Lounging in the Wreck of the New Order

Who's up for some lounging!? Well, you won't be doing any here, nor using the ladies' room. The lounge is locked, and appears to be in an advanced state of dereliction. A recent trip to Minnesota's North Shore brought me through the town of Cloquet, home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station. This was built in 1956, and supposedly still functions as a service station, though I wondered if it has been abandoned. The observation deck/lounge, pictured at the left, was inaccessible, and littered with gloves, tools, and gas station detritus. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. I can't think of a better place to lounge than on a small town street corner in the Upper Midwest.


I did find the building to be quite intriguing, even if in need of some attention. The formal parallel with California Googie was really striking, though the materials were very different. The gas station was apparently derived from the Broadacre City Standardized Overhead Service Station project, from 1932, which I found suprising (though I should say that the Cloquet station doesn't feature the overhead gasoline delivery from the earlier proposal). Did Wright exert some influence on later Googie offerings, or perhaps the other way around? If anyone has bothered to research this question, I'd be interested in finding the answer, even though its a bit of a chicken/egg distinction. Whether or not any connection was explicit between Googie and Wright, something was certainly in the air.

Wright held the gas station to be a crucially important institution, specifically for its role in contributing to his Broadacre City ideal. He envisioned America becoming decentralized, cities disappearing into the prairie. The gas station, a seemingly insignificant vernacular structure, almost an accidental structure, would become an instrument whereby Americans can get back to an Arcadian ideal (or, put more properly, the Broadacre City was an Arcadia for the Modern Age - automobiles and atomic energy delivering us more intimately to Nature). With the advent of the service station, Wright declared, "The Old Order is Breaking Up".

Wright was correct, to some extent. Gas stations really did contribute significantly to the physical restructuring of the nation. And its delightful to think that by breaking up the old order we can get more directly to some lounging. Now, however, faced with rising gas prices and strip mall fatigue, Wright's ideal seems antiquated. Nevertheless, here in Cloquet, one can almost see what Wright was after. The gas station's observation deck, if one could get in, would display what once would have been a pretty nice vista, even if now the scene is muddied by encroaching urbanization.





As an aside, note the picture at left - the original gas station didn't really proclaim Wright's name. It advertised Phillip's 66.

Betting on Poetry

Louis Zukofsky's "A" is a set of 24 poems written over a fifty year peroid, totaling about 800 pages. The picture here shows just two of the multiple volumes. When I encountered a reference to "A" in the newspaper a few months ago, it caught my interest. It seemed like an intriguing read. When I mentioned this to Eve, however, she cast some immediate doubt on my ability to get through all of it. Not to be undone, we decided to make a little wager. If I manage to get through the whole thing, she'll bake me a cake! And I get six months! Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Not only do I get to read an intriguing work of literature, I get a delicious treat for my efforts.

Well, it's been about five and a half months now, and I still have a volume and a half to go. Frankly, its been a long hard slog. Not that "A" isn't worth reading. Actually, I'm enjoying it immensely. But, well, its quite a bit to get through, and its written in something fairly akin to a stream of consciousness style. So, not only isn't there any plot, but its often hard to say what its really about at all. I'm not sure that it would be correct to say its "about" anything. But I'll say more on that in a later post, when I give this thing a proper review.

It occurs to me, in looking at the book jacket, that perhaps no one has actually read "A". Usually, when one looks at a book jacket, some synopsis of the book will be offered, along with a blurb about the author. None of the volumes I checked out of the library had jackets that actually referred to the contents at all. For instance, the second volume, which contains poems 13-21, refers to the work as "determinedly modernist", "Byzantine", and "ambituous". But nothing is said about what the poems actually refer to, what they're "about", or even what one might encounter in reading them. Anyone given a passing glance might have come up with "Byzantine", but did anyone actually read it? Am I attempting what's never been done!? I'm a trailblazer! A pioneer of poetics! The back of the cover doesn't even mention the book, but instead includes some advertisements for other offerings by Paris Review.

Even if I am the first person to do this, I'm certainly not in the clear yet. The poem I'm about to start is actually a play, though written in the same style. If I tell Eve, I'm pretty sure she'll make me do different voices for each part. Surely no one has ever staged a production of this work, which makes me a little sad. But am I obligated to do so? And the entire last volume is written as text accompanied by a musical score. What am I supposed to do with this? I can't play piano. Eve will want me to sing it, I'm sure. And if I don't, I'll feel I've failed somehow, not to mention that I'll owe her a cake.