Year: 2008

Today’s E. B. (Elwin Brooks) White’s birthday. Like everyone else, I knew him from Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but when I moved to New York, one of the first books that was given to me (by dear Mark Shulman) was his essay, Here Is New York. It absolutely floored me with its brisk beauty. It appeared first in Holiday magazine sixty years ago, and even though so many of the references (e.g., the Third Avenue elevated line, old speakeasies, the coal chutes into cellars) have faded away–along with the magazine that published it–his simple observations about urban life still hold true. He even has a premonition:

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the prefect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence…this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and nations…housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

Of course, he’s referring to the United Nations building that was rising from the skyline at the time. But it is quotes like these that get me tapping out about him first thing in the morning:

Many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

My newfound respect for him led me to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style which, along with Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists, is always on my desk. (E.B. was commissioned to update his old professor’s little book after he had passed away.)

Sequestered away in Northampton and now similarly confined on Long Island, yet writing about cities and William H. Whyte level serendipity, I’m getting a little cabin fever. When reading about these topics, however, I find this to share. Graeme Gilloch notes that Kracauer “contrasts the cityscape as deliberate construction and as unforeseeable improvisation” in his meditation on Berlin (2007: 121). Gilloch goes on to quote him at length:

One can distinguish between two types of cityscape: those which are consciously fashioned and those which come about unintentionally. The former spring from the artistic will as realized in those squares, vistas, building ensembles and perspectives which Baedecker generally sees fit to highlight with a star. In contrast, the latter come into being without prior plan. They are not, like the Pariser Platz or the Place de la Concorde, compositions owing their existence to some unifying building ethos.   Rather, they are creations of chance and as such cannot be called to account. Such a cityscape, itself never the object of any particular interest, occurs wherever masses of stone and streets meet, the elements of which emerge from quite disparate interests. It is as unfashioned as Nature itself, and can be likened to a landscape in that it asserts itself unconsciously. Unconcerned about its visage, it bides its time.

In my online travels, I also came across one of my favorite New York writers, Luc Sante, who has a lovely online archive of a blog on visual information.

I will admit, sheepishly, that my first impression was ‘Oh my, I would love to buy one of those,’ when I started reading about the oil paintings produced in Dafen, China. The little village, located in the south east of china, has been getting a lot of attention for producing 60% of the world’s market of reproductions of famous paintings (see Chicago Tribune and Der Spiegel). The Atlantic has some incredible pictures. This area has hundreds of factories where artists spend their days slaving away at di Vincis, O’Keefes, Klimts, Manets, and Yue Minjuns, shipping out $120 million worth of art last year alone. What this says about aura will surely be a topic in class on Tuesday. The aura of the sweatshop? I can just imagine my own instinct played out: “Oh, and over here we have our Mona Lisa… That’s right, it is a copy, made in a real Chinese sweatshop!” This is from a conversation with an 18 year old factory worker in the Trib article:

“We divide up the colors among us,” said Zeng, working his way briskly along a line of 10 identical contemporary-style paintings, applying a stripe of brown, while a teenage partner worked on the red. Surrounded by dozens more identical pieces at the sprawling Artlover factory, he explained: “By dividing up the work, contrasting colors stay clearest.”

The Trib article goes on to talk about how they have 5,000 artists, 700 galleries, and a new museum under construction. Will the latter be a mixture of copies of famous works and originals by the copyists? (Mt. Holyoke’s Ajay Sinha has apparenty given talks about the 200 history of the Chinese producing mass art for the West.) Pics from The Atlantic:

I wrote earlier about ‘Sock City,’ and this is a topic that spans both my Media and Technology class and my urban one. There’s also a professor of management science at Instead that has written a program that ‘writes’/’auto-assembles’ books (e.g., ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ and ‘The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India’) using relevant information from the public domain. Phillip Parker and his team of software engineers have written 200,000 books. (The above two books sell for $24.95 and $495, respectively.)