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Naomi Wolf has written a powerful political pamphlet that's got me thinking: The End Of America: Letters Of Warning To a Young Patriot.Subtitled "A Citizen's Call To Action," the book makes a simple point without sliding into hysteria: The transition from a democratic government to a fascist state has happened many times in recent history, always by ostensibly legal means, and usually with the tacit cooperation of most of the country. Populations in fascist or totalitarian systems adapt to fear through complicity ... when a minority of citizens is terrorized and persecuted, a majority live out fairly normal lives by stifling dissent within themselves and going along quietly with the state's act of violent repression. ...[F]ascist regimes can be "quite popular" for the people who are not being terrorized. Most of us are, for now, in the latter category, and behaving exactly as described. This shift, she says, happens according to a ten-point plan, followed not only by the monsters of history like Hitler and Stalin, but also by everyone from Pinochet to Musharraf. She makes a compelling case that this plan is well underway in this country, putting into one very small and precise book the fears many of us are probably feeling. This country is slowly sliding into totalitarianism, and may in fact be further along that road than we realize. And beyond that, her point is that democracy is fragile; that we have grown accustomed to "outsourcing" our democracy to lawyers and civil rights organizations and professional activists, which is how we got ourselves into this fix in the first place. The ten-point agenda looks like this: ( Ten Steps To Totalitarianism )Will any of the leading presidential candidates solve this problem? I doubt it. If Giuliani is put in charge of this police-state apparatus, terrifying things will happen; think of how he ran the city when his actions were subject to judicial review. All the other Republican candidates are lining up behind the Bush agenda, even ones like McCain who should know better. Will Hillary Clinton repeal the Military Commissions Act, close Guantanamo and go back to seeking warrants for all searches? Her record says no. But even if she, or any other Democrat, tries to get our society back on a more Constitutional footing, any crisis or terrorist incident, real or manufactured, would be grounds to impeach that President and drive him or her from office. Is Bloomberg an alternative? He presided over blatant repression of free speech and protest during the Republican convention in 2004 and has followed a generally anti-free-speech agenda, with his proposals to ban public assemblies, require permits for photography, etc. If not for judicial review and his fears of how the NYC electorate would react, he would have accomplished all of that and more. Between that and his pro-corporate viewpoint, I suspect he'll be a more intelligent and palatable face on the same agenda that Bush has been driving. And then of course there's Ron Paul. Is it time for people like me to make our peace with Libertarians, as hateful as I find their agenda? I might consider it if I believed he would actually work to reverse the anti-Constitutional trend, but I find little to encourage me on his site. He thinks the greatest threats to Americans' liberty are high taxes and restrictions on religious expression. His anti-immigration stance means there will be more reasons for armed thugs to break your doors down. Overall, his vision looks as much like a police state as the others', but with more people going hungry. No thanks. In the end, it's not about the candidates. They all follow the crowd. As long as most of us (not them, not the Shrubbies, but you and me) are content to do our shopping and live our lives and pretend nothing is happening, they will be more than happy to reinforce that. Is it time for liberals to make common cause with conservatives who believe in the Constitution, and set aside disagreements over things like gun control, abortion, social welfare and religion? If Ron Paul were making a clarion call for the restoration of habeas corpus, the end of secret prisons and illegal wiretapping, I think I might forgive him his other stances and work with him. Is there a candidate out there like that? Or do we have to move candidates to those positions ourselves? Most of us sat by as Bush stole the election in 2000, as he passed the Patriot Act and its increasingly repressive follow-ons, as Democrats and the media colluded with him in defrauding us into war. We cannot afford to do that any longer, but as Wolf says, one of the tactics of a fascist shift is to leave individual citizens feeling ineffective and afraid to speak up. How do we combat that? This is all going to figure into my thinking as I decide what I'm going to be doing next year. Tags: books, politics
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 Madeleine L'Engle is dead. I think it was through the Scholastic Book Service (whose deliveries were one of the very few bright spots in the hellish years of third, fourth and fifth grades) that I first got a copy of A Wrinkle In Time. It was the blue mass-market paperback pictured at right, shorter (in height) than the standard paperback. I've long since lost that copy, and I now have the edition with the scary cover that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) regyt mentioned in her post. Anyway, I adored that book (with its thoroughly unthreatening abstract cover) although parts of it were pretty scary. I had a crush on Meg but I liked Calvin anyway and I wanted to meet Mrs. Who. I read the sequels when I found out they existed. I read other young adult novels she'd written ( The Young Unicorns), and then her adult fiction ( A Severed Wasp, in particular, which I've reread several times). About ten years ago I was at work one day, in the World Financial Center, and a co-worker looked up from the paper as we were all eating lunch and said, "Hey, Madeleine L'Engle is signing books over at the Trinity