TODAY WE DISCUSS two of the topics we’ve been obsessing with of late: “deviant” Northwest fiction and the now-allegedly-fabulous 1980s.
The editors of the recent anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions claimed they were doing something wildly outre by compiling tales based on strong plots, well-defined characters, and urban settings; instead of adhering to a nature-travelogue vision of “Northwest writing” emphasizing birds and sunsets and massively de-emphasizing humans. (What the Northwest Edge folks really did, natch, was to reassert some universal rules of good storytelling, in the guise of breaking other, less workable or appropriate, rules.)
The ’80s nostalgia fetish, meanwhile, speaks to more than just the longing to recapture one’s younger days. At least around here, it recalls a time when everything wasn’t about making money and feeling pressured to make even more. A time when the dominant local paradigm wasn’t wealth but mellowness; when all you had to do to be a paradigm-subverter was to assert your right to a passionate life of any kind.
Which brings us to The Cornelius Arms, a trade-paperback suite of fifteen interconnected stories by ex-local guy Peter Donahue (now teaching lit in the Carolinas) and put out by still-local dude Von G. Binuia’s Missing Spoke Press.
Set at some indeterminate point between 1983 and 1990, Donahue’s tales revolve around the denizens of a decaying Belltown apartment building. The building’s obviously based on the real Cornelius Apartments at 3rd and Blanchard, a place I’d frequently visited at the time. (It’s still standing, now providing student housing for the Art Institute of Seattle.) Donahue’s descriptions of the building (a once-stoic place, reduced to near-unlivability by a spendthrift slumlord) are accurate, as is the running plotline of tenant activism against the slumlord.
The stories are dotted with other (mostly now-gone) real places (the Tugs gay disco, the Unique Cafe, a renamed version of the Magazine City store, and the still-extant Virginia Inn). A couple of real-life Seattleites also get cameo appearances (housing activist John Foxx, the late Virginia Inn bartender Homer Spence).
Donahue’s resident characters are well-written and well-defined. They comprise a fine cross-section of Belltown life in the pre-dot-com days. There are retired pensioners, druggies, a young recovering alcoholic, a gay party dude who’s already lost one lover to AIDS, a Korean immigrant, some racist skinheads, a female young executive with a confusing sex life, a former WWII refugee, some lonely middle-aged men, a Native American woman struggling to better her condition in life, a young man at the crossroads of his life, and an old man who’s proclaimed himself President of the World.
All are treated as sympathetically and as humanly as possible (even the skinheads, whose philosophy of violence is eventually revealed as just a sad attempt by these lost boys to forge a substitute family).
By the book’s end, the Cornelius Arms building has fallen into the hands of redevelopers, who’ve rebuilt it with gaudier fixtures and tinier, costlier apartment units. The residents have scattered.
It’s not the loss of a “community” that the reader may mourn; most of the residents never really met one another except at tenant-activist meetings.
It’s the loss of a place, a shadow-space of sorts where society’s marginalized (by choice or by force or by a combo of the two) might live in squalor, but at least can live in relative peace and with relative dignity.
TOMORROW: Why I’ve never been to Burning Man.
ELSEWHERE:
