jamie's blog

Overexposure Fine. This may be obvious. It’s cliché. This is my last real class. I’m graduating in a few short weeks and flipped out. I took a photojournalism class, and a computer programming one, neither of which required the writing of any papers, which is to me what distinguishes a class as real. I was worried that this class, in the beginning, was going to be too architecture-y. Too urban design-y. I took another class with Steve last year, and I liked it, so I signed up for this one without really analyzing the syllabus. Then when we started with Kunstler, I though, oh shit. But after that, things got better. We’re Gallatin, so we kind of tailor things to fit our interests. Analyzing city layouts? No, thanks. Being a little floozier, discussing the “broader” issues, skimming over specifics—that I can do. It’s my strong suit. But that Tuan book, Jesus. Hard to read, but got me thinking the most. I’m writing an article based on my blog posting for that week. Is that book teetering toward metaphysics? I don’t know enough about it. I want to read his one about pets. Anyhow, now it’s suddenly really hard for me to write probably our easiest assignment, so open-ended I can do anything. Isn’t this how it always works? This might be the last academically-oriented piece (though that itself is a bit of a stretch) I ever write. Sounds daunting, like I should do something really profound. Instead I’m practically writing a diary entry. Okay, here’s a suggestion from Steve: talk about my summer travel plans. My summer travel plans consist of traveling around the city, in search of amusement, and money, which are oftentimes tied together. Three summers ago, I was living in this god-awful apartment off the Myrtle-Wykoff stop on the L, deep in the heart of Bushwick—real Bushwick, not that pansy McKibben loft shit by Morgan Ave—in this two-bedroom apartment with four people, one of whom slept permanently on the futon in the living room/hallway, and we didn’t have AC. And it was hot. It was city hot, when the asphalt is all glittery and it makes your head woozy when you walk and the thumping bass from all the parked hot rods throbs to your bones and your thighs stick to each other and the subway seats and the fucking corduroy futon cover. So my roommate Will and I are on the futon, with one big fan blowing air from the window in the far bedroom our way, and we’re as close to naked as we can be without offending each other, and we are dying. We are at the point where we are rolling ice cubes all over our bodies, in the unsexiest fashion imaginable, each aiming a little handheld dollar store fan at each other to spread the cool water. Christ, it was miserable beyond belief. I felt like I was physically wilting, like the blood was evaporating from my veins and leaving my empty sack of skin on the sweaty futon. I thought I was dead. It sounds stupid now. Will and I don’t live on Gates Ave anymore, or even with each other. We live a few blocks apart, in two apartments that both have AC, at least in our bedrooms. We still talk about the ice cube day all the time, though.

I: Hello, Jamie.

J: Hello, interviewer.

I: How are you today?

J: I’m fine, thanks, how are you?

I: I have to admit, I’m a bit taken aback. What the hell were you thinking?

J: Excuse me?

I: I want to know where you get off writing an academic paper about dumplings.

J: Well, it certainly wasn’t my intent to offend anyone. This is the last final project I may ever have, and I wanted to have a little fun with it. I’ve always loved exploring far-off parts of the city, and I love dumplings. It just so happens that some of the best dumplings are found in the outskirts of Queens. It’s an adventure to get there, an adventure to order what you want when there’s a language barrier, and an adventure for your taste buds all in one.

I: So you fancy yourself some kind of urban culinary swashbuckler? Why are you so fixated on trekking out to the end of the subway line just for some snacks?

A single xiao long bao: commonly referred to as "soup dumpling" The best part about riding the 7 train is that it goes outside. Unlike most New York City subway lines, which are confined to dank, underground recesses, the 7 train, which cuts east-west from Times Square to Flushing, Queens, bursts out into the fresh air somewhere around the Queens border at Vernon Boulevard. From that point, as you barrel across Queens, rooftop scenery flashes by, and people look at the windows in lieu of books. It is exhilarating, being out in the open like this—like a monorail at an amusement park, or a double-decker bus without the tour guide. The 7 is not the only train to see the light of day—the A train, the N, the Q, the D, the F, the J, M, and Z, plus a handful of others – make it above ground at some point in their journey, usually towards the end, in the nether regions of the outer boroughs. And for those willing to ride it out, the treasures at the outskirts of the city can be great.

Urban Loneliness?It’s a Sunday night, and I’m home alone. Today was slow, in a good way, and quiet. I went outside for only a moment, with my hair unbrushed, to get milk for my late breakfast. Some Sundays are like this. They are lonesome and quiet, though not lonely, per se. Other Sundays are noisy and active, a day of errands and brunch and people-watching on the main drag of your neighborhood. Early on, Colson Whitehead in The Colossus of New York tells us that “the city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone” (8). And this is true.

