire and police protection, “nor had the city fathers resources on hand for additional health” facilities as epidemics became widespread. Slums abounded. Bad wiring hung over poor pavement as the city struggled to keep pace with its rapidly expanding borders and population.
Housing, Pittsburgh, 1938. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein.
“As a chapter of municipal history,” writes Gerald W. Johnson in Chapter 8, “it is somewhat less than edifying.” There are dozens of these grim proclamations—and pictures; of smog, shanties, fires and floods, rebellions and strikes—and as a reader, the lone edifying thought may be that these chapters seem beamed to us from a different era. Typhoid, lack of water filtration, outrage aimed at horses who mutilate the city’s trees: these are issues of a different epoch, we think, if not a different country altogether. These issues have surely all been conquered, and conquered quite thoroughly. The text even congratulates us for our heroically evolved civic intelligence. There is a chilling line directed squarely, it seems, at us: “The labors of scholars in later days have clarified our understanding of the process of capital accumulation. We know now that the rapid industrialization of a nation is not to be accomplished without stresses, some of which are sure to inflict formidable pain on a large number of people.”
o we? Are we fully aware in a daily, visceral way that rapid growth places enormous stress on a huge number of people? I’m thinking specifically here of my current residence in Portland, Oregon, the metro area of which is slated to grow by up to 725,000 people in the next twenty years, with the potential to reach 3 million. It is impossible for me to read Pittsburgh without thinking of Portland, its many neighborhoods now contaminated with condos. The most recent Barry Apartment Report, released semi-regularly by the Portland firm Barry & Associates, cited, unsurprisingly, that “apartments remained the golden child of real estate investments.” Roughly 9,300 apartment units have been completed since 2013. Another 22,000 are proposed or under construction, their offwhites and browns and soft yellows conspiring to mark the land with vertical Band-Aids wherever a blank space had once dared exist.
Aesthetics are just the beginning of the problem. Brad Schmidt’s November 11th article in the Oregonian revealed that despite a 2003 mandate from City Council to designate 582 of the first 3,000 units on the South Waterfront for affordable housing, the Housing Bureau has requested the number be lowered to 434, which is still well above the 209 affordable units that have been completed. In the Division Street area, new buildings have nearly doubled the residential population without providing additional parking, a discrepancy the city will happily solve in this and another areas with meters, permits, and a street tax for road repairs, the latter of these having nothing to do with parking, but have you seen what the backhoes have wrought on the boulevards?
There’s also the matter of what these condos have displaced. A May 23rd article by Elliot Njus in the Oregonian reported that the long-time food cart lot known as Cartopia—the first “pod” I was ever taken to, and arguably the most notable location for what is a notable Portland “thing”—was scheduled to be sold and developed. (A September 17 update said Cartopia’s tenants were later offered another two-year lease with no explanation; one of that article’s commenters claimed the development delay was due only to there having been a gas station nearby in the past, complicating construction planning.) A November 12th article in Willamette Week announced that the same fate would befall karaoke bar Chopsticks II, a fixture of East Burnside that now sits snugly against a condo. I’m eliding many other such stories. The weeklies have become little more than Lamenters of Things Lost. The various neighborhood newsletters have continuously, heroically ruined my theory about poor syntax equating to poor moral reckoning. It’s hard to keep up with all the news, let alone all the development. If I were to fell a tree in Lone Fir Cemetery, and if this tree were say, ten blocks tall, and if I were to stand on my roof and swing it in a circular fashion, I’d strike down anywhere from fifteen to twenty new condo buildings, depending on how you math out the catty corners. Nearly all of these buildings have been built on terrain that hosted what were once institutions in some specific Portland way. I will forever expect the low purple of Spunky Monkey Coffee as I head north on 20th Ave., and I suspect I’ll continue hating anyone so much as biking past the drab condo on the site now, whose aesthetics look institutional in the worst possible way.
And so okay: up to now, this intake could quite easily be classified as soppy, itself a Lament of Things Lost. Your coffee shop is gone—boo hoo. Once upon a time, it displaced something else. I get it. You’re right.
But here’s where Lorant comes in. It’s quite possible that the widespread disappearance of these places and the absurdly quick rise of different (and, let’s be honest: more economically and spatially logical) residential spaces are merely symptoms of a larger process whose results are impossible to predict, a process about which Lorant’s book makes a pretty convincing thesis: that even with the most well-thought plans, it takes years for public health, infrastructure, safety, and education to catch up to the havoc wreaked by population expansion. This point does not feel interpretative. The correlation between exploding populations and explosions of civic disrepair seems inarguably factual. Stated differently, by Valeria Luiselli, channeling Wittgenstein: “Cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction.” The city/body analogy here is especially useful. You likely know someone older than you who, perhaps from weight, perhaps by chance, has had difficulty with their joints or bloodflow. The addition of years and weight has caused damage to their body, resulting in knee and hip replacements, artery cleanings, inhalers and respirators, often at unfair ages—and are cities any different? Adding immense weight to a city’s infrastructure—no matter how carefully considered the structures—creates new problems and exacerbates old ones.
This point is worth reiterating, particularly in the face of so many civic storytellers who sell urban growth as a no-doubt-about-it net positive: adding immense weight creates new problems and exacerbates old ones. (A separate essay: why is this weight being added to Portland? It clearly isn’t in the name of some tangible, necessary element found in the earth. What, then? “Culture?” “Lifestyle?” A TV show?) Portland’s roads and parking aren’t the half of this coming slog, the full length of which is slowly coming into a clear and disheartening focus. In May, the entire city was gradually instructed to boil water before drinking or cooking with it after regulators found E. coli and coliform in a sample. A community meeting—“Enough is Enough”—was held in August in the Police Bureau North Precinct following a weekend in which three separate shootings occurred, raising the gang-related violence calls to 87 for this year, up from 65 in 2013 (this after a 1,045-page report released in June by the Multnomah Local Public Safety Coordinating Council concluded that police, according to Willamette Week, possess “no comprehensive way to measure the number of gang members in Multnomah County or the violence they cause”). Though Portland improved its anti-human-trafficking enforcement from a ‘D’ grade to a ‘B’ in the 2013 Protected Innocence Challenge, sentencing remained a problem: according to Shared Hope International’s most recent Demanding Justice Report, Portland owns the highest rate of cases (62.5%) that ended with a “buyer” (i.e. of sex acts with a minor) receiving a misdemeanor conviction as opposed to a felony. Though improving, Portland Public Schools graduated 63% of students on-time in 2013, six percent lower than the state average—a state average which in 2012 was second lowest in the nation.
