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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Lopate: You know, it was absurd, because I got so involved with jazz and blues, and I would walk down the street thinking, "I'll tell them that I like jazz and blues." And I had an almost scholarly relationship to the jazz and blues and I had a lot of black friends in high school, and they'd come over to the house, and I'd play them these things like the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and they'd be so embarrassed. They'd say, "That's the stuff my grandmother listens to." And even when I was playing Charlie Parker, they had moved on. They were listening to organ and saxophone combos that were playing in Harlem. They weren't listening to this. I had become a "Ph.D. in spadeology," as they used to say.
The thing about power, though -- I had an experience when I was about 13, 14 where my parents had a camera store near Myrtle Avenue, which was right by a big, black public housing project.
And they would send me in to try to collect, with these packets of photographs that had not been picked up -- because people would send their pictures in, but then they didn't have the money to collect them. So I'd knock on the door, and I'd hear the sound of pure terror. "It's the man!" And I could have been 6-foot-5, I could have been the landlord, as far as they were concerned. They were behind closed doors, scurrying around saying, "Don't open it!" and "What are we going to do?" In that situation it was very clear who was in the power seat.
Conley: I think sometimes it could break either way, in the sense that, for example, being called "honky" or any sort of racial epithet doesn't work. It just sort of falls flat, like a bad pitch, compared to the reverse.
Something I talk about in "Honky" is the issue of "cultural capital" -- a term sociologists use, which describes how my parents had a certain middle-class status no matter how little money they had. For example, when my local school got so bad, they might not be able send me to private school, but they could get a friend of theirs on the West Side of town to get me into the Greenwich Village school by lying about our address.
Coming from a family of artists, I knew all these totally useless references, in terms of any objective standard. But if I were to go to college, the fact that I knew who Jackson Pollock was would help me out in the interview. And so on.
Ironically, I think I was also advantaged because I sucked off the cultural capital of the neighborhood, in the sense that thinking of a quick retort to "What are you looking at?" or "Your mother's so stupid she tried to alphabetize the M&M's" was the perfect training for being an academic, for being a professor. That's what we do. We sit around snapping on each other.
Lopate: I think in a way what you're talking about, and again I identify with this, was your parents were bohemians. And it's a strange class.
Lethem: I think it stands outside class ...
Lopate: It pretends to be outside class. There's no such thing as outside class, but it pretends to be, and there's a kind of reverse snobbism. Just like my parents said, "Well, we're living in the ghetto, but we've got the Bach records, and we know who Jackson Pollock is ... We're more sensitive."
Lethem: Right, sure. Our parents cultivated an aesthetic of renouncing the things that were seen as middle class. I didn't understand that we were as poor as the people in the neighborhood around us, but we were. I was insulated from that understanding by the book-lined walls and the people who would come over for dinner, the things that connected us to the world.
In fact, it was an enormous advantage when I finally got to college and met my ostensible peers, who were from the middle class but were often much more culturally deprived than I was.
Lopate: When I got to college, I went to Columbia, and I could not stop talking about the ghetto. And they would say, "Come on, Lopate, relax, you're not there anymore." Meaning, "You don't have to be scared." I wasn't scared, I was boasting. And I felt like they didn't understand something that was so important, that was reality. So I kept bringing the ghetto along with me.
