2nd Sep, 2008
Last night an accidental taxi ride into the 'west side' of Chicago, apparently a largely Hispanic area. The driver was Latvian and spoke almost no English. He played Pat Benatar loudly (Meet Me at Midnight) [actually, there was some debate about who it was singing, and the genereal consensus was that it was Pat Benatar, but I am now beginning to doubt this]. Lost, unknowingly on our way to what we had been told was the no-go area of the west side, we passed a great many places to wash clothes. Back home these would be called laundrettes, but here they were on a larger scale. Low buildings sprawled, lit up with the sleepy glamour of yellow light and filled with nothing but row upon row of washing machines. I remember, in particular, one name – Bubble Land. As far as I recall, the sign was a dark blue, and there were cartoonish, overlapping circles on it, multi-coloured, to represent the bubbles. Somehow the colour scheme did not conjure up the primary brightness of Hollywood America. I seem to recall a story by Ligotti in which the narrator wanders an American small town – or mid-sized town – at night. I think it must be 'The Glamour'. He mentions the strange associations and feelings evoked by some of the names in the neon signs or above dark shop windows. "Playing nightly" is, I think, one of the phrases that exerts an eerie enchantment on him. When I first read it, I didn't quite get it, but this view of Chicago from the window of a taxi brought it back to me. Bubble Land. There was a kind of cosmic decrepitude here.
This is the America not portrayed in film. Even Lynch does not capture it. Film does not have the right texture for it, or else American film long ago took a turning away from the ability to create such textures. Ligotti, however, captures it in prose, despite his insistence on wishing to locate his stories in a place that is no place.
Much of America is a projection of Hollywood, or an international corporation, but there is still plenty that remains only internal. Company names like Texaco are now familiar, but there is a strangeness in them that may be rediscovered in the company names of those businesses that are not known internationally. In Britain, originally, all businesses were surely known by family names, or by staid, descriptive names such as 'the East India Trading Company'. Texaco, Toxico and so on are surely American innovations, the same corruption of language into strangeness that brought us the likes of 'Daz'. Some of these names are now associated with success, and primary colours, but some are shibboleths that might open the way to a dream or a nightmare world, to an eerie glamour, to Bubble Land.
Perhaps I should try to make a note of interesting ones.
