I was born and raised in Worcester County, where camcorder footage endures of me mispronouncing barn and idea through a thick MetroWest whine. When I turned eighteen, I moved to Manhattan. In the months leading up, I endeavored to rid myself of such distorted inflections, as well as the habit of dropping wicked before every adjective. I wanted to be a writer, an arbiter of culture.
So you can imagine my mortification, spiffed out in American Apparel, seated on the polished wood floors of some Lower East Side loft, ready to take in the fine art of poesy, when I heard Eileen Myles read for the first time. Rs dropped and tagged on in the least appropriate places. Hard hawks, nasal drawls, sharp corners. I’d explicitly fled from New England and these acrid squalls.
What end, I asked myself, could this downtown darling be serving? To whom could they appeal? Such flagrant debasement of English’s poignancies! The travesty! The chagrin! The gall!
So commenced my initiation in the world of personal branding. Myles’s working-class Boston lilt polished to hostile aloofness in the face of the society from which they indeed sought approval. I was from the suburbs. My conception of “punk” didn’t include blue-chip galleries. This marriage of philistinism to haut monde frankly revolted me, and I left before the poet had finished.
Of course, I was young. And I soon acclimated to the code of appearing to have ascended from dirt to elite aesthete intellectualism. And when I’d had my fill, I moved back to the suburbs with the intention of fading into obscurity. Instead my art flourished. So who am I to judge? I recently had the privilege of hearing Myles narrate their own Chelsea Girls audiobook. Lo and behold, they’d majorly toned down the timbre. At least I had proof they weren’t shackled to their accent. And all my vindication still came without relief.
-David Fishkind