4. Waldie

Lakewood Grid Housing

In Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Waldie plays with boundaries in a unique way. Just like the rigid confines of his suburban Southern California community, Lakewood, Waldie established a set form for his writing using guidelines for each chapter. He discusses the grids and patterns of the suburbs and created his own grid with a maximum for each chapter: “No section is longer than a single, double-spaced, typed sheet of paper. That was my grid—the boundaries of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch rectangle of white” (182). Certainly, my short attention span fares better with the short chapters, but I also thought it was an extremely creative way of addressing structure in relation to Lakewood. It showed the way in which his thought process was possibly affected by growing up and living in Lakewood for his entire life so far. Instead of longwinded accounts of the development of the community, Waldie uses the unique form to provide snippets of history, all the while interjecting anecdotes of his neighbors, parents, etc. In the dialogue at the end of the book, he addresses Holy Land as a memoir, saying, “It doesn’t look much like one. And it doesn’t have some of the things memoirs are supposed to have. Holy Land is a memoir of a place more than an account of a life” (181). While it may not look like a traditional memoir, Waldie certainly shares some personal information within the brief yet engaging chapters, among the hard numbers and silly tales. I was particularly interested in the way in which he wove details of his parents’ deaths into his story of Lakewood. He sometimes even appeared to write in the third person about it. He seems so affected by his house and life in Lakewood, and certainly by the reality of continuing to live in his parents’ home after their deaths. While a normally structured and conducted memoir might be a lot to take when writing, or reading, about such a difficult topic, the structure allows for him to only present and deal with his two major losses in pieces. It is as if he finds comfort and encouragement in the self-prescribed grid of his book in the same way he finds comfort within his suburban gridded community.

Port Washington, Long Island

As a born New Yorker with a metropolitan solidarity complex, confronted deeply and many times over, I have always found it impossible to conceive of people having affection for the suburbs. My mother grew up a Long Island baby boomer in a town called Bellmore—her memory set is littered with stories of toy trains, milk men, weekend excursions to other parts of Long Island to see cousins with distinctly ‘50s names (Howie, Stewart, Dale), and her stay-at-home mother—with her many cocktail parties, her homemade trail mix, the year she decided to go to night school only to resign to the notion that her husband’s Mercedes dealership was sufficient to fund the family, her bridge games.

As soon as high school wrapped up, my mother fled to New York City and never looked back. Her brother, upon graduating law school, married and also moved to New York City—14th street (in the ‘80s), actually, a far more adventurous move than my mother had made. But as soon as the first child arrived, he and his wife moved promptly to Port Washington, Long Island, where they would buy a backyard swing set, two cars, a Wheaton Terrier, renovate the basement into a play room, and send a boy and a girl to a school with an emphasis on Hebrew Studies.

It’s understandable—considering the critical mindsets of so many like myself—that DJ Waldie feels he must make a case for the suburbs as pleasant living. Though expressed with a heavy-handed poetic device of muted, yet descriptive nostalgia, Waldie even apologizes for the notions we have so deeply engrained in us about the wasteful sprawl of the suburbs, and their capitalization on a rapidly dwindling American Dream. And yet, some really hold deep respect and admiration for the kind of lifestyle the suburbs have been able to afford their families. My uncle certainly thrives in his environment, even relishes in his daily commute to-and-from his law offices, located in New York City’s Midtown. And though I personally don’t see the appeal, many would.

Granted, there are some suburbs that (now approximately 60 years after their origination) do anything but cultivate an air of happy living. Some suburbs are pockets of immorality, promoters of crime and drug usage, places where kids hang out in 7-11 parking lots, operating under the (sometimes correct) assumption that it’s a more pleasant place than their own home. But my cousins, and everyone I know they know, are happy going (yes) to soccer practice, coming home (yes) to a table of milk and cookies, and doing homework in the family room with one short break to (yes) play fetch with the Terrier in their gated-off 20x20 foot backyard. Albeit routine and subdued, they live the kind of austere, monk-like existence that Waldie so clearly outlines. And they’re happy.

