A guest post from Pittsburgher at heart, Nick Courage of amutualrespect.org.

I’ve been to Pittsburgh a few times now, can tell the Monongohela and the Allegheny apart; recognize where they meet at the downtown point of the city to form the Ohio. I’ve had a Chicago veggie at D’s Six Pax and Dogz, biked the jail trail, and seen the cloud factory behind Carnegie Mellon (twice). Shoot, I had drinks with Mr. McFeely at an astronaut’s house, which is about as Pittsburgh as things get as far as I’m concerned.

But before that – when my girlfriend wanted me to visit her family in the ‘Burgh for the first time – I was suspicious. Beyond Annie Dillard and Michael Chabon, I hadn’t ever really thought about Pittsburgh. And Dillard was too pleased with herself for me. And Chabon felt like he was hiding something. Outside of those two literary landmarks, I could barely find Pennsylvania on a map. After a disappointing trip to Philadelphia a few years earlier, I was actually opposed to finding Pennsylvania on a map; there was a geopolitical ethos of exclusion in play.

And now I know where the Monongohela and the Allegheny meet to form the Ohio, which – I also now know – contours West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois before feeding into the Mississippi, a popular favorite that’s worked its way down into the effluvium where I was born since well before it was discovered by Hernando de Soto (who called it Río del Espíritu Santo – “River of the Holy Ghost”), or the Cheyenne before him (they went with Ma’xe-e’ometaa’e – “Big Greasy River”).

The Mississippi connection feels important. I’ve come at it from every other angle I can think of and – as long as I’m thinking about it in a codified sort of way – my new-found affinity for the ‘Burgh really seems like it can be best explained by psychogeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment [...] on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In layman’s, those amalgamating rivers – The Mon and Allegheny, The Ohio and the Mississippi – are like the aligning chakras on the laminated acupuncture posters hanging in all the windows of my psychic Chinatown. Or… something like that.

And I’m not usually this mystic – the incense was burning when I got here. My first instinct was to take the big historical view, which I stuck with for a while, thinking: it’s an entrepôt, a port city like New Orleans (my hometown) – so it makes sense that I feel nearly the same in Pittsburgh as I do in New Orleans. We’re cosmopolitan, we’re… mercantile? But that didn’t make sense, my definition of entrepôt was too generous,* my historical grasp too loosened by too many bayou pirate day dreams. On the face of things: Pittsburgh and New Orleans really don’t have much in common.

Except for those rivers. And when you think about them everything makes sense … in a transhistorical, Billy Pilgrim kind of way: First, fifteen and lying next to my friend Josh on the inside incline of the Uptown levee – watching tankers with Chinese hanzi slouch back and forth and wondering about what all was getting tossed in the water further up the line. And then (again): twenty-seven and walking up the Monongahela on the way to a casino where I’ll double a dollar at the nickel slots and then lose it all. In Pittsburgh, I’m both at once. Listen: Nick Courage has become unstuck in time.

Spatially, though – at time of writing – I’m in New York, where every day is what a marketing professional might call “aspirational”. Inspirational too, like Alicia Keys sings in “Empire State of Mind” – but with a semantic shift: inspiration as a means to an aspirational end. And it’s usually razzle-dazzle inspiration instead of the DIY type — which leads, inevitably, to the kind of aspirational fulfillment you see on Kanye’s twitter (see: figure 1). The city breeds it: The New York Times is a catalog of restaurants you can’t afford, clothes you can’t have, and apartments you can’t live in. Self-loathing can come easily if you’re not actively seeking perspective.

Figure 1:

Which may be one explanation for why so many books are set in the city. Perspective – we’re all solipsistically writing this thing out to get a little. Speaking of, I went to a panel at this years BookExpo America where a writer for Publishing Perspective’s (!) joked that because the market is filled to bursting with books set in Brooklyn, Brooklyn is killing literature. Which is funny, because I’ve recently felt like Literature – capital L – is killing Brooklyn (and for completely ideosyncratic personal reasons I conflate Brooklyn with NYC). Something about vast swathes of asphyxiating aspiration…. And then, to quote the last two lines of Paul Auster’s autobiographical Hand to Mouth: “So much for writing books to make money. So much for selling out.”

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, feels like it has a lot of love to give; like it has room in its black and gold folds for the projected self-portraiture of everyone it contains. And it seems to: there’s The Waffle Shop, Conflict Kitchen, Encyclopedia Destructica, and a whole host of others. In Pittsburgh, there are writers and painters that apparently support each other – and who the city supports – outside of the kind of necessarily tribal arts scene that defines New York. Pittsburgh… I realized on my last trip – rivers converging – is my candy-coated New Orleans of the ’90s.

In case we didn’t go to highschool together: in my New Orleans ’90s I was fifteen and carried around dog-eared, taped together copies of Crimethinc.-style zines that I picked up, probably, in the Loyola Student Union. I wished, daily, that I was twenty-seven, that I had a girlfriend with interesting hair. For context: when last in the ‘Burgh I was twenty-seven, taking a break from 9-to-5′ing in NYC (where every two weeks I cursed the purse on my theory-heavy graduate degree, which was founded on personal discovery of the iconoclast who’d inspired Crimethinc. – Guy Debord. Who was, it turns out, the originator of my working definition of “psychogeography”).

Anyway, it was then that it really hit me (in the side of the head, by surprise): I’d found a place where my fifteen-year-old’s projected future self might’ve opened up a record store like Mind Cure and thrown down some serious rock and roll roots; where hipster laureate Paul Auster might’ve turned a bigger buck. I’d lucked into a sort of alternately lived nostalgia. Which makes sense, Pittsburgh’s where My So-Called Life was was set.** I kept expecting to hear Superchunk blast out from city-wide PAs.

Recalling this in New York, at twenty-eight, I feel guilty about talking smack about Annie Dillard and re-read the first few pages American Childhood; am surprised (again) to see that she too felt compelled to understand Pittsburgh psychogeographically:

“When everything else has gone from my brain–the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family–when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

I flicker back and forth, temporally unstable and thinking about the Mississippi. The Mississippi and – because no reflection on Pittsburgh’s literary life is complete without it – Michael Chabon’s reluctant erection (Mysteries of Pittsburgh):

“A warm breeze carried dinner smells and birdsong across the neighborhood, ran lightly over my sweaty face, and stirred the hair on my arms. I had an erection, laughed at it, and patiently pushed it down. Four years of familiarity and unconcern with Pittsburgh turned suddenly to arousal and love, and I hugged myself.”

I understand the feeling – have coveted it for myself in my darker moments – but’ve never had a self-satisfied hard-on for my own hometown. As a younger New Orleanian, my civic arousal was forced out before it could actualize into something approaching summer-loving. Psychogeographically speaking, I entered the affair – mid-Katrina – with nostalgia and am working backwards through the break-up toward what I’m hoping is that moment of Pittsburgherian identification between city and self.

In the meantime, torn between inspiration and aspiration, New Orleans and Brooklyn, it’s nice to know that there’s a place like Pittsburgh.

* Pittsburgh is technically too far inland to be an entrepôt, a port city traditionally found ocean-side to save long-trekking vessels the time and trouble of reaching upriver destinations.

** On the Wikipedia page for My So-Called Life, Angela Chase – cathected poster child of the 90s, played by Claire Danes (same) – is described as “a 15-year-old sophomore at Liberty High School in Three Rivers, Pennsylvania, a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh.”