>Or maybe its just New Yorkers? I don't know. Seems like lots of lefties
>are either very nice people, or ornery cranky assholes.
>
> But I do remember that same part. The dinner guest was supposed to be a
>relatively well known author on the left, and I was very curious to know who
>it was. So Michael, has enough time passed that you could tell who your
>very rude dinner guest was?
>
>Sheldon
this is the passage that we're thinking of. sharing it because i'm sure the rest of the list will get a hoot out of it too.
DINNER PARTY
The following story describes some remarkable behavior. It is not typical, but it is reflective of certain attitudes common enough among those we met in Manhattan. It marked a turning point in our New York life and greatly sped up our decision to leave.
Karen and I invited a noted left-wing writer and her husband to dinner. I had met her a few years earlier and we had some correspondence after that. I used one of her books in a class I taught. Her book voice was that of a person sympathetic to the plight of ordinary people caught up in the capitalist rat race. She got paid to write, and I was hoping that she could give me some tips on getting an agent and maybe introduce me to other writers."
NOTE: Michael I laughed at this part. I always wondered if you realized that people see *you* the same way you saw her. People see you as a lefty who knows lots of other lefties, who gets paid to write, etc. and I could picture people cooking you lots of nice food with the hopes that you'd voluntarily share contacts, resources, and so forth. I can also imagine that you would have no idea anyone thought of you as someone who would mentor them in their writing career. It just tickled me when I read it and thought about that.
Yates continues: "I planned to tell her I would review (the author's latest book) for the magazine. We spent half a day shopping for food and drink, settling on fresh wild salmon, fingerling potatoes, field greens, and haricots verts, with homemade olive hummus, roasted red peppers, and crostini for appetizers, and cheesecake from the famous Veniero's Bakery ....
Our guests arrived on time. They handed me a jar of homemade quince jelly, and I walked them up our tairs, As we made introductions, the writer said she has been under the impression that we had given our possessions away, yet here we had a couch and a chair. We said that we had had to buy some things to live in the apartment. I had the feeling that the fact that we weren't living on the floor disappointed her. She didn't sit down but instead began to inspect the living room, raising and lowering our window blinds, looking at our pictures, books, and photographs. She opened our bedroom door and checked out the room. Karen went into the kitchen to do some food preparation, and the woman followed her, picked up the wrapped fish, and smelled the package. Karen and I finished the first of many glasses of wine.
I didn't think people get home-cooked meals much anymore. Every time we cook for guests, they eat as if it were their last meal. These two were no exception. They greedily devoured appetizers and ravenously ate dinner. The writer cleaned her plate, got up, found the salad bowl, returned to the table, and began to eat straight from the bowl. She did the same thing with the cheesecake, except that she didn't bother to come back to the table She just ate from the pie plate at the kitchen counter. She managed to get in a dig about our dinnerware, suggesting that the English version was much nicer than the American brand.
< I snipped the part that reveals that she lives in rent controlled apartments and the politics of rent control in NYC>
Minutes later, the writer asked if we had the Sunday magazine's crossword puzzle. Karen duly fetched this, and our erstwhile artist immediately retired to the bathroom. We went into the living room and sat around trying to act as if nothing crazy was happening. She remained on the toilet for thrity minutes, working the crossword puzzle and yelling out responses to our conversation.
After she rejoined us things really deteriorated. She kept going into the kitchen to gobble up whatever scraps of food remained. When she went into our bedroom again and we heard her opening our closet doors, we glanced at each other as if to say, "Keep calm." We somehow kept the conversation going until they mercifully left around midnight. She never talked about writing or offered me any encouragement. They never called or sent a note to thank us for dinner, and they didn't reciprocate. I vowed never to review her book, or any book she might write. In fact, I threw the book away.
<snipped discussion of the mental and physical assault on residents' health >
A final thing that upset me was the constant in-your-face reminder that the city is too big and impersonal for people to care about one another. There are thousands of acts of individual kindness done every day, and Manhattanites don't often fir the stereotype of the callous urban dweller. But tens of thousands of them are locked into their own tiny worlds and too beset by worries large and small to have much time or energy to devote to the more fundamental matters of human existence. Karen and I expected to be drawn into a circle of left-wing intellectuals and activists, but we soon realized that this wasn't going to happen. There was a lot o pretending otherwise, but we knew after a month that we were not in the New York of the romantic imagination but in a place where no one much cared if we lived or died. The only time residents in our apartment building spoke at any length with us was when we were moving out, probably to gather information about a now empty unit. Everyone was working so hard just to pay rent and meet other expenses that they had no time for neighborly give-and-take familiar to me as a child.
...
I had come to Manhattan not just because it was a fabulous city; It was also the center of progressive politics and thinking, the kind that aim to end every type of inequality, to liberate working men and women and encourage all people to fully develop their capacities, and to create livable spaces for everyone. I wanted to be a part of this creative ferment. yet the intellectuals I met there often didn't match my expectations. They had a disconcerting way of dismissing the rest of the country and assuming that what their friends in the city were thinking and doing was what everyone else was thinking and doing. Their circles were remarkably well of, insular, and egoistic.
I can't say that I was unhappy to end my first six-month stint in May of 2002. I hadn't found what I wanted there. When I was a young teacher and a few of us were trying to unionize the campus and make the students thinking critically, life was exciting. Time on and off campus blended together, and life was whole, as it should be. During a sabbatical in 1976 I went to California to work for the United Farm Workers and experienced the same thing: a common purpose with thousands o f migrant farm workers. I went to their meetings, their parties and the houses. I was inside something rand. Even at the hotel in Yellowstone, I was part of a collective enterprises, the others clerks and I pulled together everyday, eating and living together. Most of the time it felt right. But her in New York, I felt alone and small. If left-wingers could make me feel like that, if radical could act like the wrier and her husband, I wonder what kind of good society we might make. ...
Before I had made the decision to leave, I wrote a short article for the magazine's newsletter. Here is what I said:
So, now here I am in Manhattan, working for Monthly Review, It is more pleasant and stimulating work than being a clerk. I have met interesting people, solicited good articles for the magazine, edited some bad articles into good ones, almost complete a draft of a new book, and enjoyed living in one of the world's great cities and working for the world's finest radical journal and press. I have even gotten a new teaching gig, at Cornell's Labor Center near the Empire State Building. But still, when I walk down the harsh and impersonal streets, breathe in the foul air, and daily confront the greatest inequality I have ever seen in the United States, I long for the West. for the stream rushing down the mountains and the eagles flying free. And I miss my fellow clerks too!'
from pp. 96-102 of Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate by Michael Yates, http://cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)