Category: Books

City Comforts Books
2003
Out of anything else I’ve read this year, David Sucher’s “City Comforts” has completely changed the way I look at the world, in particular cities and the urban environment.
It was reading James Kunstler that first put voice to my feelings about living in strip-mall America, but Sucher’s book is a sort of antidote. “City Comforts” is a guidebook to what’s right in a city (Kunstler focuses on the opposite), with photo illustrations every page from his native Seattle, Portland, and other livable cities to prove his point.
Sucher’s philosophy of urban planning comes down to three points, which he hammers throughout the book.
One: Build to the Sidewalk (Property Line).
Two: Make the Building Front Permeable. Use windows and doors to link the interior of the building to the exterior of the street. No mirrored glasses.
Three: Prohibit Parking in the Front of the Building. This is not to be confused with on-street parking, which is essential. It is almost a sub-rule of Rule One.
This isn’t just the point of the book, but a backbone. Elsewhere Sucher photographs parts of cities he likes and then tries to divine a rule from them. Some are obvious, others aren’t.
For example: Mixed-use buildings make sense at transportation hubs. At a train or bus station, why not have supermarkets and other essential shops? This is a given in many metropolitan areas, but it doesn’t seem in use here in Southern California. Bus depots sometimes have crappy little gift shops, but so do hospitals and gas stations.
Being able to go for a stroll is not just relaxing, but, I learned, in some cultures it’s essential:

“In many parts of the world, particularly the Latin nations, it is a part of daily life to take an evening stroll. There is s acomplex and involved ritual to this walk, this promenade, this passaggiaeta or paseo, as it’s called in Italy and Spain. It was a tradition in France and Britain, and in the United States, too, before the automobile spread us so far apart that now one has to drive to find a place to walk.”

Sucher titles this section “Bumping into People” because that’s what makes urban living so enjoyable. Last Saturday, for example, I had lunch with my wife, but then took the afternoon to go to the coffee shop to write. On the way there I ran into my professor from my days at UCSB outside the art museum. In the art museum’s cafe I ran into my dad, who was having lunch with my cousin and her husband, who were visiting from England; I briefly checked out the public library’s art gallery and ran into my friend Alex’s girlfriend Carla, who now works there. Finally when I got to the coffee shop I ran into Laura, formerly a waitress at the above mentioned cafe writing two 10-page papers for her class. And that was all in the space of one block and 30 minutes!
Other ideas that turned me on: Widening bridges over freeways into streets with shops (continuing the street that leads up to it); using white noise from a waterfall to cover traffic noise; allow windows to open visibility into businesses, for people watching and to see work being performed (countering idea that work happens outside public sphere).
The book is over 200 pages long and has at least that many ideas. Buy one for yourself and one for the urban planner of your town. One thing Sucher points out is that this isn’t a no-growth proposition. But if the citizens can’t point to examples of what works and what doesn’t in a city, then they can influence developers better instead of just opposing them.
In Santa Barbara, we have a little of both. Downtown S.B. is vibrant and offers plenty of strolling areas, but a majority of this is centers down 10 blocks of State Street. Go one block either way and the “urban village” experience stops. Instead we get parking lots, storage units, blank-walled office buildings, administration buildings, and no mixed use. A stroll down these streets can be very lonely indeed. “City Comforts” is essential reading if you want to understand your environment, and better yet, gives you the tools to change it.
As far as I know the best (and only?) place to buy the book is from Sucher’s web site. You might also want to check out his blog.

Here’s an excellent post over at 2blowhards.com on Ian Nairn. I’d never heard of him until now, but his writings on London apparently would go down very well with the James Kunstler/David Sucher crowd (to which I belong). He was more of a fan of modernism than Kunstler, but still understood the essential truth that people like to live in walkable, friendly cities, not in pod boxes out in the suburbs. And this was many many years ago.
Looks like it’ll be slightly difficult to find some books by him, but I’ll start looking.

Mark Edmunson, a professor at the University of Virginia, has just released a book, “Why Read?” that takes on the modern educational system. In this excerpt, he points out how the liberal arts has been reduced to pure entertainment–education as commodity.

All Entertainment All the time
So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they?d had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from?that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)

I want to credit this link, but I’ve lost the link page! Whoops.

Yesterday I went to the opening of the 10th Annual Planned Parenthood Book Sale, one of the biggest book sales of the year in Santa Barbara. Located in a large hall at the back of Earl Warren Showgrounds, there was plenty to go through. Being “The Press,” and having written on the event for my column, I got in on the “pre-opening” day, where the serious book dealer wages angry battles over rarities. While many carried around large cardboard boxes for their finds, I relegated myself to what I could carry under one arm. I got five books for a total of $18. And they were all things I’ve been looking for or come under the categories of interest below:
William S. Burroughs: El Hombre Invisble by Barry Miles (The “I Need to Know More About Authors I Like” Category)
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney trans.) (The “I Must Read More of the Classics, But Only If the Translation Is Great” Category)
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (The “Reread Authors from Impressionable Teenage Years” Category)
The Onion: Our Finest Reporting (The “Now You Have to Pay for the Online Archives, I Better Buy the Books” Category)
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (The “Books Jon Has Recommended, Nay, Insisted, I Read” Category)
In the meantime, I’m stuck into the Chabon book. Wheee.

