Last night there were drinks at a CBD bar (CBD = central business district. The US equivalent is 'downtown') toasting a friend's upcoming 30th birthday. So it was filled with the after-work business crowd until suddenly at 8pm the lights dimmed even more and the music grew louder and suddenly I am shouting things I would normally whisper. In those toxic bar environments I find myself putting on a bit of superficial banter, a false persona of tavern wit, saying things like "do you think many dyslexics spit in the tips jar?" and gossiping about strangers.
It reminds me of driving... I tell people that I hate to drive, which is true... but I rarely tell why. Truth is, it makes me into someone I don't like -- impatient and irritable. At the bar, shallow and clever.
Often I'd rather stay home and read. Or like the David Bowie song goes: "I don't want to go out, I want to stay in / get things done". It's true. I'm ankle-deep in the E.L. Doctorow novel Ragtime (1975) and am enjoying it. It has an element of postmodernist intertextuality that I enjoy -- historical figures interacting with fictional characters, which I suppose would be related to what Linda Hutcheon once termed "historiographic metafiction".
It's a concept that would complicate those disclaimers at the end of fiction films and the start of fiction monographs that (paraphrasing) the characters are fictional and any similarities to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.
Instead, some of the characters are real, some are not, you be the judge. Very much like a night at the bar after all.
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