Church bookstore." (One good thing about that job was that I was not the only person in the room who said "Really???") So we walked over and met her, and I bought a copy of The Other Side Of the Sun, which she signed for me. We chatted with her for a while as the lunch hour ended and the store emptied out, and she was every bit as kind and engaging as I'd imagined from her books. The inscription, more than just a signature, is lovely, but what charmed me the most was when she flipped to the first page of the book and corrected a typo ("sandpipers stalked" had become "sandpipers talked"). "This edition embarrasses me," she said. "It's full of typos. The kind that spell-checkers don't catch." Her writing always spoke to me, was always an escape. She wrote realistically about children and teenagers. She wrote about worlds in which it was good to read lots of books and have an inquiring mind. Her books were full of gentle humor and a deep respect for learning and knowledge. She was identifiably Christian, but always gentle and compassionate and open-minded, never spinning off into pathology the way writers like C.S. Lewis often did. In my early teenage years, the Catholic Church reversed what had been a gradual course of liberalization and turned sharply rightward under John Paul II. The religious authorities in her books were a welcome relief from the mean-spirited intolerants who characterized organized religion in my life. Her books were deeply moral, but never judgmental, and encouraged thinking rather than condemning it. The first time I saw the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in person, it was her books I was thinking about. ( Inscription and correction )"Of course I’m Meg," she told an interviewer. Of course I loved her! Tags: books
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 This is not the book to read if you want an overview of the philosophical underpinnings of atheism. Dawkins reviews them superficially, without adding anything new and without acknowledging the subtleties of the various positions. But part of his point is that the subtleties are pointless and not worth paying attention to; rather than thoughtfully discussing atheism as one possible view of the world, he gleefully trashes every form of religious belief, presenting atheism as the only worldview not worth mocking. It's certainly a cathartic exercise for those of us who are frustrated by the amount of energy and agony wasted on belief in a mythical supreme being. So on the one hand, I applaud, laughing aloud, as Dawkins uses his acerbic wit to wonderful effect, mocking and ridiculing religion, holy books, and dogma. Every religion in the world would issue a fatwa based on the book, if any of them would read it or even take it seriously. But therein lies the problem: Dawkins is (to misappropriate a metaphor) preaching to the choir. His arguments against religion are glaringly obvious to someone like me; while I enjoy the way he says it, I don't need to be told that the Bible is a self-contradictory mess of unsavory behavior, that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is a brutal nutcase, or that creationists are ridiculous. And the people who do need to hear those things aren't going to read this book. Dawkins is mounting a very rational argument against religion, which rejects rationality and reason as bases upon which to understand the world. It's as pointless as a religious person telling a scientist that she simply needs to have faith. The book is amusing, shocking, worthy of guffaws and cheers, but ultimately pointless. ( "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions." )The one thing I've taken away from this book is that I'll no longer waffle when asked what my religious beliefs are. He opens the book talking about the "religious" beliefs of people like Einstein, whose many references to God are largely metaphorical. Einstein described himself as a "religious nonbeliever" and his religion as the sense "that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection." [19] I have often been reluctant to call myself an atheist because it seems reductionist and arrogant, to claim that one fully understands the universe and its possibilities. However, I do not believe in the supernatural; if there is a "God" then he, she, or it is just as subject to natural law as we are. We might not understand all of natural law, but I firmly do not believe there is anything outside of it. Dawkins' point is that my viewpoint is essentially a-theistic, in the sense that I do not believe in a personal "God" of any sort. (" Theism" is the belief in a personal God, while " Deism" is the belief that God is in no way still involved in workings of the universe.) So yes, I'm an atheist, but I'd rather spend my time rejoicing in the wonders of the natural world than making fun of people who've found answers I don't agree with. A blistering attack on fundamentalism is long overdue, but this blistering attack on religion as a whole is a waste of energy. ( Part Two: Other critical reactions )Tags: books, religion
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I read 86 books in 2006, about the same number as last year, and thanks to LibraryThing, I can list them here. (I've now entered all the books I've read back to April, 1995 into LibraryThing, and I'm working backwards through the notebooks I've been keeping since September, 1979, of the books I've read.) Borrowing an idea from fiveforsilver, I've made my book list into a poll. Under the cut, please check off those books you've read (anytime, not just in 2006). ( Poll below )Tags: books
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 This book, by the extraordinary journalist Tracy Kidder, is a sobering portrait of Dr. Paul Farmer, who has spent his life caring for the sick in Haiti and other poverty-stricken parts of the world. He is no Mother Theresa: Acerbic, angry and impatient, he has the incisive just-get-it-done attitude of a Fortune 100 CEO combined with a revolutionary's fury at injustice. While one back-cover review calls it "a true-to-life fairy tale, one that inspires you to believe in happy endings," that's evidence that the reviewer didn't read or understand the book, not an accurate description of the book, which will leave you disturbed and uncomfortable. ( "The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor." )I saw Farmer speak a few weeks ago at the Keep A Child Alive benefit. Most of us were there to see David Bowie perform, and Farmer's pointed remarks were probably viewed by most as the sermon to sit through in order to see what we were really there for. Exactly the kind of screwed-up priorities that would send him off on an impassioned rant. Intentionally or not, most of us have set our priorities so that saving the lives of poor people with curable diseases is less important than significant changes in our standard of living. This book raises uncomfortable questions for us, poking at what Kidder calls "the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world." As you read it, you ask the obvious questions about the reality of what Farmer does. At one point his organization spends upwards of $20,000 to fly one Haitian boy with cancer to Boston for treatment. The cancer turns out to be untreatable, the boy dies, and even people in Farmer's organization ask whether something better couldn't have been done with the money. After a day-and-a-half hike up a mountain to visit a couple of patients, Kidder poses the question to him. Farmer first points out the other questions that could be asked -- why didn't the airplane company donate its services? If $20,000 is so precious, why are first-year doctors making $150,000 a year not asking those questions about their own salaries? But he also acknowledges that it may not be a winning battle. How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, That's all it adds up to is defeat? ... I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I'm not going to stop because we keep losing ...
People from our background ... we're used to being on a victory team, and actually what we're really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it's not worth it. So you fight the long defeat. ... I don't care if we lose, I'm gonna try to do the right thing. [288-89] Tags: books, politics
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The Mission Song--John le Carre Le Carre was the master of the cold-war spy novel, but rather than losing his way at the end of the cold war his books got more sophisticated and ambiguous, not to speak of bitter and angry. The Constant Gardener was a searing indictment of U.S. economic imperialism in Africa, and Absolute Friends was a furiously angry novel about U.S. hypocrisy and British complicity in the so-called war on terrorism. The Constant Gardener in particular was a brilliant novel made into an equally brilliant film. Sadly, one can't say the same about The Mission Song. This novel is also set in Africa, this time in the eastern Congo, the region decimated by years of war, most recently with Rwanda. Congo has a long and ugly history, with brutality piled on brutality by European and U.S. companies bent on looting the country of its rich resources. But le Carre doesn't tell much history, and while his spy thrillers are usually notable for the richness and multi-dimensionality of their characters, this book is full of cardboard villains and African stereotypes, and a hero who behaves so naively and so foolishly that you lose patience with him before the book is halfway through. ( Impatient summary of an irritating plot )The story of the Congo is vitally important to understanding the current state of Africa and the amount of blood on European and American hands, but this is probably not the book to look to. You might start with the seminal work, Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, whose title is perpetually misunderstood as referring to Africa when in fact it refers to the evil hearts of the European traders and colonialists. Two recent nonfiction works are also required reading: Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, about the Belgian colonial era (which stood out for its brutality so badly even in the benighted early 20th century that it sparked a worldwide reform movement), and In the Footsteps Of Mr. Kurtz, by Michaela Wrong, which covers the Mobutu era and whose indictment of U.S. policy and corporate crimes was so pointed that it was never published in this country, though it is still available in the U.K. She is credited in le Carre's acknowledgements. Sadly, though, aside from some interesting insights into the life of a diplomatic interpreter, there's not much of interest to learn from this novel. Tags: books
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This fascinating book is a new examination of the earliest days of New York City, focusing on its days as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. While most NYC histories brush past this period pretty quickly, Shorto makes a convincing case that the Dutch origins of New York are responsible for its unique place in the country now and in fact for much of the modern American character. The flag of the City of New York got its colors from the seventeenth-century Dutch flag, and the influence goes much deeper than that. The story of New York's founding and commercial origins has been told many times, but I've never read anything with as much detail and thought given to how the Dutch era influenced the political character of the city and of America. ( Like a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world... )This is a great story, and one that simply hasn't been told well enough. Gotham brushes past van der Donck in a single paragraph, referring to him as the "suave young" "ringleader," and The Epic Of New York City covers the entire affair in two pages (55-56). Shorto's argument that van der Donck represents the Dutch character that would later inform America is well put and well-supported by his careful reading of documents most other historians seem to have ignored. His belief that Holland's