Georges Perec, 1936-1982 (I mean, come on. Look at that face.)
Fitting that, moments after running into my favorite writing teacher, sociologist Jim Jasper (see his comments on how to write better here and how to give better talks here), I came across a little blog post on a ‘definitive’ reissue of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which has been out of print for a bit. I have commented on the book (and Calvino’s) earlier, but I was inspired to learn more about the Oulipo group, which sought to promote new forms of writing. As Joshua Cohen, in the blog Tablet, explains:
Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters.
Closeup of the gorgeous 'Our Faces and Sounds Got Lost in the Clouds' by a favorite ethnographer moonlighting as a fabulist renderer.
A few thoughts on books from the last week. First, a colleague stopped me in the cafe to let me know about an Chronicle of Higher Education article on Google’s Book Search being a ‘disaster’ for academics because its data is often incorrect. Yikes. Second, this week one of my new colleagues, Jay Demerath, invited faculty to come into his office to pick out any books that he or she wanted. A generous and dangerous offer with a warning: “You all may be in the last generation to experience the problem of dealing with books upon your retirement.” The visit made me really contemplate teaching, careers, and my ever-growing library. He said that the grad students just didn’t know what classic books are anymore (undoubtedly a frequent lament). Despite the warning of an unwieldy library at the end of a career, I picked up Halle’s Inside Culture, Sacks’ massive Conversation Analysis lectures, and Jeffrey Alexander’s four volume set Theoretical Logic in Sociology, among other things. Third, friends and I descended upon the League of Women Voters Book Sale this morning as if I had not picked up enough books at Jay’s office. I nabbed a few goodies (Hodgeman’s More Information Than You Require, Schott’s Miscellany, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia), but was amazed at the piles of great books that book resellers had squirreled away in the corners of the High School cafeteria. Upon asking one of the volunteers, I was told that they pay a $10 fee to come in early and, essentially, scrape the cream off for themselves, searching prices on their iPhones and then taking their time to toss back the small fish. I had mixed feelings about it, but the ladies I spoke insisted that they make a ton of money off of these folks. There’s a thread in here somewhere… in lieu of a summary, a link to Benjamin’s essay on book collecting.
One of David Byrne's Bike Racks, which can be found throughout NYC
This has to be the fifth post out of the 120 posts that is on David Byrne, which is overkill, but I’m very excited to get The Bicycle Diaries in the mail. Am I wrong to hope that it is like a Walter Benjaminesque mediation on cities, as he bikes through NYC, London, Buenos Aries, Istanbul, Berlin and beyond? Am I wrong to hope that it could be a companion piece to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City? Perhaps I will use it in Urban Sociology soon…
Our values and hopes are sometimes awfully embarrassingly easy to read. They’re right there – in the storefronts, museums, temples, shops, and office buildings and in how these structures interrelate, or sometimes don’t… Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind.
The battle between people-turned-symbols of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is well-worn and yet evergreen. As much as I like using Simmel and Benjamin and Haussman, a new book by Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City revisits the more contemporary exchange. A nice review is here.
It’s hard to argue against the relationship between coffee and gentrification. Sharon Zukin, for example, writes about ‘pacification by cappuccino‘ and my new neighbor Andrew Papachristos writes about the interrelationship between crime and coffee. I’ll just say this for now: The Blue Bottle’s Kyoto style cold-brewed chemistry set of a machine made me come back five times in four days. I groveled to get my last cup before I headed out of town.
Finding delicious coffee should be added to either Kieran‘s or Andrew‘s ASA Bingo cards. Although I’m doing my best to reserve judgment on Atlanta’s coffee scene.
Coffee Shop, 1956
Tangentially (although coffeeshop-related), there is something to be said for catching a good museum exhibit. In my case, coming early to the ASA, I made it to a Robert Frank exhibit at the SfMoMA. Four rooms were dedicated to the four sections of The Americans. (Read Anthony Lane’s writeup here.) It was an incredible experience, and the narrative became overwhelming, if a little forced by the placards. I use RF via Howard Becker’s Telling About Society for my Media and Technology class, as his work is clearly sociological. He writes:
Robert Frank’s (…) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville‘s analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants—eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.
Fellow museum compatriot, Patrick Inglis, reminded me of Walker Evans‘ style of taking surreptitious photographs of his subjects, and it got me thinking about technique a little more.
Update: A nice review of the 50 year anniversary of The Americans is here.
In San Francisco for the ASA, I did a little scouting around and came across a bunch of ‘unaccepted streets’ thanks to a lovely local. She told me about how these are a ‘public right of way’ that has not been built according to city standards and has not been accepted by the city’s Board of Supervisors for maintenance. These are scattered all over the town, and the residents are required to take care of them. According to the San Francisco Public Works Code:
Residents of Penny Lane Arrange a Beautification Day
sec. 400.1. Owners of frontage responsible for removal of rubbish or debris from unaccepted streets that are unpaved. It shall be the duty of the owners of lots or portions of lots immediately adjacent to any portion of the roadway of any unpaved street, avenue, lane, alley, court or place, or any portion of any sidewalk thereof, in the City and County of San Francisco, none of which has been accepted by the Supervisors as by law or as in the Charter of said City and County provided, to maintain said roadways or sidewalks adjacent to their property free and clear of rubbish or debris. (Added by Ord. 16-71, App. 1/26/71)
The San Francisco Public Trust has a plan to make these spaces into ‘street parks,’ but what is interesting is that many locals have enchanted these places into their own: transforming them into public gardens, or making their own mosaic-tiled parking space. I was also fascinated by the little paths and stairs that weave around people’s homes, that have these lovely pockets in which residents have decorated them with flowers, art, and mosaics.
This stands in dramatic contrast with what I have always thought of as ‘privately owned public spaces:’ Corporate-held public plazas–in which landowners could build beyond their envelope due to a 1961 Zoning Plan incentive program–detailed in Jerold Kayden‘s excellent book. The NYC Department of City Planning reports:
Approximately 16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces, 21 percent are usable as brief resting places, 18 percent are circulation-related, four percent are being renovated or constructed, and 41 percent are of marginal utility.
While in San Francisco, I also hung out with Venice Beach urbanist, Andrew Deener, and he told me that his work touches on the Venice Canals, which exist in a way similar to SF’s unaccepted streets: this one-time aspiring Disneyland/Coney Island neighborhood fell on hard times, but is now a isolated bourgeois citadel thanks to these manufactured canals. Interestingly, like the unaccepted roads in San Fransisco, the City does nothing to maintain the canals, even though they are the only way for residents (and city services) to access their homes.
Scum River Bridge
Update (2/1/10): A nice little example of Urban Alchemy is in Astoria, where residents have built a bridge over ‘Scum River’ using a nearby broken bench. (This actually received an accommodation from the office of NYC Council Member Peter F. Vallone, Jr. January 25th)
At the same time, there is some research being conducted by twittering, which can be seen here, and Richard Wiseman’s take on it can be read here. Also, from the data visualization file, here’s a nice image (although I’m not sure who the gray people are, and the ‘5 with more than 100 followers’ should probably ‘5 with more than 10 followers’ if this were at the scale the author makes it):
'Don't get too excited'
Update: More pretty data visualization about Twitter here.