Coping, 1950's style: Pain can easily be covered up and forgotten.Perhaps the biggest tragedy of the suburban experiment is the fact that now two generations of Americans, having fled, look back at these subdivisions with nostalgia. In Holy Land, Waldie presents himself as a character that has deserved to call Lakewood home. He has experienced the place. Part of the collective American experience is mobility and the striving to obtain that mobility, and having that luxury is a way to escape the true experience of place.

Waldie has a collection of real experiences in Lakewood because, instead of fleeing at the first sign of distress, he chose to remain and work through shock, pain, and grief not just within the confines of his hometown, but within the confines of his very own childhood home. Having spent time in Lakewood he has not only garnered a greater appreciation for the town and its history, but also for himself and his own perspective. Although the deaths of his parents are touched upon delicately in the book, his coping mechanisms – such as painting the walls white – demonstrate both a very typical effort to mask the pain and a sincere commitment to his home.

All too often, grief and recovery are treated as fleeting experiences that can be remedied easily or avoided entirely. Waldie chose to experience his hurt in the place in which it was dealt to him. For others, it is easier to simply pack up and go – leave the pain in the place where it feels the most vivid. In doing so, we retreat from our own history and deny ourselves a truly well-rounded experience of ourselves, our homes, and our places. It is easier for some to sugar-coat than to cope. Or, as in this image from Doctor Dan: The Bandage Man, a children’s book from the 1950’s, it is easier to cover it up with a bandage and forget about it. Click for more on the history of this book, which was sold as propaganda for Band-Aid bandages. Appropriately, the brand “Band-Aid” was never mentioned in the children’s story, but the book came with “Six Real Band-Aid Adhesive Bandages!”

I am as guilty of this defense mechanism as anyone, but I admire Waldie’s ability to transcend his own grief in his hometown. After the shock of loss subsided, I could not bear to keep living in Park Slope, so where did I look to move first? The polar opposite: Williamsburg.

damn thats nasty; human cancer

When Lakewood, California was established as a community, it was an escape from the evil world of the city into a holy land of purity and solitude. At least that’s how it was marketed, in reality this city was a man built Mecca, a soulless land, built by soulless people seeking to make a profit on others desperate for a place to rest their head. This matrix like block of land really did not offer a peaceful retreat; instead it furthered the false ideality of a happy suburban life and made people prisoners to a pointless place. Yet the beauty and mystery behind Waldies memoir is that he finds life in a lifeless place and enables one to see that each place has its own special meaning in the hearts of those who inhabit it. Waldie was born into Lakewood and for that reason alone Lakewood is a part of him, as he is a part of it. The feeling of being an integral part of a larger scheme of existence drives the heart and soul of his book, as he connects religion, with family and a sense of place and home. For Waldie, and for most Americans there is a love-hate relationship with the place they come from. No place is perfect, but it is a place none the less, a place that occupies space, and a space that enables life to thrive; a place for babies to be born, for personalities to evolve and expand, a place to learn, a place to breath, a place to exist within a greater body of human beings. But this greater body of human beings is the larger problem behind the seemingly peaceful suburban lifestyle that humans are manipulated into believing is “the good life”. Coming from Santa Monica, California I’m about as close to Lakewood as one could possibly get and yet I barely know that it even exists. This town of 20,000 people or more is nothing in comparison to the super-mega metropolis of Los Angeles. Lakewood, which was, once isolated, is now just a peace in the ever-expanding puzzle of human growth that is draining the natural world of its ability to thrive. So ending this rant of a blog, I have to say that something must be done to stop the ever increasing excess of modern western human existence. How holy can a land be if it is built on the destruction of the natural world, and replaced with the material suburban.

