Hands down, my favorite part of SPACEMAN BLUES is the depiction of NYC's literal underground. I love the idea of a city below the city, preferably one that involves juke joints, bathtub gin, and the hard-partying folks that refuse for some reason to live in apartment buildings with the rest of us.
Right after this novel caught my attention, there was a fantastic article in the City section of the times about urban explorers, which is a fancy term for people who like to hop around below the streets of NYC looking in old subway tunnels and forgotten basements, generally for the sake of art. What I like about this article--and how I saw it relating to SPACEMAN BLUES--is the portrayal of underground New York City as a place outside the limits of most people, for the unique few. What does it mean to be both a part of the city but voluntarily removed from it?
In both SPACEMAN BLUES and this cult of urban explorers, the city underground is a glorious place. Not everyone is allowed to experience it, much in the way not everyone is allowed to experience the 'aboveground' New York, one that professes an ignorance of the below-ground sections of the city--partly because no one they know could tell them about it, but primarily because they don't care to know about it and via their position in society are allowed to profess ignorance of it. It becomes a metaphor for the culture of our city, for the way one can choose to experience only part of New York City. Both Wendell Apogee and the urban explorers in the NYT article are unique because of their position in both the surface world and the core and in the fact that they choose to experience both.
Interesting, right? What's your take on the idea of a city-beneath-the-city?
3 comments:
I'm not done with the book yet, so I've only been treated to one visit to Darktown so far. That said, I like the idea of an underground mirror city, but - and this goes for the rest of the book, too - I was jarred by the transition from the "real" (in this case the aboveground world) to the fantastic (in this case the underground world).
I understand it's sci-fi, but this is sci-fi that's firmly grounded in a New York that seems real and familiar. The idea that something that big could exist in the first place and yet go almost unnoticed kind of strains the bonds of credulity. It's almost like the book is breaking its own rules, somehow. Most every time something magical happens after a long passage of relative mundanity, it takes me out of the story entirely.
I disagree. I think it would be easier to take in if there was a better distinction between the real (Upper) and fantasy (Darktown) worlds, but it's the mixing that makes me uncomfortable, the bleeding over (or perhaps overblown metaphors/flights of language we're not supposed to take literally?) that bothers me. Like are we supposed to believe that people actually parachuted 40 floors down in the financial district with only sheets to break their falls? Or was that a drug-fueled mass halluciantion? Or literary device? This kind of muddy indecision drives me crazy. HOWEVER, I only got to the Darktown bits last night and I loved them. Darktown is awesome. The suspended subwaycar bar, inspired. My other FAVORITE is the house in the water, and the idea that the parents were drowning under the teenager, as he listened to them scratching and didn't seem to mind too much. I wonder if maybe I'm too middle-class and bougie to appreciate Manuel.
I guess I kind of just rolled with most of the fantastic stuff, just because I liked the idea of it, so I decided not to question it. The minute the Pan-Galactic Groove orchestra jumps in "through the window" I decided that we were definitely in a story where the real rules did not apply.
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