Looking at the photo by Garie Waltzer serving as our header today I thought of this—

“Driving through the iron landscape of early Winter, early December: black and white and monochrome: dust of snow on slanted roofs, wide plains of iron, gone numb under a hard low sky, driving blank, gone frozen coasting the lines of longing, slowly scattering all invisible ghosts — even that of loneliness which usually follows all around and as a good friend” —

—which is how Mike DeCapite opens his novel, Through The Windshield, which I’ve been reading on my kindle.

Here’s Harvey Pekar’s review of the novel.

Mike is coming to CLE on 12/20.  I wonder if we might get a dusting of snow for the occassion.

–a.t.

Sometimes I think John Hyduk is summoning a nostaglic muse, real-man-for-the-1970s style, from when Springsteen was young. Sometimes I think I’m a fool for thinking that, that what he’s writing is what we keep running circles around looking for and not finding elsewhere, that he’s our zeitgeist after all.

You decide: some tapas from his “Loading Dock Manifesto,” which appeared in Esquire last year:

No job’s perfect, this one especially. I’m fifty-nine. The first two hours of my shift are spent outside. You work outdoors in a Great Lakes winter and you know cold — mind-fogging, finger-stiffening cold. In the summer you head off to work just as the sidewalk cafés and patio bars are filling up, driving past laughing guys and girls with bare shoulders studying the appetizer menu. I don’t know which season is worse….

The contemporary job-search experience can best be summed up by the phrase “part-time man.” I saw that scrawled on an index card thumbtacked to a job board: “Seeking Part-time Man.”…

Big Rick favors a biker’s bandanna and looks like Monsieur Zig-Zag on growth hormones. He’s the king of sports trivia; ask him what number Archie Griffin wore and he’ll say, “Ohio State or the pros?” Then there’s Rob, my buddy Rob. Rob trails dreadlocks, speaks fluent Bob Marley, and always surprises. He’s a cabbage wizard, and if there’s a rarer bird than a Rastafarian who cooks Bavarian I haven’t found one. Dario and Danny are the newbies. I don’t know much about them. I don’t have to…

Read more: John Hyduk – Loading Dock Manifesto Essay by John Hyduk – Esquire http://www.esquire.com/features/essay/john-hyduk-0511#ixzz2DvTfbeo6

–a.t.

I want to laugh when I hear that people are moving to Cleveland to practice their art. Then I want to spit in their faces. I want to do them grievous bodily harm. How dare they, I think. The nerve. Cleveland has never been the kind of place where it’s easy to be an artist; in fact, people who want to unravel the greater mysteries or search for universal beauty or answer the unanswerable questions usually leave Ohio, while those who stay often find themselves using art as a way to make life on the North Shore more bearable. In Cleveland, there just aren’t that many careers in the arts to be had. When I told my father I was thinking about going to the Cleveland Institute of Art, he said, “What kind of work can you find doing that?”

In fairness, he knew I lacked any sense of practicality. I wasn’t thinking about a career in graphic design. I wanted something like Warhol, but you know . . . more manly. But I was young and I didn’t have an answer to his question, so I did what he did. I found a job working construction in the steel mills.

–An excerpt from Eric Anderson’s essay, “Pretty Things To Hang On The Wall,” in Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology.

We here at Rust Belt Chic do like our Cleveland writers, especially those who deserve more notice. Read Laura Putre’s profile of Raymond DeCapite here. Of his novels she writes,

His oeuvre reads like a long poem to the working-class West Side, the spare descriptions conjuring up the blue chug of steel mills and the 2 a.m. sizzle of fried eggs amid the cold blade of life lived by punching a clock.

Want more? Here’s a great review of the reissue of A Lost King. 

I’ll admit to not having read the book, but I just ordered a copy. Maybe you might want to, too.

Read more of Laura’s writing here.

–Anne Trubek