What I Learned At Starbucks

Photo by Flickr user williamhartz, here. Used under Creative Commons license.

I spend a lot of time at Starbucks. I have three main Starbucks I go to. There's the one near my home in the "gay village," which is always filled to the brim with flirty gay guys; there's the one near the public library, which is kind of a mix; and there's the one downtown, which is visited mostly by lawyers and business men taking a coffee break.

The one I go to most often is downtown. I work as a professor, and after a day of sitting alone in the library working on some writing, it's refreshing to my spirit to go downtown. I like seeing everyone all dressed up. I like hearing their conversations with deal with concerns so far from my own. I like the bustly energy of "downtown" which is so totally unlike the energy of the university.

A lot of people complain about Starbucks, and I understand being frustrated with the feeling that they are taking over. But in many ways it's a very OK company. In my experience, they're for real about welcoming anyone to hang out there, even for long periods of time. They're respectful of the wandering, the confused, and the homeless. They offer a good selection of healthy snack foods, and they're cheerful and encouraging about putting your coffee in ceramic instead of paper. They offer health insurance to their employees.

Today's narrative happens at the library Starbucks, which, as I said, is a real mix. It's kind of close to the University, so there are students, but it's also close to various museum-y things so there are tourists. It's slightly a "see and be seen" crowd, because there's a Tim Horton's right next door, and in some class-distinction-complexity of Canada that I don't quite get yet, it seems that people who identify as "sensible" are faithful to Tim Horton's, though to the untrained eye the two places just seem to offer completely different sorts of things.

I was working at Starbucks, and I had my laptop open. On the other side of the narrow room, there was a weird guy, maybe about 22 years old. At the table next to him, a young couple - maybe like 17 or 18, very quiet.

Some coffee spilled. I looked over, couldn't get the story. Whose coffee was it? Was it an accident? The older guy's laptop was open on his table but it seemed fine. There were some words exchanged, but quietly. It was calm for 5 minutes.

Then angry, louder words. Some taunting: it seemed like the older guy was taunting the younger guy, trying to get something started, and the younger guy wasn't sure what to do. I'm probably just projecting, but it seemed to me like the younger guy would've been just as happy to leave the place and avoid a confrontation but that he also wanted to stand up for himself in front of his girlfriend.

The tension escalated. Everyone could tell a fight was brewing; everyone was kind of looking at them like, guys, just cool it, it's Starbucks. You can't fight here.

Eventually the younger guy started trying to make peace. "It's fine; let's just forget it, OK? Just let it go," he said.

"Good," I thought.

Then wham. The two guys were up, seriously going at it, knocking into the table with the older guy's laptop, which teetered and almost crashed to the floor. They grabbed one another, started careening around. In about one second they were crashing toward me.

I grabbed my laptop and held it to my chest, evidently having some thought that if they were going to crash into me I could put myself between the computer and the floor. I'm not sure.

Finally the staff came over and shouted and called for back-up and shouted some more and made a huge fuss and finally the young couple left and the staff stood over the old guy glaring at him 'til he packed up his stuff and got out.

I learned:

I do not have the necessary qualities for breaking up fights. It's not just that I'm physically not a fighter (though that is true), and it's not that I'm timid (because I'm not); it's just that I don't care enough. These guys were so mad, they'd have steamrolled right over me.

It's not necessarily because I'm a girl that I don't have these qualities. The staff member who came over and broke it up was a girl and she did an awesome job. Those two piped right down.

I seem to care a lot about my laptop.

Moralism, Nihilism, Whatever.

I just read the Bret Easton Ellis book The Informers. It's pretty good, not, it seems to me, one of his best, but I like some of the other ones a lot. Like his other books, it presents a dark sort of picture of the world we're living in.

It was written in 1994, but I'm just getting around to reading it now, in the middle of a mini-obsession with Ellis. This started when I read Lunar Park last summer and felt inexplicably connected to the narrator (as I mentioned in my previous post, Dear X: U R My Favrite Riter).

As the Wikipedia page on Ellis says concisely and correctly, "He has called himself a moralist, although he has often been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it."

I see how Ellis might think of himself as a moralist: he is depicting what is obviously a fucked-up world, and saying how fucked-up it is.

But it's easy to see, too, why some readers aren't quite buying it, and insist on calling him a nihilist. Yes, the characters "choose to enjoy it." But it seems that the author chooses for the reader to enjoy it, too. The author himself seems to be enjoying it, kind of a lot.

The descriptions of violence, of drug-induced euphorias, of sexual cravings, of empty-minded sexual satisfactions are lovingly rendered and seductive. They're exciting, and written so intimately they make you feel you're right there feeling the same things.

It seems readers are enoying it. It would be hard to believe that these books are so popular in spite of the lovingly-rendered violence and depravity rather than because of it. And of course, Ellis is most popular not with moralizers but with those skating on the edge of the very world he describes.

I must confess: I kind of love it. Even as I'm appreciating the moralizing. I'm having just the reaction I figure is intended.

Even granting the seriousness of the moralizing, ambiguity like this is common: some art experience meant to comment critically on X presents X in such a way as to suck us into a kind of involvement. We wallow in it even as we appreciate the commentary. We're complicitous.

There are obvious reasons to worry that there's something bad about this, especially in straightforward cases like violence or cruelty. Feeding even a minimal appetite for these things seems wrong. Some readers may have more than a minimal appetite, which may be awakened and encouraged. Popularity lends a kind of legitimacy to what is depicted. And, as is often suggested (and was suggested in the digital-unicorn-rape discussion), there's always the possibility that participating in various pleasures in the imagination will make one more likely to participate in them for real.

But this isn't the whole story, and I think there are reasons to tolerate and even encourage such ambiguous artisitic experience.

First, people are really really easily bored. Pretty much all serious thinking has to be dressed up for excitement in some way if more than ten people are going to participate.

Second, people do have mixed impulses, and part of why we love art is for the way it reveals us to ourselves. Expressing and encountering dangerous aspects of human nature in literature is a way of domesticating it, bringing it into the realm of things we think and talk about rather than the dark realm of impulses no one ever acknowledges.

But mostly, in the literature case, depravity in a novel clearly need not function to represent depravity in real life in any literal way. It can mean anything. It can be better than literal representation. Let me explain.

In an August 5th New York Times interview (now behind the pay wall, damn!), the novelist Mary Gordon says of the current literary scene, "I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than acknowledge that they are sad."

She may be right that more sadness in novels would be somehow better. But personally, I can hardly bear to read a sad novel. It's not about acknowledging; sad books just make me too fucking sad.

One time I read a George Eliot novel, I think it was The Mill on the Floss, and I felt like killing myself.

For people like me, anger, vitriol, even cruelty, can be ways of engaging with the dark unhappy parts of life without being overwhelmed with sadness. And if a book is funny, this is especially true. You can experience what is scary, horrible, depressing, and feel angry, outraged, puzzled, amused, and generally life-affirmed, rather than life-defeated.


I actually felt totally life-affirmed reading Lunar Park, even though it's an absurdly bleak portrait of modern life. Even at the time, I thought, "how strange." But it has something to do with what I have described here: the presentation of what is awful in a seductive and complex way.

Maybe. Or maybe I'm just an unusually fucked-up person.