Layers of Past Suburbs

“The critics of the suburbs say that you and I live narrow lies. I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger” (Waldie 94)
In context, this chapter seems a bit out of place. Is it linked to the religious tone of the following anecdote, or an illumination the minutia preceding? Though it, of course, works in both of these ways, a more interesting functions is the way it emphasizes one of the themes Waldie develops even further as the passages near an end: Geography and Geology as a function of fate and God.
Specifically in reference to the water supply, the author takes great care in describing the history, makeup and current happenings of the layers of earth below his town. They are what have come before Lakewood, are what support it, and what the lively suburb will eventually become. Just another layer. Just another slab of stable ground. A slab that is part of the natural, inevitable continuation of the world. This plays into Waldie’s religious world-view where we are all a part of an inconsequential, fleeting world whose sole importance lies in its eternal implications.
This is also interesting when one realizes the connection between his description of the subterranean realm and his suburban home. Layers of sediment seem to warrant similar narrative and description. The territorial wars between salt and fresh water mimic those between different factions of the community. The description of the composition as well as the seismic activity that had so far shaped it resembles the exposition of the materials and history of Lakewood. The city is composed of wood frames, gridded streets, and imported lawn. It came into existence by the divine work of three men, while the tectonic shifts are the inevitable work of nature (or, to some, God).
The way he speaks about both types of events with an air of inevitability, maybe even fate. The events in the town, though emanating from individual desires and free will take on the cadence of biblical verse where all happened and was meant to happen. Additionally, the grid descending from God emphasizes the notion that the limited scope of suburban life that seems so “narrow” is in fact part of a divine plan. This current terrestrial incarnation is only another narrow sliver in the more substantial whole of the physical world. When its time has passed, it will be another layer of earth, reduced to its bare components.

Lakewood, CA

D. J. Waldie's Holy Land is at once memoir and map. Waldie repeatedly references both the concepts of map and grid throughout the text, and in the suburban world he describes, these are nearly interchangable.

One of James Howard Kunstler's major complaints about suburbia is among Waldie's most prized features: the map as grid, drawn before the existence of the terrain it describes. To Kunstler, it is a lie, a hubristic defiance of topography. Waldie instead ascribes a peculiar holiness to the grid, or at least an opportunity for holiness. Many people, including his father, felt its ordering rigidity would create a space allowing, and even enforcing, some habits that other places could not—habits that are not shameful, but family-oriented, and in his case, Catholic.

Waldie's literary map is neither a plan for construction nor a complete description of the town's layout. It is not the map that planners drew up in 1949. It is instead a means of navigation for those unfamiliar with this holy land. His map was constructed according to a grid of rectangles, each of its 316 parts fitting as double-spaced text on a single sheet of paper. This grid defines the space in which he describes another space defined by another grid.

Waldie's grid does not directly correspond to the grid that defines his suburb, but it is a grid by which one can interpret, measure, and attempt to understand its relationships. Waldie allots equal space to each historical passage, vignette, and life story, but not all of these fill up their alloted spaces.

Any useful map has a grid, overlaid regularly (that is, with no regard to topography) across the landscape it describes. Lakewood, though imperfect, is the map realized, an alteration of landscape to conform to a grid, to create a map on the land itself, as exists across America in plots, state lines, and cities, all aligned to the cardinal points of the compass. Sometimes America can appear to be a map of itself.

We divide time up this way, too. Our days are regular over the course of a year, even though sunlight is not. Each day is divided into the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds. Months and years are similarly dependable. Our temporal obligations are to this grid, not to daylight or season or harvest. For example, among our obligations for this course, we are expected to be in 527 715 Broadway from 2:00 to 3:15. These numbers refer to grids which we use to understand our world and our obligations to it.

The spacial and temporal architecture of the holy land is one of regularity and repetition, a shift away from the cycles and spaces that arise out of utility in agriculture and plodding, unplanned urban development. The people that live there have religions, families, jobs, and homes. They have schedules.

Knowing precisely how one is restricted can be liberating. Waldie explored thoughtfully within his grid of 8.5 by 11 inch sheets. Working Americans clamored to Lakewood's grid of 50 by 100 foot lots. These people knew what they were buying, and they knew it would affect them. They knew it operated by different (and maybe more) rules than the places they were coming from. They hoped it would improve their lives, and for some, Waldie suggests, it did. For others, it didn't. The singular grid of the suburb does not define a single possible life, though it may appear to; it instead defines a range of possibilities, conditions for failure and conditions for success. This is reflected in Holy Land by the small personal stories that fit into the grid, and by the historical view of chaotic happenstance, opportunism, idealism, and profiteering that surrounds it.