“Any generalizations about a big city,” writes Johnson in Chapter 8 of Pittsburgh, “can be supported by a citation of selected facts.” Stated differently by Lorant: “Instant history is bunk.” Both statements are correct and could easily be applied to the above paragraph, which is cherry-picking of the highest order.
One of many new "Band-Aid colored" apartment buildings built recently in Portland, Oregon.
The retorts are pretty standard. I get them a lot. Cities come with problems, I’m told. Other cities face similar challenges. Many of these problems existed long before the city began expanding and plus seriously man, don’t you think it’s kind of ridiculous for you to assume you know more about cities than city planners and developers and public health officials and people who have spent their entire lives thinking about this stuff? Isn’t it beyond dumb to compare a modern city to an industrializing one? Condos are a little different than factories, chief. And who said growth is so bad? Would you rather have us be Detroit? You’re not even native. You’re parachuting in. You’re a Lorant is what you are. What’s got you so combative and corrective? Why you picking us apart?
espite all the sports talk, I never did become much of an athlete. Not by Pennsylvanian standards, anyways, where your parents need small red tickets and gaudy picture-pins the size of mayo-lids to validate your efforts. And lights. Lights are key, I think, be they in gyms or on fields. Tennis was pretty nickel and dime as far as pomp went, and so the only stadium I ever really considered myself to have “performed” in was our church, St. Anne’s, which, like most Catholic churches, had the high-ceilinged, stagey wooden feel of an extremely ornate boxing ring. A golden strip ran to the ceiling as though reflecting the center aisle, and I lost many hours as an altar server to the series of illustrations carved within that column. Certain crosses and crucifixes could’ve been ringers for crossbows pulled taut. The slender fish were torpedolike, their heads darkly stenciled. The round stuff I could never figure. Those were bombs. I guess. It’s not like I was a violent kid. I wrote poems. The Philadelphia Flyers suck; you’re the girl of dreams I’d be lucky just to dream—those were pretty much the two notes I could hit. Years later, living with old friends from the (altar) service in a rougher area, the type of lengthy bar-studded street where junkies would shove your AC through the window and make with your ‘tronics, ditto casual entry to your car (though all they ever did was find R.E.M. CD’s I’d lost), there, in that era, sure: there was violence. Occasionally. We didn’t exactly walk away when a night had hit a late and moony juncture and a thing got said. We stole things. We tried to, anyways, and though we rarely saw the actual moment of real life-scarring crime, the thing about violence is that once you hear of its misty arrival, you start seeing it all around you in forms that are quite tangible. The telepole down the alley was crooked for a week after the St. Patrick’s Day Shootout, the guy having sped backwards the whole way from I think 16th to 22nd, slamming into the dense wooden cross and taking a slug from a cop (you can’t even find this stuff on Google what with all the doppelgangers). Three houses down from that, plywood gravestones marked the second-story windows after a bad fire above Margaritaville, which was closed in September of this year due to shootings. Stabbings were popular then. For some reason there were lots of stabbings. Didn’t matter if you were a Steelers offensive lineman or homeless. A friendly hand finds my rib in jest every time we pass a certain bar, guaranteed, and I laugh, and that bar, like many others, featured a large red-lettered “FOR SALE” sign shortly after the well-publicized incident. “I’ve got, like, eight pairs of these from County,” my neighbor Ryan told me one day. We were on his stoop in the alley we shared with six other doors, though one was just a frame. He was talking about his standard-issue shoes.
The only full-body uniform I’ve ever worn was an altar serving alb, which is basically a white tunic. They never seemed to fit right. Either that, or I kept outgrowing whatever size I’d settled on. You tied off at the waist with a monkish white rope to I guess minimize your drag and billowyness lest you breeze too closely past a candle. Self-torching was really the only thing you could potentially screw up. Sure, it was embarrassing if you got the yips on the sanctus bells at consecration, even more so if you rang too loud and too early, but your parents were the only ones noticing. I never learned how to set up the altar correctly. The priest would pause and fix it, every mass.
Mostly what you did was sit. These stationary moments were when I really applied myself, and not just with regard to weapon inventory. The homily was the real highlight for me. I’d dissect those orations right down to their liturgical bones.
People tend to use “homily” and “sermon” interchangeably, but “homily” is from the Greek homlietikos, meaning “conversation. “Sermon” comes from the Latin sermo, i.e. “speech.” You can feel the difference in how they land on your cheeks. Catholic priests are supposed to keep it conversational, real workaday, everyday type stuff, Seinfeld without the barge-ins or the nihilistic bent. I was in the grocery store and saw X, it reminded me of Y from Luke Z:12. That’s the rough format, condensed from ten (or so) minutes to a line. The old joke goes that Catholics do homilies and Protestants do sermons, but every Catholic has experienced some visiting road show of a priest who decides that this here crowd better settle in for some old-school brimstoning, yes sir. “Conversation” is a bit of a lie when you get down to it. There’s only one person talking. Even now, approaching my first Pittsburgh Christmas with my wife, a woman spared a religious upbringing, my main pitch to her about Mass is that the car ride home is fun. The best part, I tell her, is debating whether the homily was a conversation or a speech.
So tone was always crucial. It probably accounted for half the rubric on the Homily Assessment. I docked big time if the hook became gassy. You had to transition smoothly from the anecdote to the scriptural stuff and you had to do it at the right moment. It was about ratios. No one wanted to hear a homily if more than half of it was text-based. You needed to delay the move to scripture for as long as possible, until the moment it was needed, when some peak narrative moment of confusion or discord cried out for a deus ex sancto libro. It’s not like I give wads of cash to feminist causes—the only women to appear in this essay thus far are Marilyn Monroe and a nameless 20-year-old graduate student—but any priestly appeal that had the whiff of something aimed just to the right of my sisters was no good. What about them? I’d think. Who are you leaving out here?
And look: I get that it’d no doubt make a better story if the priests had been bad to me or were irreputable in any way. There’s a certain schmaltzy version trending heavily toward spoof about a boy and his priest, how he suffered in private and became rhetorically adept as revenge. Har har, boo hoo. This just was’t the case. Not at all. These weren’t evil men I was assessing in silence (save one cretin who, right around September 11th, demanded the congregation join him in a protest of 7-Eleven, which sold pornographic material; my catechism teacher, a guitar-playing hero of a woman, gave him an earful about how it might just maybe send the wrong message to the faultlessly nice Pakistani owners). So no, the Homily Assessment exercise wasn’t fueled by vengeance of any sort. In its place was a deep and reverential respect, the kind I now reserve for writers and artists, men like Zinn (and maybe still possibly Lorant), the kind I have for figures against whom I measure myself, the kind that, whenever I manage to keep a journal for more than a week, is an idea I come back to with embarrassing regularity. June 9th, 2007, at one of my first jobs: “I have an insane desire to impress A___. I always want to impress brilliant people. I am obsessed with it.”
As an altar server, I worked for good men who were smart. Father Dom wasn’t some bathtub-bellied Italian but instead a slight Vietnamese guy, genuinely content, yet driven. Monsignor Charles Owen Rice marched with King and was a labor activist and spoke openly about communism and my word, what a bad ass (a prayer of his offered in 1982, as quoted in Pittsburgh: “We find that in which we trusted is failing. We trusted in the smartness of our industrial leaders. We trusted in the great corporations. We trusted in money. We trusted in the power of steel. We couldn’t imagine that there could ever be a day that they’d be closing steel mills and that they wouldn’t need steel”). Five years after Bishop Wuerl presided over our Confirmation he got the call to the big time and then the Big Time, first as the sixth Archbishop of Washington, as in D.C., as in U-S-A!, then to the College of Cardinals, as in Rome, as in Vatican. When Father Brier used his homily to announce that he was being relocated to a suffering parish, people gasped and wept as though a car accident had occurred right there in front of the altar, and this was fairly recently, mind you, in a time when people aren’t supposed to care about this stuff. These heavy hitters, these veterans of the homily, men in charge of interpretation and suasion—these were the guys (once again, always men) who I was sizing up, inaudibly, stage right.
It’s clear now that I was seeking permission for a way out. If I scanned hard enough for any failings or stutters, any undue leaps of logic, I might find an excuse to jet from the service and from my lone rickety pew. You’re looking to make a break as a kid, and the problem was that I liked school. My friends and I were a roaming cabal of gods. It was apparent early on—say, maybe six; I’m not kidding—that I had hit two parental Powerball’s. My family was big and awesome, so much so that if this religious stuff turned out to actually matter somewhere down the road, I figured my great aunt the nun, known to all as ‘Sis,’ I figured she’d let me in through the rectory.
So altar serving: this was it. Test your chops, kid. The audience out there: they’re transfixed. They’re hardly risking a blink. You’re up one with a minute left. You got him on his sloppy hook, all right, and can you finish the job? Can you find another crack in the logic? Look sharp, now. Head up.
t’s painfully obvious that I’ve been playing a similar game with Portland. I’m probing it for some oversight, some flaw, one that grants me permission to leave and go home and continue my life’s important great work cataloguing every stabbing and bar closure. What a life.
And yet I’m hopelessly drawn toward it. I want it. I better, otherwise this whole charade I’ve been performing out here is going to look pretty dumb in retrospect—the raising up of my hometown’s ancient problems in a crazed grip, me shining them as though they’re an all-powerful source of clarity when the place already has plenty of light from good and well meaning sources, many of them cited herein. People here are on the case. They’re reporting the right stories, penning the right angry letters. Meanwhile I get so hopelessly contradictory about this city’s whole expansive enterprise. I wring hands that haven’t seen serious labor in a decade about police enforcement—What about police? Will Portland have enough police? What will happen to crime if the city keeps expanding? And gangs? The children! Tsk tsk, cluck cluck—and yet part of me wants to burn a condo just to see how the story changes, to have a say in a city that I really actually do like, one that keeps feeling further from any one person’s control, at least any one person I can identify and whose tone and syntax I can savage. Violence is a form of authorship, after all. Your unvoiced inner bubblings need an outlet, so you strike a match, start an essay, and voila—see who gathers to cheer or jail you.
And for as nice and warm as that sounds, I have to remind myself that unnecessary aggression—located around a Band-Aid of a building or a text—is the stated opposition here. I’ve thought of eliminating my use of the word “detonate,” but it marks me as hyperbolic in a way I deserve. We tend to either oversell violence by a wide and gaudy margin (“detonate”) or undersell it so low as to be sub-history itself (“subdued”). This, then, is perhaps one reason Lorant wrote that line about “Indians.”
Lorant "skipped around the world cataloguing his interests, and he missed some key element at every stop."
Another explanation is that books and cities accumulate hidden problems as they expand, which is a pity, because I love the bigness of both. There it is. Couldn’t be any simpler. Tip your historians. It’s such an annoyingly trite conclusion for all the life-and-death-volume levied in the opening, all the preaching (“Satan lives in your syntax!”), the constant burying of the personal stuff, the jacketing of it in parentheticals, trying to pass off a sports-talk radio story as sufficient self-assessment, holding onto the boring kiddy Catholic stuff as though it’s some really damning personal secret, fashioning it as this big late-game reveal, though as a matter of narrative flow, you can’t just up and start with the church stuff unless you want everybody thinking there’s some sort of religious parable coming. Either that or a rape. The Catholic stuff works best here as a counterpoint, not “the point.” The point is that I’ve been a reader for much longer now than I’ve been a Catholic, and somewhere along the line I began to behave as a distrustful if not joyless one. The problem is more with my behavior than with any text, just like the problem isn’t whatever city I’m living in, and it definitely wasn’t the “neighborhood.” The problem wasn’t that strangers found a way through our window and ran their hands over things we took for granted. The problem was the watchful guy next door saying, “I thought he was, like, your dad.”
I’ll tell you why Lorant wrote that line: because he lived in too many places. That was his problem. He skipped around the world cataloguing his interests, and he missed some key element at every stop. You miss things when you spread yourself thin. He must’ve missed the day they covered Native Americans in Vienna or Berlin and so he got the tone wrong, he barreled into it. He was too full of energy. How couldn’t he be? What other option did he have? To sit still? Reflect? To keep rewinding the screams of the other prisoners? To keep seeing the “half-dead men” thrown in heaps? I’m usually pretty crass and uncaring when it comes to a writer’s biography, but given that Lorant’s biography has been made textual, just think: he’s sitting there in a German jail, a Hungarian Jew who left his home country, and because why—because it had become too fascist. “Regret” doesn’t come within half a globe of that feeling. Criticize his output’s failings all you want, but my God: the attempt! The slew of work after his jailing! I’m fussing over romanticized and deromanticized paragraphs about cities I know cold, and he’s starting magazines in languages he hardly knows! Understand: the drive and the flaw come from the same cell. This was a man who occupied a small space supplied only with time, after which he was given a limited term to cover impossibly large terrain.
