An Essay on Atmosphere
The novel Write Your Heart Out: Advice from the Moon Winx Motel was written by Geoff Schmitt and published in 2000 by Small Mouth Press. It is in the form of a writing how-to manual with insider tips, exercises, and prompts, but the story of its fictional author, down on his luck, bleeds through in a patchwork narrative. The picture of the sign on the cover of the book has been tinkered with. Lodge replaced by Motel. I suppose the revision was poetic. Motel seems the natural appellation, alliterative with Moon. But in the history of the Moon Winx Lodge, using "lodge" averted ones attention from "motel," its bad rap and rep. For a while the Moon Winx itself was associated with the Quality Courts, a loose cooperative of motels trying to spin the image. This is a classy joint, Quality said. There is something poignant and classic and very noir with the book's whole setup. The writer struggles with his work at a cheap desk in a crummy unkempt room while an oversized neon sign flashes hypnotically just outside the window, the window frame reframing the words, scrabbling the meaning. Geoff Schmitt went to writing school up the road at the university. I imagine him contemplating the sign just as his main character does, absorbing its aesthetic radiation, its atmospheric juice. Me too. That's me looking at the moon. A big chunk of that oversized moon fills my window as well. Its smiling bright-eye stare stares back at me. Then blinks.
An Essay on Night and Day
Glen House Sr. designed the Moon Winx Lodge sign in 1957, added the crowning touch of the crescent moon to the preexisting crossword of the Moon Winx Lodge. He told Rick Stoddart, an architectural writer, that it wasn't so much the medium of neon that excited him but the new Day-Glo paint he had on hand. The Moon Winx sign is really two signs. Night and day. The paint-bright yellow for the moon and pastel green for the placards with the cream-colored lettering-has its own charm. At night, the outlining neon in warm oranges and reds also interacts with the reactive paint. The cooler color tubes spelling out the name, announcing the restaurant (in a different font), the telephones, and the air conditioning, look, in the reflected illumination, as if they have been both burnished and embossed. The sign is scaffold shaped, with Moon Winx running horizontally at the top and Lodge a vertical slash, narrowing where it hits the scalloped base with "Restaurant" and "Air Conditioned" and "Telephones" footnoted there. The moon seems suspended from the craning sign. Its face is a sublime one with pronounced cheeks and chin, nose pugged, arched eyebrows, and a smile positively puckered, a Moon a Lisa. The profile works as the moon's topography, as the ragged shadow cast on a rough surface, a pimpled penumbra. The moon faces away from the road that was the main highway to Birmingham when the sign first went up. The moon then casts a coy eye over its shoulder. A come hither. The moon moons the highway, turning its back on the traffic, both shy and an exhibition. The contrasts are most striking. Day and night. Hot and cold color. The severe angular geometric alphabet wedged next to the sweeping free-hand sine curve of the animated moon.
An Essay on Auditing
The night auditor sits in the office of the Moon Winx Lodge. He can see, out the window, the famous neon sign of the motel, a two-story crescent moon, its man in the moon face outfitted with a winking eye. From where the night auditor sits, he sees the moon head on, the narrow leading edge of the contraption, its wide sides displayed to the cars passing on the street out front. He sees more of a line, a thick slice, the intricate cutouts and struts of the sign all flattened. There is little to do. The vacancy sign in the office window, so understated in comparison, is always lit. The books he keeps have been kept. The figures he adds to the folios have been summed up. Next to the desk is a small electrical box with the switches and breakers for the sign. One switch turns the neon lights off and on. The other controls the circuit that opens and closes the moon's electric eyes. The night auditor amuses himself through the endless night, turning the winking circuit off and on, off and on, off and on. It is a wink inside a wink. When the wink is on, the sign cycles through opening and closing its eye. But the night auditor can make the sign wink just by turning the eye on or off. Sometimes he fixes it so the eye stays closed. Sometimes he leaves the eye open, an insomniac moon. Or so you think as you drive past the Moon Winx Lodge. Who, you ask yourself, is operating this moon? It sometimes sleeps. Other times it is wide awake. And still other times its lids flutters as you drive by, both coming and going. The moon is dreaming. Rapid eye movement. It is a mystery and a gift as you commute.
An Essay on Folly
Call it a folly, a useless edifice where art meets architecture, where structure meets sculpture. The Moon Winx Lodge sign. The architect Frank Gehry's follies always incorporate an image of a flopping fish. The concrete lawn deer, the pink plastic flamingo are ready-made follies. A bowling ball in a garden. Follies are buildings-well not buildings-but built things that are built for no other reason than to say they can be built. They are interesting as things in a context. They are things, and they define the thingness of things. And the places where we find these constructed things gain too. Follies are foci of place. I think of the Moon Winx sign as a folly. It has evolved to a constructed "natural" wonder like a waterfall or more like a geyser. It is an Old Faithful of light and color and on its own clock. I have seen people just stop and look at it, regard it, contemplate it. In Japan today pilgrims are retracing the journey the poet Basho took centuries ago to the North Country. As he traveled he wrote poems. A cherry tree Basho commemorated is believed to survive today amid the modern urban landscape, on a pedestrian island in the middle of a busy highway. It does not matter when one looks. The folly expands. The folly defines. A folly is foolishness and it fools you. Move along. There is nothing to see here. There is nothing to read here. There is nothing but this compelling nothing.
On Being
B
"So I have sailed the seas and come… to B…. a small town fastened to a field in Indiana." So begins "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," a story by William H. Gass. He began writing it about fifty years ago, while he was living in the town of Brookston, Indiana, about the time I came to be, born in another corner of that state. Years later, I read the story for the first time in a classroom on the third floor of Jordan Hall, on the campus of Butler University, in Indianapolis. I didn't know then that Gass had lived in Brookston. He reveals that much later, in the preface for a paperback reprint of his story collection, where he also admits to B. being an allusion, in his thoughts, to William B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" and to the pun imbedded in B. of "be." And he writes that the town of B., finally, is not anywhere, not any place, really. The story's setting is to be read as an artifice-see "Sailing to Byzantium"-a model, an abstraction at best. This story was not to be confused as biography, auto- or otherwise.
But what did I know? I was a sophomore in Indiana, enamored by the artifice I was reading in the huge limestone ship of Jordan Hall, these words about the place I had inhabited since birth. Gass does say that a former student of his at Purdue University, just up the road from where I sat reading, working as an editor, prompted what became "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by asking Gass to write what it was like to live in the Midwest. What it was like. It would be years before I read this. When I read the story, though, I was a literalist, so the first chance I got, I went looking for B.