The architecture of Holy Land shapes its content, as the architecture of the land it describes shapes the lives of those who inhabit it. We may run the risk of Waldie's grid replacing in our minds the physical grid it describes, as we may only be familiar with that grid as mediated by his. As Americans, however, many of us are familiar enough with the type of neighborhood Waldie describes, and so we may better understand our own grids through his; his grid may be not just a map of his own holy land, but of ours. Holy Land is often and easily compared to scripture. Of religious texts I've encountered, Waldie's elliptical and concise writing most closely resembles the Tao Te Ching. Much of that text's popularity is said to lie in the possibilities for interpretation its short yet cryptic sections provide.

The 88th section of Holy Land was for me the most illuminating. It reads, in full:

"Every map is a fiction. Every map offers choices.It's even possible to choose something beautiful."

A possible arrangement of John Cage's Fontana Mix: A musical composition created by overlaying transparent sheets of a line and a grid onto random forms

The Grid Life
While there are several elements of Waldie’s writing that I find commendable and even enviable, the thing that popped out most to me was his ability to further the significance of his story by his peculiar choice of style. His writing is abrupt, slightly chaotic, and cut off in to tiny little chunks. While at first this may look appealing, the short, paragraph long chapters, one soon realizes that the book loses an organic sense of movement because of it. Does that remind us of something he is writing about?

For me, it is clear that Waldie chose to write in such a way because of how it parallels his experiences with suburbia. The unstoppable grid wrote people in to an exacted and measured lifestyle. Everyone’s plot was exactly the same and was therefore repeated over and over and over again. There were too many different people crammed in to houses that looked exactly the same. In this way, Waldie’s writing travels from stories of death, to descriptions of subdivision politics, to poetic statements on life itself in little more than a page. His short chapters mirror the chopped up way of life so prevalent in early suburbia.

As his story suffers from an inability to grow organically, so too does the suburbs. But in this case, Waldie benefits from his stylistic choice as the choppiness of his story only enhances what he is speaking about. As for the suburbs, the repetition and abruptness of gridded-lot lifestyle does little to enhance anything and instead seems to stunt the growth of those who live in it.

Shadows and the outdoors
In The Holy Land, D.J. Waldie's account of suburban life, the author keeps coming back to his parents and their death as important elements in his experience of life in the suburbs. At one point, when he is talking about his house, he mentions that "[his] mother would have preferred a Japanese house of paper and satinwood -- a house without anything that could be taken from her" (37). This concept of a house with or without something that could be taken immediately stood out to me as something that required a closer look.
What does Waldie mean when he says this, and what does this statement imply about his house, his suburb, and suburbs in general? It is interesting to analyze the relationship between post-WWII suburban American homes and traditional Japanese homes. Waldie's home was built as cheaply and quickly as possible, out of wood, cement, and stucco, in order for its developers to make a profit from satisfying a housing shortage. The government is in charge of planting a single tree on his property, and the rest of his grassy lawn goes largely unnoticed other than the regular mowing. Japanese homes are characterized by a greater interconnectedness between indoors and outdoors, and more effort is made to respect and appreciate nature. The materials used in traditional Japanese homes, paper, and wood, exhibit a level of care and craftsmanship than is missing from the construction of suburbia. Japanese homes are reminiscent of the type of place that Christopher Alexander would approve of, they are arranged based on a series of traditional principles, but each one is different.
So, what does Waldie think could be taken from his mother in their home, that could not be taken from her in a Japanese home? Is it the appliances that the original inhabitants of the house would have paid nine dollars a month for? Or the furniture? Or maybe the car culture that goes hand-in-hand with living in such a place? Maybe the answer lies in the following quotation, from an essay called In Praise of Shadows, by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki: "And so it has come to be that the beauty of Japanese rooms depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows -- it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament."

