Geography Thursdays #1: The Rise and Decline of Detroit
Rotting building in Detroit, photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, from their Time Magazine series (click on the picture to see all the photos)
This is the first installment of a regular feature. Every Thursday, Lily Hoang and I will be bringing the news from the world of geography. First up is the most beautiful piece of writing about a city I have ever read — Rebecca Solnit’s “Detroit Arcadia,” which first appeared in Harper’s, but which now seems to be available through a link from the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. The thesis, or one of them, is that Detroit has completed the usually epochal life cycle of a major city, from rise to decline, in a hundred years:
After the Panic of 1893, Detroit’s left-wing Republican mayor encouraged his hungry citizens to plant vegetables in the city’s vacant lots and went down in history as Potato Patch Pingree. Something similar happened in Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed and the island lost its subsidized oil and thereby its mechanized agriculture; through garden-scale semi-organic agriculture, Cubans clawed their way back to food security and got better food in the bargain. Nobody wants to live through a depression, and it is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape. There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us, but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing. (Click here for PDF Full Text of Solnit Article.) READ MORE >
Thinking About Indulgence
This guy. Yeah. This one.
A friend of mine sent me a link to this letter ‘To a Young Writer’ from Wallace Stegner (you know, the guy that fellowship that rejects you every year is named after.) The letter is long and dire and occasionally overwhelmed me with anxiety. I mean, it’s a great read. No, really. Uplifting.
You write better than hundreds of people with established literary reputations. You understand your characters and their implications, and you take the trouble to make sure that they have implications. Without cheating or bellowing or tearing a passion to tatters, you can bring a reader to that alert participation that is the truest proof of fiction’s effectiveness. You think ten times where a lot of writers throb once.
And there is very little demand for the cool, perfect things you can do. You have gone threadbare for ten years to discover that your talents are almost sure to go unappreciated.
Ok, great! Pass the barbiturates, Wally! If you can get past the fact that (prepare for a news flash) you shouldn’t expect ‘literary’ fiction to earn you a fabulous living on it’s own, the letter raises some interesting questions. I’m just going to point out one that caught my eye.
For one thing, you never took writing to mean self-expression, which means self-indulgence…I speak respectfully of this part of your education because every year I see students who will not submit to it—who have only themselves to say and who are bent upon saying it without concessions to the English language.
One of my least favorite phrases is ‘self-expression.’ When people say they make art or write or sing or whatever to express themselves, I immediately stop listening to them. Someday I’ll be able to forgive this turn of phrase, but for now, I can’t help it. It’s a red flag. (Like ‘Work hard, play hard.’ Yuck.)
We speak a lot about books being ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘masturbatory,’ but less is said about things being too self-expressive. Good writing goes deeper than the self; it isn’t about you, in particular. It’s a hole that you dug through yourself using words like pick-axes until you reached everyone else, or at least a lot of other people. Which reminds me of that post that Mike Young put up the other day. I loved that post. (And it’s weird to realize that sometimes it’s a random blog post that sticks with you and not that one book you read months ago Who wrote it? What was it called? It was so… expressive.)
Screensees.
1. See left. (an excerpt: Amsterdam Island, France-
Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.)
2. See fifty (unfairly forgotten films).
3. See the wheel turn (on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series).
Theme-drenched works can be damn suspenseful. Page-turner and mind-turner–concepts not mutually exclusive (no matter what the aisles of my grocery store say). My example is The Road, by Cormac the Withered. Yours?
Isaac Bashevis Singer in Carbondale, Illinois
Four years before he died, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited Carbondale, Illinois, at the invitation of the Southern Illinois University English Department, and on money mostly from the Honors College. It must have been some visit. Both times I’ve visited SIUC for their Devil’s Kitchen Literary Festival, there was no after-reading bar talk that was entirely Singerless. In the introduction to the new Best American Short Stories, Richard Russo, who taught there at the time, relates Singer’s formulation of the purpose of literature (First, to entertain; Second, to instruct; and in that order, and that order only.) My favorite account of Singer’s visit is recorded by Rodney Jones, in his estimable poetry collection Elegy for the Southern Drawl:
The Limousine Bringing Isaac Bashevis Singer to Carbondale
Rodney Jones
A town is the size of a language.
