Writing at the Café

Of course I would be an idiot, one not fit to write anything about anything, if I didn't observe and give homange to the great café writers of the twentieth century. Especially do I have to look at, admire, and kiss the hand and foot of Ernest Hemingway, a man (yes, just a man! Imagine!) who had reached nearly one-named status through writing about writing, and writing at cafés. And writing about writing at cafés, at cafés. So yes, I'm not doing anything new or revolutionary, except, perhaps, that I'm writing about writing at cafés, at a café, in America. And as I'm writing about writing in cafés, at a café, in America, I'm acutally at what is called a diner. Everyone here, as far as I can hear, is American, and most likely is a local. I can't walk here, I live on the other side of town, but I'm still a local, in a sort of sweeping urban sense of the word.

I guess there are other writers who wrote about writing in American diners. What's his name did that painting of the lonely man in the coffee shop in the early twentieth century. Maybe hard-boiled detctive and noir fiction gave its first mucusy cough in an American diner. Interaction with the usual features of a diner is certainly inspirational. Some people are forced to be here, forced to make wages. Some are enjoying being waited on. I certainly enjoy having my coffee cup refulled without asking. The food is actually excellent here. French influenced, west coast, psuedo-soul fare. Great shiny onyx coffee and unusual cucumber infused still. Aside from the dark sage and white linoleum checkered floor, dark sage wainscot, and baby lemon curd walls, everything else in ways of decor is a carefully arranged mix and match of antiques and strangely iconographic configurations of kitsch. The radio from the nineteen tens on the counter masking the modern cash register, the patina green metal scale which holds drink menus, the blackboards on walls hanging out with mounted children's chairs and old serving trays, plates, and a colorful vintage Chinese checkers board, a few do-it-yourself paintings ranging from a nude feminine bust to a fogged-in Golden Gate. The seating is French bistro style, with chairs made of bamboo and woven plastic. Everything together making it hard to imagine just one person arranging things.

Does the diner want to acknowledge France? Yes, but it wants to look only so long, then it says, thank you so much for these great chairs, goodbye. It doesn't linger on France like a voyeur with a pocket busting with quarters for the empire's cultural peep show. Are the baguettes perfection? I wouldn't know, but they are good enough that I always save my hunk of airy and crusty bread for last. I wait until all other breakfast foods are consumed, and then I spread butter on each slice and eat them like exquisite desserts.

I think more than many other locations, cafés give you the impresison that you're being watched, and therefore you really should be doing something. Writers are solitary people in my experience. And even if they are socialites, they are elitist, and imagine themselves isolated. That stupidly talented writer Jonathan Franzen says that if you truly want to be alone, read a book. I can't remember if he extends his theory to writing, but I think it might be just as true. If you write like the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, alone in some dank uninhabitable basement, projecting your voice out of the obscure darkness, you eventually lose touch with the point, the desire, the means. Well, if you want to use a deranged Poe narrator, someone who exhibits unabashed self-destruction like reality T.V. characters before reality T.V., then perhaps you do need to lock yourself up in an attic like that father character from Absalom, Absalom!, finally refusing the hoisted up buckets of bread crusts. It just doesn't work that way for me.

When trying to look at and understand Toni Morrison's arguments in Playing in the Dark, I do better when I'm out. When I'm alone in my home, with the T.V. begging me to stop thinking critically, I can't help but have to read her over and over until I have to look up every other word, and I just end up napping. If I'm at the café, three coffees in, being asked intermittently by the wait staff about things like the local college baseball team, or how I'm doing in school, I feel just the right amount of self-imposed, self-conscious pressure that seems ultimately necessary in keeping up with Morrison. Here, I get just enough outer stimulation that the sabotaging images of my instructors, who have dubbed my writing "unclear," "wordy," and "confusing"; dubbed it so through glaring marginal repetition; just enough white noise (there's a reference Morrison would be interested in), to quiet the doubter within. How am I doing in school? Barely. Barely staying above average. Barely crossing finishing lines. Barely getting any kinds of attention. Barely ever having to say, oh no, I'm married, but thank God you asked because I've been internalizing all this "average" criticism and feel like I have no wares left. Nothing to flash. Nothing to tantalize you with.

Being out, being a member of the diner microcosm, helps to facilitate the understanding of lines like this:

Such studies will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and order external and internal chaos.

Of course, Morrison is talking about her term Africanism, and the other here is defined by marked or markable racial difference. But I'm in the café, it's not black and white here. Yet, I'm surrounded by others, through the very processes that Morrison describes, and I have been influenced to see things in the context of me/others/else through the way of structuring my self and the world that her work describes. I'm a universal consumer, and the other is everything outside of the voices in my head and impulses in my body. I think she is right, we know ourselves through others. And not just racially, but in all kinds of ways. What is it that Derrida calls it? Differànce? Differánce? It's how we know ourselves. But something escapes. The soul, maybe.

I think the diner worked its voodoo today, and I've been able to formulate something about Benito Cereno that will make my previous essays look concise, sparse even. I mean what's not wordy if Playing in the Dark is not wordy, and confusing, and ambiguous, and unclear? That's what the café does. It gives you just the right amount of hope that maybe you are unclear because you are a genius, or that maybe even if you are an idiot you can write about something, which is more than most dare to dream to do. It's the kind of stimulus that helps the writer to skate the edge of brilliance, or at least to resort to nice chit chat when the glare is too painful. It's the tightening of the mind at the bottom of a mimosa. The possibility of sharing an insight, and keeping it all to your greedy obese self, alone with everyone.