So...

While it is true that Balzac’s Paris is a multifarious monster—precursor to the textual Berlins and Dublins that came after—the difference between Balzac and his city-novel progeny is that the modernists were less concerned with a city’s “biological continuity” (its unity, progression, and connective tissue) and more interested in what could be called a city’s “biological discontinuity” (its intrinsic inability to adhere to a tidy narrative). This is what Döblin meant when he referred to “the chaos of cities.” In exploration of this biological discontinuity and in articulation of a certain urban texture, the modernists implemented new ways to embody the city’s multitude: the stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, free indirect discourse, appropriation, fragmentation, and, especially, montage.--TM

I think I know Portland well enough to write a novel with the city as a central character.  Yet I get lost and can't find a narrative, truth or fiction, that suits me whenever I sit down to write about Portland and its other characters.

I should have quit Art long ago, but then what would I have done?  Nothing appealed to me as much as the dream of literature. I found nothing else worthy. Nothing that might move me along a reasonable path and into the heart of the mundane, where society thrives and coexists with "reality," where jobs and status and money and the ordinary prevail.

So, in Nightscape in Empire I wrote:


The Insane Lover's Question

How did it
come to this,
that I became
an insane lover
of the world's madness,
that the sight and sound of it
repelled me in my dreams as I
tossed through the night,
and never learned to
live a quiet life
before taking flight;
never quite getting
very much right?


TS