Cities, Sulaco and two top tens

Two books finished now, among others still being read and others just begun. Two great books: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, and Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a scrappy, provocative, thoughtful and ranging investigation of what it is that makes a city and city life successful. From sidewalk width to subsidized loans, Jacobs takes up the issues of how cities actually work and how they can be made to work better from a deliberately, stubbornly street-level view. One of the great joys of the book is how free and easy Jacobs is in her criticism of what she calls “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” utopianist city planners like Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard, who in her view seem willfully ignorant about how cities function. Another great joy of the book is in her description of grassroots activism fighting city hall and city planners, especially her own Greenwich Village fights against Robert Moses, Saul Alinsky’s efforts in the Back-of-the-Yards, and Boston’s North End’s fight against slum designation. It’s a little funny reading in her book about the Village’s “mixed use,” its working class communities, and its struggles against development, considering how ridiculously gentrified and tourist-oriented the Village is now, but other than that, the issues and points she addresses are no less relevant today than they were forty years ago. Planners seem still to favor suburban and big-scale, simplified planning over complexity and the nourishment of diversity within cities, and the Disneyfication of urban centers in America in the last twenty years has succeeded not in revitalizing our cities but rather only in commodifying them. The book is not without its faults: Jacobs seems to rely almost wholly on anecdotal evidence to make her points, which while compelling is not always convincing, and her one solution to every city problem, essentially “embrace complexity,” seems at times to offer more trouble than solution. Her idea, for example, of dividing city government into administrative districts of between 50,000 and 200,000 seems laudable, but ignores serious questions about citywide coordination, funding and planning within departments in favor of what seems to be a fragmentation into almost feudal power bases. I am all in favor of shifting power down the hierarchy, as a general principle, but this doesn’t take into account some of the reasons why the top-heavy governance may have developed in the first place: attempting to deal with pervasive, widespread issues, attempting to coordinate citywide resource use and allocation, and attempting to build a centralized power base to compete with other centralized power bases like corporations. Despite these issues, however, the book is as a whole awesome, fun and provocative.

Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, is also awesome. It’s a deeply pessimistic work, but beautifully written, politically and psychologically astute, epic in scope, and generally magnificent. I just finished the book this morning, and don’t feel I can say too much yet without lapsing into breathless, back-cover gushing. It is a rich and powerful narrative, the storytelling is masterful and modern in the best sense, and the dynamics of the book are compelling and deep. Is that abstract enough? It’s the sort of work which strikes one dumb with its vivid power, like Hamlet, say, or Middlemarch. Great book.

Speaking of Hamlet and Middlemarch, at a recent post-class bullshit session down at the local tapas dive, a fellow class-mate asked the professor to recommend “10 books to read before he dies.” In my overweening arrogance, I said, “are you asking him or are you asking all of us?” No, actually, maybe not overweening arrogance. I’d rather think it was that I find this to be an interesting question for discussion, and think that different opinions could be quite illuminating. We drifted back toward the question and then back away, but I’ve been thinking about it and would like to lay out some kind of provisional list. Ten books to read before you die, according to me, an ignorant plebe, in no particular order:

Hamlet, Shakespeare.
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams.
Middlemarch, George Eliot.
The Republic, Plato.
On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche.
The Heart of Darkness, Conrad.
Candide, Voltaire.
Ulysses, Joyce.
Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable), Beckett. (I know it’s three for one. Fuck off.)
The Brothers Karamazov, Dosteyevsky.
(and The Ethics, Spinoza, for 11).

Well. Not very shocking a list, is it? Very much Great Books of Western Civ. Well, so be it. So how about ten books I want to read before I die, which I haven’t yet read?

In Search of Lost Time, Proust.
War and Peace, Tolstoy.
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy.
Alexanderplatz, Berlin, Alfred Doblin.
Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West.
A Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil.
The Recognitions, William Gaddis.
Being and Time, Heidegger.
The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel.

and Finnegan's Wake and The Tunnel and the list could go on and on. So ignorant. So many books, so little time. Which, if such is the case, suggests I should quit blogging and get reading.

