I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to read the published version of my review last night, but I did just now: with the exception of a bizarre superfluous comma or two that made it through to publication, I’m not mad at it. In case anyone living outside of Fuse’s distribution range (that is, most of the States) wants to have a look, I’ve uploaded a PDF version below. For Canadians, it’s volume 32 number 4 (September).
I had no idea (1) the issue of Fuse that I wrote a piece for this summer had come out; (2) that my review (which would ordinarily have gone in the back of the issue with the other reviews) was going to immediately follow Lee’s cover story on Detroit. Um, I guess this (3) makes me a—and you’ll have to imagine me saying this while suppressing a laugh—published… art critic? Weird!
To encounter Windsor is, in many respects, to be confronted with the logic of the dreamscape. Both its chosen narratives and particular cast of characters tend, at an instant, to be both naggingly familiar and only partly resolved. Any new development to the plot refers insistently, if obliquely, to a past that shimmers on the horizon between genuine recollection and mythic fabrication. This situation is perhaps one common to all industry towns faced with the threat of obsolescence; lacking a received frame of reference for reinvention, such places turn recursively and inflexibly to their own familiar tropes in acts of stubborn defiance and frantic self-preservation. For Windsor, the available palette of stock metaphors is rooted in the cycles of industrial manufacture and labor conflict, in the stereotypic patterns of shifts beginning and ending, of work stoppages and arbitrations, rhythms of drudgery, righteousness, and resentment.
Particularly their list of “common solecisms.”
Wrack is an old word meaning vengeance, punishment or wreckage. It can also be seaweed. It is not an instrument of torture or a receptacle for toast: that is rack. Hence racked with pain, by war drought, etc. Rack your brains—unless they be wracked.
And, especially for the art majors:
Critique is a noun. If you want a verb, try criticise.
Remember, of course, that this is a guide only for people who write for or intend to write for the Economist. For the rest of you: back to your toil, peasants!
I’ve started working on a piece of writing, tentatively called “Windsor and It’s Metaphors” (a nod to Sontag, though the original title was going to be “DNR“). I probably won’t finish it, and it’s even less likely that, if I did, I would go so far as trying to have it published. It’s certainly…uncharitable in its tone, and it would probably be less so if I wrote it with some distance (emotional, physical) from the place. It’s going to be awhile before I stop taking this city personally.
Windsor, Ontario imagines itself a certain kind of town. It is, by its own account and its own recollection, a manufacturing town, a union town, and a “border town,” encumbered with the border town’s accumulated weight of superstition. It is, for each of these reasons, a town that understands itself in terms of serving one or another purpose, of performing one or another task. “To serve a purpose” is, in Windsor’s native idiom, not the same thing as “to be of use.” Windsor is a town possessed of an excess of purpose, and it is, at the same time and increasingly, useless. Windsor’s function has been relegated to the ceremonial; its arguments for itself are intractably religious in their character, its aims fundamentally magical, its rewards forestalled—unknowable, millennial, apocalyptic.
Later, I may or may not have referred to something as “a Potemkin village of environmental sustainability.” So there’s that.
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