Patrick McGinty’s fiction has appeared, most recently, in ZYZZYVA and The Portland Review. He recently wrote about Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation.
The ConventionalistPittsburgh's Past May be Portland's Future. But Does Criticizing a city reveal more about the City or the Critic?
o this Stefan Lorant guy: at bare minimum, you’ve got to give it to him that he was a survivor. Born in Budapest in 1901, he left when the Hungarian government ceded to fascism. Franz Kafka (that one) helped him find work playing the violin in Czechoslavakia, and by the time Lorant was nineteen and living in Vienna, his film The Life of Mozart had helped him achieve a certain level of notoriety as a European filmmaker. He would make fourteen films and eventually find himself in Berlin, where he began a career in journalism. By 1928 he was chief editor of the Munich Illustrated Press, a weekly considered to be Europe’s first modern photojournalistic paper, one that Life magazine would crib from pretty dutifully. As an editor, Lorant sharpened his political commentary. He grew an audience. And in 1933, when the Nazis crossed into Bavaria, it was Hitler himself who cast Lorant as a rebel and recreant, ordering that he be taken into "protective custody.” Lorant never saw a court, let alone a list of his perpetrations. What he saw was a jail cell, nearly a years-worth of it. The Hungarian government came to his rescue, and soon after his release, he carried his experiences in the form of a manuscript, which he took with him to London. It was published as I Was Hitler's Prisoner in 1934.I knew only this last biographical tidbit when opening Lorant’s Pittsburgh: The Story of An American City (1964), a pictorial and essayistic history Lorant edited and to which he contributes several chapters, along with other scholars and writers. I was unaware that he had edited and founded several British “picture magazines,” cementing his role as the “godfather of photojournalism.” I did not know that he was friends with Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Carter, and the Kennedys. I did not know that he had published Lincoln, His Life in Photographs (1941), an illustrated history of U.S. Presidents called The Glorious Burden (1968), and Sieg Heil!: An Illustrated History of Germany from Bismark to Hitler (1974). What I knew about the guy was that he had criticized Hitler, had been jailed by him and survived, and that he had translated the experience into a book.
Which made his transition to a new paragraph in an early colonial section of Pittsburgh a real doozy: “If only the Indians could be subdued!”
On the whole, Lorant’s 700-plus page picture-laden book takes a slow, serious look at the germination of American society upon a fixed terrain, and yet the above line delivers real ache in a way that’s far too familiar to those who read the 20th century: one groans not merely at the historical record, but at the representation of it. The transition comes out of nowhere, a true seat belt in a car door of a sentence, the added injury being that we cannot remove it. “If only” is the language of the infomercial—can’t you see him? The colonial merchant, blue-suited and three-cornered, his face frowny, hands upturned—if only there was a product to exterminate these pesky Indians! I’ll grant that “subdued” does not leap to as rageful a register as my substitution (“exterminate”), though the characterization in the next line—“They were a constant menace to the growth of commerce, a steady threat to the lives and possessions of the inhabitants”—begins fingerwalking up those white keys. We can be generous and note that the appearance of “Indians” in a 1964 text predates, by perhaps a smidge, the Civil Rights movement and the preference for the term Native Americans. Generosity is hereby barred in all instances wherein an exclamation mark is used as historical record, or as a transition, or as a capper to a line about mass murder.If you should ever need an example of the smoke-and-fire relationship between poor syntax and poor moral reckoning, you could certainly do worse than “If only the Indians could be subdued!” The counters are obvious—whose advance is more in need of subdual: the settlers or the “Indians?” Who is the true menace here? Which race is it, exactly, that poses a greater threat? Like I said: these are fairly standard replies, ones encouraged (I would hope) by any decent high school history teacher. Lorant’s sentence provokes more complicated questions than just those, though. For instance: how does a man once marginalized by Hitler wind up marginalizing Native Americans in print?
A spread from Lorant's book "Chamberlain and the Beautiful Llama and 101 More Juxtapositions."n short: I have no idea. The longer answer is that I have some kind of idea, though it’s more of a hopeful guess. This circuitous semi-answer must address the difficulty of Lorant’s task and also acknowledge that the method above, i.e. the gassy syntactical examination, is potentially a really dumb way to read history. Yes, our nation’s historical record is a fluid, many-paged document worth constant attention and stress. Yes, my convictions tell me that whatever grammatical fire I can bring to a fight against moral oversights is worth summoning, every time.
But sifting for inadequacies and prejudices in the men of yesteryear is an easy game (and it is seemingly always men when it comes to these obsessive, historical books). It is dramatic irony devoid of any sympathy or intrigue, and though it’s tempting to label my motives in this exercise as simply flimsy or casual, I fear that they are actually quite strong, calcified as they are within the sturdy apparatus known as “bad habits.” Why is it that I read history this way and do it so often? Why is it really? More and more I think: because it is good fun to live in a state of perpetual, guaranteed superiority. It’s good sport to take hard, two-handed critical swings at The Oversights of Dead White Men, men who—and this is key—cannot fight back. There is a deep, reprehensible quality in me that, above all other appearances, privileges an aggressive intelligence, that likes a fight I can win, that wants to conquer lines from Lorant not on behalf of any slighted minority group but on behalf of myself, so that I may “figure him out” and then lord over him with this approximation. This is a bad impulse, and I’m learning not to trust it.
(I did not walk to my middle school each morning, a sad fact I’ll occasionally feel shameful about whenever I see a bold young gradeschooler heading toward an intersection at a good clip. Each morning, when the little heads and backpacks of my younger siblings would shrink up the hill to Foster elementary—and then up another hill; two hills! you can look it up!—I would turn and leg up into my father’s truck. It was always snowing. My memory has made it so. How else to justify accepting the seven-minute ride? This was Pittsburgh, a town where our grandfathers’ grandfathers saw twelve-hour shifts as a godsend, given what and where they’d come from. A town where men had worked six days a week, uniting daily as (perhaps) the most overworked group of non-slave humans in the history of civilization. These were men who approached not ramshackle or husked-out or hey-isn’t-that-old-thing-beautiful factories, not Jesus-you’d-think-they-fought-the-war-here factories, but who stood before flaming, smoldering pumps, a veritable tabagie, pronged and still, the pores of these men no doubt weeping just looking at the huge things, lavaflow soon to be inches from their hair and flesh, and somehow—and God, doesn’t it just detonate whatever personal high mark for pluck you’ve achieved—marshaling some deep religious faith or guilt, thoughts of family, children, maybe mortgages, and yielding to whatever self-supplying drug it was that worked their veins from the inside out, they went inside.
And meanwhile I took rides. Cozy ones. My father’s office was next to my school, and what I remember most—what I remember really, really enjoying—was flicking on 1990’s sports-talk radio, a pre-internet forum which allowed me to enter a discussion that was 1) full-throttle in media res regardless of the hour, and 2) a fighting ground on which I was undefeated. I could out-argue the stated position of any caller or host. No, dummy, they can’t trade the sucky shortstop because nobody else wants a sucky shortstop. You idiot—they’re not going to immediately fire a coach they just gave a new contract to. Go find me the police records if you really believe that the black quarterback got arrested for giving a handy in Schenley Park (this anecdote, unlike those offered by the callers, is one-hundred percent true). If you aren’t familiar with the genre, I apologize—not for your lack of familiarity, but for my refusal to explicate my way any further into those foul rhetorical swamps.
At any rate, some kids smoked at smoker’s corner to gin themselves up before school. Some checked mirrors and gelled hair and strategized chance encounters with the opposite sex, plots I was still a term or two from hatching. In middle school, I fought the hard morning voices of strangers and did so silently, in my mind and indefatigable. I carried my victory with me through the sometimes-snow. The doors were tall. The school was named for an industrialist.)
And so I’m doing my best not to be a petty, argumentative child when it comes to some of the cringers that pop up in Lorant’s Pittsburgh, or when Capital-p “Providence” makes a quick appearance to I guess let us know that this city’s story was “Based on a True God.” These quick hitters result in some bad, bad lines, no doubt about it, ones celebrating their fiftieth year in print, but they are hardly the genre’s worst offenders or the oldest. Or worse, the most recent.
Howard Zinn recognized he had given minimal attention to gay and lesbian rights due to personal bias.The thing about these types of books is, they tend to be pretty big. When a single mind walks into a huge chunk of history, oversights will abound. Even Howard Zinn—that careful cataloguer of the crimes perpetrated against Native Americans, that happy pacifist warrior, that anti-establishment grandfather you always wish you had—even he acknowledges the failings inherent in such projects. “There is no such thing,” he advises in A People’s History of the United States, “as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.” In a newish afterword, penned before his death in 2010, he wonders why it is that he didn’t pay more attention to the plight of Latinos in the United States. Was it an East Coast bias? “I suppose,” he writes, that “it was my own sexual orientation that accounted for my minimal treatment of gay and lesbian rights.” It is a necessary postscript. In rereading A People’s History recently, I kept wondering: Does he write about the gay community? Did I even care the first time around? Where is it? He couldn’t possibly forget...not Zinn!
Alas. He was bound by his interpretative limitations, expansive as they may have been. He was human.
As was Stefan Lorant. Lorant, the survivor of Hitler. Lorant, the human Rolodex. Lorant the charmer. The womanizer, according to Michael Hallett’s biography, Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism. Lorant the 59-year-old Harvard graduate student who married a twenty-year-old peer. Lorant, who stole across Europe and bagged a violin gig from Kafka, which, I mean: how farcical is that? Is this person even real? Did he swim the Mississippi in a day? I may as well criticize Paul Bunyan for his inhumane treatment of Babe the Blue Ox.
Stefan Lorant. After escaping Hungary, he found work as a violinist—hired by Franz Kafka.Smiting Lorant as a potential semi-bigot strikes me as a squeamishly modern move in that it is both harsh and largely pointless. His era is his. And it’s not like the book is exactly scholarly. It doesn’t necessarily want to be treated with this scrutiny. The book is “popular.” Close to 200,000 copies have been sold in five different editions since the original 1964 version, and in one added chapter, written as a conversation between a grandfather and grandchild, the academic and reportorial observations steer toward doddering proclamations, as though the book is entering its third hour at a departmental Christmas party. The entire big-hearted endeavor results in a project that is both serious and jovial. The six-font, tri-column, eighty-four page timeline of the city’s entire history is one of the most wonderfully obsessive endeavors I’ve ever read. There’s also huge spreads that feature women crossing intersections in mini-skirts because...fashion! I guess. It’s a strange bird of a book, one dotted sporadically and darkly with the prejudices of Lorant’s time, and though I cannot imagine discussing it without referencing some of the miscues, I assure you that I will discuss it, as should anyone living within a rapidly growing city.
successful feature of Lorant’s book, in the early goings in particular, is the careful, consistent treatment given to population expansion. “The 376 inhabitants of 1790,” he writes of Pittsburgh’s population in Chapter 2, “grew into 1,565 by 1800.” By 1810 this number would reach 4,768. Population statistics are a through-line of the book’s fifteen chapters, as though Lorant and his other notable writers are asking Pittsburgh to step on the scale for a physical in every decade, if not every year. Workforce data is carefully noted. Immigrant influxes are compared to previous swells as well as national trends. We’re given a familiar reason for this rapid rise in population: the rise of industry. The city’s output of wagons and glass and then yes, steel, are documented in charts that seem to double or triple by the year. Thirty-seven mechanics worked inside sixteen factories in 1792, and within twenty-five years, there were 1,657 mechanics working in 259 factories. Iron production in 1810 was worth $94,890, it rose to $764,200 by 1815, and if you, like me, have no idea what three-quarters of a million worth of iron resembles, Lorant will usher you along into a more familiar metric: namely, people. In 1830 the city’s population was 12,500, and by the eve of the Civil War there were 50,000 in the city and 100,000 in the outskirts. By 1880, those 50,000 people in the city had become 156,000. By 1920 the number would be 588,343.
The co-dependent relationship between population and production isn’t exactly newsy. Nor is the civic disrepair wrought by industrialization, both spiritually and physically.
But in a book that amounts to an homage, it’s worth commending Pittsburgh for the care it takes to track the ways in which fundamental aspects of society crumble as output and population multiply. Shoemakers were the first to strike in 1799, followed by carpenters, shoemakers again, and boilers. Though uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion were fiercer in name than execution, the Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 were two of the more violent confrontations in the history of U.S. labor. In a three-month span of 1919, streetcar workers, steelworkers, and 42,000 miners walked out, and when they left, they encountered yet more problems at home. Pittsburgh details how the city was lacking in schools, fire and police protection, “nor had the city fathers resources on hand for additional health” facilities as epidemics became widespread. Slums abounded. Bad wiring hung over poor pavement as the city struggled to keep pace with its rapidly expanding borders and population.