There are varying levels of alone here, each with different consequences. There is the most typical incarnation of alone—solitude, often occurring indoors, in the private realm. This is usually a very quiet type of alone, and it can be both calming and depressing. Then there is the type of alone that occurs in the presence of other people, often in public places, which can be disconcerting. The sensation of being surrounded by other living, breathing subjects (and potentially by visual, auditory, or physical stimuli as well), and still feeling alone, may be a particularly urban condition, though it is difficult to say for sure. Finally, there is the environmental/existential kind of alone—in which residents of any given place feel isolated, lost or small within their surroundings. This type of alone is not limited specifically to urban areas, though, as Whitehead hints, the scope and size of many cities may amplify the sensation of being alone.

A few months ago, New York Magazine ran a cover story with the headline “Is Urban Loneliness A Myth?” The article poses this theory: “Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.” In short, alone-ness does not necessarily equate to loneliness. Whitehead, who was born and raised in New York City, seems to understand this. The New York he describes is alternately isolating and inclusive, overwhelming yet simple. People, landmarks, trains and homes come and go, sometimes with us and sometimes merely around us. As Whitehead notes in the chapter “Morning”: Take your eyes off this city and it will play tricks on you.

Chicago's Lake Shore Drive In Ian Fraiser’s own words, his hometown, Hudson, Ohio, “was made for leaving.” Hudson is encircled by the Ohio Turnpike and bordered by other interstates, so that “the distant sound of traffic on the turnpike was part of the aural background of the town” itself (188). I am familiar with this type of town: suburban Chicagoland is filled with them, towns and villages sprung from the empty spaces between highways, where the soccer fields and jogging paths lie just below the roar of thousands and thousands of motors rushing by. Many of these suburbs are, admittedly, ugly. They are a sort of halfway point—not rural enough to resemble the Midwestern small-town ideal Frasier rhapsodizes about, and not urban enough to sustain a vibrant culture of their own. Hop on the interstate for half an hour in either direction and you’ll hit either downtown Chicago or a cornfield.

Even Chicago proper is surrounded by highways in a way that most of New York City isn’t. Route 55 turns into magnificent Lake Shore Drive, which just barely keeps the Chicago skyline from spilling into Lake Michigan, from the southernmost tip of Hyde Park all the way north, up through the Museum District and the Gold Coast, past the giant ferris wheel at Navy Pier and the gay clubs of Boystown— past all of Chicago, actually—LSD doesn’t end until its six lanes have been winnowed down to two and abruptly dead end in the northern suburb called Evanston. Lake Shore Drive is by far the most scenic route, giving drivers the full-frontal view of the city on one side of the car and the glowering lake on the other. On the other side, Chicago is bundled by the Kennedy and the Dan Ryan Expressways, cutting east-west arteries through the uglier parts of the city, where manufacturing warehouses sprawl out for miles. Manhattan, though the necessity of space, has been built upwards, while Chicago spreads out horizontally, indefinitely.

In the New York outsiders think of as New York—that being Manhattan—the highways aren’t like the ones Frasier describes or the ones I know from Chicago. Yes, the West Side Highway and FDR Drive race up either side of the island, constricting everything in the middle like a corset. But these busy roads exist more as a part of the city—they are flush with other streets, and parts of the WSH are even open to pedestrian use. They are not raised up high, on massive concrete support beams that cause the roads to look like floating tentacles above the city, encircling the skyscrapers in a literal steel vice. The highways in other boroughs—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, for example, are more like the Chicago-style highways. I live in Brooklyn, block away from the BQE, actually, and I walk under one of those enormous support bridges almost every day. I can hear the engines of thousands of cars and trucks above me, feel the vibration of the weight of tons of moving machinery.

A few paragraphs after writing that Hudson, Ohio, is a place made for leaving, Frasier writes that when he returned to the town after college, he felt “geographically well-situated and defiantly at home.” Although the two sentiments at first seem contradictory, I know what he means.

