Ode To A Dump. My Dump

A friend of mine used to housesit for a super-annuated professor of comparative lit at University of Michigan. The house was one of those rambling affairs that had been renovated and extended every time a promotion came through. In the very back room was a massive library. Not that you'd want to read any of the books, mind you. To a one, they came from presses like Duke and Minnesota and Routledge and god knows what other satanic mills of academic publishing. I was reminded of the scene from "The Barbarian Hordes" by Denys Arcand. The moll of the dying professor steps into his library, filled with books and more books and we are supposed to be comforted knowing that even though he's gone off to the Great MLA in the sky, his dedication to the pillars of scholarship and social justice remains.

Ugh. I remember rummaging through that library with a mix of awe and revulsion. Here were so many academic careers made on such flimsy and boring grounds. Multiculturalism, hybridity, interdisciplinary studies, postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum. All the usual suspects: Spivak, Bhabha, Lacan, and that jolly joker, Baudrilliard.

The only concept out of that whole "publish or perish" frenzy of the 80's and 90's that ever resonated with me was something from the 70's: Raymond Williams' savvy idea of the "lifeworld" - how people live where they live with what they have to live. Exhibit A: Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Before I moved across the river five years ago, I lived large in a spacious cryto-Dickensian apartment not far from downtown Windsor. I could walk to Via Italia where I often ate my lunch and/or dinner in the kitchen of friends' restaurants. Every other night, the phone would ring around 1am and I'd walk downtown to meet someone for a nightcap. Drunken American youth would be running amok from bar to bar until they fell down on top of one another.

And as you walked around the city, you realized that the diversity of the city was completely without planning or self-consciousness. Windsor is the synapse at the end of a number of different frayed nerves. It's where you come to look across the river and dream about America or the place you come to get away from the rest of Canada. The local is the cosmopolitan through sheer tidal flow. People come, people go. Refugees from the four tattered corners of the world idle, waiting for their papers. Drifters bide their time and their troubles. There's a dingy casino. There's a dingy racetrack that now has slot-machines. Before the slots, the track was a low-end gambler's Tower of Babel. You heard a hundred tongues cursing a hundred deadbeat horses. In the bar, the hostess brought in home-baked pies so you could enjoy your free pour rye with a slice of apple cobbler.

It always makes me laugh when I hear and read academics going on and on about abstract borders and border culture and postcolonialism blah blah blah. Friends, come to Windsor and see it all on the ground - the XXX video shop next to a mosque next to a flophouse next to a halal butcher shop. The winos doing battle in the street as women in burqas look on. Nobody really thinks about it too hard. Or should they. It just is. And becomes. Every minute of every day. Bloody lovely.