Get on the Syllabus: What I’m reading and where it takes me.

2024 —

With his glitter makeup and long hair tales of living off welfare in abandoned lofts, playing bit parts in art film flops, and doing drugs with his band scene pal, precursor punk faerie rocker Eric Emerson, Chris Stein’s stories from early 1970s Lower East Side Manhattan overlap with Murger’s 1840s fables from the Left Bank.

With his first person account of the endlessly fascinating era when hippies were transforming into punks in NYC’s downtown art scene, Stein, who has a charming, humble and earnest online presence today, by the way, is working with rich source material (like the day in 1973 when his girlfriend Debbie Harry comes back to her Little Italy apartment from her job at a New Jersey salon with her hair dyed blond.)

Unfortunately, despite the perfect bohemian trappings, Stein writes with zero craft or reflection and the book reads as if he simply hit record and proceeded to reminisce without purpose. I have no idea, for example, why Stein loves, or even plays music in the first place. Or, for that matter, how his high school band ended up opening for the Velvet Underground.

Alas, I’m reading every word.

From 1975: “We went to some guy’s basement recording studio in Queens. Nobody had a clue where we were… It was miserably hot in the basement but we managed to get five tracks done, including a version of what would later evolve into ‘Heart of Glass.’”

*Henri Murger, Scenes of Bohemian Life , ©1851*

This is a hilarious precursor to all the (more serious) urchin chic fiction I love. I’m not sure why it took me so long to finish reading it.

Here’s what I wrote about it when I first started it in June, month ago. And with exception of wanting cite more of the constant side-splitting one-liners (which constitute every three lines of every story) and noting that it does offer a more serious side towards the end with Mimi’s death (and the great one-off short story about Francine’s death), my original account is captures it:

My own private city studies seminar (which last year, focused on mid-19th Century Industrial Revolution Manchester novels such as Elizbeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and this year, seems to be focusing on 21st Century Lagos novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad), has suddenly returned to the 1850s, though not to Manchester.

It’s Paris this time.

I’m reading Henri Murger’s 1851 Scenes of Bohemian Life. Murger’s novel (more a collection of short stories starring a recurring crew of Latin Quarter young souls in their charming, starving-artist garrets) was the source material for Puccini’s famous 1896 opera La bohème.

I’m only 10 stories in, there are 23 in the collection, and to my surprise, as opposed to more bittersweet urchin chic literature like Bertol Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, or my favorite urbanist novel, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners, this seems to be an all-out madcap comedy.

It’s as if the Marx Brothers were the main characters in 1001 Arabian Nights. The Marx Brothers in this instance being Rodolphe the poet, Marcel the painter, Schaunard the musician, and Colline the philosopher, gallivanting and stumbling their way through offhanded urban parables, constantly in need of rent (or date) money while pursuing their Quixotic masterworks, such as Marcel’s grand painting “The Passage of the Red Sea.”

A perfect example of Murger’s sit-com chaos plays out in the story “The Billows of Pactolus.” In this installment of Rodolphe, Marcel, Schaunard, and Colline’s merry poverty, named after a river from Greek mythology laced with gold ore sediment (presumably making its riches hard to grasp), Rodolphe suddenly comes into some money (500 francs!) and sets out to “practice economy” with the convoluted logic of a dreamer: the first thing he buys with his windfall is “a Turkish pipe which he had long coveted.”

""This is my design. No longer embarrassed about the material wants of life, I am going seriously to work. First of all, I renounce my vagabond existence: I shall dress like other people, set up a black coat, and go to evening parties. If you are willing to follow in my footsteps, we will continue to live together but you must adopt my program. The strictest economy will preside over our life. By proper management we have before us three months' work without any preoccupation. But we must be economical."
"My dear fellow," said Marcel, "economy is a science only practicable for rich people. You and I, therefore, are ignorant of its first elements. However, by making an outlay of six francs we can have the works of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Say, a very distinguished economist, who will perhaps teach us how to practice the art. Hallo! You have a Turkish pipe there!"
"Yes, I bought it for twenty-five francs."
"How is that! You talk of economy, and give twenty-five francs for a pipe!"
"And this is an economy. I used to break a two-sous pipe every day, and at the end of the year that came to a great deal more."
"True, I should never have thought of that."
They heard a neighboring clock strike six.
"Let us have dinner at once," said Rodolphe. "I mean to begin from tonight. Talking of dinner, it occurs to me that we lose much valuable time every day in cooking ours; now time is money, so we must economize it. From this day we will dine out."
"Yes," said Marcel, "there is a capital restaurant twenty steps off. It's rather dear, but not far to go, so we shall gain in time what we lose in money."
"We will go there today," said Rodolphe, "but tomorrow or next day we will adopt a still more economical plan. Instead of going to the restaurant, we will hire a cook."
"No, no," put in Marcel, "we will hire a servant to be cook and everything. Just see the immense advantages which will result from it. First of all, our rooms will be always in order; he will clean our boots, go on errands, wash my brushes; I will even try and give him a taste of the fine arts, and make him grind colors. In this way, we shall save at least six hours a day."
Five minutes after, the two friends were installed in one of the little rooms of the restaurant, and continuing their schemes of economy.
"We must get an intelligent lad," said Rodolphe, "if he has a sprinkling of spelling, I will teach him to write articles, and make an editor of him."
"That will be his resource for his old age," said Marcel, adding up the bill. "Well, this is dear, rather! Fifteen francs! We used both to dine for a franc and a half."
"Yes," replied Rodolphe, "but then we dined so badly that we were obliged to sup at night. So, on the whole, it is an economy."

Needless to say, abiding by their delusional budgeting scheme, they promptly go broke. As the story concludes (and after firing their costly servant), Rodolphe muses: “Where shall we dine today?'“ and Marcel replies, “We shall know tomorrow.”

I turned to one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Emma Cline—The Girls (2016), The Guest (2023)—to jar me out of my recent reading slump. And it worked. In this instance it was short stories, her riveting 2020 collection, Daddy.

Given that most of the 10 dark stories here play out in proximity to male violence—or the ubiquitous possibility of male violence—the title, as my book store bestie Valium Tom suggested, seems to be a Sylvia Plath reference. Otherwise, the only explicit reference to “Daddy” here comes in the final story “A/S/L” (sex hookup slang for “Age, Sex, Location”) as the online handle—”DaddyXO”— of Thora, a woman who spends all her time catfishing oafish men. The listless wife of a non-descript, “not a bad person”-husband named James, Thora lies awake texting “furtively on her phone…while James slept, his back turned to her” posing as an 18-year-old high school cheerleader. The story is set, presumably after Thora crashes and burns from her phone sex addiction, in a high-end rehab facility where she then contemplates seducing a famous Me-Too’d TV chef, “G”—who has landed at the facility as well. Thora is exactly the kind of damaged soul who inhabits Cline’s fiction.

However, the majority of the stories, the best of them set in Cline’s flawless simulacrums of ennui-laden, Slouching Toward Bethlehem Southern California, feature men as the despondent central characters: a diminished abusive 60-something father who is bemused by his distant and aimless adult children during their annual holiday season visit home; a Me-Too-disgraced magazine editor now groping through a pity assignment working on a book by a wealthy tech/lifestyle guru, and then botching the rare career opportunity by aimlessly hitting on the guru’s assistant; a divorced, fading movie producer suffering through his surfer-bro son’s banal directorial debut during a tacky theater rental screening; a simmering and distant father (with an alcohol and opioid addiction) called in to rescue his troubled, violent son after the boy gets expelled from an elite private school.

And, in the collection’s showstopping story, “Arcadia” (originally published in Granta and which I actually first read in The Best American Short Stories 2017), one of the few characters here who appears to have a moral center: an earnest boyfriend/live-in farmhand navigating the fraught household of his pregnant girlfriend and her erratic and frightening older brother, who owns and runs the farm.

Like much of today’s short fiction, Cline’s stories remain mum on specifics, only hinting at the crux of the conflict at hand while preferring to linger in deceptively casual dialogue, quietly startling observations, and the minimalist realism of daily lives. The understated stories usually include a dramatic scene too, well-placed land mines that offer some sort of allegory when their explosive glare sheds light on the otherwise repressed narratives.

Cline is a master of this form, particularly pivoting to violent scenes—the impromptu dentistry in “Marion” (which struck me as an early draft of Cline’s Manson Family novel The Girls), or most notably, a terrifying porn-inspired night, drunkenly orchestrated by the dangerous aforementioned older brother in “Arcadia.”

It’s the quality of Cline’s keen observations, with their crisp verisimilitude, that make her stand out from the pack of writers working in this style of enigmatic storytelling. Whereas most writers—I’m thinking of Sally Rooney—tend to tack on observations that fall outside of the scene (I jest, but something akin to, “a crash of thunder sounded in the distance…”), Cline’s breadcrumb asides—"We sat in the back of Bobby’s pickup as he drove the gridded vineyards and released wrappers from our clenched fists like birds” … “‘Home around five,’ she said… [loosening] her hood, pulling it back to expose her hair, the tracks from her comb still visible….”—feel intrinsic to the action at hand while simultaneously commenting on it.

What also makes Cline stand out from the pack, is this: While feminist at their core, her stories are deeply sympathetic to both women and men (who she seems to have a surprisingly uncanny inside track on) as she portrays both genders as trapped in the manufactured doubts scripted by societal roles, but also born of the stultifying human condition.

(I wrote a review of Cline’s second novel, The Guest, last year, which also includes a lot of thoughts about her first book The Girls. Scroll down down down to find that review.)

*Jos Charles, a Year & other poems, ©2022*
These poems are songs; rhythms punctuated by gorgeous phrases that have an effortless way of finding the contradictions afloat in the subconscious: ”between the hole of/a stone & dove within it;” “Let us hold a coconut It is dusk;” “canopies of collapsing light;” “I put you into a poem/you climbed the giantest tree/I put a dozen grapefruit into a tree/You ate every one.”
It reminded me of the obscure imagery and shrouded narratives you find in cryptic John Ashbery poems. It’s all a bit bewildering.
I read Charles’ (Pulitzer nominated) 2018 book of poems *Feeld* back in 2020 and remember feeling the same way; though in *Feeld,* she embraced the rhythmic trance and cryptic meanings to the point of creating a brand new language. A gorgeous feat. Unfortunately, I didn’t find nearly as much of that here.

Incredibly brave and startlingly vulnerable. But she doesn’t translate this diary into a new or larger narrative.

*Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, ©2013*

So much hype and this was disappointing. There was too much telling and not enough storytelling.

And most of the telling, while undeniably true and important, was well-tread talking points about the tangible, systemic walls and everyday slights that make life for Black people in America a barbed wire fence of challenges. Again. Undeniable analysis. But not new nor shown here.

I have been searching for the great Lagos novel;Teju Cole’s thoughtful Every Day is for Thief (scroll down for my review) wasn’t grand enough to fit the bill.

I’d hoped Nigerian Nollywood movie maker, actress (that’s how she describes herself) and creative artist, Damilare Kuku was en route to pulling it off with her 2021 short story collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, which is just now being published in the U.S.

And while it is an addicting collection of reverse-rom-com tales (the affairs do not work out here), the stories felt more like binge-era-TV pilot episodes than literature.

This might not be the classic I’m looking for, but indeed, I did binge. This is a flippant, fast-paced book; I read all 12, neatly crafted, 20-page stories (which often experiment with narrative POV, including rotating narrators and even some Bright Lights, Big City second person) in a few delightful sittings this week.

Certainly, Kuku’s candid, mostly female narrators—no-nonsense entrepreneurial strivers who fall for good looking lover boys with rizz and fatal flaws—convey the tragicomic condition of life in Lagos for women caught up (along with their guardian angel, best girlfriends) in the go-go capitalist patriarchy that fetishizes them as both subservient wives and party girls.

Set against Lagos’ backdrop of lush compounds and first-time apartments, clubs, scandalous texts, social media melodrama, ubers and public transit, nepotism, hustles, corruption, starter jobs and start ups, Kuku’s city stories focus on wary characters whose inner monologues ruminate on class, raunchy sex, tragic pasts, toxic family dynamics, love, and lousy men (even the sensitive guys.)

The breezy, pop culture tone and rushed, tidy finales interrupt Kuku’s frequent literary and philosophical turns, so I’m hesitant to recommend it. But, admittedly, I’m recommending it.

*John McPhee, Levels of the Game, ©1969*

I wrote about this book on my I’m All Lost In post for the week of 3/1/24-2/8/24:

I devoured 70 pages of Levels of the Game, John McPhee’s literary dispatch from the 1968 U.S. Open, in one sitting on Monday night.