tradition of welcoming refugees would allow Manhattan to grow exponentially, his love for what would become New York, and his fiery advocacy of free expression and politicaly diversity make him indeed worthy of being called the first New Yorker. In the final chapter, Shorto looks at the traditional historical view, of thirteen English colonies, and judges it an inaccurate history written by the winners. The Dutch colony covered parts of five of the original thirteen states, and after the takeover, the Dutch did not leave. Dutch legal traditions heavily influenced the New York City charter granted by James II in 1686, acknowledging that citizens of the "ancient City ... Enjoyed ... sundry Rights Libertyes privledges [and] ffranchises" that derived not only from its English rulers but from the "Governours Directors Generalls and Commanders in Chiefe of the Nether Dutch Nation." [315] While phrases like "Dutch treat" and "Dutch courage" [319] show the history of English antipathy towards their former rival, the Dutch colony "set Manhattan on course as a place of openness and free trade" [310] with the freedoms James had left intact. One has to keep in mind what an oddity the new city of New York was to people of the seventeenth century, with its variety of skin tones and languages and prayer styles coexisting side by side. The English leaders in Whitehall Palace were surely aware of this unusual characteristic of the island across the water, and they may have been confused by it, but at the same time they understood that it was part of what made the place function. [305] Tags: books, nyc
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The fourth and last part of The Death and Life Of Great American Cities discusses possible tactics to solve some of the problems she discusses. She opens by noting that city planning does not lack for tactics that are "aimed at carrying out strategic lunacies. Unfortunately, they are quite effective." [321] ( Obvious solutions and an inevitable conclusion )In the end, she finally has to concede the point she's resisted for much of the book: That the destruction of cities, and what she calls the "Great Blight" of suburban sprawl, are not the result of chance, but of deliberate malice. This misunderstanding and simplification, she says, "could hardly have ocurred, and certainly would not have been perpetuated...without great disrespect for ... cities." [435] It's the working of "an all too familiar kind of mind ... a mind seeing only disorder where a most intricate and unique order exists." [447] And she concludes with a prophetic point, which fails only in that she does not go far enough: Thirty years from now, we shall have accumulated new problems of blight and decay over acreages so immense that in comparison the present problems of the great cities' gray belts will look piddling. Nor, however destructive, is this something which happens accidentally or without the use of will. This is exactly what we, as a society, have willed to happen. Tags: books, nyc
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As the plans to build the so-called Freedom Tower get clearer, so does the fact that we're repeating the terrible mistakes we made when the World Trade Center was built originally. WHen completed in the mid-seventies, the Trade Center dumped millions of square feet of unneeded office space into an already stressed downtown real estate market, depressing it for years. The buildings would have remained largely vacant if not for the state renting almost all of one tower for government offices, adding billions to the public money already wasted on the project. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the WTC was finally rented out fully to private tenants. And this week, Pataki announced that we're going to do it again. Nobody wants to rent the Freedom Tower; it's not only unnecessary in the current market place, as the original WTC was, it's a scary place to locate your company. So, government agencies will spend millions of unnecessary dollars propping it up. On Sunday, Gov. George E. Pataki and other officials announced that federal and state agencies would be the anchor tenants in the planned Freedom Tower, occupying a million of the 2.6 million square feet, at a rate of $59 a square foot. As of last month, the average rent for office space was $35 in Lower Manhattan and $58 in Midtown, according to Newmark Knight Frank, a Manhattan real estate advisory firm. (The New York Times) And, unsurprisingly, state employees aren't too happy about locating there. "It was there in 1995 and it will be there when the Freedom Tower is completed," Pataki said of the state government, failing to mention that it was not in 1996, 1997 and through 2001, since the Trade Center had finally been rented to private tenants. ( The history we're repeating )Tags: books, nyc
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This entry covers Part II of Jane Jacob's classic book, which focuses on the ingredients necessary to promote diversity in a city. I wrote about Part I in an earlier post. ( On diversity )Jacobs continually expresses wonderment at the foolishness of planners who believe so ardently in things that never work in reality. In some ways, she is remarkable in the calmness and factual approach she takes to dissecting the idiocy and blindness of planners. Their policies were so destructive that one has to wonder if the terrible results were unintentional. Jacobs says, "the development of modern city planning and housing reform has been emotionally based on a glum reluctance to accept city concentrations of people as desirable." I believe she is understating the case here -- the issue is not "glum reluctance" but outright hatred. I believe that the people behind the destruction of American cities, then and now, are not unaware of the natures of big-city populations, but well aware of and actively hostile towards them. Call it the Robert Moses theory: They either had no intention of improving anything, or their notions of "improvement" were as odious as the motives