Venice in Las Vegas

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• The Beginning
• Acknowledgments
• 1 When I Was Twenty
• Cadillac to JFK Airport
• From World War Two to Suburban Long Island
• Between the Cold War and Baseball
• 2 The Scene of the Crime
• Nursery School, Kindergarten, First Grade
• Second Grade, Third Grade, Fourth Grade
• À la recherche du temps perdu
• 3 The Radical Left Late 1960s
• Junior High School
• The Dreaded Bar Mitzvah
• Rebels Against the Establishment
• My Love of Star Trek
• John Glenn’s Orbital Spaceflight
• Yuri Gagarin’s First Manned Spaceflight
• Summer Camp in New Hampshire
• The Jets, Mets, and Knicks
• 4 High School
• My Hometown is Roslyn, Long Island, New York, USA
• My First Job in Manhattan
• 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• My First Year at MIT
• My Second Year at MIT
• 6 Cornell University Arts and Sciences
• Dominick LaCapra and European Intellectual History
• Hiding Out in the Library Stacks
• Rupert Roopnaraine and Marxist Literary Theory
• The Leftist “Student Movement” at Cornell
• Looking Towards France
• 7 First Year in France and Italy
• Summer in Toulouse
• A Quick Exit from France
• 8 Art Students Make Politics: the “Metropolitan Indians” in Italy
• Disney World in Bologna
• The Events of March
• Last Stop Venice
• 9 Back in America Only to Leave Again
• Yes, I Lived in Boston
• Yes, I Lived in Manhattan
• The Best University Ever: The “Free Association”
• Stockboy at Macy’s
• Trip to Atlantic City
• I Hold Down a Full-Time Job for Twenty Weeks
• Yes, I Lived in San Francisco
• 10 Two Years in Bologna
• The Chimes of Big Ben
• The Beaubourg Effect
• Learning Italian in Milan
• Twenty Months in Bologna
• 11 Las Vegas in Venice
• Winning at the Venice Lido Casino
• Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
• 12 Sociology Graduate Student in New York City
• Engaging with Sociology
• Donald Trump and Atlantic City Casino Gambling
• Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America
• The Sense of an Ending
• 13 Greenwood Mills Marketing Company
• Enter the Personal Computer
• Not the King of the Roost
• 14 Wall Street Computer Programmer
• From Procedural Programming to Object Orientation
• Windows Programming
• Network Programming
• Another Nasty Boss
• The Ecstasy of Speculation
• 15 Venice in Las Vegas
• The Secret Affinity Between Gambling and the Desert
• The Total Design Environment
• The Simulacrum is More (Hyper-)Real Than the Original
• The Sexuality of Gambling
• Online Gambling
• Whiskey Pete’s and the “Chance” Event
• The Goddess Fortuna
• Riding the Lucky Streak
• From Fyodor Dostoevsky to Paul Auster
• Last Stop Las Vegas
• Close Encounter with the Wormhole
• Epilogue
• Notes

To the memory of Paul Auster. I cannot write as well as you, but you inspired me to write my story.

A group of books on a table (Photo by Alan N. Shapiro)¹

Table of Contents

1. List of Illustrations

2. Foreword

3. The Beginning

4. Acknowledgments

5. 1 When I Was Twenty

6. 2 The Scene of the Crime

7. 3 The Radical Left Late 1960s

8. 4 High School

9. 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10. 6 Cornell University Arts and Sciences

11. 7 First Year in France and Italy

12. 8 Art Students Make Politics: the “Metropolitan Indians” in Italy

13. 9 Back in America Only to Leave Again

14. 10 Two Years in Bologna

15. 11 Las Vegas in Venice

16. 12 Sociology Graduate Student in New York City

17. 13 Greenwood Mills Marketing Company

18. 14 Wall Street Computer Programmer

19. 15 Venice in Las Vegas

20. Epilogue

21. Notes

List of Illustrations

1. 1 Books by Paul Auster on a table

2. 2 Gondola at Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas

3. 3 Ca’ d’Oro Palace in Venice and in Las Vegas

4. 4 Ceiling Painting at Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas

5. 5 Alan as a baby

6. 6 A handwritten list of structural engineering projects made by my father shortly before his death

7. 7 My parents, Murray and Florence Shapiro, in the early 1950s

8. 8 The model house of our cookie-cutter house, Williston Park, LI, NY, 1958

9. 9 Painting “Connecting Fences” by my mother Florence Morrison

10. 10 Sands Point Country Day School mansion at Elm Court

11. 11 Members of the Kennedy family leaving the U.S. Capitol after viewing JFK lying in state

