There is. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, I'm going to do a reading. This is from sort of about a little less than halfway through Polostan. It's in Chicago. So it's set around the time of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which was called 'A Century of Progress.' And things you need to know: this features a young woman named — she's bicultural. She was raised in Russia during the early Soviet Union and in the American West. So in America she goes by Dawn; in Russia she goes by Aurora. Her parents are sort of radicals of different stripes. Dad's a Russian sort of hardline Leninist, a rule-follower. Mom is more an anarchic western cowboy, but she's passed away by this point. And a year earlier, in 1932, they were involved an event in Washington, D.C. called the Bonus Army, which is an amazing chapter of American history if you haven't heard of it. But she has now gone to ground in Chicago near the university — I should probably specify, the University of Chicago. She is living in a kind of communal housing situation which is called a kommuna, by these kinds of people. And like I said, it's not far from the Century of Progress. So I'm going to read for about 15 minutes, I guess. The other detail I'll mention — you could call it a trigger warning if you want — but all of this is based on the language of the time, the way people categorized people at the time. It's based on newspaper reports describing the Century of Progress, and is told from the point of view of a young woman who's immersed in that world. So there are certain terms that are used here to categorize different kinds of humans that we don't often use in public discourse today, such as 'dwarf,' 'Negro,' and 'Indian.' So brace yourselves. So with that, I'm going to just start.
Dawn decided she was going to go to the Century of Progress. It was only a few miles away. It seemed to possess a power of magnetic attraction on more than just beekeepers. One day, for example, she saw a dwarf buying a paper at a newsstand, and the next day a pair of them on the streetcar, and then suddenly they were everywhere, as often as not dressed in miniature lederhosen. There were Indian chiefs, or at least Indians with imposing headgear, busloads of showgirls, yodelers, Civil War veterans, and bathing beauties. Flatbed trucks with alligators, ostriches, vintage locomotives, giant pumpkins, frigidaires, rickshaw, X-ray machines, and potted Florida orange trees all went north on Drexel and did not come back. A man identified as C. C. Slim Williams trundled down the street behind his dog sled and his team of huskies, which he had driven all the way from his home in Copper Center, Alaska — the first 1,800 miles on snow, and the balance on a wheeled contraption interposed between skids and pavement. A quarterback from Dallas strode up Drexel with a 135-pound bale of cotton on his back. He had toted it 1,200 miles so that the world would not live in ignorance of the glories of Lone Star agriculture. Not far behind him was a boll-weevil cotton-picking machine drawn by the largest tractor in the world, described in newspapers as being capable of replacing 48 Negroes. All of these pilgrimages created an almost palpable gravity, drawing Dawn toward the Century of Progress. Though in a funny way, what really got to her was Slim's huskies — not just pulling that sled as fast as they could, but fighting each other the whole way and leaving the street half-paved with fur. Not to follow them seemed mean of spirit. So Dawn let herself be entrained in that flow, using as an excuse that she wanted to show the newly arrived Germans around. As card-carrying persecuted Communists, there was little chance they'd fall for the propaganda anyway. Their kids were underfoot, and their perfectly non-English-speaking womenfolk were trying to clean and organize parts of the kommuna that, in the view of more tenured residents, could not be improved upon. Instead of which, they now devoted their husky-like energies into the projected fair visit. Dawn had floated the idea of hoofing it, so as to avoid crammed streetcars and give the little Huns a chance to blow off steam. When translated into German, that took on a range of significations that were unclear to Dawn but extremely well understood by the matrons. These threw themselves into hamper-packing and knapsack-mending as if they were getting ready to be hounded over the Alps by Brownshirts. These people were not going for a walk, as the 48-Negro machine was to harvesting cotton. She was forced to consider the matter of attire. The only shoes she owned that were equal to the trek were a pair of men's work boots, recently resoled. She couldn't wear them with a dress, unless she wanted to end up in a sideshow booth as the Amazing Montana Bumpkin Gal. So she put on jeans, a long-sleeved shirt to protect her arms from sunburn, and a straw cowboy hat to shade her face. On the Loop she'd draw stares, but at the fair she might go unnoticed among midgets, quarterbacks, the fattest farmer in the United States, Miss Japan, Chief Evergreen Tree, and Duke Oduro Quikunu of the Gold Coast and his Ashanti warrior dancers, slated to perform the golden stool ceremony in the Darkest