Iraq War Novel

I posted an excerpt before, which due to formatting was rather disappointing, but now here is the whole thing: my Iraq war novel, Your Leader Will Control Your Fire. Enjoy. It’s still looking for an agent/publisher (I should add, for anybody who chances along, that the novel is semi-autobiographical. I served in the US Army from 2002 to 2006, including 13 months in Iraq with 1/94th Field Artillery, 1st Armored Division, as a driver and rifleman. The novel is based on my experiences there).

In the summertime when the reading is slow

Two books finished in the last two weeks. I’m fucking slacking. It’s the heat, perhaps, which leaves me addle-headed and dumb, or it may be that I’ve been doing Judo, Yoga and weightlifting in addition to my normal running, and it seems these days like I’m either working out, eating or sleeping.

In any case, I’ve finished Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Ward Just’s A Soldier of the Revolution. Spinoza’s Treatise is awesome: it’s a slow, careful argument from religious (Judeo-Christian) belief and political obedience to the absolute necessity of a secular, democratic state, founded in free speech. If I believed that contemporary fundamentalists or even just regular religionists had the patience to follow Spinoza’s arguments, I would think this book could convince them that the truest way to God’s truth would be through secular democracy. Unfortunately for this use, but fortunately for thinking in general, Spinoza takes his time. He’s great, audacious, humane and brilliant, a true hero of free thought.

Ward Just’s A Soldier of the Revolution is less awesome. It’s a slim, passable novel about American politicking in Central America, full of the expected tropes of corrupt governments, debauched imperialists, and scheming yet failing guerillas. Eh. It has some moments, but overall I think I’d have been better served by Graham Greene.

I’m about halfway through Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is great, just into Nostromo, by Conrad, and am now beginning Derrida’s Writing and Difference. Only so much time left before school starts in the fall… so little time, so much to read.

War, huh, what is good for? Literature!

Mostly reading for class, specifically this Cities Under Siege class I'm taking, and these books I’m going to approach by order of size of format, starting with the paperback of The Plague and ending with Spiegelman’s In The Shadow of No Towers.

Albert Camus’ The Plague was a reread, and I’m pretty sure I got much more out of it this time than I did ten years ago when I read it as a budding self-described existentialist. Among the aspects which I appreciated this time which no doubt escaped me previously were the tender and subtle evocations of the feeling of timelessness and loss under the conditions of war/quarantine, the allegorical nature of the work and its relevance to the occupation of France, and the ways that Camus’ racist, colonialist and Eurocentric views limit and weaken the book. It’s somewhat shocking to realize that, utterly without irony, Camus is writing a book set in a French-occupied Algerian town which is trying to make us sympathetic toward the French colonialists as victims of an occupation-by-allegory. Moreover, the book is almost completely without Arabs as characters, and definitely lacks any Arab or Algerian voice. In The Plague, we hear nothing of the Algerian victims of either the French plague or of the plague-plague, except insofar as they serve as a colorful backdrop. Taking these aspects of the work into consideration, it was hard for me to see it as keeping any integrity as a whole, as a statement on occupation, as anything really politically or philosophically viable. Still, however, as a literary work, it has moments of deft writing and perspicuous psychological observation, and taken as a human story outside of historical context I found it to be quite moving. Unfortunately, “a human story outside of historical context” is also a human story without significance or meaning.

The other plague book we read was Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which was unexpectedly excellent. It was easy and conversational in tone, a remarkable mélange of views and approaches, and very much brought to life 17th-century London and the Londoners’ reactions to the plague. It is full of great stories and wonderful images, the very sorts of grubby and surprising details that get left out of the grand historical narratives. Although it is a novel, it reads like the best kind of straightforward, journalistic writing.

Switching gears from plague to war, I have to recommend very strongly and without reservation the book The End, by Hans Erich Nossack. Nossack was a German writer living in Hamburg during World War II, and in 1943 he and his wife (or girlfriend, it’s hard to tell) took a short vacation just outside of town in country cottage. It was from this cottage that they watched Operation Gomorrah, the massive Allied strategic firebombing attack, lay total waste to the city of Hamburg over the course of several days. The End is a short, dense, lyrical and unique work, a brief memoir of Nossack’s view of the bombing, his return into the city, and the rootless drift of the refugee state of being in which he found himself thrown, and it has come as close to knocking the breath out of me as any work I’ve read. It is horrific, tragic and awesome. Read this book.

