Turnstiles or Literature from the Periphery

I have been listening to Billy Joel’s 1976 album, Turnstiles, on repeat. It’s the ultimate normie album, written for a caricatured America that includes just two cities of note. But Billy Joel, the king of normies, is also the king of mourning normalcy. The perfect quarantine soundtrack for those of us toggling between political anger and fully automated luxury autofiction.

I listen, and I cry. The piano man isn’t playing for anyone now. You will not have dinner with your lost love at an Italian restaurant. (Neither of these songs are on Turnstiles but you get the point.)

 So I wrote a mini essay for each song on Turnstiles:





Say Goodbye to Hollywood 
“Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes/ I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again” 

Beginning an album with goodbye is a form of foreknowledge. On Twitter, Molly Young asks, “How old were you when you figured out that life is suffering.” To me, the answer lies in faith. Are we taught to see ourselves in Job, or a state of permanent exile? André Aciman, the modern Jewish traveller, sees exile as a form of mirroring between cities. The place where we are, and the place we imagine from the place we are. Broadway or Hollywood. In his 2011 book Alibis, Aciman writes: “Longing and recollection, yearning and nostalgia, have been confusing their signals so much over the years that I am by now perfectly willing to accept that memory and imagination are twins who live along an artificial border that allows them to lead double lives and smuggle coded messages back and forth.”

But Billy Joel is not Jewish, not really. Although he was born into a Jewish family, he was baptized in the Church of Christ, cleansing him from original sin– another kind of foreknowledge of life’s suffering. I was born into a Jewish family and raised Christian without a belief in original sin and I have a high bar for what I consider suffering. Like Joel, I prefer to stuff my sadness into a pregnant pause, like the singer does at 1:22 before the word “together” and 1:37 before the word “forever.” He can live without staying in one place, it’s the not staying together that tips him into tragedy. Likewise, losing friends is an inevitability he’s already accepted… but he’s struggling with the foreverness of it. Struggling without admitting it.

Billy Joel wrote this song after relocating back to New York from Los Angeles. There is nothing about the move that is inherently sad. It’s the permanent sense of exile the singer brings with him. The foreknowledge that the present is already the past forever. Aciman again: “When you have doubts, simply saying how frail is your hold on the present can become a gratifying act. Therein lies the true aesthetic of temporizing: by admitting, by showing that we do not know how to live in the present and may never learn to do so, or how thoroughly unsuited and unprepared we are to live our own lives, we do not necessarily make up for this inability. But we uncover a hitherto unsuspected surrogate pleasure: in making the realization of this unsuitability become a redemptive testimonial.” Turnstiles is a redemptive testimonial.

In early March, I was taking a car over the Manhattan bridge with my best friend, scrolling through Sephora products together on her phone. I nudged her. “Look back,” I said and we considered the skyline together. I am always looking back at New York even when I am here.

Summer, Highland Falls 
“They say that these are not the best of times/ But they're the only times I've ever known” 

Periodically, someone on Twitter will want to vote for the saddest song and Summer, Highland Falls is my perennial answer. The song is structured to reflect the peaks and valleys of depression: one hand playing the highs and the other hand playing the lows. The whole song is suffused with melancholy, the dashed expectations of a summer upstate, the place you go to be safe from the thing you cannot outrun.

In the song, the thing you cannot outrun is, of course, the self. The limitations of the self become the limitations of a relationship: “For all our mutual experience/ Our separate conclusions are the same.” I remember listening to this song with an ex-boyfriend as our relationship was dissolving and wanting to be inside his head listening to the song, knowing he would never let me.

These days, the thing you can’t outrun is still the self. But layered over the self is another inescapable doom. On a moment by moment basis, that can feel truly unbearable. In the words of Miranda Popkey, “The conditions of quarantine are the conditions of depression & my body is reacting accordingly.” Listening to Summer, Highland Falls is an ekphrastic experience of these symptoms. With time, my relationship to the song has felt less like falling into a memory and more like bearing witness to an imaginary couple. I hope my relationship with this period of my life will someday feel the same.

