Queer Ideas by Martin Duberman

Author:Martin Duberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558614161
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2016-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

wrote Hart Crane, in “The Tunnel,” in 1927, the penultimate section of his great poetic mosaic of American sensibilities, The Bridge. Well, the coin was a nickel and the place you got it was the change booth. I didn’t correct the sociologist when she made her error; my question here, however, a prologue to my discussion of still another venue where networking is eroding contact, is what would the status of such a correction have been, had it been made? What is the status of the failure of someone with the available facts to offer it? Would stating the fact have been a simple and unencumbered rectification of an inadvertent error, and by extension, my failure to state it simply another such error? Would it have been a gesture of nostalgia to an earlier vision of the transportation system? Would it have been the assertion of an authentic image of the past in place of an inauthentic image and thus the failure to state it a momentary triumph of such inauthenticity? Or was it a mild, momentary slip of no particular consequence, so that pointing it out would have been an equally mild moment of embarrassment, which I sidestepped by overlooking it with no harm to the general social good? Or was it a case of a hard-edged objective truth and an equally hard-edged objective falsity, the replacement of one by the other another case of the evanescence of knowledge of the past and the displacement by ignorance based on our assumption of a universal present? Frankly, I believe all of these would have been the case, and what’s more, inescapable. But I also maintain that none of these, for the purposes for our discussion here, are particularly interesting. What interests me, is that the encounter of the two facts represents a rhetorical detail and a rhetorical collision, which is a moment in the process by which one material discourse can be seen to give way to another, to have been revised by, and to have eroded away, another.

The Times Square problem I perceive entails the economic “redevelopment” of a highly diversified neighborhood, with working class residences and small human services (groceries, drugstores, liquor stores, dry cleaners, diners, and specialty shops ranging from electronic stores and tourist shops to theatrical memorabilia and comic book stores, interlarding a series of theaters, film and stage rehearsal spaces, retailers of theatrical equipment, from lights to make-up, as well as inexpensive hotels, furnished rooms, and restaurants at every level, also bars and the sexually-orientated businesses that, in one form or another, have thrived in the neighborhood since the 1880s) giving way to an upper middle class ring of luxury apartments around a ring of tourist hotels clustering around a series of theaters and restaurants in the center of which a large mall, and a cluster of office towers, is slowly but inexorably coming into being.

Let’s speak a bit about the four great office towers that will be the center of the new Times Square.

The

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