bvo12585's blog

Everyone.Below is a collection of books and other things from my bookshelf. A collection of unread and partly read books, a collection of purchases inspired by this class and purchases that inspired my want to take this class:

The Endless City
Put out by The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank, The Endless City is, in brief, a profile of six global cities. It’s a collection of essays by the world’s most famous contemporary urbanists discussing the phenomenon of urbanization. 2008 marked the year in which over half the world’s population lived in urban areas. Although the statistic itself has its complications, it marks a significant point in human history. They have a website.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography

For ever and ever (as long as history will allow), there has been an inherent power in maps, an assumingly innocent activity like cartography is ripe with power hierarchies. The basic idea behind An Atlas of Radical Cartography (and related books like Experimental Geography, Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories) is to reverse the power hierarchies by mapping information that is generally left hidden. My favorite is a map of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. It was originally intended as a guide map for protesters during the Republican National Convention in 2004 to plan a route of least surveillance but has since attributed several essays of Foucault-ian analysis on the post-9/11 authoritarian state.

A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan

I generally don’t like New York Times bestsellers. I think they’re written for the masses, and the masses are generally dumb. For some reason, though, I picked up The Omnivore’s Dilemma, loved it, subsequently purchased, read, and loved Pollan’s follow-up In Defense of Food, and decided to buy A Place of My Own. I’ve not yet read it, but the opening line is, “A Place of My Own is the biography of a building.” I like that.

Altermodern

Post-modernity is dead. Now we’re in an age of Altermodern, according to Tate Britain, whatever that means. “A new modernity is emerging,” Nicolas Bourriaud writes in the Explain section, “reconfigured to an age of globalization—understood in its economic, political, and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture.” Whatever that means.

Wait for Walk

Wait for Walk is a book of photographs by Florian Bohm of people in New York City waiting for the walk signal at intersections. Most people, as people tend to be in such situations, look very, very awkward. As a friend and I were looking through it one day, I made the comment that most of the photographs were taken in tourist hotspots, and were they photos of locals, we wouldn't be waiting for the signal. Though Wait for Walk is a brilliant idea, she retorted, photos of locals dodging traffic would be much more funny.

EndCommercial / Reading the City

Next time I run into a spare $300, I’m going to buy EndCommercial / Reading the City, another book of photos by Florian Bohm. From what I can determine from the descriptions of the book I’ve read, it’s a collection of photographs of objects in New York City. The idea behind this project is that all objects are social in nature, and by “reading” a society’s objects, one can determine some knowledge or understanding of the society.

Enjoy.

C'est Moi!Why did you write this piece?

One thing I found interesting about the last few books we’ve read in class—Gone to New York and The Colossus of New York, specifically—was the inherent assumption that in order to truly know New York, one must have an intimate knowledge of the city. In that, I started to wonder about the people that don’t have an intimate knowledge of the city. How do they interact with the city? How might they know the city that is different than simply less knowledge than someone who’s been here longer.

Did you do anything special to write this?

I did a little research, but my biggest endeavor was a sort of participant-observation anthropological research sort of thing. I rode around the city on top of a double-decker Gray Line tour bus.

And how was it?

It was miserable. I mean, the beauty about living in the city and doing something like that is we’re not confined to a three or four day visit. If the weather isn’t good, we can do it another day. So I picked one of the most beautiful days of spring. But after a few hours, I just thought to myself that I was wasting my day. I’d much rather be sitting on my roof drinking sangria than sitting on a bus inhaling exhaust while some woman from Newfoundland next to me knocked me in the head with her camera.

If you could choose a different tourist activity or do something differently, what would it be?

I’d probably convince a friend to go with me. And I’d get really really drunk beforehand.

a New York streetThere are eight million people living and breathing in New York City. Eight million people who walk the streets and ride the subways and frequent the parks on sunny days and soak to the bone when it rains. Eight million people who eat and sleep in this concrete jungle where massive buildings of glass and steel scrape the sky and underground tunnels of piping and wiring and steam and electricity keep the city functioning at all hours of the day, every day of the year. Eight million people whom make and remake the city every moment of every day. It is these eight million people whom writers since the dawn of the city have valorized as the progenitors of a dynamic and energy of The City that Never Sleeps.