Vintage
1951, reprinted 1990
I picked up this Mencken book after seeing his name used many times in the same sentence as Twain. Before then I hadn’t heard of him, but fortunately Amazon had a good guide to him and the Book Den had it in stock.
Selected by Alistair Cooke, this is a fairly decent overview of the man, starting off with Mencken’s memories of Baltimore, the city he rarely left, and ending with an essay on death.
Mencken was one of the original crusty curmudgeon journalists, chomping on a cigar, attacking the typewriter, and assailing all preconceived notions, left and right. He’s not exactly a fan of democracy, either, if by that you mean mob rule. In one of the most fascinating long articles near the center of this collection, “The National Letters,” he takes on the paltry (up to the time of writing, 1920) contributions made by Americans to world literature. (Hemingway and Steinbeck were right around the corner, but miles away, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Mencken would have liked them.) His view that it is our inherent Puritanism, coupled with a pleasant moderation, which has led to weak lit is close to Robert Hughes’ view of American art before the Modern era. yet Mencken’s prescription is for the creation of a true aristocratic class. This is a hard thing to parse, but he doesn’t mean the rich either, who have all the money in the world but no sense of heritage or class. (He has a lot to say about the idiotic rich, as well.)
Elsewhere, his look back at the Wilsonian era is notable for its parallels to life under Bush: fearmongering (Germans instead of terrorists), a leader who speaks in sound bites without substance, a cowed press and academia, intolerance of dissent. But enough of me, here’s some choice quotes by Mencken that should give you some taste:

Civilization is at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to rule. he runs the whole South–and in the whole South there are not as many first-rate men as in many a single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is still firmly in the saddle, there we look for such pathological phenomena as fundamentalism, Prohibition and Ku Kluxery, and there they flourish.”–from “the Anglo-Saxon”

Or how about this comparison found in a review of what we would now call a puff-piece bio on Wilson:

“This incredible work is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussyfooting, ludicrous posturing, and naive stupidity. to find a match for it one must try to imagine a biography of the Duke of Wellington by his barber.”

Ouch.
Mencken also wrote many an epigram: “Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”
“Puritanism–The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Who knows what Mencken would have made of Bush, but I don’t think it would have been favorable. He certainly would have seen through the phony bravado and “common man” play-acting, as he does in his reports of politicians excerpted here (when FDR wins the nomination during a very tight convention night over challenger Al Smith, Mencken is sure it will spell upcoming defeat for the Dems.
For the insight into American tastes and politics, this book is worth reading. Although Mencken’s style is wordy, it still has bite. Charges of racism are refuted at least in this volume by his strong support of allowing blacks and whites to mix in public (in Baltimore, of course). He is quoted elsewhere as putting down the intelligence of the “negro,” but read alongside his even more vicious attacks on religion, corrupt politicians, and the great unwashed, Mencken lets them off easy.
Side note: This book’s previous owner, I would guess, looks to be an angry undergrad, full of righteous political correctness, who had gone through the book and checked off all the sentences where Mencken fails as a member of the 1990s. This, of course, is missing the point, but these wrongheaded annotations almost seem appropriate to this volume.

Noonday Press, 1961
Man, I really wanted to get this book, to get into this book, but it just did nothing for me. Walker Percy’s novel of existential crisis set in New Orleans is often talked about in glowing terms by its fans. It seems to have the ability to put voice to a early-30s malaise, and many readers identify with this strongly. I would have thought I was prime material for this, but apparently not. So much of the writing struck me a unnecessarily and deliberately vague, though taken in small does, Percy’s prose is quite lucid. Yet there was nothing drawing me from page to page. Maybe I’m just an idjit, but I kept losing track of what was being talked about.
The plot is minimal–a few days in the life of Binx Bolling, a 30-year-old manager of a brokerage firm. He spends his days either visiting movie theaters, where he feel he can connect with the reality on screen more than real life, or taking one of his secretaries out in his MG for a bit o’ rumpy-pumpy down near the shoreline. There’s also his aunt who is ready with advice and comes from a distinguished family, and his cousin Kate, who suffers from some mental illness that is not entirely spelled out.
Along the way there are numerous diversions with a small cast of characters in an around New Orleans. I’m sorry to say, I’ve forgotten most of them.
Bolling has a brief revelation early on in the book–he sees through the dull surface of reality and tries to comprehend the true timeless state of the universe, and this is what sets him off on “the search”–the lifelong struggle to achieve that state again, to know that he’s onto “something.” I should have been fascinated by all this, or amused, but I was just unaffected. Better luck next time.

