Woman Of This City

That is the gayest title for a blog ever - sorry.  It’s honest though.  One of my courses (I’m back in academia once again) is called “Writing New York”.  We read Luc Sante, Whitman, Chester Hines, and more.  What is so wonderful about this course is that it allows me to compare all of my experiences and perceptions with those other writers.  Finding similarities in these writers’ stories with my own life here is like finding a friend, like finding a fellow drinker at the bar who just had the same day you just had.

I’ve never been so ready to delve into a class.  A wonderful part is that it seems I’ve been taking this class, on my own for years. I’ve always been fascinated with NYC’s history, it’s people, it’s men, it’s buildings, it’s intensity, it’s sickness. 

I build my own bridges as I walk on the bridges of this city.  New York builds me up, and it shits me out and it breaks me down and builds a bank in my stead.  Why woman of the city as a particular theme?  Well I’m not trying to be a Sex and the City retard here - but there is something different about being a female New Yorker.  First of all, there aren’t too many women who have actually written about New York. There is not one book I’m reading in class that is written by a woman, although there are some poems and essays within the anthologies we have.

I vie today to become a female New York City writer.  I know there are others, but not enough in my opinion…and far too few who aren’t named Candice Bushnell or Lauren Weisberger (google them if you don’t know who they are).  I want to write about New York the real way, the multi-cultural, multi-class, multi-psychosis way that happens to you and to others by being here.  I want to show people that this city can make a woman offended by a disgusting cat call and lifted up to the status of a CEO in the same day.  That my smiles are few and far between on a general walk around the block, but dazzle in the midst of friends, and when I have lived out a fantasy that you can only have in this city.

I’ll leave you with all with a poem:

I’m sorry e.e. cummings, but I’ve stepped in on your verbiage

Like stone masons I haul rocks around my neighborhood waiting for something to take it away -

Locked I can’t go into the twenty-four hour superette when all I wanted was some stupid wrapped cake to ease my sugar needs

Shamed and defeated by such base human need I yearn for primal and rational to fuse more.

Don’t want my need to shit to conflict with my important documents. 

Instead I’ll hold it in until Happy Hour so I can be care-free.

 

 

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