“There are roughly three New Yorks,” wrote E.B. White in 1948. “There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.”

This is East BroadwayIn The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead writes, “There are eight million naked cities in this naked city—they dispute and disagree.” There are eight million people; there are eight million constructs of the city; there are eight million stories. And Whitehead, in his fragmentary style of writing, tries to tell them all.

The Colossus of New York is a series of fragments describing life in the city, a series of chance encounters and awkward situations New Yorkers constantly face, whether we’ve lived here a week or a lifetime. It’s certainly an interesting way to look at the life of a city dweller. If one were to compile all of the events of one’s day and string them together in some semblance of a narrative, something like The Colossus of New York would emerge. So I did just that:

Waking precisely at 7:00 you’ll have precisely the amount of time necessary to shower, dress, have coffee, breakfast. Leaving no later than 8:01—slightly obsessive compulsive, but that’s what subways do to you—you’ll make it to work by 8:30. You’ve done it a thousand times, and barring no major delays, 29 minutes is all you need for the door-to-door commute.

But there’s a major delay. It must be the sunshine. Sunshine delays trains all the time, just like rain and snow. “Ladies and gentleman, there’s an F train directly behind this one,” the conductor says to persuade the morning commuters not to pack themselves tight, causing further delays. But no one believes him. You do because you don’t like being in a packed train. Especially when people are wet from the rain. But it’s not raining. Nothing but blue skies.

The conductor wasn’t lying. There was an F train directly behind that one. And this one is empty because everyone is on the first one. You even find a seat, which is a rarity for the morning rush hours. Whatever that means. Every hour is a rush hour.

When you get off the train everything is different. You’ve gone less than a mile, but are worlds apart from where you started. The buildings are different, they’re taller. The people are different, they aren’t Chinese and are wearing suits. Even the weather is different. It’s windy up here. It may even be raining or snowing even though it was nothing but blue skies downtown.

After work you go to a bar. Sometimes you meet friends. Sometimes you go alone. But it doesn't matter. Today you just needed a drink. Work or school or life was just too hard. You need to relax. You have a second drink. You talk with the bartender, and you tell him your troubles. He doesn’t care, but he has to listen to you. It’s his job, and when he’s off he’s going to drink to his bad day at work, too. Sometimes with friends. Sometimes alone.

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When looking for a picture to include in this post, I Googled 'Eight Million' and stumbled upon a series in the New York Times called One in 8 Million, which looks interesting.

home is where the heart isReading Ian Frazier’s Gone to New York, it seemed that he and I had somewhat similar, yet opposite, experiences coming to New York. I mean, not that similar—I didn’t hitchhike here, and a torrential downpour never flooded my apartment—but there are some interesting coincidences.

For one, Frazier grew up in Hudson, Ohio, in the northeastern part of the state off Interstate 80, and I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, a few hours’ drive west on the same interstate. Another is how the first apartment he lived in and felt compelled to write about was off Canal Street on the west side; my apartment is off Canal Street on the east side.

Perhaps it’s the 35 years and the generational difference that made our experiences different—Frazier has a strong attachment to Hudson, and an almost lack of attachment to the Manhattan he left Hudson for. His nostalgia for his hometown is apparent in much of his writing, whereas I have no particular attachment to South Bend.

When I first moved to New York, I made varying jokes on the theme “home is where the heart is,” including “home is where your lease is,” and “home is where you buy your first couch.” Then I got to a point when I didn’t have to make up clever little idioms to convince myself that I had found a place I belonged.

“Most modern people don’t belong anyplace as intimately as we belonged to Hudson,” he writes, but I don’t think this is true, not even a little. I can’t say how intimately Frazier belonged to Hudson, but neither can he say I do not intimately belong to New York.

Words!Paul Auster’s City of Glass presents many interesting notions of placelessness in a postmodern novel about what I cannot be certain. His incorporation of language, though, and its importance in place making is fascinating.

In the novel, Peter Stillman spent a significant portion of his childhood locked in a room with no human contact with the exception of occasional beatings by his father. As a result, he suffered stunted cognitive development, and as an adult, his grasp of the English language is childlike at best. There’s a whole study on feral children, and a movie based on the wild boy of Aveyron was made in 1969.

Stillman’s undeveloped mind means that, as he tells Quinn, “I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep.” Stillman’s sense of place is a lack of place, in part because his understanding of place is that of a child.

In his discussion of “Space, Place, and the Child,” Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “The child not only has a short past, but his eyes more than the adult’s are on the present and the immediate future. His vitality for doing things and exploring space is not suited to the reflective pause and backward glance that make places seem saturated with significance.”

Furthermore, Stillman—as well as the child—hasn’t the communicative faculties to explain much of anything, including place. The inevitable question arises: Does place exist if there is no language to describe it?

To accompany this theme, Auster invokes the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which God condemns humanity to eternal misunderstanding by forcing upon them a multitude of languages. Often when we think of places, especially foreign ones, we subsequently think of the language spoken there. In France they speak French, in China they speak Chinese. Language is a defining characteristic of place and a place’s people, and it is language that defines place.

By way of conclusion, I’m further reminded of the importance of language in the discourse of decolonization. Many post-colonial writers have written of their unease—or, in some cases, downright despisal—with having to write in the language of the colonizer, English in most cases. For them, it is not only a foreign power that shaped the place during colonization; language continues to shape the place.

NY Talk ExchangeWhile Reading Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, with its focus on one’s experience of spaces and places, I started to think about the effects of globalization on our perspective of space, place, and time. David Harvey has a concept he refers to as “time-space compression” in which he describes “the annihilation of space through time.” With technological advance, especially in the area of communication, there is an ever shrinking of the world.

An excerpt from The Consequences of Modernity by Anthony Giddens is worth quoting at length:

“In premodern societies, space and place largely coincided, since the spatial dimensions of social life are, for most of the population… dominated by ‘presence’—by localized activity… Modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction.”

To demonstrate this concept, I point to an exhibit at the MoMA last year called “Design and the Elastic Mind.” One of the pieces in the exhibit called the New York Talk Exchange showed a time-lapse animation of the globe with lines shooting out of New York City and landing in various locales around the world. The animation was a visual representation of all international AT&T phone calls originating in New York.

What the researchers found was that a vast majority of the phone calls were made at either the top of the economy or the bottom. This represents two vastly different conceptions of space and place. On one hand, at the top of the economy, are international financiers that simultaneously exist in the space of global capital flows and the space of New York City. They assign value to both spaces because the former provides their livelihood and the latter is the space in which they physically exist, where they live their day-to-day lives. It’s not insignificant that one’s livelihood can be spatially separate from one’s life.

On the other hand, but similarly, at the bottom of the economy, are international migrants, phoning home to Mumbai or Sao Paulo or Budapest. They live in the space of New York City and make their livelihood from it but maintain strong attachments to these far distant locales. Their lives, for the most part, are split between New York and their homelands.

To quote another author, Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist, “The more social life becomes mediated by the global marketing of styles, places and images, by international travel, and by globally networked media images and communications systems, the more identities become detached—disembedded—from specific times, places, histories, and traditions, and appear ‘free-floating.’”

Yi-Fu Tuan, writing in the 1970s, is by no means incidental. I think he provides a very interesting framework for analyzing space and place in the context of many disciplines, including that of globalization.

That's all, folks.Throughout the course, there was one theme that came up time and time again, the theme of Truth. From the beginning in The Odyssey, the accuracy of Odysseus’ voyage came into question with the accuracy of storytelling itself. The truthfulness of The Odyssey must be read in the context of a culture with a strong oral tradition. Right to the end of the course, in The Tempest Gonzalo wonders “If in Naples / I should report this now, would they believe me / If I should say I saw such islanders?”

When an audience is brought into the picture, a skeptical reader will no doubt consider the possibility of hyperbole and other such devices used to entertain. We wonder what exactly Herodotus saw when he reported giant ants digging for gold; we wonder if Marco Polo traveled at all or simply retold the stories of those who did; we wonder if Ibn Battuta could accurately recall twenty years of traveling as he retold it.

Encompassing all of this, then, is the ironic value we place on travel. On the one hand, the experience of travel is esteemed and travelers are considered somewhat enlightened and knowledgeable people, in contrast to those with no travel experience who are considered somewhat backwards. Ibn Battuta, for one, is thought to have traveled in order to learn from wise men the world over about Islamic faith and law.

On the other hand, as soon as our travelers return and retell their account of their journey, we grow skeptical of their wondrous and unbelievable—tall—tales. In this there seems a suggestion that to travel and to seek wisdom is a valid and noble endeavor. To travel too much and to obsessively seek the truth is anything but. Such a traveler will return to their point of origin to skepticism and ridicule.

This brings up the question of rootedness and rootlessness. One who travels but is still rooted in place is considered a sound and reliable. One who rootlessly travels the earth, in contrast, is thought to be slightly crazy. This evaluation, then, makes sense. When it comes to the question of Truth, a large consideration in its validity is not in its truthfulness but in the dependability and reputation of the person conveying this truth. One who rootlessly travels has had no opportunity to establish his or her credibility.

In the end, though, a travelogue in many cases is intended to be an entertaining account of some part of the world unknown to the reader by a writer with limited experience of said place. As soon as the reader has experience of the place, the reader questions the validity, and if the writer has extended experience of the place, it’s no longer a travelogue but a memoir. Semantics play an important part in the distinction, but it’s true.

An Old-School TVIn Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, he outlines in “Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values” the cultural value and symbolism in top / bottom, front / back. In describing a Western room, he writes, “Rooms are asymmetrically furnished: their geometrical center is not usually the focal point of interior space.” The implication here is that “front” is more important or valuable as Tuan goes on to explain the typical lecture hall.

An unfortunate aspect of American life dawned on me as I began to think about this in terms of the American household, specifically the American family room. When televisions first hit the market, they were expensive and out of reach for most consumers. (In 1938, a 12-inch television cost the equivalent of $6,633 in 2007 dollars). Thus, they became a status symbol for the few who could afford them. Their value, then, allotted them a special place in the American household.

With the mass production—and resultant cheapening—of televisions and the quick dissemination through all economic levels of American society, the television received a permanent position in the American family room. That place, not incidentally, is on what becomes the main wall of the space with all the room’s furniture pointed towards it.

The television’s privileged place in the family room is not only because of the cost it once held, but also its value placed on the television. According to one survey, the average American consumes 28 hours per week of television viewing, which in one respect is the equivalent of a part-time job.

I have a habit of cycling through roommates fairly quickly, so every few months I post an ad on Craigslist and hold potential roommate interviews. One of the more notable interviews was with a pharmaceuticals salesman in his mid-twenties. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend, who he had been living with, and essentially had no belongings with the exception of a 50-inch flat screen TV.

Oddly, he presented this fact as a selling point, as though I would jump on the possibility of being in the midst of such a monster television. He was wrong, of course. I refused to have the television be the centerpiece of my living room. Ironically enough, I hadn’t realized that no matter what the size, the television would invariably be the centerpiece.

A Small PlaceI just finished a book--an extended essay, really--called A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid. It's classified as a memoir of globalization, or, globalization from the perspective of the globalized.

What I found most interesting about it initially were the ideas of place in contrast to J.B. Jackson's vernacular landscape. (Clearly I thought of this book in the context of 'A Sense of Place,' another class). In short, Jackson's thoughts on the landscape are Adam Smith-like in that people, individually but in concert, create the built environment, and the built environment then affects the people in certain, complex ways.

Kincaid's view, however, in the context of British colonization of Antigua (a small, isolated, surrounded on all sides by ocean place), is that outside forces can dramatically influence and shape the place more than the people who live there, or the people who are in the majority.

Following the previous session of 'Travel Classics,' and the discussion of The Tempest, I began to think of Kincaid's A Small Place in a different light. Caliban's possession of the colonizer's language reflects an entire discourse on globalization and language. Kincaid at one point discusses the inevitable tension that the only language she knows, the only language she can express her feelings about the power politics of this small island nation is in the language of the powerful colonizers.

Bringing all of this together into The Tempest, there is certainly a dynamic being played out between the construction of place and the displays of power, all in the context of this small island in the Mediterranean.