The Outskirts of Progress

From n+1 magazine…

This essay is forthcoming in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Soft Skull. March 2011.

Much of your life is now spent traveling along the American Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston. Like many who’ve plowed back and forth along this route, you’ve grown overly familiar with the spectacle of ruined industry. The railroad runs past hundreds of abandoned factories. Their graffiti-covered brickwork, their broken windows, the rusted hulks of machinery displayed in their fissured and weed-strewn vacant lots summon a sense of an age gone missing. Gone the glovers of Newark, the machinists of North Philadelphia, the arms manufacturers of Connecticut; gone the textile mills, tanneries, and foundries. In their place rose up salvage shops, junkyards, crack dens, slag piles, allegories of post-industrial American despair. Journeys along these lines can make you feel a bit like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” facing backwards, into the past, while blown forward by “the storm called progress,” the divine wind the Japanese call “kamikaze,” which heaps ruin on ruin, disaster on disaster. Except you are not moving forward, really, but back and forth, along the same tracks, past, present, and future strung in tension like all the wires, once visible, above ground, now running below. One person’s progress is another’s downfall, an opportunity taken is an opportunity taken from someone else. Those injuns didn’t even know what it was to own land. More…