My Date with 7/11 (It's Not a Date)

I was reminded yesterday by my time-conscious diary - who seems to contain so much blank space at the turn of the year that you need to pencil in 'breakfast' every morning just to feel its unscripted glare hold a future for you - that it is February 2012. Not even mid-February 2012. Pushing late February 2012. We're at the point where it's no longer valid to wish people happy new year without them calling you premature rather than late. Since I've been hibernating, I wrote 'Happy New Year!' in my diary, just to see what it would say. It asked me whether I had any hot cross buns. A calendar will always be one step ahead.

It also told me in no uncertain terms that I was well overdue for a blog post - so here's the offering in appeasement, the poor substitute for buns. Despite the relatively chaste life of work and worship I've been leading in the last few weeks (good for thinking, bad for generating blog material), the Christmas break was overfull with the blogworthy. Especially given my street level standards of what constitutes the blogworthy. So, dear reader, I ask you to accompany me to the land of the spree - both shopping and shooting: The United States of America. Please purchase a visa waiver for $14 before you start reading. We must ensure readers are poor before they begin, as well as the requisite tired and hungry.

Purpose of the trip was the world's biggest annual congregation of classicists, the APA in Philadelphia (cf. dread in previous post) - or so I told the immigration man, and, hang on, so I should have, because it was true. You can always recognise authority by the way it makes a simple honest statement feel like the baldest, most transparent lie. This titanic congress of social awkwardness took place in salubrious Philadelphia: one time capital of this fine nation, now a proud advertisement for liberal gun laws and robust homicide rates. I have to declare that I'd already accumulated twenty six years worth of negative filters with which to view this vast pile of capitalism. But as we politely descended towards that international airport, I was supercharged by the brown rivers, the heavy iron bridges, the factories belching fire from their crudely oiled bellies. Not that it was beautiful - even though I can be the worst offender when it comes to that particularly middle class habit of 'appreciating' gritty urban decay, experiencing waves for the aestheticised dignity of dilapidation. It was more that this was terrifyingly close to my expectations. I realised that travelling to the States is an inherently sui generis activity precisely because it is so familiar even before you hail that first cab; it's a country of hyper-representation, both in the sense of its disproportionate influence in world affairs, and the ever-ramifying images of itself that are propagated around the world every day. Of course anticipation is always at play, whatever the new place in question. But for most tourists, the flesh-presence of being there and seeing something always releases a gap between imagination and reality: 'I never imagined those pyramids were so big.' The bizarre thing about spying a big American city for the first time in eight years, though, was precisely the lack of gap. Comparing that out there with my mental collection of snapshots, films and television series, it all looked very much in order.

That same hyper-reality, and over-recognition, hit me over and over in the first few hours: big gestures and loud accents made you feel like you had finally realised the childhood fantasy by being sucked from your seat into the screen. Yes, this was the kind of reality where anything extraordinary could happen at the blink of an eye. No more tea and biscuits clattering on a tray beneath a gentle clock ticking in a cosy dark room. Border guards were calling on helicopter back-up to intercept that hundred kilo shipment of pure Colombian strapped to the hairy anuses of ten regular-looking Hispanics. Arnie was about to crash through the airport roof on some kind of large vehicle, lots of anonymous people would be massacred, then he would be driven to lunch in an oversize cadillac to meet the Mayor of Philadelphia and discuss strategies for emission reduction. Not that there was any external evidence for any of these impending events. I just felt all of this would make perverse since in this land's lawless filmic logic. My nipples began twinging towards the nearest plastic surgeon, for suddenly my breasts did not seem big enough.

In the end I was cast as an extra in 2012's American Philological Association Annual Meeting - a big-budget blockbuster requiring four days of on-location presence amid the generic carpets and low light of the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott. As far as academic conferences go, this is the big time of unwieldy, amorphous hustle and bustle. Pick up your name tag and it's all on: try detaining that Professor as she sprints between her panel on Ancient Attitudes to Groping and her important keynote address on The Imagery of Fingernails in Athens and Rome. Collapse on the floor as she palms you off, only to be trampled on by stressed job applicants who can no longer see past their copy of Greek Metre, borrowed in a rush when they began to apprehend the full range of interview horrors and decided that they would better spend their time learning to scan complex lyric metre than grappling with forgotten Greek syntax. We humble paper-givers had it easy by contrast. I turned up at 8.30 on the last morning of the conference, bleared from the free Gin and Tonics of the night past, and read my lines to an audience of seven (four of them were Cambridge pals). The one woman I had hoped to chat to - one of a handful of world experts in the crap bit of Juvenal, and the organiser of my panel - was a no show from sickness. So I walked out of that hallowed Conference Room No. 3 with head held high, thinking that there could have been no greater microcosm of what classics is about, a good chunk of the time: talking at the top of your voice to an empty room, or sitting in an audience so small that you can never be secure in your passivity - maybe you are the one supposed to be talking when that silence inevitably settles. So the classical world keeps turning, one unnoticed allusion to Virgil at a time.