of those seeking to purify the races. The impulse to replace city neighborhoods with sterile plazas and complexes, to subsidize suburbs while destroying downtowns, to herd poor and minority residents into hideous housing projects, was not based on any altruistic beliefs, but on the same hatred of diversity and intellectual activity that burns books, bans teaching of evolution in schools, and clamps down on political protests. The disastrous policies of the second half of the twentieth century are essentially incomprehensible without understanding this; in this case, I believe we must ascribe to malice what cannot be explained by stupidity (because I simply don't believe that anyone could have been that stupid). Our failure to understand this leads us to continue allowing the same thing to happen again and again -- as in Bruce Ratner's deliberate gutting of downtown Brooklyn with ugly and hostile projects. More about that in a future post. Tags: books
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This classic book -- by the woman who fought Robert Moses and won -- should be required reading in American history classes. With clear-eyed writing and an impatient sense of humor she discusses the idiocy of modern urban planning, comparing it to bloodletting as a way of understanding "what goes on in the brains of earnest and learned men, dealing with complex phenomena they do not understand at all and trying to make do with a pseudoscience." [13] Jacobs, who died last month, believed that the planners who gave us the housing project, the suburb, and hideous "urban renewal" projects like the World Trade Center and Lincoln Center, were using ideals and theories developed by people who actively hated cities, rather than paying attention to how real cities worked. "This is not the rebuilding of cities," she says in the introduction. "This is the sacking of cities." Forty years ago she pointed out the glaringly obvious truth that this approach does not work, has never worked, has never improved the livability or safety of a city, never brings the promised economic benefits, and invariably makes things worse, thereby necessitating more "urban renewal." Her analogy with the fools who drained blood out of sick people until they died is frighteningly apt. If anything, she holds back; while she says that the decay of cities is not only far from inevitable, but has been "purposefully manipulated for a quarter century to achieve precisely what we are getting," she never asks who was manipulating it or why they were doing it. It was prescient of her to see, even in 1961, how a combination of banks refusing to lend money in cities, of tax money being funneled in buckets to automobiles, roads and suburbs, while cities were choked of financial aid, and of zoning and planning theories, would combine to create the disaster we have today. She quickly runs through a history of modern urban planning, beginning with Howard's "Garden City" experiments in 19th century England, when cities really were seen as evil disasters needing to be broken down and rebuilt. Howard thought of planning as the creation of a static living environment, which should be protected from change or influence by its residents -- which works no better in cities than it does in software. She moves on to Le Corbusier, whose "Radiant City" visions of towers in parks led to the dreadful housing projects, and brings in Burnham's "City Beautiful" approach of segregating the great civic works of a city (government buildings, cultural institutions) from the city streets. But she has little time for theories and instead returns to the practicalities of how actual cities work. Her overall point is that cities, when they function correctly, create their own order, and planners ignore that at their own peril, ending up with something even worse than ugliness or disorder: "the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served." [15] SidewalksShe starts her actual analysis with the sidewalk, and what makes us feel safe in our cities. She begins with an interesting way to differentiate a city from a town or a village: "Cities are, by definition, full of strangers." [30] And therefore the question of safety is how to make people feel safe in a crowd of strangers. The answer has nothing to do with policing and everything to do with casual enforcement of standards, and those standards are enforced by the people using the street and those living there. A safe city street, she says, has three elements: [35] - A clear demarcation between public and private areas;
- eyes upon the street;
- continuous usage
Most city planning projects, creating as they do inward-facing buildings that plague streets with what she calls "the great blight of dullness," create streets that have none of these criteria. They create streets that no one wants to use; think of walking down Amsterdam Avenue behind the concrete wall of Lincoln Center, or the forbidding stretch of West Street and Vesey Street at the northwest corner of the World Trade Center. These are dangerous areas. Housing projects -- "streets piled up in the sky" -- have the same problem. They're open to the public, but the systems that keep things safe have been disrupted. In reaction many planners make things worse, trying to turn their precious planned communities into fortresses with gates and security guards. Hostility increases, the feel of the area gets worse and worse, and no one is really safe. Or they take refuge in vehicles (she compares this to drivers in a safari reserve) and the streets become even more deserted. She concludes this chapter with one of the more famous sections of the book, in which she describes the give-and-take of a day on her block of Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. While somewhat idealized, it's instantly recognizable as how things work on a good city block. A block, one might mention, that Robert Moses tried to destroy with one of his expressways. She continues with her discussion of the lowly sidewalk by discussing its effect on two things: contact between