In four more years he would be dead, but now, READ MORE >
The next time you’re in Brooklyn…
Hey people who don’t live in New York.* Yeah, that’s right, you people. There is something happening in Brooklyn that I want you to be a part of. This week I started a business called 3B. It’s a bed and breakfast that I have been renovating with 7 others this summer and now we’re officially o p e n . . . . Amy McDaniel and Alban Fischer both booked weekends for this month and Adam Robinson is threatening to show up with his band. I am excited about all of these people because talking in real life is awesome. FYI: All rooms will be goddamncheap til November 15, when we open our lounge and kitchen. After November 15, I will be giving all Giant-readers a deal, especially if you’re a writer on tour or coming here for writing-related stuff. Even without a discount we are ridiculously cheaper than anywhere else in Brooklyn that isn’t shady and dank and inconvenient. (And our place is really nice and we bring you breakfast and coffee in the morning.)
Also, by staying here you’ll be directly supporting the stories, music, poems, essays, buildings, etc that my roommates and I make. Everyone wins. (And if you’re considering a move to Brooklyn (and who isn’t?) we have good monthly and weekly rates if you need a place to land before finding an apartment.)
*People who live in New York: send us those out-of-towners who keep showing up on your couch!
Vollmann, Elliott, Foucault
I have been thinking a lot lately about the connections between Foucault’s and Vollmann’s works. Their kinship is immediately apparent. Vollmann has a massive multi-volume treatise on human violence; Foucault has a massive multi-volume treatise on human sexuality. Vollmann works with human sexuality constantly in his fiction and nonfiction; via Foucault’s investigations into power, especially in Discipline and Punish, Foucault works with human violence. Both authors refuse confinement to a single discipline; both are interested in what has been dubbed biopolitics. Vollmann’s Imperial and the newly translated The Birth of Biopolitics by Foucault put into stark relief the overlap in this interest.
Blake Butler—
Can we drop the “Talent borrows, genius steals” line yet? It was never really true, and sounds even more lame every time it gets “borrowed” in repetition.
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Word Bigot
There are some words that, when I come across them in a work, make me unhappy, sometimes even upset. Maybe for all of us, this is true. We are accustomed to groaning over phrases (too cliche, too idiomatic), tropes, themes, etc., but it strikes me as peculiar, on this particular night, that individual words, taken individually, can also bring the cringe. They’re just words! And yet, certain ones seem dirty, cheap somehow–carrying more than their fair share, evoking too much, taking some of the onus off the writer and moving it onto some collective, anthological poetic consciousness. Too, is word-disdain the equivalent of that prevalent relationship theory–that when you dislike a certain person, you’re disliking the part of yourself you see in him or her? Are you, here, rejecting the part of yourself that secretly, shamefully, is prone to using the blacklisted words, or uses them still? For me, words that put me off tend to be ones I cherished at some point, maybe when my expectations of language were different, but ones that I’ve since, I don’t know, outgrown? That’s not quite right. Can you grow out of words? Have you? Which ones? Let’s burn some up. Or, burn some sage and get a few back.
A little more about Moe.
An earlier snippet linked to a Pitchfork story about Moe Tucker, drummer from The Velvet Underground, having recently been spotted at an Albany Tea Party rally. Not just spotted, though. Ms. Tucker was interviewed, and in grand ole Tea Party style, she talked about being “furious about the way [the country and its citizens] being led towards socialism.”
The snippet says just this: hearing that Moe Tucker, drummer from one of my favorite bands, and creator of some really great solo work, is now part of a political movement I find—when I am trying to be generous and open-minded—baffling, kind of made a little part of me die. (In ungenerous moments, I say “Hear, hear,” to Matt Taibbi’s assessment of the Tea Parties in Rolling Stone.)
A comment made by someone going by R. Ridge:
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