Africa concession. Somewhat taken by the Germans' intrepid spirit, Dawn opted for a less direct but more scenic route, striking due east and crossing the Illinois Central sooner rather than later. There she quietly amused herself by imagining how her charges would react were she to propose that they go down to the line and hitch a ride on a northbound freight. But they were already looking uneasy about the number of hobos and the smell of their encampment, and so Dawn led them on east until they found the shore, placing the blue water of the lake on their right hand. They proceeded up the chain of parks on its shore. Consequently, they saw the Century of Progress from afar and went on seeing it for a long time as they strode along, swinging their alpenstocks and singing jolly German hiking songs. It was shockingly enormous. She was a little mortified that such a thing, all by itself, bigger than most things that styled themselves cities, had been created without her altogether knowing, out of nothing, a few miles away from where she'd been living. It brought back a few memories, in a funny way, of a year ago when she had ridden the rails to D.C. with her father and first come in view of the Bonus Army camp on Anacostia Flats. But where that had been a stinking Hooverville, this was a glorious fairyland — or what such a thing would look like if fairies toted slide rules instead of wands and made magic of electricity. The temperature was 72 degrees, climbing to 76 during the last hour of the hike. She knew this because of the Havoline thermometer, a 200-foot-high obelisk supporting a bolt of red neon, luminous enough to be read in direct sunlight. It was far from the tallest thing on the fairgrounds; that honor went to a pair of towers, steel trusswork thrice as high as the thermometer. Cables between them supported the Sky Train of rocket cars. Above even that hovered the silver seed of the Goodyear blimp and a graying swarm of airplanes, variously towing banners or shedding daredevil parachutists. From half a mile away, they could hear stentorian announcements on the largest loudspeakers in the world, relayed over the largest private telephone exchange in the world. In due course, they bought the tickets — 50 cents for adults, 25 cents for children — that got them through the largest and most expensive metal fence in the world and onto the Midway, passing between a pair of statues that seemed to be its household gods. Both were seated low-slung, not posing like the idol gods and heroes of old, but hunched forward at their work. On the left, a bald, bearded savant peering at a test tube in one hand while running his index finger down the page of a tome in his lap. On the right, a young man, powerfully muscled, enthroned on a massive gear and reaching out with both hands to control the wheel of a consequential valve, which put Dawn in mind of something she had read in the Trib within the past day or two. Some ribbon-cutting worthy had made a speech to the effect that this fair was all based upon a great theorem, namely that industry, manufacture, and commerce depended, quote, 'almost immediately,' unquote, on the pure sciences. The temperature was 82 when the Havoline thermometer disappeared from their sight line, swallowed in the clutter of progress. Every so often it would spring into their view as they rounded some corner, the neon inexorably mounting through the 80s. From the fair's midst, getting a synoptic view of it was impossible, which probably explains the need for rocket cars and airships. Merely walking its length was half a day's journey, not so much because of the distance as the impossibility of simply placing one foot in front of the other. A troop of a hundred women dancers in sailor costumes collided with a contingent of Mounties in a street between a reproduction of a hillbilly shack from the Ozarks and a crowd that had gathered to watch a squad of Chicago firefighters extinguishing a burning popcorn hut. The hillbillies looked on curiously as the Mounties doffed their hats and made way for the sailor girls to squirt out through a gap between the Negro Fair Visitors' Office and a powwow wigwam in which a whiskey bottle once owned by Abe Lincoln was on display. Dawn seized the chance to draft behind the sailor girls. The German Communists followed her smartly. Soon they were picking their way over thrumming pipes feeding the fake Alpine waterfall in the Swiss Village, but had to pull up short to make way for a lady lion tamer being rushed off the property on a stretcher. For lack of any other clear goal, they struggled for hours in the direction of the German-American Building. En route, they passed analogous structures for Yugoslavs, Italians, Bulgarians, and the South Manchuria Railway, because Miss Japan was in there. An echelon of well-dressed society girls, volunteering as tour guides to a horde of underprivileged children, were having difficulty keeping them from disrupting the watermelon-eating competition. Makeup running, corsages drooping in the heat, hats askew, they struggled with the impossible challenge of maintaining decorum at such an event in a world so hungry. Fortuitously, the stately facade of the German Pavilion heaved into view. When they made for it, on the reasonable assumption that things would be more orderly there, they stopped in a little cluster on its threshold, suddenly preferring the crowds in the 91-degree air to whatever might be inside. Dawn, deeming herself immune to whatever it was that was troubling them, led them through the doors into its cool shade. After a pause for their eyes to adjust, the Germans all made astonished but happy noises. Seeing the curiosity in Dawn's eyes, Dr. Voss took half a step toward her and allowed himself a slight relaxation of the face that was the closest he'd ever come to smiling. 