adults, and the rearing of children. A busy neighborhood sidewalk is a venue for multiple casual contacs with your neighbors, with local business owners, and with complete strangers. Cities are full of people that you'd never invite into your home or go out for dinner with, but that you do want to have an occasional conversation with. The sidewalk provides a place to do that at your own time, with an easy excuse to move on or to avoid someone you don't feel like talking to, and without any need for uncomfortable or inappropriate prearrangement. And out of these contacts come "a web of public respect and trust" with which you can tell someone misbehaving to stop, and know that someone will back you up. She discusses the concept of privacy at length -- not "window privacy" which is easy to get, but the privacy of not having people know your business unless you want them to. A properly functioning city allows that privacy without leaving you entirely without a support system. She talks about the common urban habit of leaving a key with a local storeowner -- as she says, "a service that cannot be formalized." The corner deli provides a myriad of services like this as well as opportunities for contact. "It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements." [62] But in planned communities or housing projects, these institutions were deliberately destroyed, replaced with organized meeting places that have no social network to support them. The end result is that people isolate themselves defensively, everyone becomes anonymous, and no one feels safe telling the kids to stop misbehaving. [57,59,65]. This chapter is one of the wisest descriptions of city life I've ever seen, down to her discussion of the need for "self-appointed public characters" and the way that a business with too many customers can no longer provide those many services -- so that when zoning or planning restricts commercial to a few areas, creating unnatural monopolies, the businesses become impersonal and unfriendly. What makes this more remarkable is that she was writing at a time when most planners saw no value whatsoever in street life or neighborhood activity. She becomes even more acerbic in her discussion of children, and what she calls the "superstition of planning and housing" that children playing on the street are worse off than those playing in nice well-tended playgrounds." [74] The problem with those well-tended places is that there aren't enough adults around, and children can then do horrible things to each other as they tend to when unsupervised. "Planners do not seem to realize how high a ratio of adults is needed to rear children at incidental play," she says. "Nor do they seem to understand that spaces and equipment do not rear children." [82] So the building of playgrounds (one of the activities, by the way, that is often cited as evidence that Moses was not all bad) "wastes this normal, casual manpower for child rearing and either leaves this essential job too much undone ... or makes it necessary to hire substitutes." The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets, filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boils down to a deep contempt for ordinary people. She also points out that most of these planned play areas are boring, aimed at "filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots" [83]. "No child of enterprise or spirit will willing stay in such a boring place after he reaches the age of six." [80] Older children are noisy and energetic, and they act on their environment instead of just letting it act on them. Since the environment is already "perfect" this will not do. She ends the chapter with two interesting points. One is that these planned places are essentially matriarchies, and that segregating work and business areas from play areas mean that men are not usually involved in the rearing of children. [84] Also, the widening of streets for cars, and the resulting narrowing of sidewalks, makes them inhospitable for play. A thirty-foot sidewalk, she says, has room for trikes and jump-rope and a million other activities, especially if the building line is not even -- play happens in the niches. And the incidental play she considers so important isn't something that happened at preplanned times, but rather in the spare moments of a child's life, before being called in for dinner or on the way home from school. ParksFrom sidewalks, she moves onto parks, specifically neighborhood parks. She starts with the premise that parks are not an automatic benefit to a community, that they need benefits from the surrounding community in order to work, and without those benefits, they become like the "dozens of dispirited city vacuums called parks." [90] The veneration of open space (which she compares the veneration of magical fetishes) never questions who uses the space, or what they use it for, or when they use it. The requirements for a park to work are basically that there be a wide mix of uses around it, so the park is used by a variety of people, all with different schedules. This way it remains busy all the time. And variety, as she says, attracts variety. She's merciless in her criticism of the process then in vogue (driven, of course, by Robert Moses) of tearing down sections of city neighborhoods to build parks. "There is no point to bringing parks where the people are if in the process the reasons that people are there are wiped out and the park substituted for them." [101] She ridicules the notion that parks are "the lungs of a city" since trees cannot recycle anywhere near as much carbon dioxide as is produced by a city neighborhood, and in fact, more open space means more sprawl means more pollution, so in a way, badly planned parks can have a negative effect on the environment. [91] The park itself needs a few things in order to succeed: - Intricacy -- room for different moods and activities, a feeling that there's something worth exploring, "subtle expressions of difference." [104]
- Centering -- the park should have a central place that most paths lead to.