12. 12 Painting “Fishing Village” by my mother Florence Morrison

13. 13 My father and I: 1966 Sands Point Country Day School sixth grade graduation

14. 14 Steve McQueen on a motorcycle in The Great Escape

15. 15 Treasure Island Hotel-Casino Las Vegas

16. 16 Herricks Junior High School Math Award, 1969

17. 17 Star Trek: The Original Series, episode “Shore Leave”

18. 18 John Glenn and Yuri Gagarin

19. 19 Alan, age 13

20. 20 Winning all the math awards, The Roslyn News, June 15, 1972

21. 21 Painting of Chevy Corvette and Americana, Dana Forrester watercolors

22. 22 Article about the JFK assassination in MIT newspaper Thursday, November 29, 1973

23. 23 Marc Silver, my lifelong best friend

24. 24 Albert Camus

25. 25 Alan, age 19

26. 26 Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord

27. 27 U.S.S.R. Pavilion and French Pavilion, Montreal Expo 67

28. 28 Mural in the Bologna university zone from the student movement of 1977

29. 29 The DAMS dragon from the 1977 movement

30. 30 Umberto Eco at DAMS during the Bologna student uprising of 1977

31. 31 October 1978 DAMS city bus activist art project, ironic gift to the city of Bologna

32. 32 Fremont Street, Las Vegas

33. 33 Statement of Philosophy of the “Free Association” alternative university

34. 34 Portmeirion, Wales, UK, the filming location for The Village in the TV show The Prisoner

35. 35 Roulette scene in the episode “A. B. and C” of The Prisoner

36. 36 Alan, age 22

37. 37 Casino Express Boat to the Venice Lido casino

38. 38 The closed and boarded-up Lido Casino, many years later

39. 39 Near the “Crazy Bar,” I hallucinated seeing the wormhole deep in the water of the canal

40. 40 Alan, age 24

41. 41 Letter of Recommendation from political philosopher Claude Lefort

42. 42 Donald Trump loves McDonald’s fast food and gambling casinos

43. 43 Telos editor-in-chief Paul Piccone’s nasty letter to me about my work, May 1985

44. 44 January 1984 Super Bowl TV commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh

45. 45 Letter of Recommendation from Larry of Neuberger & Berman

46. 46 C code that implements an algorithm of Euclid

47. 47 C++ code that creates an object instantiated from a class and accesses its attributes

48. 48 Code from the original Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit

49. 49 C code for FTP file transfer using TCP/IP Internet Sockets

50. 50 Letter of Recommendation from Steven of Neuberger & Berman

51. 51 New York-New York Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

52. 52 Bell Tower of St. Mark’s Church in Venice and in Las Vegas

53. 53 Rialto Bridge and Rialto Deli at Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas

54. 54 Whiskey Pete’s Casino, Primm, Nevada

Foreword

This memoir or auto-socio-biography is about the relationship between America and Europe. I left the USA several decades ago. I was disillusioned with my country’s rightward political and cultural turn. Yet I love my first “homeland” in many ways. I sought an existential and philosophical understanding of what I glimpsed as a possible secret connection between these two “continents” or “halves” of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism.

I tell the story of my childhood and teenage years on Long Island. I write about my father, the son of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, who enlisted in the U.S. Army at age seventeen and was in combat in Belgium and France during the Second World War. I describe my experience of skipping ahead two years in school when I was seven and its consequences for my life and my education at MIT and Cornell University. I divulge the adventures I lived during my first four years traveling around Europe with almost no money and the strange and harrowing jobs I had in New York City. I departed to Europe for good at age thirty-five, when the chronology of the memoir ends.

After graduating with my B.A. from Cornell at age twenty, I became a traveler and a gambler. My experiences – both outside and inside casinos – in Venice, Italy, and Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, crystallized symbolically the connection between America and Europe I sought. Venice and Las Vegas intertwined with one another.

There is a casino in Las Vegas where Venice is copied and simulated. It is the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino (renamed in 2021 to The Venetian). You can ride on a canal in a gondola steered by a gondolier wearing a picturesque costume. There are large-sized replicas of the Bell Tower or Campanile of Saint Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge. There are ceiling paintings in the Renaissance style. The overall look of the property is Italian Gothic architecture.

I searched for authentic dialogue between Europe and America through the exemplary case of Venice and Las Vegas.