You may not know it, but Portland, Oregon, is a city on the edge of hep. The people there dye their hair, or if they don’t, they certainly don’t wash it. Portland is so far past the silly punk days of it’s Northwest rival (Seattle) that not only are the young and trendy of Portland not piercing their noses and eyebrows, they’re not even piercing they’re ears any more. Holes are just to cliche’ at this point. It’s true.
My childhood has become trendy. The guy who wrote Fight Club is from Portland, and he wrote a book about the city that points out everything hep, and it’s where I grew up. It’s everywhere where I grew up. It’s the hardware store we bought our bathtub at. Dude, we were so avant guarde.
There’s a Bloomsbury class at Pomona. They’re the kids in Creative Writing classes with David Foster Wallace and who go to Julia’s (and my) parties and who have read Kant, maybe who have read Kant for fun. Oh! Everyone’s read Kant. You can’t use Kant as a measuring rod anymore. You know who the young intellectual elite are at Pomona. They’re not just smart elite. They’re intellectuals.
The intellectual elite has heard that Portland has a great creative writing community. It has also heard of Powells Boooks (which, by the way, has gone way-down hill since my childhood, but then so has a lot of Portland), where the intellectual elite of the larger metro community can gather. They haven’t heard, but the Pearl District is full of apartments to live in, these days, and the city really is becoming a ball of trend.
I’m warning you know: the new lost generation isn’t lost, it’s at the end of the Oregon trail. Portland’s the Paris of 1920 and the New York of 1960. The creative writing aware are moving there, and what’s more, this newest trend is visually obvious. Bloomsbury has relocated.
I’m very excited to be aware of the movements of Bloomsbury.