Originally published serially in the New Yorker in 1969, Levels of the Game is a minutely and lovingly detailed account of the semifinal match between tennis legend Arthur Ashe, (“his body tilts forward far beyond the point of balance”) versus Clark Graebner, Ashe’s bruising, top-ranked, opponent. Ashe wins and goes on to become the first African American to win the Men’s U.S. Open.

McPhee approaches sports writing as if he’s Sherlock Holmes, seamlessly combining a meticulous tennis-match details—”He takes his usual position, about a foot behind the baseline, until Graebner lifts the ball. Then he moves quickly about a yard forward and stops, motionless, as if he were participating in a game of kick-the-can and Graebner were It…”—with the slow motion backstories that inform each volley: “‘It’s very tough to tell a young black kid that the Christian religion is for him,’ he says. ‘He just doesn’t believe it. When you start going to church and you look up at this picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, you wonder if he’s on your side.’”

For me, McPhee’s crack reporting skills—he knows exactly how Graebner places his feet when he brushes his teeth in the morning—confirmed McPhee’s revered status as a progenitor of creative non-fiction.

Those reporter’s chops are certainly on display as McPhee conjures Ashe’s childhood with evocative quotes from Ashe (“The pool was so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water”), to his research into Ashe’s junior games (“he read books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing,”) plus a wonderful anecdote from a high school date about Ashe’s “antique father.” He does all this right alongside the immediate tennis play-by-play (“a difficult, brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else”), while adding his transcripts of the rivals’ internal monologues: ”Graebner dives for it, catches it with a volley, then springs up, ready, at the net. Ashe lobs into the sun, thinking, ‘That was a good get on that volley. I didn’t think he’d get that.’”

And he serves quiet axioms along the way: “Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net like the ball itself, and only somewhat less frequently.”

One disappointing oddity: For a book about such a turbulent era, McPhee writes with a square, AM radio voice; as a result, a time that is decidedly connected to our own is rendered strangely remote here.

That said, it’s a pleasure to disappear into a lost world drawn so vividly.

———

I’d add that the in the final 30 pages or so, McPhee directly addresses the “Black Militant” politics of the time—or quotes moderate Ashe on the subject; keeps rolling with the internal monologues; and has a lovely locker room scene before the final set when the Davis Cup coach (Ashe and Graebner are both on the U.S. team) visits each player separately to give them last-minute advice.

*Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries, ©2024*

I wrote about this exciting book in my weekly obsessions post, I’m All Lost In :

I still remember reading an excerpt from Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti’s innovative memoir two years ago when the NYT ran a preview — and how it struck me that her writing should be filed under poetry rather than memoir.

When I saw that the book finally came out this month, I had to buy a copy.

Innovative how? Heti downloaded a decade-worth of journal entries into an Excel spreadsheet and re-sorted it alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

From Chapter 9, for example:

I have never been so screwed for money, and I am angry at Lemons for not returning my emails. I have never known what a relationship is for. I have never worn such dark lipstick before. I have no money. I have no one. I have spent the whole night in my hotel room, eating chocolate cereal. I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.

While the effect can be a bit like refrigerator magnet poetry—with entire sentences instead of single words—Heti’s idea that “untethering” her lines from their original chronological narrative “would help me identify patterns and repetitions…How many times had I written, ‘I hate him,’ for example?” works as exegesis for the reader as well. By scrambling the traditional notion of a diary, often comically so, Heti’s non-stop and remarkable juxtapositions reveal how life’s epic and mundane moments intertwine—indistinguishably at times—to create a super-narrative distinct from specific plot twists.

It’s a useful, and ironic directive (from a diary!), to get out of one’s own head and notice the larger stories that define us.

I’m only on Chapter 14, N, which begins, “Neglect my friends and family. Never having felt so sad. New sheets for the bed. New York, I think, made me depressed…” but I will have surely finished the whole book by the time you read this. I’m addicted to the clipped rhythm that’s transforming Heti’s non-sequitur flow into a logical story. It’s as if each sentence is commenting on the preceding one. Glued to her “untethered” account, I’m dying to see what happens next.

Heads up—not that this going to ward anyone off—these diaries are salacious.

————

And having finished it now, here’s what I’d add:

Late in the book, in the W chapter, Heti breaks from her steady, minimalist cadence and rolls out a run-on sentence (a fantastically specific description of a woman on a 13-hour train ride, the person Heti wants to write a novel for) that’s simultaneously anxious and calm—the sentence, not the woman—which, with its meta overtones, is, as much as possible, a summary of the character we’ve come to know after immersing ourselves in her musique concrète diary revision.

Also: Affirming that this instructive lesson about the human condition is inseparable from a personal, intimate, and vulnerable autobiography, late in the T chapter, Heti outdoes the salacious standard she’d already set with a super risqué account: “This was the weekend that Vish hog-tied me, fucked me up the ass for the first time, …”

She closes the book with a playful sentence about Zadie Smith’s husband, the lone sentence in chapter Z.

*Jane Wong, How To Not Be Afraid of Everything, ©2021*

This book of excellent poems topped this week’s (2/16-2/23) I’m All Lost In post, my regular roundup of current obsessions. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Wong’s poetry splices her outcast biography—mostly her formative experience in white America/”the Frontier” (growing up poor with a Chinese immigrant mom and derelict, alcoholic father)—into the harrowing history of her grandparents’ crushed lives under Mao.

She still speaks to them: “Was I a pigeon in this city in your dream? Were you/ hungry when dreaming?” And they still speak to her: “…I can only hear the vowels of your questions,/your fists curling and uncurling in sleep, the low rush of wind along ferns so tall—they must be pulled up by the sky.”

Wong is a master of the fine detail (”a butterfly crawls into a chip bag;” “fruit flies fluttering about like snow;” “my father’s ruined jaw/misshapen like a novice ceramist’s bowl”); the liberating revelation (”let all your hexes seep into your pores;” “beware of light you cannot see;” “leave any country that has a name”); and sumptuous mic drops (“Serenade a snake and slither its tongue/into yours and bite. Love! What is love/ if not knotted garlic”).

Her evident talent effortlessly lifts her verse beyond politics into poetry. An uncommon skill!

