In these two paragraphs from her memoir Minor Characters, novelist Joyce Johnson offers a concise sketch of life in New York's Lower East Side at the height of the Beat Movement in the 1950s. Consider how Johnson relies on lists (or series) to organize the many cultural images and references in each paragraph.
from Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir*
by Joyce Johnson
Scuffling was what you did in my new neighborhood, soon to be called the East Village. The original poor of the Lower East Side had scuffled without hope, of course, selling their labor for low wages. Their children grew up and fled to Queens or Jersey, leaving room in the tenements for middle-class children loosely defined as "artists," who believed for a while, under the influence of all the new philosophy and rejecting the values of their own parents, that they had no use for money. Nomads without rucksacks, they joyfully camped out among the gloomy Ukrainians, the suspicious Poles, the Italian fruit vendors, the retired Jewish garment workers dying in their fourth-floor walkups. The newcomers to the neighborhood regarded jobs the way jazz musicians regarded gigs--brief engagements. A steady gig (really a contradiction in terms) was valued chiefly as a means of getting unemployment insurance. The great accomplishment was to avoid actual employment for as long as possible and by whatever means. But it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The women didn't mind, or, if they did, they never said--not until years later.
Meanwhile rents were low, you could eat for next to nothing, toilets were in the hallway, bathtubs were in the kitchen and you never let the meter man in if you could help it. Con Ed trucks appeared on the streets on Friday mornings to turn delinquent payers off for the weekend, plunging them into penal darkness even if they could have paid up that very afternoon. Yahrzeit candles, or the Puerto Rican kind with rainbow-colored wax, were hoarded for such emergencies. Poems were written about roaches who lived in the stove, the woodwork, the innards of portable radios and shoes, and copulated in the chocolate smelling gas heat of winter. Wives swapped recipes for chicken-back stew or lentil soup with gizzards; tofu had not yet been discovered in the West.
* Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1983 and reprinted by Penguin in 1999.