The flâneur's arcade

In the city, we walk. We don't have cars to drive in, and public transportation isn't always reliable. We walk because it is often faster and easier than other modes of transportation. We walk because we things are close enough. We walk because we like to be outside, even if there aren't pastoral fields or forests surrounding us. Sometimes we're walking in a straight line, A to B without detours or distraction, and sometimes we're strolling, leisurely, maybe with a destination in mind but no timeframe and no set route to get there. This kind of walking evokes the French term flâneur (from the verb flâner-- to stroll), a term developed and used by Charles Baudelaire to describe "a person who walks the city in order to experience it." Flâneurs are not in a rush. They are walking to absorb the essence and aesthetic of a city. They participate in the actions of a city, and may interact with other people in their space, but flâneurs are also removed: they observe the city, remaining somewhat detached at all times. Quinn, in City of Glass, is not a flâneur. He is certainly a walker, and the distance he covers on foot through New York City is impressive. While trailing the elder Stillman, Quinn loops through block after block of Manhattan, in an eerie letter-shaping pattern. Later, after losing Stillman, Quinn embarks on his longest jaunt, from the Upper West Side all the way to the Financial District and back again. He does not have a destination, per se, nor a route, which in some ways resembles the actions of a flâneur. But on this walk, Quinn is not observing the city or the people in it. He is not interested in the aesthetic or the essence of Manhattan as a place; he is instead in the grips of a mental breakdown. He does take the time to pause and write an account of the city's "tramps, down-and-outs, shopping-bag ladies, drifters and drunks," but says nothing of the city itself or anyone who isn't a societally marginalized figure. In the end of his diary entry, Quinn actually quotes Baudelaire: "Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not" (from Baudelaire's poem "Anywhere Out of the World") (168). While Quinn's use of the quote in his own text is important in the context of his mental state, so too is Auster's (the "real" one, the author) invoking of the man who coined the phrase flâneur. Even though Quinn may not embody the character of a flâneur, he is still rooted in the tradition of those who walk.

Clam Chowder @ Captain Parker's, West Yarmouth, MA: A meal unto itself

Most people probably don't think of Cape Cod as a premier Spring Break destination. (Well, some people do). In March, it's cold. Very cold. And due to the Cape's highly seasonal economy, many stores and restaurants aren't open until May. But that didn't stop my friends and I from hopping a Chinatown bus to Boston and driving out to spend a week in at the Commodore Inn in West Harwich. It was quiet, chilly, and completely lovely. One of our only scheduled activities during the week was eating.

Leaving your hometown and eating elsewhere raises interesting questions about the relationship between place and food. Specific memories, senses, and associations are deeply assigned to certain spaces, but this sensation is highly subjective. According to Tuan, when a space feels familiar, it has become a place-- but the definition of space and place vary by individual. Beyond that, every individual's personal sense of place is ringed by a haze of mythical space, which is the "fuzzy area of defective knowledge surrounding the empirically knowns; it frames pragmatic space." Mythical space is the area with which we are familiar, but weren't necessarily taught, and it is often too abstract to be illustrated. For some places, physical structures are representation enough (i.e., the Empire State Building = NYC), but for many others, it is fleeting sensations and memories that describe them best.

With relation to food, this mythical space can be understood as the knowledge that certain regions have certain specialties: in the US alone, think of chowder in the Northeast, muffalettos in New Orleans, or bagels in New York. We may not like these foods or ever have eaten them, but our inherent knowledge that they represent a place can convince us of their place value. We need not necessarily consume these foods to feel connected to a place-- oftentimes, the mere mention of them ("imagined consumption”) is enough. The consumption, or the idea of the consumption of these foods can become a physical representation of an “intimate experience of place.”

When I was in Cape Cod last week, I found myself affected by a common travel-diet sensation: the desire to eat foods representative of the region, i.e., chowder or stuffed quahogs. On a superficial level, it's simple: I can't get quahogs in New York, therefore, I should take advantage of them on the Cape. But after a few days, I began to question my subconscious motivation: am I ordering X, Y, or Z because I want to, or because I think I should? Because by eating this bowl of clam chowder I can shift my experience of Cape Cod from a space to a place?

A big part of why we travel is not only to participate in new, novel experiences, but also to become a part of older, more established ones. Foods are one of the most tangible manifestations of mythical space. Eating a black-and-white cookie in New York or deep-dish pizza in Chicago is a simple way to make those spaces more familiar--that is, to make them a place.

My sentiments exactly

That's right.

I said it once, and I’ll say it again. I hate children. Fine—maybe hate is a too strong a word. I strongly, deeply dislike children of all ages, from infanthood to teenagedom. You’re probably judging me for this. That’s ok. I understand, and I don’t want to get into the variety of reasons I feel this way. But try to imagine my dismay when I had to read a whole chapter in Space and Place called “Space, Place and the Child.”