Housing, Pittsburgh, 1938. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein.“As a chapter of municipal history,” writes Gerald W. Johnson in Chapter 8, “it is somewhat less than edifying.” There are dozens of these grim proclamations—and pictures; of smog, shanties, fires and floods, rebellions and strikes—and as a reader, the lone edifying thought may be that these chapters seem beamed to us from a different era. Typhoid, lack of water filtration, outrage aimed at horses who mutilate the city’s trees: these are issues of a different epoch, we think, if not a different country altogether. These issues have surely all been conquered, and conquered quite thoroughly. The text even congratulates us for our heroically evolved civic intelligence. There is a chilling line directed squarely, it seems, at us: “The labors of scholars in later days have clarified our understanding of the process of capital accumulation. We know now that the rapid industrialization of a nation is not to be accomplished without stresses, some of which are sure to inflict formidable pain on a large number of people.”
o we? Are we fully aware in a daily, visceral way that rapid growth places enormous stress on a huge number of people? I’m thinking specifically here of my current residence in Portland, Oregon, the metro area of which is slated to grow by up to 725,000 people in the next twenty years, with the potential to reach 3 million. It is impossible for me to read Pittsburgh without thinking of Portland, its many neighborhoods now contaminated with condos. The most recent Barry Apartment Report, released semi-regularly by the Portland firm Barry & Associates, cited, unsurprisingly, that “apartments remained the golden child of real estate investments.” Roughly 9,300 apartment units have been completed since 2013. Another 22,000 are proposed or under construction, their offwhites and browns and soft yellows conspiring to mark the land with vertical Band-Aids wherever a blank space had once dared exist.Aesthetics are just the beginning of the problem. Brad Schmidt’s November 11th article in the Oregonian revealed that despite a 2003 mandate from City Council to designate 582 of the first 3,000 units on the South Waterfront for affordable housing, the Housing Bureau has requested the number be lowered to 434, which is still well above the 209 affordable units that have been completed. In the Division Street area, new buildings have nearly doubled the residential population without providing additional parking, a discrepancy the city will happily solve in this and another areas with meters, permits, and a street tax for road repairs, the latter of these having nothing to do with parking, but have you seen what the backhoes have wrought on the boulevards?
There’s also the matter of what these condos have displaced. A May 23rd article by Elliot Njus in the Oregonian reported that the long-time food cart lot known as Cartopia—the first “pod” I was ever taken to, and arguably the most notable location for what is a notable Portland “thing”—was scheduled to be sold and developed. (A September 17 update said Cartopia’s tenants were later offered another two-year lease with no explanation; one of that article’s commenters claimed the development delay was due only to there having been a gas station nearby in the past, complicating construction planning.) A November 12th article in Willamette Week announced that the same fate would befall karaoke bar Chopsticks II, a fixture of East Burnside that now sits snugly against a condo. I’m eliding many other such stories. The weeklies have become little more than Lamenters of Things Lost. The various neighborhood newsletters have continuously, heroically ruined my theory about poor syntax equating to poor moral reckoning. It’s hard to keep up with all the news, let alone all the development. If I were to fell a tree in Lone Fir Cemetery, and if this tree were say, ten blocks tall, and if I were to stand on my roof and swing it in a circular fashion, I’d strike down anywhere from fifteen to twenty new condo buildings, depending on how you math out the catty corners. Nearly all of these buildings have been built on terrain that hosted what were once institutions in some specific Portland way. I will forever expect the low purple of Spunky Monkey Coffee as I head north on 20th Ave., and I suspect I’ll continue hating anyone so much as biking past the drab condo on the site now, whose aesthetics look institutional in the worst possible way.
And so okay: up to now, this intake could quite easily be classified as soppy, itself a Lament of Things Lost. Your coffee shop is gone—boo hoo. Once upon a time, it displaced something else. I get it. You’re right.
But here’s where Lorant comes in. It’s quite possible that the widespread disappearance of these places and the absurdly quick rise of different (and, let’s be honest: more economically and spatially logical) residential spaces are merely symptoms of a larger process whose results are impossible to predict, a process about which Lorant’s book makes a pretty convincing thesis: that even with the most well-thought plans, it takes years for public health, infrastructure, safety, and education to catch up to the havoc wreaked by population expansion. This point does not feel interpretative. The correlation between exploding populations and explosions of civic disrepair seems inarguably factual. Stated differently, by Valeria Luiselli, channeling Wittgenstein: “Cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction.” The city/body analogy here is especially useful. You likely know someone older than you who, perhaps from weight, perhaps by chance, has had difficulty with their joints or bloodflow. The addition of years and weight has caused damage to their body, resulting in knee and hip replacements, artery cleanings, inhalers and respirators, often at unfair ages—and are cities any different? Adding immense weight to a city’s infrastructure—no matter how carefully considered the structures—creates new problems and exacerbates old ones.
This point is worth reiterating, particularly in the face of so many civic storytellers who sell urban growth as a no-doubt-about-it net positive: adding immense weight creates new problems and exacerbates old ones. (A separate essay: why is this weight being added to Portland? It clearly isn’t in the name of some tangible, necessary element found in the earth. What, then? “Culture?” “Lifestyle?” A TV show?) Portland’s roads and parking aren’t the half of this coming slog, the full length of which is slowly coming into a clear and disheartening focus. In May, the entire city was gradually instructed to boil water before drinking or cooking with it after regulators found E. coli and coliform in a sample. A community meeting—“Enough is Enough”—was held in August in the Police Bureau North Precinct following a weekend in which three separate shootings occurred, raising the gang-related violence calls to 87 for this year, up from 65 in 2013 (this after a 1,045-page report released in June by the Multnomah Local Public Safety Coordinating Council concluded that police, according to Willamette Week, possess “no comprehensive way to measure the number of gang members in Multnomah County or the violence they cause”). Though Portland improved its anti-human-trafficking enforcement from a ‘D’ grade to a ‘B’ in the 2013 Protected Innocence Challenge, sentencing remained a problem: according to Shared Hope International’s most recent Demanding Justice Report, Portland owns the highest rate of cases (62.5%) that ended with a “buyer” (i.e. of sex acts with a minor) receiving a misdemeanor conviction as opposed to a felony. Though improving, Portland Public Schools graduated 63% of students on-time in 2013, six percent lower than the state average—a state average which in 2012 was second lowest in the nation.