My standard moans about the nitpicking of academia have particular relevance (they always have general relevance) here because the nitpicking helped intensify, indeed formed one end of, the seizure of cognitive dissonance that is travel through the States. One minute I was giving ground over a difficult question on the precise nature of synecdoche in Juvenal; the next I was on the Chinatown bus to New York City, receiving the slobber of tiny children who had escaped their mother's supervision while she blared hip-hop through a tinny smartphone and chimed along with the odd rhyme. This bus was perhaps my favourite more-American-than-America moment of the trip. Revelling in our sacred right to choose from the full range of quality transport options, we chose to neglect the overpriced privatised rail option and opt instead - what exhiliration to opt! - for the only option we could afford: the Chinatown bus, a mode of transport so named because it connects the Chinatowns of the nation's big cities. As I tried to tune out and follow the contours of the New Jersey landscape, flicking eyes back and forth between the fast moving motorway and slow moving factories coughing up phlegm in the dusk of biting winter, I kept feeling sharp, elastic snaps back to my immediate reality. The aforementioned mother, a big black woman who had to economise by booking just one seat for her three small children, would periodically try to restore order in her universe by screaming at her squirming little'uns: 'Shut the FUCK UP!' The outbursts had no discernible relation to the childrens' behaviour: whether they were silent or clamorous, the random interventions came once every few minutes. At one point, the middle-sized boy somehow obstructed her view of her smartphone, and she promptly gave him a hard slap on the face. The most disturbing thing again, however, was the inconsistency and schizophrenia of the situation: now she was tellin' y'all to shut the fuck up, now she was lavishing affection on the youngest and calling him the cutest boy in the world. But what really made things horrible and apocalyptic was the reaction, both mine and that of others. To pass the time between screams and recapture command of reality by digital means, I started writing notes in my iPhone. I looked to the left of me and my neighbour was texting on his own smartphone, writing to invite the sympathy of some distant person: 'One ghetto-ass woman screaming at her kids sure can ruin your trip to New York.' What kind of people were we that this poor woman's predicament impacted on us only enough to seek out thumb exercises and screen deflections? We, all three figures, self-atomised in our backlit realms. The finale of this grim comedy came as the mother signed off a phone conversation with her partner: 'I love you too asshole.' Then, the end-call button pressed, she sat back and chuckled to herself: 'Hehe...muthafucka call me a dickwad.' I remember so clearly because I - self-hating modern man - transcribed the quotation into my iPhone. That domestic drama is now the raw data of the blog post you are reading - feel the implication burn your eyes!

The Big Apple itself was more inviting: its anonymous bosom could be felt out and mapped immediately, based as it was on grids and numbers (two of my favourite things). I spent the usual time taken to acquaint myself with the geometry of a new place in marvelling at the strange sensation of not having to do this. Walking with complete, instant orientation, pinpointing E 85 and 3rd in the mind's eye immediately, Empire State always in the peripheral vision at wide vantage points - it was impossible to get lost! I've never been one for the romanticisation of losing oneself - discovering novel things, cool, but what's wrong with knowing your gps co-ordinates while you do it? So in that respect, NYC was the ideal town for me: freeing the mind of the fear of derailment, sorting you out for other, funner forms of irregularity. If Martin will permit me the use of a weak jazz metaphor to speak of jazz's birthplace, NYC built in the regular changes over which I could improvise. Of course, like my jazz days, this was so humdrumly executed that no one even recognised I was playing a solo. But that didn't matter. I just kept on walking...man.

For all the performance culture comparisons panting through this post, I ended up cashing out some literal time in the limelight during a play we watched at an East Village (? - can't get lost ey?) theatre one night. The friend with whom I was staying happened to have a happening mum in touch with the experimental theatre side of town, and we scored ourselves some tickets to the show on everyone's collagen-injected lips. The play was a loose 'version' of the Antigone set in Athens 2008, during the aftermath of the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a young man shot by police and turned martyr for a generation of sold-out young Greeks. The central point of connection was burial and mourning as radical act in the midst of an establishment bent on sweeping the inconvenient death clear. One of the play's urgent battle cries was for the expression of outrage, protest, resistance - and one of the ways it sought to galvanise the audience was through direct participation. Everyone was invited on stage to join the unchoreographed chorus of angry kicks and jolts - a dance that anyone with working legs could do. After waiting cautiously for other braver souls to get down there first, I too added my small contribution of ungainly thrashes. Whether I'm more politicised since, I couldn't say. Which fact is probably a dead giveaway that I'm not. But it's certainly stuck in my mind as a vivid demonstration of how stupid a feeling embarrassment is, and how easily it dissipates when you start kicking up some air.

So I played a minor role in a modern tragedy - and it would be too easy to write that up as the governing summary for My Time in America. This, both because that behemoth of a nation has so many products in its gigantic supermarket that it defies my classical impulse to stuff it into a good synecdoche; and because when it comes to America, the trip never ends. Next week I'll watch Terminator II for the seventh time and think, fondly: 'Yeah. It really is like that.'