All You Wanna Do Is Dance
“Oh baby, you want to crawl back into yesterday” 

All You Wanna Do Is Dance is like being chastised by a wedding DJ for not having enough fun. The cadence of the song is all Jimmy Buffett but the message is all you’re going to die. In as much as the medium is the message, I can’t help but think of Boomers when I hear it. For every piece of shame a Boomer doles out to Millennials, one can assume they have felt that shame two-fold.

It’s not our own easy lives we’re nostalgic for, it’s theirs. Which means Boomers must experience both the nostalgia and the loss. Cue the reggae. The 1976 ‘you’ that Billy Joel is addressing reminds me of Mary Gaitskill describing Joyce Carol Oates describing Marilyn Monroe. Caricature so far removed it feels like truth: “Monroe’s story is a tragic soap opera that has already been set to every sound track imaginable, and now here comes a cerebral lady professor to pound it out on her piano.”

This is a song about how everyone secretly believes they are too late to be cool. Late to their own lives. Listened to in quarantined limbo it sounds like a life sentence (because it is).

New York State of Mind
“It comes down to reality, and it's fine with me cause I've let it slide” 

In the words of Eva Hagberg, “a thing i learned when i was 31 and had a brain hemorrhage i thought would be fatal is that there is no such thing as ‘life’ vs ‘life on hold,’ there's just ... life.” Billy Joel sang New York State of Mind to commemorate the losses of 9/11. He sang New York State of Mind to commemorate the losses of Hurricane Sandy. And I guess someday he will sing it for the victims of coronavirus. I’m more sure of that than any other future.

The reality is, this song describes the past. Right now, we cannot hop a flight to Miami Beach or to Hollywood. Restaurants are boarded up in Chinatown and on Riverside. It is the song of our past selves, the self of two months ago that we are all jealous of. The narrator of the song is a flâneur, an endangered category.

Yes, it is possible to go out and wander the streets in the manner of a flâneur. The streets are emptier, but not empty. Restaurants and stores are closed, but not all of them. But doesn’t the flâneur draw their power from exploring during the normal course of business, subverting the pressure to be productive? Otherwise, Will Smith in I Am Legend would be the ultimate flâneur. Alas, the ultimate privilege of flâneurship is not to be concerned with one’s survival.

I try to flâneur around the Internet, which is really only possible on tumblr. I look at Japanese desserts and wedding dresses. I share photos from Fire Island and 1990s catwalks. I come across a photo of Manhattan at sunset and stare at it for a while. I want to be in that New York. But even the New York of right this second isn’t the New York of five minutes ago. There is no such thing as New York on hold. There’s just New York. 

James
“Will you ever write your masterpiece?” 

Every expertise I’ve tried to cultivate is woefully outdated. Especially now that everything has changed. We were supposed to become knowledgeable in one subject, indispensable to magazines and publishers. Or else become prominent as a generalist, an essential voice on every topic. How stupid we all were, how disposable.

We can’t afford to be dilettantes and we can’t afford not to be. The side hustle is now the saving grace hustle. I have gone from hand-hold to toe-hold gripping my resume in my teeth and it meant nothing. We were dismissed when we wrote about ourselves. And now, the self is all anyone can write about. How lucky, that myself is the only thing in which I am an expert. In the words of Amory Blaine, “I know myself, but that is all.”

Billy Joel’s James is like David Byrne’s Once in a Lifetime reinterpreted for a distant relative who calls once a year. It’s a tame retelling of the inevitable disappointment of doing exactly as you were told and getting nowhere. Lines like “Everybody knows how hard you tried,” delivered earnestly by your friend Billy, veer into sarcasm when you repeat them to yourself later– looking into your own tired face in a hotel mirror. Before you write your name in the steam, hoping you catch the next guest with your ghost trick. James.

Prelude/Angry Young Man 
“I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage/ I found that just surviving was a noble fight” 

When this is done, we will have hundreds of stories from people about their bedrooms. I wonder if Billy Joel knew how facile Angry Young Man would sound when he wrote it, and that’s why he made it a prelude. I read somewhere it’s actually a prelude because Joel needs to play it near the top of the set or else he doesn’t have energy for all of the piano riffs. It’s a song about spent energy, anyway.