“Any generalizations about a big city,” writes Johnson in Chapter 8 of Pittsburgh, “can be supported by a citation of selected facts.” Stated differently by Lorant: “Instant history is bunk.” Both statements are correct and could easily be applied to the above paragraph, which is cherry-picking of the highest order.
One of many new "Band-Aid colored" apartment buildings built recently in Portland, Oregon.The retorts are pretty standard. I get them a lot. Cities come with problems, I’m told. Other cities face similar challenges. Many of these problems existed long before the city began expanding and plus seriously man, don’t you think it’s kind of ridiculous for you to assume you know more about cities than city planners and developers and public health officials and people who have spent their entire lives thinking about this stuff? Isn’t it beyond dumb to compare a modern city to an industrializing one? Condos are a little different than factories, chief. And who said growth is so bad? Would you rather have us be Detroit? You’re not even native. You’re parachuting in. You’re a Lorant is what you are. What’s got you so combative and corrective? Why you picking us apart?
espite all the sports talk, I never did become much of an athlete. Not by Pennsylvanian standards, anyways, where your parents need small red tickets and gaudy picture-pins the size of mayo-lids to validate your efforts. And lights. Lights are key, I think, be they in gyms or on fields. Tennis was pretty nickel and dime as far as pomp went, and so the only stadium I ever really considered myself to have “performed” in was our church, St. Anne’s, which, like most Catholic churches, had the high-ceilinged, stagey wooden feel of an extremely ornate boxing ring. A golden strip ran to the ceiling as though reflecting the center aisle, and I lost many hours as an altar server to the series of illustrations carved within that column. Certain crosses and crucifixes could’ve been ringers for crossbows pulled taut. The slender fish were torpedolike, their heads darkly stenciled. The round stuff I could never figure. Those were bombs. I guess. It’s not like I was a violent kid. I wrote poems. The Philadelphia Flyers suck; you’re the girl of dreams I’d be lucky just to dream—those were pretty much the two notes I could hit. Years later, living with old friends from the (altar) service in a rougher area, the type of lengthy bar-studded street where junkies would shove your AC through the window and make with your ‘tronics, ditto casual entry to your car (though all they ever did was find R.E.M. CD’s I’d lost), there, in that era, sure: there was violence. Occasionally. We didn’t exactly walk away when a night had hit a late and moony juncture and a thing got said. We stole things. We tried to, anyways, and though we rarely saw the actual moment of real life-scarring crime, the thing about violence is that once you hear of its misty arrival, you start seeing it all around you in forms that are quite tangible. The telepole down the alley was crooked for a week after the St. Patrick’s Day Shootout, the guy having sped backwards the whole way from I think 16th to 22nd, slamming into the dense wooden cross and taking a slug from a cop (you can’t even find this stuff on Google what with all the doppelgangers). Three houses down from that, plywood gravestones marked the second-story windows after a bad fire above Margaritaville, which was closed in September of this year due to shootings. Stabbings were popular then. For some reason there were lots of stabbings. Didn’t matter if you were a Steelers offensive lineman or homeless. A friendly hand finds my rib in jest every time we pass a certain bar, guaranteed, and I laugh, and that bar, like many others, featured a large red-lettered “FOR SALE” sign shortly after the well-publicized incident. “I’ve got, like, eight pairs of these from County,” my neighbor Ryan told me one day. We were on his stoop in the alley we shared with six other doors, though one was just a frame. He was talking about his standard-issue shoes.The only full-body uniform I’ve ever worn was an altar serving alb, which is basically a white tunic. They never seemed to fit right. Either that, or I kept outgrowing whatever size I’d settled on. You tied off at the waist with a monkish white rope to I guess minimize your drag and billowyness lest you breeze too closely past a candle. Self-torching was really the only thing you could potentially screw up. Sure, it was embarrassing if you got the yips on the sanctus bells at consecration, even more so if you rang too loud and too early, but your parents were the only ones noticing. I never learned how to set up the altar correctly. The priest would pause and fix it, every mass.
Mostly what you did was sit. These stationary moments were when I really applied myself, and not just with regard to weapon inventory. The homily was the real highlight for me. I’d dissect those orations right down to their liturgical bones.
People tend to use “homily” and “sermon” interchangeably, but “homily” is from the Greek homlietikos, meaning “conversation. “Sermon” comes from the Latin sermo, i.e. “speech.” You can feel the difference in how they land on your cheeks. Catholic priests are supposed to keep it conversational, real workaday, everyday type stuff, Seinfeld without the barge-ins or the nihilistic bent. I was in the grocery store and saw X, it reminded me of Y from Luke Z:12. That’s the rough format, condensed from ten (or so) minutes to a line. The old joke goes that Catholics do homilies and Protestants do sermons, but every Catholic has experienced some visiting road show of a priest who decides that this here crowd better settle in for some old-school brimstoning, yes sir. “Conversation” is a bit of a lie when you get down to it. There’s only one person talking. Even now, approaching my first Pittsburgh Christmas with my wife, a woman spared a religious upbringing, my main pitch to her about Mass is that the car ride home is fun. The best part, I tell her, is debating whether the homily was a conversation or a speech.
So tone was always crucial. It probably accounted for half the rubric on the Homily Assessment. I docked big time if the hook became gassy. You had to transition smoothly from the anecdote to the scriptural stuff and you had to do it at the right moment. It was about ratios. No one wanted to hear a homily if more than half of it was text-based. You needed to delay the move to scripture for as long as possible, until the moment it was needed, when some peak narrative moment of confusion or discord cried out for a deus ex sancto libro. It’s not like I give wads of cash to feminist causes—the only women to appear in this essay thus far are Marilyn Monroe and a nameless 20-year-old graduate student—but any priestly appeal that had the whiff of something aimed just to the right of my sisters was no good. What about them? I’d think. Who are you leaving out here?
And look: I get that it’d no doubt make a better story if the priests had been bad to me or were irreputable in any way. There’s a certain schmaltzy version trending heavily toward spoof about a boy and his priest, how he suffered in private and became rhetorically adept as revenge. Har har, boo hoo. This just was’t the case. Not at all. These weren’t evil men I was assessing in silence (save one cretin who, right around September 11th, demanded the congregation join him in a protest of 7-Eleven, which sold pornographic material; my catechism teacher, a guitar-playing hero of a woman, gave him an earful about how it might just maybe send the wrong message to the faultlessly nice Pakistani owners). So no, the Homily Assessment exercise wasn’t fueled by vengeance of any sort. In its place was a deep and reverential respect, the kind I now reserve for writers and artists, men like Zinn (and maybe still possibly Lorant), the kind I have for figures against whom I measure myself, the kind that, whenever I manage to keep a journal for more than a week, is an idea I come back to with embarrassing regularity. June 9th, 2007, at one of my first jobs: “I have an insane desire to impress A___. I always want to impress brilliant people. I am obsessed with it.”
