Flipping Pencils

Insh'Allah

"'Under the sign of death.' Why should not our every utterance come accompanied by a reminder that before too long we will have to say goodbye to this world? Conventions of discourse require that the writer's existential situation, which like everyone else's is a perilous one, and at every moment too, be bracketed off from what he writes. But why should we always bow to convention? Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of present joy and future grief. Insh'Allah."
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Source: Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee, Viking 2007.

Mr. Thundermug

Curious sensation of driving underwater 

"Within the [city] walls, virtually the only piece of the old fabric that remains intact is the crisscross network of its streets, the straight avenues that run for miles between the gates. These avenues are lined with spreading plane trees whose branches meet across the road. In summer, when the trees are in leaf, it is quite dark underneath, so that in a car you have the curious sensation of driving underwater."

 A baboon in the narrowest sense

 "All the patients and nurses in the room were staring at the baboon with undisguised prurience. It was the opening he had been waiting for. 'This is rampant discrimination,' he shouted, with gleeful rage. 'I realize that I may be—in the narrowest sense of the word—a baboon, but are you really going to refuse me treatment just because I don't look like you?'"

Proof of particular affection

"Occasionally, if he wanted to show proof of particular affection, Mr Thundermug would sidle up to the teacher as they sat together on the sofa and stroke her hair with his long, delicate fingers, just as he used to groom and pick the lice out of his wife's coat. This had startled Miss Young at first, but he did it so rarely and with such wistful sincerity in his eyes that it always made her tremble with delight, although she was careful to preserve the severe straight face which she had been taught to adopt at her teacher-training college. She was supposed to reciprocate by feeding him grapes or pieces of apple, which she lowered gingerly between his open jaws; or he would stretch out luxuriantly on the sofa while she stroked the warm, tender skin of his chest, which reminded her of chamois leather."

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Source: Mr Thundermug: A Novel by Cornelius Medvei, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. Listen to a National Public Radio interview with the author here. Read about less eloquent, less fictional baboons here. 

City as Image

Why we are fascinated by the destruction of cities

"At a very deep level, the city seems to express our culture's restless dream about its inner conflicts and its inability to resolve them. On a more conscious level, this ambivalence expresses itself in mixed feelings of pride, guilt, love, fear, and hate toward the city. The fascination people have always felt at the destruction of a city may be partly an expression of satisfaction at the destruction of an emblem of irresolvable conflict."

What happens when experiencing the city in real life

"The basic problem is how to reduce a cacophony of impressions to some kind of harmony. … The inhabitant or visitor basically experiences the city as a labyrinth, although one with which he may be familiar. He cannot see the whole of a labyrinth at once, except from above, when it becomes a map. Therefore his impressions of it at street level at any given moment will be fragmentary and limited: rooms, buildings, streets. These impressions are primarily visual, but involve the other senses as well, together with a crow of memories and associations. The impressions a real city makes on an observer are thus both complex and composite even without taking into account his or his culture's pre-existing attitudes."

The impossibility and necessity of imagining the city

"The city is, on the one hand, incomprehensible to its inhabitants; as a whole it is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified. But on the other hand, any individual citizen, by virtue of his particular choices of alternatives for action and experience, will need a vocabulary to express what he imagines the entire city to be."

Cities provoke clash of contradictory feelings

"Clashing contradictions: perhaps the central fascination of the city, both real and fictional, is that it embodies man's contradictory feelings—pride, love, anxiety, and hatred—toward the civilization he has created and the culture to which he belongs."

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Source: All quotes from Burton Pike, "The City as Image" from The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton University Press, 1981) as quoted in The City Reader edited by Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout (Routledge, 1996), p. 244-245, 249.

Wanted: Novel that Celebrates City Life

A law professor I know is looking for a novel that celebrates the virtues of city life. She can't think of one. Neither can I.

In the law and literature course that she teaches, her students read—among other works and writers—Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry. Like many of Berry's stories, these take place in Port Williams, a fictional rural community in Kentucky. I haven't read these particular stories but they are, I'm told, complex and subtle and celebrate what Berry thinks are the virtues of life in a small farming community.

Is there fiction that does the same thing for big cities?

"I've combed through my book shelves," the professor says, "and I can't find anything that treats an urban community as the kind of 'value' protective environment that Berry seems to have created."

Cities play important roles in lots of fiction. As settings, of course. As characters in their own right—think of Dublin in Ulysses or Dubliners by James Joyce, for example. As metaphors and images. But, like the professor, I can't think of any novels or stories that explicitly celebrate the moral and community virtues of city life.

There's got to be something, doesn't there?

Tell us what we're missing by adding a comment to this post.

The Road to a Big, Odd Vocabulary

Here are just some of the words I had to look-up while reading The Road a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The story follows a father and son as they make their way through a scorched and menacing post-apocalyptic American landscape. (Click on words to link to definitions from Dictionary.com.)

I've also appended a list of words from the novel that I haven't been able to find in a dictionary.

1. "Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls." (p. 3)

2. "Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast." (p. 3)

3. "The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the windfall trees of a hurricane years past." (p. 13)

Poverty is a Constellation of Difficulties

"[P]overty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another: not just low wages but also low education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just poor housing but also poor parenting, not just lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households… The troubles run strongly along both macro and micro levels, as systemic problems in the structure of political and economic power, and as individual problems in personal and family life."

—David K. Shipler

Source: The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 285 as quoted in Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream edited by John Edwards, Marion Crain and Arne Kalleberg (New York: The New Press, 2007), p.5.

Dogs Are Beasts of Sorrow

"If [Roger] Grenier [a French novelist, essayist and editor] suggests that the experience of loving a dog is life-affirming, he means it in the very Gallic sense that life is lived more keenly in the knowledge of death. Dogs help with this, in short, because they generally predecease their owners: 'Because dogs inflict the suffering of loss upon us, the French sometimes call them beasts of sorrow, bêtes de chagrin.'"

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Source: Alison Gillmor, "It's a Dog's Life," an article in the April 2007 issue of The Walrus. In the quote above, the writer of the article is discussing The Difficulty of Being a Dog (University of Chicago Press, 2000) by Roger Grenier. Read Wikipedia about him (in French, alas) here.

City Infrastructure: A Reading List

"The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel."

— Carlos Fuentes*

For an article I'll be working on soon, I've picked three books to read about urban infrastructure. Here they are (in alphabetical order by author's last name):

--The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher (The Penguin Press, 2005)

--Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005)

--The Way Things Work by David Macaulay (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1988)

* Quote spotted in The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Placemaking by Jay Walljasper (New Society Publishers, 2007).

Writers: Tape This Advice to Your Forehead

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Random House, 2007

Actions that are both simple and memorable—like accidentally firing a bottle rocket into your neighbor's open bedroom window and igniting their baby's crib on the Fourth of July—are comparatively easy to put into simple and memorable words. Writing about something complicated that involves abstract concepts, however, is another story.