Relatedly, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction discusses and commends Nossack in the essay “Air War and Literature,” which is deservedly famous and provocative, profound and in the end equivocal. There is a stunned horror that Sebald somehow manages to communicate, a response to the back-and-forth devastation wrought by and upon everyone in World War II that is somewhere between a shrug of the shoulders and a weeping, crashing nervous breakdown, a sense of the abyss of human existence, which he has in common with Nossack and which informs his sharp, clear and often biting critiques of German literary responses to the war. This is an excellent and shaming book, demanding as it does of writers the highest ethical approach—a total honesty and a total repudiation of power and ego. Philosophical and worldly problems with this viewpoint aside, it is compelling and humane.

We’ll c0me back to the war between men momentarily, but first let’s take a brief digression into the “war between the mind and sky,” in Simon Critchley’s thin, pedantic and self-satisfied study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Things Merely Are. While Critchley’s basic idea, that the operative dynamic in Stevens’ poetry is a conflict between imagination and the world, or between thoughts and things, and that as Stevens grew older he came more and more to a calm acceptance of the thing-itself, the palm at the end of the mind, is not only essentially correct but blindingly obvious, Critchley’s constant efforts to simplify and clarify Stevens, to turn poetry into philosophy, are tuneless and generally unmoving. The work comes off not like great literary criticism, but rather like someone trying to analyze a joke. This tone of autopsy, of draining the lifeblood out of something in order to claim a position on it, is even more exacerbated in the concluding essay on Terrence Malick and The Thin Red Line. Again, Critchley’s basic points—conflict between imagination and world, or between metaphysical and material, and the peace in things-being—are right on, and obvious, and neither enlivened nor illumined by his crude exegesis, his somewhat smug pseudo-deprecation of using philosophy as an approach to art, and his deeply academic approach. I really wanted this book to be good, because I love Stevens and Malick, and am planning on taking classes with Critchley at the New School when I being work on my MA (perhaps even next spring, when he is teaching on Levinas). Too bad.

Back to total war, I lately finished Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, which I’ve had for a couple years. I read the first half when I first got the book, then put it aside because I couldn’t handle the horrific accounts of the Bosnian Muslims of Gorazde, of the brutalities and devastations they suffered at the hands of Serbs during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. I don’t know if I’d want to sit down and read the whole thing again—Joe Sacco’s careful and detailed line drawings of rubble, ruin and architecture contrast with the slightly cartoonish (think los bros Hernandez) drawings of the people, giving a vibrant visual dynamic to the utterly awful stories of mass murder, rape, devastation, want, despair, and blunt human will to live told to and illustrated by Sacco. Like Nossack’s work, this is a witness to the abyss.

Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers wants, I think, to be the same thing, but instead succeeds only in bringing to harsh, surrealistic life the trauma and madness of September 11th, 2001 and subsequent days. I think I’ve read this before, and it’s good, and in fact many of the details of the work are striking and memorable, but overall it accomplishes little except to reiterate the twin laments of the twin towers from the New Yorker set—“We New Yorkers Are Victims of Trauma” and “We Liberals Are Victims of a Mad Government.” It’s hard for me to get too worked up over singular traumatic events, even events of enormous trauma, which is precisely why the politicization of 9/11 (9/11! 9/11! 9/11!) is so repugnant and ridiculous to me. One fucked up event compares not at all to the devastation wrought by long-term, chronic trauma, like, oh, war or the holocaust or the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, and even an event as tremendous as 9/11 (9/11! 9/11! 9/11!) cannot compare to the total devastation of something like the firebombing of Dresden (thanks, Johnathan Safran Foer, for being self-absorbed enough to make the comparison). So while In the Shadow of No Towers is moving as a personal account, in the end, as a response to what the events of September 11th, 2001 mean and portend, it leaves me cold.

That’s all for now. The war novel is still looking for a publisher. Ulysses is going slow, slow, mostly because I don’t spend the time on it. I’ll try to get to Being and Time before the summer is over. . . Oh yeah, Happy 4th of July. Let’s celebrate by killing some Indians.