Marking my favorite poems in this collection with stars became redundant, but there’s definitely this one:

I Put on My Fur Coat
And leave a bit of ankle to show.
I take off my shoes and make myself
comfortable. I defrost a chicken
and chew on the bone. In public,
I smile as wide as I can and everyone
shields their eyes from my light.
At night, I knock down nests off
telephone poles and feel no regret.
I greet spiders rising from underneath
the floorboards, one by one. Hello,
hello. Outside, the garden roars
with ice. I want to shine as bright
as a miner's cap in the dirt dark,
to glimmer as if washed in fish scales.
Instead, I become a balm and salve
my daughter, my son, the cold mice
in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage
out at midnight. I move furniture away
from the wall to find what we hide.
I stand in the center of every room
and ask: am I the only animal here?

*William Wordsworth, Selected Poems 1793-1850, ©2004*

My recent foray into 19th century literature—Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater—all from a subset of my self-induced City Studies Seminar— has led me down another autodidact path: 19th century poetry.

(Just like the city syllabus, my 19th century poetry reading list is research for my all-consuming poetry practice.)

I led off this 1800s poetry inquiry with William Wordsworth.

His idyllic and philosophical nature poetry, which, channeling the age-old and persistent Babylon trope, casts cities as havens of corruption and inauthenticity—”Love cannot be; nor does it easily thrive/In cities, where the human heart is sick/” (The Prelude, Book 12, Same Subject)—certainly seems at odds with my own pro-city, city-planning poetry; and, by the way, his religious reverence of nature comes with the trite and adjacent narrative that fetishizes childhood .

But Wordsworth’s 100% gorgeous writing (“the stars have tasks”; Gipsies); his calm strong suit, writing verse as short stories —The Ruined Cottage, The Brothers, The Thorn, Michael, Idiot Boy); and the larger space-time continuum philosophy that governs his scenic Romanticism, all render my political disagreements with his pastoral odes irrelevant.

In fact, I found Wordworth’s nature walks—”I love a public road…like a guide into eternity…” (The Prelude, Book 12, Same Subject)—simpatico with my own city strolls. Wordsworth is a great flaneur.

All his vales and crags and nooks and “foxglove bells” (Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room) aside, what always seems to be at the heart of his sylvan perambulations are the characters, the freaks (!) he invariably meets along the way: noble beggars, ghosts, orphans, leech collectors, spooky kids, gipsies, sailors, ancient men; and mysterious women with “a tall Man’s height, or more….” in “ a long drab-colored cloak” (Beggars).

Coincidentally, Wordsworth is also drawn to the the exciting characters of the city; in fact, in the finale of The Prelude, Book 7, Residence in London, he exalts the street entertainers that define his crowning metaphor of the city’s “press of self-destroying, transitory things.”

His “Parliament of Monsters” is pure urban exhilaration:

The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves,/
Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum,/
And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,/
The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,/
Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,/
Blue-breeched, pink-vested, and with towering plumes./ — All moveables of wonder, from all parts,/
Are here — Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,/
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,/
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,/
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,/
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,/
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft/
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,/
All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,/
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts/
Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats/
All jumbled up together to make up/
This Parliament of Monsters. /

No wonder in the next chapter of The Prelude, Book Eight, Retrospect. — Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind, Wordsworth sounds like city zealot, poet Frank O’Hara:

“London!”—O’Hara would say Manhattan— “to thee I willingly return./Erewhile my Verse played only with flowers.”

Yes, I’m cherry picking lines. Wordsworth exclusively reveres the “internal feelings” of dandelions, the “gentle agency of natural objects,” (Michael) his “darling Vale!” and the “active universe” (The Prelude, Book Two), and regularly returns to his overarching idea that glimpses of the glorious natural world and its “gem-like hues!” (Ode Composed upon and Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty) sustain us during the otherwise downcast prison of the daily world.

Wordsworth’s topic isn’t my thing, but his subject is.

In Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth channels his “wild green landscape” to cast light on the “unintelligible world”:

Almost suspended, we are laid to sleep/In body, and become a living soul/…We see into the life of things.

I have been enamored with this collection—and its non-stop reservoir of possible epigraphs—all January and February, writing about it along the way here, here, here, and here.

2023—

Fans of Manchester novels, a sub-genre of Victorian fiction that explicitly deals with owner-worker conflict during the Industrial Revolution, undoubtedly put Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton on their lists of classics.

Of all the similarities between these two Communist Manifesto-era standard-bearers—the beshitten backstreets, the righteous working class heroes, the saintly women, the pompous, oblivious privilege of the master class—one curious plot device quietly figures in both novels: the good guys’ unquestioned decisions to shield a family member from the law. In Hard Times, the nearly spectral protagonist Loo Gradgrind helps her remorseless, selfish brother, Tom Jr. elude the police after he embezzles money from his fancy bank job. And in Mary Barton, hero Mary conceals evidence—she burns it—that will clearly implicate her father in the cold-blooded murder of callous young capitalist, Harry Carson.

Yes, the victims in these crimes are bad guys—a bank and the noxious wealthy son of a capitalist. But the whole point of both novels is the Christian tenet of forgiving your enemies; Christianity is a term that was synonymous with social justice during this period. As if serious crimes weren’t shocking enough in the morally black and white 19th Century (and used as literary symbols of depravity), both Dickens and Gaskell make it extra clear to the reader that these respective crimes are “abominable.” In the case of Tom Jr.’s crime, Dickens points out that this wayward lout robbed hard-working depositors. As for the murder in Mary Barton, not only does Gaskell give us the gruesome head wound autopsy report—”they lifted up some of the thick chestnut curls, and showed a blue spot (you could hardly call it a hole, the flesh had closed so much over it) in the left temple. A deadly aim!”— but she writes about the murder in the unequivocal terms of sin.

Why then are both cover-ups presented as logically coherent givens for the protagonists, as they go unquestioned by the author and presumably, the audience.

Is the intent to foster a debate about the justness of desperate acts within a morally bankrupt capitalist society? That’d be great. But, again, in both instances, there’s no discussion of a moral conflict whatsoever—either by the narrator or in the lead character’s brain. It’s presumed without question that eluding the law by saving her brother (Loo Gradgrind in Hard Times) or father (Mary in Mary Barton) is the protagonist’s natural priority.

In Mary’s case, turning her father into the law—as he himself later intends to do—wouldn’t only match the Christian themes of the novel, but it would exonerate her lover, who is falsely accused of the crime. Gaskell, in fact, uses the evidently unthinkable option of turning over the evidence, as a binding condition that creates the literary poetics of her mental torture: visions of watching her condemned finace hang at the gallows.