Severing Unruly BranchesWhy is it that pictures of Lakewood from 1950 strike such fear into my heart, fear of the unnatural, but pictures of Lakewood today do little more than make me bored? I asked myself this question as I read D.J. Waldie's Holy Land and at first I wondered if the black and white aerial photographs were somehow creepier than today's colored ones, or if it was the old cars and poodle-skirted housewives in front on each house that reminded me too much of the movie Pleasantville. Then Waldie flicked the switch in my brain at his mention of urban forestation. In the 1950's the trees planted in front of each house were still saplings and the landscape appeared barren; but today the trees, planted twice and often thrice over, have reached maturity and tower over driveways and houses, providing shade and privacy to each little box. There's just something about those trees that has transformed Lakewood into a "real" place. A place that looks like it has "history". So I did a little research and thinking about Urban Forestry.
Part of the reason so many people joined the mass exodus out to suburbs in the mid 20th century was to get away from the industrial grind of cities that no longer had anything natural about them. What was supposed to be natural about a place like Lakewood beats me, but apparently the absence of smog and and factory smoke was enough. But developers and city planners knew that Lakewood would need trees - hence the planting of one in front of every single house. Urban planners and psychologists alike often agree that trees increase mental health and that the absence of nature in a person's daily life can have a negative effect. When planning and developing a suburb or city, a certain aesthetic is often produced as a formula for the happiness of each resident. A tree, some grass, those things should liven up our lives right? But is this simple formula actually effective? We all like to open our window and see leaves, birdies making nests, the smell of fresh cut grass.
In several of China's big cities millions of dollars have been spent developing parks and green belts around commercial areas. In New York City central park provides a green escape for Manhattan's harried residents. The old Miami neighborhood of Coral Gables is famous for its myriad tropical trees.
But what Urban Forestry is really about is not only creating a "natural" environment in an urban setting, but also controlling it. In Lakewood the city is responsible for pruning the trees in residents' front yards and removing trees with over ambitious roots chewing up sidewalks. Waldie says that though their are no laws requiring Lakewood residents to mow their lawns regularly, maintaining one's property becomes part of a social contract. No one wants to look at an overgrown front yard and neighbors will probably complain to the city if they have to.
Forestry is a misnomer. We aren't creating forests in our urban areas, we're just planting a few trees. Forests are big and uncontrollable; we like to be able to dominate the nature we create in our cities and cookie cutter suburbs. So is that really "nature"?
Regardless of what it indicates about human nature, the planting of trees and inclusion of parks in the development of Lakewood may not have made a huge difference in the first years of the suburb, but over fifty years later a little bit of green goes a long way.

The Dying TreesWaldie provides us with a collection of entries of suburban life in California. They are poetic in their own fashion, with many entries having meanings hidden deep with in. In a way, it reminds a lot of Jean Baudrillard’s America, which is a collection of his responses as he travels across the United States. Similar to Baudrillard, Waldie gives us these textual snapshots of suburbia: some of them are about the physical descriptions of the landscape, some of them about the history of the urban development, some of them are personal scenarios, etc.

In several of the entries, Waldie discusses how the houses were being produced overnight (figuratively speaking), and because of this they were being sold as a commodity. Their purpose was less habitual, and more like a kitchen appliance: they could be cheaply mass produced, sold within seconds, and could serve the basic functions necessary to the consumer. However as years have weathered on the houses, we are now beginning to see the problems with the fast mass production. Quantity came before quality, and where the initial costs of building the units was cheap, they are increasingly expensive to maintain. And as much as we would like to, we aren’t able to go to the store and pull another unit off the shelf.

There also seems to be this preoccupation with grief and death. Waldie is constantly discussing the death of his parents, and the feeling of solitude in the house once they are gone. He discusses the death of an infant due to the lack of investment in transit and telephone systems.

Waldie also paints us a picture of our submission to the giant department store—aka consumerism (155). He discusses the construction of the May Co. building and the surrounding housing units that have trees planted in each of their yards. As the trees grow taller and taller each year, the view of the store becomes obstructed until its façade is completely out of sight. And then the trees begin to die all at once, and we slowly see the May Co. building once more. We see the overwhelming power consumerism has had in the past century. With the birth of suburbia came also the birth of the department store. And as years came by, we kept submitting ourselves to the store until we were completely lost in the gimmick, the low prices and the convenience, until we could no longer see the objective of the store because the obstruction from the ‘trees’ we had planted. But once the trees die, as the economy dies, we finally get a glimpse of what had happened. Mass consumerism was both the birth and now the death of the modern economy. And now we are standing there, along the giant row of tree stumps that leads up to May Co., with no money in our pockets to replace the trees, and we stare at the 16 foot light up ‘M’ logo as we say to ourselves “Huh, so that’s what happened.”