City Confidential: On the Lyric Mapping of Urban Space

Flesh, color, speech: these exist by the rivalry amongst little phrases the struggle to conceive sounds that palpitate and style the possible: distant horizons that complicate a ghetto in the grove, in the shadow of a city that goes on writing.-Leonard Schwartz, " As You Run Up the Stairs " While teaching creative writing, I began to note a pervasive narrative in several of my students' work; they wrote about being lifeguards at suburban Chicago swimming pools. While it seemed a strangely particular narrative, inevitably the trope of the " bored lifeguard " was the backdrop to the same discoveries—that living in the suburbs " sucks, " that the consumerism and sameness prevalent to that locale was sapping everyone of their will to live, that they longed to get away and be " real. " Throughout the semester the class had been grappling with the idea of the " I, " debating its various modes, determining how the first-person subject was constructed both in their work and in the culture at large. Generally , the students seemed both willing to accept that sub-jectivity was defined by media, fashion, etc., and unwilling to part with the idea that somewhere underneath all that was a unique, " real, " and more aesthetically pleasing subject struggling to emerge. In attempts to differentiate their similar narratives, I began to ask my ex-lifeguards why they had wanted to be