The only rationale I can come up with here is that private forgiveness— that is, overlooking the crime as an extension of familial love— is more Christian than participation in the formal legal system.

Gaskell’s confusion on this point is both more palatable and more complex: The criminal in Mary Barton, Mary’s opressed, hard-working father (as opposed to the reprobrate brat in Hard Times), and the victim, a toxic playboy who not only exploits workers, but cavalierly, sexually exploits Mary herself, make the murder more comprehensible. However, the crime, cold-blooded murder (as opposed to the sneaky, sad sack theft in Hard Times) is more abhorent. This, I suppose, raises the stakes of the question itself. This story line, in turn, is a better thematic match to Gaskell’s novel, the more pensive and philosophical book of the two. And again, the stakes of the plot twist are already higher than in the Dickens novel; the question of Mary’s father’s guilt has dire ramifications for Mary’s own future in terms of her pending marriage to her lifelong friend and now fiancee, Jem Wilson. Conversely, in Hard Times, Tom Jr.’s fate is not super germane to Loo’s future, which is entwined with her spiritual comrade, former circus outcast, Sissy Jupe.

For me, the ways in which these similar plot devices differ when you game them out, serves as a symbol for how these novels are ultimately distinct. Overall, there’s more at stake in Mary Barton.

I actually got to the less-well-known Gaskell, Mrs. Gaskell, as she was known at the time, through Dickens; her name comes up in all the academic essays and intros to Dickens’ books. It turns out, Gaskell’s narrative is calmer, wiser, and has a more contemporary sensibility when it comes to the human condition.

I will say, even though, for hundreds of pages, Christian/Marxist Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) seems on track to be a Victorian Brit lit masterpiece, the hurried concluding chapters do trip it up a bit; they’re also marred in turn by some cheap literary symbolism (a blind character regains her sight).

That said, for 35 chapters or so (there are 38), Mrs. Gaskell is a patient, concerned, and artistic narrator, who expertly unfurls stories about star-crossed love, intimate family tragedies, potent proletarian immiseration, along with a Nancy Drew mystery to boot, complete with epistolary ciphering.

The disappointing ending is an ironic misstep because it’s here that Gaskell re-introduces the novel’s most compelling character, Esther, Mary Barton’s long lost aunt. Esther, who sets off the novel’s spiral of heartbreaks in Chapter 1 by abandoning her family to marry a soldier (not gonna happen, even though he promised), subsequently shows up in pivotal scenes as Mary’s jinxed angel. She’s an outcast, alcoholic prostitute who lives on the damp, gas-lamp streets of Industrial-Revolution-era Manchester watching over young seamstress Mary from the shadows. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Gaskell misplays Esther’s final appearance by rushing the drama rather than taking her time with the complex character she initially created.

But my disappointment in that final turn just speaks to how invested I was in this great novel.

I savored this book; I wrote a couple of iterative takes as I lovingly read the novel throughout December and January. The tidy TV-series-wrap-up (Gaskell fast forwards a decade after the drama to a hokey scene of domestic bliss) nonwithstanding, Mary Barton brims with literary craft. Gaskell is particularly skilled at creating meaningful parallels within the natural flow of the plot, such as when Jane Wilson, busy tending to her sick sister-in law Alice, first learns that her son Jem has been arrested for murder. Stricken, she unburdens her sorrow to Alice.

Gaskell writes: “She told the unconscious Alice, hoping to rouse her to sympathy; and then was disappointed, because, still smiling and calm, Alice murmured of her mother, and the happy days of infancy.”

This knack for telling two stories at once seems to mark every scene as the novel’s main concern—owners versus workers—is replicated with binary after binary such as vengeance versus forgiveness and hope versus despair. Mary’s own story line is plagued by another stark binary: innocence versus guilt. Her lover Jem is falsely accused of murder, but again, as only she knows, it’s her beloved and morose father, mill worker John Barton, who’s guilty.

Gaskell’s poetic 19th Century prose—”the men were nowhere to be seen, but the wind appeared”—successfully immerses readers in the private worlds of her anxious characters’ inner monologues, all the while, set in the visible world of bleak lanes, cellar flats, seamstress workshops, foundry shop floors, pubs, candle-lit kitchen tables, and glimpses of the wealthy reclining on divans in the drawing rooms of their estates. The ultimate setting, however—spiraling downward in fustian rags and opium addiction toward murder—is class war.

And class analysis! In the big trial scene, wrongly accused working man Jem Wilson is defended with powerful exculpating testimony from an eye-witness sailor. When the no-expenses-spared prosecuting attorney (working for factory master Mr. Carson) cross examines, asking the sailor if he’d “have the kindness to inform the gentlemen of the jury…How much good coin of Her Majesty’s realm have you received, or will you receive, for walking up from the docks, or some less creditable place, and uttering the tale you have just now repeated…” the sailor, Will Wilson (Jem’s long lost cousin) responds with a withering juxtaposition class conscious rejoinder that exposes the unbalanced scales of justice:

Will you tell the judge and jury how much money you've been paid for your impudence towards one who has told God's blessed truth, and who would scorn to tell a lie, or blackguard any one, for the biggest fee as ever lawyer got for doing dirty work? Will you tell, sir?--But I'm ready, my lord judge, to take my oath as many times as your lordship or the jury would like, to testify to things having happened just as I said.

This is a particularly satisfying for readers to hear because we know that Mr. Carson already offered double the typical reward money (1,000 pounds as opposed to 500). And bent on vengeance, Carson told the police: "Spare no money. The only purpose for which I now value wealth is to have the murderer arrested… My hope in life now is to see him sentenced to death. Offer any rewards. Name a thousand pounds in the placards.”

By contrast, Mary got Will Wilson’s testimony through a shoe leather labor of love and not through any high-paid legal team of her own.

Meanwile, the sailor angle isn’t merely a working class plot device. It also brings the story a-train-ride-away to British port town, Liverpool, which sets the novel’s immediate Manchester-based factory strike narrative in the broader setting of national and international capitalist markets. This geographically expansive theme (again, a binary juxtaposition to Gaskell’s hyper local “Tale of Manchester Life,” the novels’ subtitle) is established early on. In addition to Mary’s patron saint Job Legh’s tragic London-based origin story (Legh is Mary’s best friend’s grandfather), and weaver union member John Barton’s eye-opening and dispiriting trip to London to plead the workers’ cause to an inattentive parliament (the weaver is also turned off by the hipster fashions), Gaskell makes it plain that forces beyond Manchester are always present.

