Growing up, I liked to imagine what it would be like to work in a library. What little I knew about them was what I’d gleaned from movies and TV because my conservative parents never took us to any and only let me read books they purchased from the Bible Book Store. I didn’t know any librarians in real life—outside of the elderly woman who ran our tiny school media center—but I understood librarians were smart and savvy. Cool and collected. They were everything my rowdy, boundary-busting, literature-hating family was not. I envisioned a sweet future for myself sitting behind an elaborately carved wooden desk, surrounded by towering stacks of leather-bound books. I’d read for hours in total silence, vanilla and almond perfuming the air. Pages wafting in a gentle breeze. Nobody around to bother me. With librarianship, I’d finally have solitude. Peace.
I cling to these happy memories whenever somebody breaks the copy machine for the fourth time that day by jamming a ballpoint pen inside the feed tray. Or spills their kale smoothie down the side of the circulation desk. Or when a person decides to eat an extra large pizza while vaping in the women’s bathroom. I think: remember why you chose this job? The elegance? And I laugh.
If he owned a bookstore, he had mused at the age of 7, he wouldn’t have to spend money on books. From behind bars, and with his entrepreneurial drive still intact, he saw his dream in a different light. A bookstore might be a more plausible way to pursue the freedom of ideas that he and hundreds of thousands of others had failed to win with public protest.
He got out of jail fairly quickly. The authorities lightened up a bit. He opened a bookstore and ordered an eclectic range of volumes that leaned toward philosophy, history, political science and an ample dose of Western thought.
Punishments for profane language vary by culture and context, but in America a foul mouth is scolded, washed out with soap, censored, or even cited. In Massachusetts, anyone older than 16 is subject to fines for using “impure language” at sporting events, and an errant “Jesus Christ!” could theoretically land someone in jail. Obscene words are bleeped or minced on-air, asterisked or expurgated in print. In January, when President Trump reportedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries,” the New York Times’s headline discreetly described his language as “disparaging words,” while the Washington Post printed the insult in full. Most cable newscasters repeated the word on-air, and it scrolled across CNN and MSNBC’s chryons. Fox News, meanwhile, bowdlerized the word with dashes.
For poets, the stakes of using profanity are different. Each of a poet’s “fucks” is deliberate and premeditated, deployed for meaning and phonetic value rather than shock value.
It’s not that hard to go out into the street and take a stranger’s picture. It is legal and, with the right equipment, technically simple. But how do you arrive at two pictures of the same person, with almost the same expression, on what seem to be different days? These photographs were made by the Danish artist Peter Funch, and they are part of a series of many such pairs. For nine years, from 2007 until 2016, Funch hung around Grand Central Terminal and watched commuters during the morning rush between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. Using a long-lensed digital camera, he made countless portraits, an intriguing face here, another one there, yet another over there. He began to notice repetitions, the same people, the same faces, the same gestures, the same clothes. Each person was in the self-enclosed reverie of getting somewhere. The photos were all taken in May, June or July, in bright summer sunshine. The resulting project, published last year in a monograph titled “42nd and Vanderbilt,” is named for the street corner on which Funch stationed himself. It contains dozens of pairs of portraits (and a few in sequences of three), all of strangers.
But the truth is, all women writers find themselves turning the crystal tumbler of their experience against men’s light. (Men, on the other hand, just get to write about the light, and are applauded for it.) And so the question remains, grows ever larger: How do writers divest themselves from the pressures of the dominant culture while also addressing the burdensome weight of that dominant culture?