- Sun -- people avoid shade, one of the many reasons for the abandonment of the dismal midtown "plazas" built by office building developers to get some extra stories on their buildings.
- Buildings -- a park needs boundaries, and people nearby to use it. A park next to a vacant lot or a parking lot just won't be used.
"City park users," she says, "simply do not seek settings for buildings. They seek settings for themselves." [106] NeighborhoodsShe wraps up Part I with a discussion of neighborhoods, and how they need to be richly interconnected. "This 'ideal' of the city neighborhood as an island, turned inward on itself," is completely unrealistic. "It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life." [115,112] A small town may be the same size as a neighborhood, but the people in a small town work together, shop together, their children attend the same schools -- they're connected by geography. City residents are not. Their connections extend across the city to many differing communities, and they do not want to "face inward." Yet, the city neighborhood is a critical part of self-government, so it must be planned in a way that's inclusive, that overlaps with other neighborhoods, that gives residents many reasons and venues to meet each other and interact. She then discusses the cooperation of neighborhoods to form districts (her own Greenwich Village, for instance) which are necessary to mediate between the city itself and the neighborhoods, which are too small to have any political power on their own. She concludes with a basic set of prescriptions for good neighborhoods: - Lively and interesting streets;
- A continuous fabric of such streets
- Parks and squares and public buildings that are part of this fabric
- Functionally identifiable districts, a result of the first three, and what she calls the "cross-use" that interesting and varied streets will encourage.
Like The Timeless Way Of Building, this is a warmly human book. It looks at how we live, and recommends building nurturing cities that support people, rather than brutal cities that negate their efforts. Tags: books
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I'm in the midst of Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories, from which comes the short story "Brokeback Mountain." The stories are typically stark and beautiful, although sometimes the bitterness and bleakness get to be a bit much. (As they did in the flatly unreadable Accordion Crimes.) But speaking of bitter and flatly unreadable, Proulx had a column recently in the Guardian, where she gives us a vinefull of sour grapes about Brokeback's failure to win an Oscar. I can certainly sympathize with her depiction of the ceremony -- "the hours sped by on wings of boiler plate. ... three-and-a-half hours of butt-numbing sitting" -- but couldn't she have figured out how annoying and trivial the ceremony would have been, and stayed in Wyoming? Would she have carped as loudly had Brokeback won? Reading it made me happy it lost, to be honest; while it was a better film than Crash, Good Night and Good Luck was more timely, more beautifully shot, and better acted than either one of them. Proulx says, Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page? I don't know. The subject never comes up. Cheers to David Strathairn, Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman, but what about actors who start in the dark? I don't know that either is less of an acting challenge, but one could say that Heath Ledger's main job in the film seemed to be to say as little as possible while maintaining the exact same expression on his face. One could say that, in particular, after enduring the brickbats Proulx hurls at everyone within reach including the bystanders. "For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays," she concludes her column. I just did. Tags: books, stupidity
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For nearly a quarter-century, I've kept a running list of all the books I read, first in spiral notebooks and for many years now, in a blank leatherbound book I bought at the WaldenBooks in the Staten Island Mall early in 1985. The list is around 3,000 books long, and I am gradually putting it online, thanks to a wonderful new site called Library Thing. I've entered my books, going back about three years so far, and will be updating it going forward. I'm not sure how much back-entry I will do, but being able to search, tag and categorize books online, link to reviews and communities of others who own the books, and at some point perhaps even provide a "What I'm Reading" RSS feed, was just irresistable. My bookshelf. Additionally, I have for the last few years been writing about each book I read, in an attempt to stave off that horrible feeling of having read a book some years ago and not remembering a damned thing about it. I'm no longer doing that with a fountain pen, but instead in LJ entries, which will be linked to from the Library Thing catalog. (I'm not making the entries directly into Library Thing because (a) it doesn't support HTML, (b) the comments aren't text-searchable, and (c) there's no way to make your bookshelf public but your comments private). My book essays -- not reviews, which I post publicly -- will be tagged "books" and will be filtered. If you are interested in reading what I write about each of the books I read (be warned, there will be many spoilers and I will make no attempt to label them), comment here or email me, and I'll add you to what will probably be a very small filter. Tags: books
