“To escape,” writes Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Street Haunting,” “is the greatest of pleasures.” She’s describing a walk she took on a London winter afternoon, an afternoon in which she became “part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” I took a similar journey a couple of days ago, eager to “shed the self [my] friends know [me] by” — but rather than winter it was summer, and rather than London it was Detroit.
Woolf’s ramble was prompted by a desire to buy a pencil; mine had even less of a pretext. I parked in Midtown, not far from the Detroit Institute of Arts — but, being Tuesday, the museums were closed. Feeling pleasantly directionless, I stumbled upon Leopold’s Books, a gem of a shop run by Greg Lenhoff. The store’s floor space is somewhere between small and tiny, and so is the size of its offerings — but what treasures, at every turn! (I side with a reviewer on Yelp: “If I were a rich man, I would buy every book in this store.”) Lenhoff told me that he’d been open for about ten months, and that the store’s selections reflect his taste: he stocks books that he likes. I bought the catalog for a show I had hoped to see earlier in the year: FUNNY (not funny): A Modest Selection of Comic Art Exhibiting Signs of Black Humor. (The title reminds me of Zachary Schomburg’s Scary, No Scary, which Sierra highlighted in her Halloween post.) I also picked up a book of Daniel Clowes’ Eightball postcards, along with Lenhoff’s recommendations for other interesting stops in Midtown.
A block or so from Leopold’s, I found myself in front of the Main Library. (Etched in its marble facade: “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”) Inside, I discovered the exhibit “Marching Toward Justice: The History of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” a smartly curated collection of quotes, audio files, and photographs of historical figures and documents. I read about the Amistad Mutiny and the Nat Turner-led Rebellion; about Harriet Tubman and John Brown; about the Dred Scott Decision (in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that blacks “could not rightfully become citizens of the United States, since the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were never meant to include [blacks]”) and Frederick Douglass‘ response to that decision (“My hopes were never brighter than now. . . . The Supreme Court is not the only power in this world. . . . Judge Taney cannot bail out the ocean, annihilate the firm old earth or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our Northern sky”).
Leaving the library, I happened upon another shop that called to me: Marwil Bookstore, with its mix of magazines, maps, and new and used textbooks. (Again, from “Street Haunting”: “But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. . . . Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”) I bought Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide and a Rand McNally Michigan map (“45% LARGER” — the map, not the state). And though I have nothing but good feelings about Marwil, I was disappointed to see that a Wayne State professor had assigned Poetry for Dummies as a class text.
(To be fair, the Wayne State shelves were also stacked with Coleridge, Eliot, Woolf, O’Connor, Barthes, Eugenides, and Lahiri.)
Walking south on Cass Street, I ran into hundreds (and then thousands) of labor and social-justice activists. It was the first day of the week-long US Social Forum, and in every shop I entered for the rest of the afternoon I was asked if I was part of the assembly. (“No,” I’d say, suddenly embarrassed by my flaneur status, “but I certainly support them.”) I heard speakers decry human rights abuses and inadequate health care; I also heard four thirsty teenagers mutter-chant to each other, on this 80-plus-degree day, “What do we want? Water! When do we want it? Now!” before splintering off to a nearby McDonald’s.
On Willis Street, a man pedaled past me on a bicycle, laughing maniacally. This was movie-lunatic laughter, a kind of laughter I’d never heard before, at least not in person. What was the man thinking? Was the laughter uncontrollable, or was it a kind of performance? Has he ever read Heinrich Boll’s “The Laugher,” a short-short about a professional laugher who, rather poignantly, has never truly laughed himself? Reflecting on the figures encountered on her walk, Woolf writes,
Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?
I left the street again, this time to investigate Spiral Collective, home to a gift shop, an art gallery, and, best of all, Source BookSellers, run by the wonderfully welcoming Janet. I bought a copy of Jokes Every Man Should Know (p. 47: “A car hits an old man. The paramedic rushes over, lifts his head carefully, and says, ‘Are you comfortable?’ The guy says, ‘I make a good living.'”) and a bag of spicy popcorn. I considered getting a haircut at the salon next to the Collective — a salon whose name (and, I’m guessing, sensibility) tracks nicely with the Funny (not funny) show:
I wound up (and down) at Motor City Brewing Works, place of Pizza Margherita, Ghettoblaster beer (“The beer you can hear”), and World Cup soccer. I had the usual conversation with myself (‘Sup? / You know. Watching World Cup. / You should be writin’, dude. / No. Not in the mood.), and I looked through my bags of loot. (Woolf was more frugal: “And here — let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence — is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.”) On the brewery’s windowsill, I saw a half-dozen stacks of postcards, including one stack that advertised Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage. That’s a book I’ve been meaning to read; but, as Woolf reminds,
The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.