At first, I was not pleased. I actually thought about skipping this chapter. But I started reading, and was pleasantly surprised with some of the questions (and answers) Tuan poses. I’ve never been interested in childhood development, believing that children, due to their limited mental capacities, can offer adults little in the way of intellectual analysis. But I was actually fascinated to learn some basic facts about perception development—for example, for weeks after birth, infants physically cannot focus their eyes on an object in their direct line of vision. Imagine being able to see—but not clearly—during the most intense period of sensory introduction a human will ever experience. The infant’s visual space “lacks structure and permanence. Objects in it are impressions; hence they tend to exist for the infant only so long as they stay in his visual field. The shapes and sizes of objects lack constancy,” explains Tuan (21). Imagine being surrounded by virtually endless stimuli for the first time, while not being able to focus clearly, and lacking the ability to express, through either language or motion, your lack of focus. If any one of us today were to be thrust into a position where we could neither see clearly, speak, nor move (to say nothing of mentally comprehending what was going on around us), we most likely would not survive. And yet all of us went through this period early in our lives.

In our adult lives, we rely on our vision constantly. Objects are stable, clear, and ordered. We have a sense of perspective, and can even perceive things we cannot physically see (i.e., the horizon, or the outstretched ocean). We then oftentimes combine our visual experiences with our other senses to “experience” a place more fully: we use words (spoken or written) to describe the place, thus fitting the place into an even more ordered structure. Infants and young children are not capable of doing this—does that somehow make their experience of a place more organic? Without the restraints of an ordered sensory system, infants are free to exist within a space that is fluid and undefined.

I am not entirely sure how social and medical scientists have been able to trace the sensory development of very young children, particularly those unable to talk or write. I must admit to a completely unexpected and sudden fascination with the lives of young children. I still don’t like them, but I am intrigued by their development.

Wares at the Brooklyn Flea I have trouble staying in one place. I took a trip to the Brooklyn Flea, where there should be more than enough visual stimulus to keep me occupied. And there is, but that didn't stop me from walking the streets of DUMBO for most of my day instead. As I wandered down cobblestone streets to the open waterfront, I realized that a place and its surrounding environment must be taken together to contextually understood. The market itself is enclosed, indoors, but the area outside of it stretches outside across vast parks and rivers and bridges. When connected, the relationship between the two spaces illustrates a longing for rural life, even in an urban environment.

The Brooklyn Flea is a flea market that used to set up outside every weekend in the parking lot of a high school in Fort Greene. It used to close every winter because no one wanted to sit outside all day. But the Flea got so popular that this year, it was relocated to an indoor warehouse space in DUMBO for the winter. This makes the vendors and the customers very happy. The Flea is made up of a motley crew of independent vendors who pay about $100 to reserve a space for the week. There’s a lot of old jewelry, housewares, handmade clothes, and a handful of food booths. In general, everyone co-exists peacefully, though there’s a lot of product overlap. Vendors arrive early, set up their tables, and a few hours later, shoppers come strolling in, milling about with children or lovers or sometimes by themselves. Then, at the end of the day, the vendors clear everything away and the warehouse is empty. It’s a simple setup.

Acorn Sprout

In "Jefferson, Thoreau, and After," Jackson explains the central philosophies behind Jefferson and Thoreau's "distrust of the city," categorized as agrarian (the former) and romantic (the latter). Jefferson's agrarian ideal was rooted in rural society, filled with active and effective citizens whose rural surroundings made interacting with other active citizens easier. Thoreau's ideal relationship is between man and his environment—he wishes to regard "man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than as a member of society" (176). Though these ideas may contrast ideologically, they both subscribe to the notion that an idealized rural or natural landscape will somehow produce a better citizen—in short, they both believed in "the possibility of human perfectibility." This comparison is engaging and entertaining, but then Jackson goes on to conclude that both men idealized utopian landscapes that can no longer exist because it is no longer possible to produce the ideal he calls "the Virtuous Citizen." "Utopias are not supposed to be subject to the vicissitudes of history…the agrarian and the romantic [utopias] dies because there were no longer utopian men to inhabit them," he claims (181). After thoroughly enjoying and agreeing with most of Jackson's analysis up to this point, I found myself a bit taken aback: surely Jackson doesn't really think that the vision of a natural utopia is lost and gone forever? It's still here, just in more fluid ways. People still dream of both agrarian and romantic ways of connecting with the earth: home gardening, for example, home gardening is a huge industry that allows people in all environments to engage, even on a very small scale, with their natural surroundings [NB: this is a link to one of my favorite stores in all of New York, whose motto is "Materials to help you cultivate your ideal environment. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty"]. On a larger scale, projects like Green Roofs for Healthy Cities taps into the pursuit of a natural utopia while working within the limitations of an urban environment; while organizations like World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) prove that there's still an avid interest in agrarianism. Perhaps none of these examples fit into the exact utopian models dreamed by Jefferson or Thoreau (WWOOF certainly wouldn't appeal to the latter, who held a general disdain for farmers), but they do tie into the underlying theme of communing with nature in an honorable way.