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 We finally saw Walk the Line this afternoon and I can't say enough good things about it. Phoenix and Witherspoon are spectactular; she in particular absolutely lights up the screen and if anything sings better than June Carter did in real life. But there are a couple of very important characters missing from the movie that are central to the book on which it is based: (Cash's Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words). The first of those characters is the most important in the book after Cash himself: God. I'm no more comfortable with deeply held religious convictions than most of my fellow urban-intellectual Johnny Cash admirers, but to ignore that aspect of him is to seriously misunderstand the man. Cash's book is dedicated to his father-in-law, Ezra Carter, husband to one of the original Carter Family trio (Maybelle) and brother to another (A.P.), "who taught me to love the Word." In the introduction, he says,"If only one person can be saved from the death of drugs, if only one person turns to God through the story which I tell, it will all have been worthwhile," and the first sentence of the book describes it as a "spiritual odyssey." It is just that: the story of a deeply troubled, self-destructive man, coming to terms with himself and rebuilding his life through devotion to his God. It's not necessarily a story most modern audiences are ready for, but that's the reality, and glossing over it does Cash's memory a disservice. The Man In Black himself explained, in part, "I wear the black for those who never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said." A somewhat more disturbing mischaracterization involves Ray Cash, his father, a cotton sharecropper in Arkansas portrayed in the film as a hard and abusive man who never has a kind word for his son and whose rages terrorize the household. Of the real Ray Cash, his son says, I have good memories of my daddy when I was a little boy. I always thought he was about the greatest man I ever knew, and I still do. ( Possible spoiler here )To my mind, that's an unforgivable distortion of the truth that would qualify as libel were the man still alive, all for the sake of some unnecessary dramatic tension. It's also worth noting that Cash's daughters by his first wife are also pretty unhappy with the film, which portrays their mother -- a woman who raised three children on her own as her husband toured the country, got drunk and popped pills, and had an adulterous affair -- as a bit of a shrew. Cash is unsparing in describing the reasons for his divorce: "I had gone too far, stayed away too much." Walk the Line is an outstanding film and I hope it wins plenty of awards, but don't let it deceive you about who this man really was. Tags: books, music
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  I just finished Philip Roth's latest novel, The Plot Against America, and I have to say I was much less than impressed, especially given that I read it immediately following Five Days In Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie" Convention Of 1940 and How It Freed FDR To Save the Western World, by Charles Peters. The latter book is a nonfiction account of the 1940 Republican National Convention, at which Wendell Willkie won the presidential nomination in a showdown with Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey. The point of the book is that the latter two, like many right-wing Americans, wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war in Europe and instead reach an accommodation with Hitler. (To be fair, many on the left believed this as well; from the signing of the Hitler-Stalin friendship pact in 1939, most American Communists supported Hitler.) Willkie, however, hated Hitler and even as he campaigned against Roosevelt, supported him on instituting the draft and providing aid to Britain. Peters makes a convincing argument that American opinion was so deeply divided that had FDR's Republican opponent made participation in the European war a campaign issue, we would not have supported Britain through 1940 and 1941 and they would not have lasted till our already belated entry into the war. Remember that all during the Blitz, as London was being bombed halfway to rubble and Britons were saving ration coupons to buy jam, the U.S. was mostly oblivious, going on as if nothing were wrong. In his book about the 1939 World's Fair, David Gelertner points out that in the second year of the fair (1940) many country's pavilions were either missing (Czechoslovakia, Poland) or full of Nazi propaganda (Vichy France). ( Spoilers under this cut )Tags: books, politics
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