We only hear from people at the periphery of disaster, because they are the ones that survive. Actually, that’s not entirely true. But there are only so many first-hand refugee and war accounts that the general public can stomach before they tune them out. Yet, we have an endless appetite for tales from the person who was almost at Ground Zero. I think about this when I read Ilya Kaminsky’s poem We Lived Happily During the War, which is a poem about war from the safety of not-war. And when I read Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds, the story of the Trump administration as told by a devastated single woman in her childhood bedroom, masturbating to the moon.

Literature from the periphery isn’t wrong, but it’s not right either. Angry Young Man is the story of someone aging with their political consciousness. It’s not facile because it’s inaccurate, such people exist. However, the angriest young man doesn’t live to tell of his anger. I remember in college, my mom told me to go down to an Occupy Wall Street protest. I didn’t see why I should. I went to college in rural Maine, the protest was a few lawn chairs on the town green. “They don’t even have concrete demands,” I told her.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know then. Here’s a story from the periphery: one year, a parent sent a group of friends on my campus a full New York bagel spread. Lox, capers, onions, the whole works. Maybe from Russ & Daughters, I wasn’t friends with those people so I never found out. But every once in a while I think back to that and wonder who kept all the ingredients fresh on the way from New York City to Maine.

I’ve Loved These Days
“We're going long/ We're gaining weight/ We're sleeping long/ And far too late” 

Last year, I read an article in The New Yorker about dreams under authoritarianism. “A Jewish lawyer dreams of travelling through icy Lapland to reach ‘the last country on earth where Jews are still tolerated’—but a customs official, ‘rosy as a little marzipan pig,’ throws the man’s passport onto the ice… It is 1935. Six years later, the mass deportations would begin,” writes Mireille Juchau.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming about people I don’t talk to anymore. Bodies I no longer touch and inside jokes I no longer know. How do we dream under the virus? Feverishly. Maybe, like I’ve Loved These Days, we weave elegies for lost luxuries or refashion the classic New York dream– a newly discovered bedroom– into a forgotten second home. “We'll have to change our jaded ways, But I've loved these days,” sings Joel. I saw a photo of the hospital rooms prepared at the Javits Center, staged with tiny potted plants. I freelanced for an agency that managed social media for Javits Center. One day, I realized that the livecam on top of the Javits Center roof was labelled by YouTube as footage from September 11th.

Juchau again: “A Jewish doctor dreams he’s the only physician in the Reich who can cure Hitler.” There are two categories of dreams under the virus: dreams of escape, and dreams of apology. I am cycling through the unsaid. I am spending too long staring at the oyster emoji. I think about a parade I went to for the U.S. women’s soccer team. Printer paper rained down from the windows above the street.

I have an apartment outside the city but there is really no point in going there now. Everything I love is here.

Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) 
“They sent a carrier out from Norfolk/ And picked the Yankees up for free” 

Norfolk was trending on Twitter today. That’s where the hospital ship is coming from. Billy Joel wrote a whole song about the end of New York City and named it after Miami. That’s funny, sort of. “I've seen the lights go out on Broadway/ I saw the mighty skyline fall,” he sings. A lot of New Yorkers have been posting about sirens. I hear sirens too. But is this just availability bias? Or maybe it’s confirmation bias.

Before quarantine started I was planning on writing about the Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten. I wanted to write about ethics and the oversimplification of “insignificance” rhetoric when it comes to human beings. The film is meant to show the scale of the universe by exponentially zooming out on some picnickers and then way back in. It almost seems like a film that could be shown to a child, until you realize it’s scored by the same guy who did The Ten Commandments and narrated by an MIT professor that worked on the Manhattan Project. It’s a film by adults and for adults.

When I was a camp counselor, we used to take our girls out to the tennis courts to look at the stars. One girl, she must have been around ten, told me looking at the stars scared her. What do you tell a child coming to grips with their mortality? You tell them that god is in the stars, too. Just leave the camera where it is! Everything that matters in the world is on the same plane as the picnickers. People are going to die, and those people are small compared to the sun. Very small. But they are people just like you and me.