Most prominently, Mr. Carson cuts wages to compete for “an order for goods from a new foreign market [which was] necessary to execute speedily and at as low prices as possible [because] the masters had reason to believe a duplicate order had been sent to one of the continental manufacturing towns.”

Certainly, Gaskell, who opens the novel with a comparison between the local countryside and the city, does an expert job focusing on Manchester itself, especially on its filthy gloom—a la Friedrich Engels’ influential The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, three years before to Mary Barton—penning sentences like this: “As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones…”

But it’s actually the climactic Liverpool chapters, when Gaskell introduces a sort of Jane Jacobs civic pride tour guide (a street-smart teenage boy named Charley who’s on a first-name basis with the Liverpool stevedores), that readers are able to place Manchester, now set in relief against its neighboring port town, fully in its own sunken context.

At both the macro and micro level, this novel lives on conjunctions like these, including my favorite passage of all, which also gives you an idea of Gaskell’s intoxicating city prose:

It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist's looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin's garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist.

As for the social justice Christianity I noted in passing in my first sentence ^ (Christian/Marxist binary!), Gaskell rolls out this showstopping line about the evil of pursuing vengeance, which concludes a chapter titled “Murder,” symbolically transmogrifying mortal sin into a discussion about forgiveness.

Ay! to avenge his wrongs the murderer had singled out his victim, and with one fell action had taken away the life that God had given. To avenge his child's death, the old man lived on; with the single purpose in his heart of vengeance on the murderer. True, his vengeance was sanctioned by law, but was it the less revenge?
Are ye worshippers of Christ? or of Alecto?
Oh! Orestes, you would have made a very tolerable Christian of the nineteenth century!

By the way, this social justice novel also has a sense of humor. Mary’s confusion (and my own) about the “pilot-boat” plan, the mermaid story (!), and Harry Carson’s utter bewilderment at Jem Wilson’s confusing motives are just a few of the goofy moments in this wonderful book.

Here’s another book from my own city studies seminar, Bryan Washington’s short story collection Lot, which serendipitously overlaps with a city planning, non-fiction book I read earlier this year as part of my same personalized, city syllabus: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. The connection between that academic book and Washington’s fast-paced story collection? The city of Houston, which Arbitrary Lines hyped as the only non-zoned city in America (you can scroll down for my review). Meanhwile, my besty Erica, who hails from Houston, recommended Washington as a talented city chronicler.

Lot, set in Houston’s cynical, hardened (and vulnerable) immigrant, POC neighborhoods—it comes with a black & white replica of the city’s street grid opposite the table of contents—revolves around Nicolás, the youngest brother in a biracial family headed by a single mom. The family is struggling to keep the restaurant they run (and live above) afloat as the the earnest mom’s incurable longing, the eldest brother Javi’s violence and reckless machismo, the distant sister Jan’s cool alienation, and the always-present subtext of Nicolás’ queer identity, along with the absentee father/husband’s ghost, haunt these stories.

The street-drug economy, the specter of homelessness, the grind of marginal jobs and petty bosses, racism, violence, and poverty also loom as a constant presence in their lives, and the lives of the characters in all the intertwined stories here, which include a few that aren’t about Nicolás’ family. Two of those stories, two of the longer stories in the collection coincidentally at 20-plus and 30-plus pages, “South Congress” and “Waugh” (all the stories here are named after Houston streets and/or districts), are explosive, showstoppers that, by stepping away from Nicolás story line, document the tenuous trappings of Nicolás’ world. “South Congress,” narrated by a young Latino named Raúl who works the drug deal circuit driving an old Corolla for his older, experienced and chatty African American mentor who sells from the open car window, and “Waugh,” narrated by a young homeless kid named Poke, who’s taken in by a Fagin figure with a flop house crew of young sex workers, amplify Nicolás’ angsty biography as Washington blurs Raúl and Poke’s pensive accounts with Nicolás’ own coming-of-age story.

While I could do with less of the tough guy dialogue throughout, Washington is an outstanding writer whose superpower is writing attention-to-detail asides—“stepping through the kitchen you cross border after border,” “we were always out of everything on the menu”— that work as slow motion metaphors for how the immediate action at hand reflects each story’s larger themes. Most often, that theme involves the idea of home and escape per the collection’s opening Gary Soto epigraph: “And how did I/Get back? How did any of us/Get back when we searched/For beauty?”

Washington, whose class-and-race-conscious immigrant narratives—a popular genre these days, particularly in poetry—stand out from many I’ve read thanks to his understated, economical prose, takes up Soto’s question head on in the story, “Elgin.” In this, the collection’s final story, Nicolás’ mother’s decision to leave Houston and move back in with her sister in Louisiana overlaps with Nicolás’ workmate Miguel’s mission to save up enough money so he can help his parents get back to their small hometown in Guatemala. “You go somewhere else and stay there and then go back home” Miguel says as the young pair, stuck in their dead end back-of-the-house restaurant jobs, ask each other why they haven’t followed their parents out of Houston.

Nicolás is the sole resident of the family house by now where “what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you.” As in many of Nicolás stories—including a sweep of poignant childhood, tween, and teenage tales early in the collection—his quiet and nearly telepathic friendship with Miguel, who has taken the first step toward leaving town by walking out on his job after a bloody fist fight with their kitchen boss, turns into a substantive love affair. In the story’s closing scenes (and the book’s), the pair are debating staying in town or leaving as they play house in the home Nicolás family has since left behind; along with his mom’s retreat, his sister Jan has a family and home of her own, and Nicolás’ older brother Javi is dead. “You could leave. I want you to think about it, Miguel said. I want you to think about what could happen.”

Nicolás tests the question: Leaving Miguel asleep in their rumpled lovers’ bed, Nicolás suddenly drives out of town to the ocean’s edge in Galveston. “This is the furthest I’ve been from the city, my city, in years, but it doesn’t feel like anything’s changed, and honestly why would it. You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.”

*Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ©1854*
As this lively and hardly subtle novel of philosophical binaries and dramatic dialectics begins, our abandoned circus youth, Sissy Jupe, is taken from her default family of tight rope walkers, horse riders, clowns, and freaks and adopted by the stiff Gradgrind family. The Gradgrind patriarch, educator Thomas Gradgrind, commands a school (and a son, daughter, and wife too) under his strict, rationalist code. In Dickens’ comic-book parable of humanist Christianity versus conniving Capitalism, the seemingly hapless Sissy Jupe, suddenly captive in the uptight Gradgrind home, symbolizes the emotional and fanciful side of human nature. Watch out fragile Gradgrind family!
By the novel’s finale, godly Sissy and Tom Gradgrind’s pensive daughter Loo Gradgrind—initially Sissy’s standoffish counterpart, who represents the stifled side of hyper rationalism and its contorted allegiance with industrial capitalism—blur into one character. Or more accurately: Loo Gradgrind blurs into Sissy Jupe as the circus side wins the dialectic battle.
And I should clarify: Loo symbolizes the outcome of her father’s didactic code rather than representing the code itself. Brilliant, beautiful, but subconsciously longing for more as she often gazes into the fireplace (a metaphor that’s simultaneously paired with the town’s blazing capitalist smokestacks or with the fire inside her), Loo is originally incapable of love. She ends up trapped in a chilly, lifeless arranged marriage with Gradgrind’s social colleague, the bombastic banker and factory owner, Josiah Bounderby.
Loo is Incapable of love, that is, until the fragile structures of the world around her are revealed and toppled by a Rube Goldberg chain of events involving: the incorruptible laboring “Hand” Stephen Blackpool; his working class soul mate, the angelic Rachael, who should be wearing a halo; the sycophantic young bank employee, Bitzer, who we originally meet as a tattle tale teacher’s pet in Gradgrind’s school; the scheming playboy, layabout James Hartouse; the meddling Mrs. Sparsit; the hypocritical, aforementioned Bounderby; and Loo’s misguided, tragic brother Tom Jr., who’s deep in debt with a gambling addiction. The cascading story line—both dramatic and comedic—ultimately lands right back at the doorstep of the Gradgrind home in the form of Loo’s feminist monologue, which she directs at her now capsized father as the book’s final act, Book III, beings.
This pivotal confrontation follows on the heel’s of my favorite sequence here: Loo’s tour de force breakout in Book II’s closing chapter, “Chapter 12: Down,” which features her take down of arrogant trickster James Harthouse and her clever footwork outsmarting the devious Mrs. Sparsit as she makes her way home (there’s that cartoon Dickens’ symbolism again) rather than to an infamous rendezvous with Harthouse. Book II’s penultimate chapter, “Chapter 11: Lower and Lower,” is also dynamite; though, showcasing Dickens’ range, we’re treated to slapstick comedy this time as Mrs. Sparsit hides in the bushes, Shakespearean comedy style.
In the novel’s dreamy denouement, Dickens’ reverses the opening scenario: Set decades in the future, when Sissy and Loo are middle aged women, Loo is taken in by Sissy’s Jupe’s loving daughters, who symbolize the outcome of Sissy’s circus paradigm.
In a novel that’s famous for its opening paragraph, a send up of rationalism …
“Now, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wqnted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else… You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I brig up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”
… let me instead quote from the fanciful mirror on Dickens’ concluding page, which, formalizes the sort of Bibi Andersson/Liv Ullmann meld (a la Ingmar Bergman’s *Persona*) between Sissy and Loo that I noted earlier. (Coincidentally, is that Sissy or Loo on the book cover?)
Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing, and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which, is a blessing and happiness to the wisest? Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was never to be.
But, happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will be the Writing on the Wall,—she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be done,—did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be.
This is obviously a fun and tidy book. But two objections, one minor, and one major. First, the gripe. It’s a bit incongruous that Thomas Gradgrind and Loo aid and abet wayward Tom Jr. after they have rejected the nihilism at the heart of industrial capitalism. I understand that assisting Tom Jr., despite his crimes, could be read as placing the amorphous bonds of family over the rational rule of law—and even seen as a Christian gesture of forgiveness that follows the the gospel of martyred working man Stephen Blackpool who preaches forgiveness in his death bed monologue. But to me, it reads more as an endorsement of cynicism.
My bigger complaint is about the standard Christian populism at the heart of this novel. While meant as an endorsement of brotherly Socialism, it’s not dissimilar to the simplistic *Fight Club* reactionary utopian-ism that often ends up scripting fascist Year-Zero purity politics of holier than though crusades for authenticity. Watch out, fragile Jupe family.
I trust Dickens, but his quaint style of moralism can quickly give way to the Huey Longs and George Wallace’s of the world. Interestingly, *Hard Times* itself features a character who fits this exact mold: Slackridge, the “United Aggregate Tribunal” (LOL) union demagogue that Dickens spoofs in Book II, “Chapter 4: Men and Brothers.” Here, Slackridge turns the workers against their factory brother, good guy Stephen Blackpool.

*Betty Smith, Tomorrow Will be Better, ©1948*

This is the follow-up to Smith’s blockbuster classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s not literally a Part Two, but all eyes were on Smith after her mega-hit debut. This 1948 novel, published five years after A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, drops the reader into the same bittersweet pre-war Brooklyn universe of struggling, working-class Irish and Italian, first-generation immigrant families who are caught on the treadmill of menial labor, tight budgets, spent, loveless marriages, and fumbling young overtures. Set in class-and-race-conscious 1920s Williamsburg and Bushwick where fathers approve of suitors simply if they vote a straight Democratic ticket and street peddlers double as philosophers, the novel mostly takes place in spare flats over meager family dinners in between lives lived watching the clock at work (or gossiping in the lady’s washroom), riding home on crowded streetcars, haggling with (though more often bonding with) proprietors of corner shops, bakeries, and laundries, and occasionally dressing up for a Friday night dance. Differentiating itself from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Tomorrow Will be Better leans more into the bitter side of bittersweet.

Gloomy might actually be the better word here as the novel’s protagonist, teenager Margy Shannon, patiently attempts to escape her stifled home life where her bickering parents cycle through the same fights night after night. Margy thinks young love is her ticket out, but hope quickly gives way to the trappings of privation and the scarred upbringings that have damaged both her and her young husband, Frankie. He, for one—thanks to his bullying father and suffocating mother —recoils at intimacy and sex.

At times, Tomorrow Will be Better can read more like an earnest YA novel than a sophisticated literary one, but Smith’s consistently crisp prose, catchy and poignant narrative turns, and genuine insights about the human condition often distill psychological blocks into surprisingly candid reflections.

