DETOUR

The 1200 and 1300 blocks of Arrow Place are lined with exceedingly handsome houses, similar in style and grace to those of Mount Zipporah Avenue. This ten-block-square area was, in the middle of the century, home to many artists and authors, to the point where it became known as “Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Hardtack.” Gerritt Porter, born and raised at 1244 by a sculptor father and a dancer mother, bought two homes across the street, 1255 ad 1257, and built a covered passageway between them so that they formed what he called “Arrow Castle.” He paid for the construction with the profits from his first and best-known novel, Green-Light Depot, and then wrote his next four novels there: Breathing Music, Timpanis and Temblors, Inversion Hit Parade, and As A People We Don’t Have Much Time. Each was the equal of the one before it, and though his sales tapered off, he would have had sufficient funds to maintain his lifestyle were he not ruined by bad investments (among the worst was a Green-Light-Depot-themed restaurant, which cost him nearly half his fortune and never opened) and a musical adaptation of Breathing Music (which did open, ran for one night, and cost him nearly as much as the restaurant). Dispirited but also inspired, he set his fiction to the side and turned to what he called “typed jazz,” not verse precisely, but a poetic form that the Marcia Malinka characterized as “improvisatory language deployed on the page for pyrotechnic delight.” As depicted on the previous page, through traffic entering from the north will now proceed around the neighborhood by way of the Sinck Bypass. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas