EdwardMorec's blog

Vietnam: My top travel destination

I was introduced generally to place studies and the idea of a “sense of place” my freshman year in a Met Studies class called “Cities in a Global Context.”  A lot of the theorizing about place in that class had to do with divisions of space.  What are the places for poor people? How are they kept there?  How do inequalities between places in the same city contribute to its overall sense of place?  I was attracted to these questions and the very “real world”, fact heavy readings.  In the context of that experience, this class has been a good compliment and a sort of book end on my University carrier (I took Cities first semester freshman year).  In a sense of place, we really looked at what it means to have a sense of place in some very abstract ways, not necessarily needing to apply our studies to pressing questions of politics, sociology, etc.

Like many NYU students, I came from an entirely different place to this University and city.  I find I’m never more aware of place than when I first get back to Oakland or when I arrive back in NY for school.  Unknowingly, I’ve often put the same cognitive work that we studied in this class.  That is, trying to uncover what sense a place gives me and how it does so.  I am still trying to define New York as a place for myself and that’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to stay.  Thus far, my experiences here have always been conditioned by being in college.  I want to see if living here without writing papers, reading academic books too quickly and stressing about deadlines will allow me to see some different side of the city (if, of course, my future work doesn’t provide some of the same restrictions).  I have also never spent a whole summer in NY and feel like there might be a different feel to the place that I want to tap into.

Beyond the near future, I have a few travel fantasies mapped out.  The one that’s most probable is going to South Africa for the World Cup next year (since my dad is planning this, it has a good chance of actually happening).  Some day down the line, I would like to take a long Eurasian trip.  It would involve starting in Poland to see some historical sites, taking the Trans-Siberan Railroad to Vladivostok, and wandering down through China to Hong Kong, Vietnam and maybe other parts of Southeast Asia.  Where I will get the funds or time for this trip, I do not know.  I just like the idea of working my way from country to county, taking in a rush of different experiences and ending up Vietnam, where I’ve wanted to go for a long time.

In this week's LiteratureBeat, we talk to NYU Sociology student Edward Morec. His new piece "Objectifying New York" was just published on PlaceStudies.com and it chronicles a sort-of scavenger hunt he did around NY inspired by Paul Auster's City of Glass. We caught up with him at an empanada stand in Alphabet City.

LiteratureBeat: What was the creative genesis of this project?

Edward Morec: Well, I read City of Glass, and I read Ian Frazier's collection, and I kind of wanted to find a way to interact with the city instead of just describing it. [takes bite of empanada] Finding or buying random items seemed to be a convenient and interesting way of doing so.

LB: How did you choose the route that you took?

EM: Well, first I was going to go to all 5 boroughs in one day and collect items. Then, I got sick and didn't think I was up to that and decided to go from the top of the Bronx to the bottom of Staten Island as a...[chewing]..sort of North/South axis exploration. Then, it ended up taking so long that I just settled with making it to Staten's North Shore and turning around.

LB: How did the books you've read recently influence the style of your post?

EM: None, everything was totally original! [laughs] The matter-of-fact style of Frazier and the sort of stream-of-consciousness feel of Colson Whitehead were definitely influencing me while writing. Since the physical project was about getting random objects, it made sense to string together a bunch of loosely connected observations in my prose.

LB: In the section on Chinatown, you mention there's a good story about a statue?

EM: Yeah, the statue of Lin Zexu. This is a story I first heard on an NYU sponsored tour of Chinatown, actually. General Zexu fought the, uh, hang on [buys Snapple]...um, during the Opium Wars, he resisted the British and became a local hero to the Fujianese. So, when the Fujianese [Editor's note; Fujianese people are from Fujian Province in China which is next to Guang Dong Province and near Hong Kong, the traditional sources of Chinese immigration to New York] started arriving on East Broadway in the 80s and 90s, the city was worried that they were mixed up in drug trafficking. [takes a drink] Giuliani's administration sponsored the construction of the state as an anti-drug message and set it facing East Broadway with the inscription "Hero in the War on Drugs." So it's kind of a celebration of the Fujianese, but also a quasi racist PSA. Plus the Fujianese turned out to be less likely to be drug dealers than the Cantonese.

LB: Oh Giuliani, those were the days. From your writing it seemed you know Chinatown pretty well.

EM: Yeah, I lived at NYU's Lafayette dorm for two years. I guess I wanted to contrast my new discoveries with an area that I knew well. It was also where I planned ahead what I was going to acquire. I really like the area and choose Lafayette. That's when I started taking Cantonese and thought it would be like studying abroad or something.

LB: How did that go?

EM: Bad. [laughs] I never learned enough in class to be confident enough to order stuff in Canto or anything like that.

LB: Why was that?

EM: That's really a whole other interview....

LB: Okay. Thanks for speaking to us today

EM: Sure, you should really try the beef empanada.

I started at Woodlawn station, the end of the no. 4 train, next to the southeast corner of Van Cortlandt park and the neighborhood of Norwood.  Actually, I started in Alphabet City, but for the sake of this final, I’ll purport to have started in the Bronx.  Next to the Woodlawn stop (which is only modestly near Woodlawn the neighborhood) there is a large construction site bounded by a stone wall that contains a few waterfalls.  It has that slightly disturbing look of soulless luxury known to suburban office complexes across the U.S.  Below it, there is a slice of park that seems too new and bright for the Bronx.

I thought if I went far north in the Bronx I would end up in an Irish or Italian neighborhood full of single family homes.  Instead, starting at the corner of Gun Hill road and Jerome Ave. there is an area that looks suspiciously like all the other parts of the Bronx I’ve seen.  Jerome Ave. has bright colored awnings, cheap prices, and Latin American food.  As I walk along, people try to keep me informed about the latest cell phone prices.  Most of the people on the street are black and latino.  The most visible white people are bikers who whip around the slice of park (seemingly) as part of a larger exploration of the vast Van Cortlandt area.  I would guess that it is usually busy, but the nice weather made it an especially good time for people to chat, cruise, and observe their kids playing in the park. 

The Colossus of New York feels like Colson Whitehead took a sledgehammer to Auster’s city of glass and is sifting through the shards.  Hardly any two or three consecutive sentences are about the same thing, yet the order of his thoughts is mainly sill clear.  He wants to inform on a different milieu for every site he visits.  Regardless of these variations, visiting each of the places starts to sound like reading Ulysses.  There are too many focal points for attention, emotions emanating from the citizens, and architecture worth worrying about.  The hustle and bustle of the city (or any city) is, of course, an all too common topic.  Whitehead seems to want to up the ante by humanizing every bustling person he can, but only has about two sentences to do it in.

City life is characterized by small encounters and brief flashes of meaning.  We can only catch momentary glimpses of the frowns or smiles of the people we pass on the street.  We have to make personality judgments from snippets of conversation.  Or, from the favored urban personal announcement: fashion.  Whitehead doesn’t spend too much time on this issue except to occasionally notice some pinstripes or heels.  As he walked around developing this narrative, clothing must have influenced his reading of New Yorkers.  Would you see the same weariness, frustration or tourist naiveté if the colors, shapes, and quality of the subject’s outfits were different?  Attire is another type of armor one puts on to strike out into the battlefield of a place like Broadway.  The goal could be to stand out, to make the most of the momentary glances.  Or, it could be to disappear into the crowd of suits and escape any analysis.

Sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the city makes people hardened to the nuances and emotions emanating from others.  It would be too much of a tax on the brain to focus on everyone and instead strangers become a shiftless mass.  In the small town, people have the luxury (or burden) of paying attention to the people around them and noticing all the slight differences.  Whitehead seems to be fighting this urge as he tries to dig into the psyches of the figures in the crowd.  He even unites characters who should be separated by urban anonymity like the woman on the bridge and her voyeur.  The question might be, if we usually cannot be like Whitehead and have our filters up, does the stuff we block out still carry weight?  It seems that, to Whitehead, the disappointments, small victories and hopes of New Yorkers are what builds up the place.  The buildings themselves wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the narcissism and hubris of designers and business types.  Even if there is a safety mechanism that allows us to turn it opaque, Whitehead sees a city of glass with struggles and obsessions on display.  His book constructs a security glass portrait of the city, with individuals contributing little connecting diamond shards of meaning.

Adding to Baltimore's Beauty?

Ian Frazier finds a sense of the places he's in not by static observation, but through interaction.  He talks to the colorful people he finds, travels around by foot, and sometimes alters his environment.  His prime method for doing so (at least as recounted in Gone to New York)  is taking bags out of trees.    He recounts how he and his friends would travel to all five Burroughs detaching wayward bags from their resting spots.  In his little way, he was leaving a part of himself everywhere he went with snagger in hand.  He recounts how he and his friends were hardly ever challenged.  I would imagine the city begin to seem open to their manipulation, a giant project they could be part of.  

Though most people approved, the project is a highly public and subjective method of acquiring sense of place.  There's actually a blog, bagsintrees.com, that glorifies the bags they see stuck in trees around Baltimore.  It's unclear from a cursory skim if they've read Frazier's “Bags in Trees: A Retrospective”, but they do have a banner saying “Stop Bette Midler.”  Let's say that the bagintrees bloggers and Frazier lived in the same city.  It's easy to imagine an encounter between their contradictory senses of place.  A blogger is taking a picture of a bag stuck in a tree and thinking about how the bag/tree combination makes the whole area special and attractive.  Meanwhile, Frazier comes down the street with his snagger and takes away the bag in the name of urban beautification.  After the inevitable battle, would both sides feel robbed of the feeling of connection to their environment their projects give them?  Probably more likely, it would become for Frazier another one of the anecdotes he tells of places to illuminate them and make them real for himself and his readers.  

Personally, I agree with Frazier that bags in trees look really ugly and that New York (or any city) is better off without them.  Like Frazier, I have some experience in unorthodox projects involving trees and poles.  The last two summers I helped glean fruit in Oakland, California.  We found donors and traveled around the city with (already manufactured) fruit pickers getting as much as we could (turned out to be a lot) to donate.  Looking specifically for a city's trees (and other produce-bearing plants) yields a different sense of place.  Oakland has a Mediterranean climate and tons of fruit trees grow, but people don't usually think of taking advantage of them.  Going around cleaning made everyone involved see a new potential in their city and gave them new ways of interacting with it.  Frazier's work convincingly shows how our senses of place are not just a function of the areas we inhabit, but how we've lived in those spaces.  

How many strolls around the upper west side until this appears?

            In City of Glass, characters use New York to exorcise inner ghosts.  Quinn is haunted by tragedy in his past that he wants to forget.  He accomplishes this by walking impulsively, letting the city’s reality become his.  Peter Stillman (Sr.) attempts to map out his theological obsessions with strange, jagged trips around the upper west side. 

            One of the clichés of New York is that it is an alienating city, that it’s so big and full of people that one necessarily feels small and lost.  Or, maybe less dramatically, one doesn’t feel as much homeliness or comfort as in the quiet small town.  In Auster’s writing, however, it is hard to tell if alienation is imposed upon the characters or if they (or other lost souls in NY) have just found a big canvas to paint their obsessions and angst upon.  Quinn (whether himself, Auster or otherwise) never has any problem getting around the city and the book details some of his travels.  Stillman seems to be really losing it, but still expertly navigates the grid. 

            Personally, I’ve never felt the alienation that so many associate with the city.  It’s always felt wide open with possibility.  I feel more oppressed by small places that have little to do and options for escape or change.  There is, of course, a real sense of dread and loss of identity in City of Glass.  The lesson is not, I believe, that these feelings were created by New York, but that the city allows these things to be laid out bare.  Hence, it is a “city of glass.”

The novel’s characters can’t hide from the things that haunt them in New York; instead, they attempt to conquer their demons on its streets.  The city is a sort of existential battlefield for them.  How successful they are is questionable, but their strivings become etched in the complicated, yet transparent structure that Auster wants us to discover. 

Graffiti on the Israeli Security Wall by British artist Banksy

In Tuan’s discussion of homeland he talks about the importance of boundary and time to a nation’s sense of place.  Viewed objectively all countries (except maybe Islands like Britain) are pieces of land connected to larger masses of land that humans have arbitrarily designated as separate.  To make the divisions “real” walls, checkpoints and landmarks are erected between nations and territories. They range from relatively friendly markers of difference (like a Welcome to Illinois sign) to imposing guards against outsiders (like the Israeli Security Wall or militarized stretches of the U.S-Mexico border).

Another method of emphasizing borders that Tuan mentions is going to war with neighbors.  Many countries have habitual “border skirmishes” with other countries.  Full blown wars break out to determine the exact nature of borders.  The people of these countries are thus made to work actively for the definition of their own borders.  Often times, these fights don’t go anywhere.  India and Pakistan keep fighting over Kashmir but the border is still about as ambiguous as it was at partition.  In Korea, superpowers collided and the end result was a retreat back to basically the same border that had been established before fighting began.  The people of North and South must have, however, felt the importance of that border much more intensely after so many fought and died for it.

According to Tuan, the experience of homeland also has a temporal dimension.  The history that has happened in certain boundaries lends a credibility to a nation as a entity.  The land evokes a past and transcends its present form for the patriot.  This aspect can be very important to the border fights I mentioned earlier.  When Hitler occupied the Rhineland, he argued he was reclaiming a land that was rightfully german.  He claimed he was trying to draw boundaries around an area that contained a certain historical continuity that was essential for a complete German state.  It was, however, just the first step in drive to put all lands (and the future itself) under Nazi control.

One of the strangest and scariest combinations of land, war and history in recent times was Pol Pot’s attempt to re-imagine Cambodian society.  Once in power, he declared it to be “year zero” and sought to move people away from anything that had the burden of modern history.  The cities were emptied, intellectuals, teachers, and other bearers of history were murdered.  Pol Pot moved his people to large forced labor camps in the jungle partially inspired by the nature romanticism of Rousseau and China’s Great Leap Forward.  This hellish utopian project sought to remake history with a change of locale and plenty of bloodshed.  I’ve heard some of the work camps were bordered with mines to stop anyone from escaping their agrarian paradise.  Border conflict with Cambodia’s neighbor, Vietnam, lead to the end of Pot’s reign (but not life) when the Vietnamese swiftly subdued the Cambodian military and took over.

Yi-Fu Tuan seeks to illuminate the physical and psychological processes that lead to an appreciation of space and place.  According to him, people don’t just experience an objective reality of landscape or built environment.  Instead, their experiences are a result of an negotiation between outside forces and internal dispositions.  Little children often do not see the connections between locations that adults take for granted.  In the early stages of development, the relative location of objects does not seem fixed.  For many other groups , occupation, culture, and impairments like blindness change the way that space and place are conceived and appreciated.

For me, the mode of transportation has always had an impact on how I experience a space or place.  Obviously, there is a big difference between flying over a country and driving over it.  I also think that there’s a large discrepancy between traveling by car or by foot.  I prefer to experience new places, even cities where one may be driving pretty slow,  by walking through them.  Walking has a number of commonly cited advantages: you can take in the sounds and smells of a new place, get exercise and stop if you notice something interesting.

Walking also gives you a unique way to experience space and how places fit into it.  Driving between points A and B may take 15 minutes.  Walking between points A and B may take 30 or more.  That extra time is experience physically and gives the walker a different perspective on the size and feel of the area he or she is traversing.  The places that are embedded in any space become more illuminated in their own size and relation to other places.  I always knew Manhattan was a long island and about how its neighborhoods fit together, but those things were never as clearly in focus for me as when I walked the length of the island a few years ago.

Walking, at least for me, helps create a certain mastery over space and place.  When walk somewhere (especially if it’s a long distance) I feel empowered, something i rarely feel on public transportation or driving in a car.  Because it is only my own body propelling me, it emphasizes my ability to access the areas I want.  A neighborhood starts to feel like “mine” when I walk around it easily.

When people’s ability to walk is limited, it can be a strong source of dis-empowerment.  In the Jim Crow era, African-Americans could sometimes not walk on the sidewalk when a white person was on it.  They also might get into trouble for walking into the wrong neighborhood.  In many ghettos there are streets or buildings that people “can’t” walk on or by because of their identity or the general danger of the area.  In the Palestinian Territories, many Palestinians can’t walk over to Israel, where the jobs are.

The number 7 train cuts across the borough of Queens.  It overshadows a wide array of neighborhoods from the renovated warehouses of Long Island City to the bustling Chinatown in Flushing.  Before it reaches Shea Stadium, the train looks down upon possibly its most complex and frenzied domain: Jackson Heights.  Jackson Heights is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country and one of New York’s most unique.

The neighborhoods main drag, a few miles of Roosevelt Avenue, lies right under the rusting metal frame of the no.7 line.  When you descend from any of the various stops that serve the neighborhood, its most chaotic foot is always forward.  There are sidewalk food vendors making amazing meat and powered by shabby briefcase sized generators.

Next to their carts, people are selling libros en español and behind them travel agencies and money transfer businesses are offering deals for your Latin American country of choice.  If you get off in the lower numbers (say 69th street or 74th) you might see Korean churches, Indian buffets or some Himalayan cuisine.

As the crosstreets get higher, Roosevelt is more and more Hispanic, but with no particular orientation.  There are Mexican bakeries and pop music stores along with Ecuadorian and Colombian restaurants and Puerto Rican bodegas.  To cut through the confusion, restaurants adorn themselves with their national colors and large signs announcing that they offer “comida tipica ____”.

Not to be outdone, South Asians have staked out a “Little India” near the crucial junction of Broadway and Roosevelt (and the 7 and E, F, R, and V trains).  It is not right under the “subway” like Roosevelt, but the 74th st. platform extends it talons in the direction of 37th avenue.  37th is the area’s more subdued and Indian thoroughfare.

Godard's alienating future

Jackson’s definition of landscape sets him apart. He sees a landscape as the product of the interaction between human intentions and the natural world they are confronted with. He takes issue with the environmentalist's glorification of the untouched natural world. However, he also dislikes construction that has nothing to do with its surroundings. A practical approach to the need for human expansion and its natural constraints appeals to him. His famous appreciation for the vernacular seems to be about Americans’ practical adaptation of the conditions they were given. Jackson applauds the shaping of landscape to human designs, but still not approve of projects that want to wholly escape the environment they are based in.

Written under the pseudonym Ajax, “Living Outdoors with Ms. Panther” is a bitterly sarcastic send-up of modern architecture and futuristic design. It contrasts vividly with the more neutral and expansive discussions of Jackson’s other essays. Instead, it tries to show how modern notions of efficiency and cleanliness leave people hopelessly alienated from the landscape. It reminded me, in a way, of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic movie Alphaville. That titular city is a futuristic society where the messiness of emotion, culture and individuality are expertly discarded. It predicted the sci-fi dystopia tropes of over-perfection and enforced order that show up in many later (and lesser) movies. It’s interesting to note that Godard shot Alphaville in Paris in the 1960s without constructing any “futuristic” sets.  Instead, the modernist architecture of the time served well enough to create the movie’s antiseptic world.

In “Living Outdoors”, Ms. Panther thinks she is connected with nature but is really sequestered away from it. In Alphaville, residents think they live in a perfect society, but have lost access to their humanity. Ms. Panther’s house may be located in the middle of nature, but is engineered to filter out the messiness of the surrounding environment. Alphaville legislates against the messiness of human emotion.

Strangely enough, there is a suburb of São Paulo named Alphaville after the film. It is a collection of gated communities with high security and the latest surveillance technology intended to allow the well-off to escape the city’s crime and congestion. Like Ms. Panther’s house it is a sterile high-tech bunker that serves to remove residents from the surrounding environment. Replace the Connecticut wilderness for chaotic third world sprawl and you still have people trying to escape, instead of be part of, their landscape.

(Teresa Caldeira’s City of Walls is a really interesting examination of the social and spacial divisions of São Paulo and mentions Alphaville).