As an altar server, I worked for good men who were smart. Father Dom wasn’t some bathtub-bellied Italian but instead a slight Vietnamese guy, genuinely content, yet driven. Monsignor Charles Owen Rice marched with King and was a labor activist and spoke openly about communism and my word, what a bad ass (a prayer of his offered in 1982, as quoted in Pittsburgh: “We find that in which we trusted is failing. We trusted in the smartness of our industrial leaders. We trusted in the great corporations. We trusted in money. We trusted in the power of steel. We couldn’t imagine that there could ever be a day that they’d be closing steel mills and that they wouldn’t need steel”). Five years after Bishop Wuerl presided over our Confirmation he got the call to the big time and then the Big Time, first as the sixth Archbishop of Washington, as in D.C., as in U-S-A!, then to the College of Cardinals, as in Rome, as in Vatican. When Father Brier used his homily to announce that he was being relocated to a suffering parish, people gasped and wept as though a car accident had occurred right there in front of the altar, and this was fairly recently, mind you, in a time when people aren’t supposed to care about this stuff. These heavy hitters, these veterans of the homily, men in charge of interpretation and suasion—these were the guys (once again, always men) who I was sizing up, inaudibly, stage right.
It’s clear now that I was seeking permission for a way out. If I scanned hard enough for any failings or stutters, any undue leaps of logic, I might find an excuse to jet from the service and from my lone rickety pew. You’re looking to make a break as a kid, and the problem was that I liked school. My friends and I were a roaming cabal of gods. It was apparent early on—say, maybe six; I’m not kidding—that I had hit two parental Powerball’s. My family was big and awesome, so much so that if this religious stuff turned out to actually matter somewhere down the road, I figured my great aunt the nun, known to all as ‘Sis,’ I figured she’d let me in through the rectory.
So altar serving: this was it. Test your chops, kid. The audience out there: they’re transfixed. They’re hardly risking a blink. You’re up one with a minute left. You got him on his sloppy hook, all right, and can you finish the job? Can you find another crack in the logic? Look sharp, now. Head up.
t’s painfully obvious that I’ve been playing a similar game with Portland. I’m probing it for some oversight, some flaw, one that grants me permission to leave and go home and continue my life’s important great work cataloguing every stabbing and bar closure. What a life. And yet I’m hopelessly drawn toward it. I want it. I better, otherwise this whole charade I’ve been performing out here is going to look pretty dumb in retrospect—the raising up of my hometown’s ancient problems in a crazed grip, me shining them as though they’re an all-powerful source of clarity when the place already has plenty of light from good and well meaning sources, many of them cited herein. People here are on the case. They’re reporting the right stories, penning the right angry letters. Meanwhile I get so hopelessly contradictory about this city’s whole expansive enterprise. I wring hands that haven’t seen serious labor in a decade about police enforcement—What about police? Will Portland have enough police? What will happen to crime if the city keeps expanding? And gangs? The children! Tsk tsk, cluck cluck—and yet part of me wants to burn a condo just to see how the story changes, to have a say in a city that I really actually do like, one that keeps feeling further from any one person’s control, at least any one person I can identify and whose tone and syntax I can savage. Violence is a form of authorship, after all. Your unvoiced inner bubblings need an outlet, so you strike a match, start an essay, and voila—see who gathers to cheer or jail you.
And for as nice and warm as that sounds, I have to remind myself that unnecessary aggression—located around a Band-Aid of a building or a text—is the stated opposition here. I’ve thought of eliminating my use of the word “detonate,” but it marks me as hyperbolic in a way I deserve. We tend to either oversell violence by a wide and gaudy margin (“detonate”) or undersell it so low as to be sub-history itself (“subdued”). This, then, is perhaps one reason Lorant wrote that line about “Indians.”
Lorant "skipped around the world cataloguing his interests, and he missed some key element at every stop."Another explanation is that books and cities accumulate hidden problems as they expand, which is a pity, because I love the bigness of both. There it is. Couldn’t be any simpler. Tip your historians. It’s such an annoyingly trite conclusion for all the life-and-death-volume levied in the opening, all the preaching (“Satan lives in your syntax!”), the constant burying of the personal stuff, the jacketing of it in parentheticals, trying to pass off a sports-talk radio story as sufficient self-assessment, holding onto the boring kiddy Catholic stuff as though it’s some really damning personal secret, fashioning it as this big late-game reveal, though as a matter of narrative flow, you can’t just up and start with the church stuff unless you want everybody thinking there’s some sort of religious parable coming. Either that or a rape. The Catholic stuff works best here as a counterpoint, not “the point.” The point is that I’ve been a reader for much longer now than I’ve been a Catholic, and somewhere along the line I began to behave as a distrustful if not joyless one. The problem is more with my behavior than with any text, just like the problem isn’t whatever city I’m living in, and it definitely wasn’t the “neighborhood.” The problem wasn’t that strangers found a way through our window and ran their hands over things we took for granted. The problem was the watchful guy next door saying, “I thought he was, like, your dad.”
I’ll tell you why Lorant wrote that line: because he lived in too many places. That was his problem. He skipped around the world cataloguing his interests, and he missed some key element at every stop. You miss things when you spread yourself thin. He must’ve missed the day they covered Native Americans in Vienna or Berlin and so he got the tone wrong, he barreled into it. He was too full of energy. How couldn’t he be? What other option did he have? To sit still? Reflect? To keep rewinding the screams of the other prisoners? To keep seeing the “half-dead men” thrown in heaps? I’m usually pretty crass and uncaring when it comes to a writer’s biography, but given that Lorant’s biography has been made textual, just think: he’s sitting there in a German jail, a Hungarian Jew who left his home country, and because why—because it had become too fascist. “Regret” doesn’t come within half a globe of that feeling. Criticize his output’s failings all you want, but my God: the attempt! The slew of work after his jailing! I’m fussing over romanticized and deromanticized paragraphs about cities I know cold, and he’s starting magazines in languages he hardly knows! Understand: the drive and the flaw come from the same cell. This was a man who occupied a small space supplied only with time, after which he was given a limited term to cover impossibly large terrain.
Patrick McGinty’s fiction has appeared, most recently, in ZYZZYVA and The Portland Review. He recently wrote about Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation.