Granta Publications, Summer 2004
This summer issue of Granta is devoted to Film, and there’s quite a lot of good reading here, mostly all of it non-fiction. Editor Ian Jack’s view of film centers around ’70s art cinema, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. There’s an lengthy excerpt from John Fowles’ diary dealing with the on-again-off-again making of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” which, typical to Fowles, disparages nearly everyone he comes into contact with. Interesting encounters with Dennis Potter, Harold Pinter, and more. There’s an account of being a rat trainer called on by Werner Herzog to populate his film Nosferatu with over 18,000 rats. Most die. (Being a Herzog film, many of the film crew nearly die too).
Jonathan Lethem’s piece on Cassavettes makes me want to rent several of his films (I’ve only seen Husbands, and I’m told this is not the place to start). There’s a memoir by Shampa Bannerjee about playing Durga, Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, but this is mostly anecdotal. I also liked the remembrance by Andrew O’Hagan about his two years as the Telegraph’s film critic, from which he earned little respect.
It’s an easy read this issue, and brings back many names that used to be household (the trio of German directors–Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder–who revolutionized their country’s cinema), if not for a reconsideration, but at least to blow the dust off the spines. But you may come away from the issue feeling that cinema has died and all that’s left is curation.

Oh man, everytime I think my childhood memory’s been tapped, along comes some other web site/documentary/book that reminds me of something I had relegated to the attic of my brain. This time it’s filmstrips, those little rolls of slide film that would teach you things about the world as you followed along to the audio. BING! Turn the crank for a new picture. BING!
Danny Gregory, master of illustrated journals, has just put out a book celebrating these notoriously cheesy strips. Me wanna. But does the book make a BING sound before I turn the page? One can only hope.

Time Reading Program, 1947
Not just the name of one of my favorite Fall albums, but Nabokov’s first novel in English. I had only read one other Nabokov before this (Lolita, of course, in 1995) and reading Bend Sinister reminded me of his mastery of language. The novel follows the philosopher and instructor Krug, having just lost his wife to illness, and living with his precious son in a society that is slowly growing into a Soviet-style totalitarian state, run by none other than a former schoolmate from childhood they used to call the Toad. Obstinate, Krug believes his intellect and position will keep him from harm, even as friends and family are disappeared around him. By the time reality intrudes and his child is threatened, it is too late. The Soviet state (how familiar is this system after reading (some of) Solzhenitsyn!) is presented in all its banal but surreal glory, yet this is in no way a realist novel, as Krug disappears in a landscape of dreams, ideas, thoughts, as does the novel itself, with Nabokov’s wordplay (in English, so incredibly developed) making a kaleidoscope of sentences. The supporting characters often seem to be half-anagrams of Krug’s name, or variations on a set of letters at least. One chapter is devoted to a intriguing, but ultimately facile re-thinking of “Hamlet”. Nabokov appears on and off as a godlike character, toying with his characters, and Krug starts to become aware of this. For some reason, the overlapping realities reminded me of “The Singing Detective,” though Nabokov came first, obviously. There’s even a section that reminds me of Dennis Potter in interview in which Potter talked about past and present running simultaneously together, like sprinters on a track. Here’s Nabokov:

Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden’s child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, overtaking the other.

There’s plenty to read about Nabokov and this novel on the web–Zembla is the main repository of scholarly work. I discovered that there was even a film version made of the novel, though unless someone like Peter Greenaway was making it, I can’t imagine how true to the story it could be.
Note: Again, for a first novel in English, the vocabulary stretched my brain to its limit. Check out this list of words I had to look up:
megrim, triskelion, selenographer, amorandola, Keeweenawatin, mnemogenic, velvetina, ruelle, pauldron, salix, cardiarium, dolichocephalic, decorpitation, noumenon, eidolon, kurorts, deoculation, yarovization.
(The problem with Googling unknown words: every fifth word turns out to the name of a literary journal.)

Doubleday, 1995
Enjoyable pop-history of how Ireland rescued higher learning and humanist Christianity during the Dark Ages. The book wastaken with me on my recent San Francisco trip as reading material. I finished a few days after I came back. This was the first of Cahill’s history quintilogy (the other volumes looking at Jesus, the Jews, and two other as of yet unwritten subjects), and it’s a good primer for studying Irish history and/or early British literature. Cahill backs up at the start and talks about St. Augustine (the first autobiographer in the West), then gets around to the savior of Ireland, St. Patrick, who, though he didn’t chase the snakes out, did convert the natives from a warrish paganism to a calmer Christianity without causing the country to implode in corpses. Just for that he should be admired. But he also brought with him a promotion of learning, and very humane idea of how the church should interact with the populace, and (most importantly) a love of books and an inspiration to text copyists, who rescued as many Latin books they could and went ur-Kinko’s on them.
Cahill often relies too much on quoting songs and poems at length when only a line or two would do, but he makes his case. That the Irish would later come to be known as a lesser people by the English is a major tragedy, and a prejudice that can still be felt (to put it mildly).