'No swastikas,' he explained, which meant little to Dawn. 'Look about,' the professor exclaimed. 'No swastikas.' She must have looked uncertain still, so he explained: 'In Germany they are everywhere. Here, not a single one. Someone made a decision not to put them here, and someone else is very angry about it, I promise you.' For the mothers and children, a cool place where German was spoken, Nazis unwelcome, and beer served — for FDR had legalized it on the same day as Himmler had opened Dachau — was difficult to leave. And so they built a revetment of chairs in the beer garden and hunkered down, while Dawn and some of the men made exploratory sallies. Dawn had felt something akin to nausea during their initial sweep down the Midway — some combination of heat, humidity, crowds, chaos, and the heavy scents of butter and caramel and hot grease. Sitting in the ladies' room for a minute to collect herself, she remembered the embodiments of science and technology flanking the gates, and the theorem. When next she went out, she willed herself not to be distracted by the close, low clutter of all fairs — the bumper car pavilion, the prodigious vegetables displayed on pillows like severed sarsaparilla heads, the food stalls, and the banjo pickers. She raised her sights and looked for higher and grander things that related to the theorem, and found them in plain view, rising above the Midway like colossi erected by scientific pharaohs, save that unlike the monuments of Egypt, these were never meant to endure for more than five months. Unburdened of the requirement to survive even a single Chicago winter, the fantasists — architects was probably the wrong word — had diverted all resources normally spent on practical considerations to the true purpose. The names blazoned on them in modern sans-serif letters were Ford, General Motors, Westinghouse, Firestone. She knew what the German Communists were thinking and what the people at the kommuna would say, which was that this only proved that it was all just a propaganda festival for capitalism. Dawn, who had been raised on propaganda, saw that this was not the entire truth. One could easily imagine going to a party congress in the Soviet Union or a rally in Germany and finding the same buildings celebrating the same things, only the tyrant faces changed. As much as they might like to believe that they were competing with one another, all were a conjoined program for the theorem. When the fair closed on November 1st, the statues flanking the entrance could be packed up in shipping crates and sped in streamlined dirigibles to Berlin or Moscow to inspire Nazis and Communists to do precisely the same things. On an island linked to the streets of Chicago by a curving causeway past Hollywood, the Pabst Blue Ribbon Casino, the Horticultural Building with its pumpkin-sized cauliflowers and its cow-sized pumpkins — just to the north of the Enchanted Island was the magnet-shaped Palace of the Electrical Group. It was near the base of one of the rocket car towers, and hence from a distance seemed low-slung by comparison. But when they wandered closer, it proved equal to any triumph of Italian Futurism, and in colorfulness exceeded any building ever made. For in studied contrast to the White City of the previous Chicago fair, 40 years ago, the Century of Progress was a fair of many colors, and there was no better place to flaunt them than the humming and crackling Electrical Group, with its RCA organ that translated music into fluctuating tints projected onto a screen — excuse me — and the hurdling rainbow of the neon waterfall. Gaudy though it all was, Dawn, who had been raised by Reds and during her adolescence read of the rise of blackshirts in Italy, brownshirts in Germany, and last year witnessed the spontaneous eruption of the khaki shirts in the vet ghettos of Washington, D.C., was happy to be in any place where more than one color was permitted. She went back to the German building and fetched a few of the older children who needed airing out, and brought them back and let them sample the wonders of the Westinghouse Hall of Electrical Living and its playground of science. Her favorite exhibit was an X-ray machine that enabled her to see the bones in her hands. She went back to it several times, bending forward to press her face into a mask-shaped hood that projected from its lid, sliding her hands into a warm slot beneath. X-rays from a tube in the pedestal shone up through her hands and struck a fluorescent screen above them, which outlined all of the little bones in black against a field of spectral green. That is the reading. Thanks.