“Why? Why? Give me one good reason why.” He thought of his mother’s reason. “Aside from the fact that you want to tie me down.”
Then she said something shew hadn’t known was in her mind. “We’ve got to have children because you and I have nothing between us.’”

Reminiscent of the more uplifting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, there are certainly light touches, humor, and sweet moments in this novel, particularly between Margy and her gregarious, off-color pal, Reenie. But as Margy comes out on the other side of hope in the concluding chapters here, her youthful idea that tomorrow will be better becomes more of a resignation that it will simply be more layered.

*M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, ©2022*

A book about zoning that’s a total gas.

For city hall reporters, policy weirdos, and YIMBYs who are already familiar with housing regulations such as FARs, maximum lot coverage rules, off-street parking minimums, setbacks, building envelopes, and R1 Zones, M. Nolan Gray’s book Arbitrary Lines is an energetic and engaging refresher that will help you collect your thoughts and re-calibrate as you consider his treatise: Abolish zoning altogether!

For the general reader, Arbitrary Lines is a friendly primer on what all the fuss over density is about right now. Gray believes doing away with the ubiquitous single family residential zoning rules that dominate ~70%-80% of the land in most American cities could be a direct route to lowering housing prices. Cities, Gray contends, are vital to the well being of the U.S.A., but he’s worried they are currently at risk of failing because their exclusionary zoning rules prevent them from being universally accessible.

Gray is no man-splainer. His tone is humble and playful. His writing is plain and engaging. And he’s well-versed in the urgent, ongoing, and reasonable disagreements —and talking points on both sides— about gentrification, incompatible land uses, racism, concurrence, environmentalism, and historic preservation that (endlessly) define the debate.

He starts the book by saying what zoning is: Rules that segregate land uses and cap densities, “That’s it.” And what zoning is not: City planning. “Abolishing zoning doesn’t mean the death of planning—on the contrary, it could mean the resuscitation of a once vibrant field” that matches growth to uses and infrastructure.

Gray also explains why zoning came into being in the first place: It wasn’t to segregate slaughterhouses or glue factories from residential areas, it was ushered in during the early 20th Century to appease real estate interests that wanted to drive up property values by limiting land use and density through exclusion. He also shows that the push for exclusion was, in large part, driven by racism, detailing how the very first two zoning codes in the U.S.—in Manhattan and Berkeley in 1916, respectively—were explicitly about keeping Jews (“flies”) out of Midtown and Chinese (“heathens”) out of white residential neighborhoods.

This did not go unnoticed by the courts who fielded several challenges to zoning as it became standard practice for municipalities nationwide in the 1920s. The landmark case, Euclid (1926), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of single-family zoning, was originally struck down at the district court level where the appellate judge ruled: "The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped 16 square miles [compromising Euclid, Ohio] in a strait-jacket… The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living persons who hereinafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and to segregate them according to income or situation in life."

As to the glue factory question, ie, isn’t zoning necessary to segregate harmful or nuisance land uses from the general public?, Gray shows both that zoning has, in fact, failed to do this (in city after city, zoning consistently slams working class and poor people right up against harsh environments) and even if done right, he argues, zoning is not the correct tool for segregating incompatible uses.

There does seem to be a bit of free market hocus-pocus in his thesis. Left to our own devices, Gray says, city dwellers will organically sort out land uses: “At a basic level, different types of uses will have different locational needs,” he writes. Maybe? I will say, and this gets back to Gray’s belief in planning versus zoning, he argues persuasively that with an attentive eye to the crux of planning questions such as transit, parks, utilities, and environmental regulations (emissions standards, for example), planners can help guide land use without relying on restrictive, largely class-based and aesthetic zoning guidelines.

Additionally, his case study (Houston, the only American city where zoning doesn’t exist) is compelling. For one thing, unlike heavily zoned cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, Houston is currently affordable because housing production has been able to keep up with demand thanks to the un-zoned fact that all kinds of housing typologies (ie, apartments!) are allowed in the vast majority of the city. “In 2019,” Gray reports, “Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large.”

Gray concludes his exciting addition to the city canon stating simply: “Zoning has had a destructive effect on cities, which is why we should abolish it.”

*J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, ©1951*

To deal with a bout of insomnia, I found a recording of someone reading The Catcher in the Rye on Youtube. Rather than lulling me to sleep, I got sucked right in. Again.

I read this rite of passage (for Gen Xers) novel long ago, and I’ve even read it a few times as an adult. It holds up every time, and I’m always wowed by some scene I had completely forgotten about; this time I think it was the summer backstory with “Old Jane” when they’re on the back porch playing checkers.

Since it’s a teenage monologue in the first place, the book lends itself to being read out loud, and this actor does a fantastic job. Here’s the link. Enjoy.

I can’t remember where, but I recently read that this 1939 book is the great L.A. novel.

The next read on my City Canon syllabus?

While I was perusing Elliott Bay Books earlier this week, looking for, and failing to find, Betty Smith’s Tomorrow Will Be Better (a great Brooklyn novel, I imagine, at least based on her 1943 YA classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I just read for the first time not long ago), I checked my phone notes and saw “John Fante, Ask the Dust,” jotted down. I found that one on the shelves, and I took it over to a table and read the first few pages of clipped Raymond Chandler-like, hard boiled, bachelor-life prose. And then this: ”Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to meet me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” Bam. More like Raymond Chandler meets John Rechy’s City of Night, perhaps! (City of Night is one of my City Canon all-stars.)

I bought the Fante novel, and read it over the next 48 hours. Unfortunately, despite the hype around this novel, at least back in the 1980s when it was rediscovered as a grimy, hipster classic—and despite some poetic and sensual passages about cheap diners, Filipino dance halls, “Negro” night spots, back-alley hophead dens, and the desperate characters who inhabit this geography of alienation, Ask the Dust falls short as a must-read. Chandler’s noir L.A. crime narratives from the same era are light years better at presenting the human condition than Fante’s self-conscious attempt to do so. Chandler seeps us in the details of L.A.’s murky world while Fante sticks to the surfaces.

Certainly, plenty of scenes in Ask the Dust can be moving and even sparkle with literary flair. There’s the late-night ocean swim and failed tryst between Fante’s roman-a-clef-narrator, striving writer Arturo Bandini, and his elusive love interest, music tavern waitress Camilla Lopez. There’s the gory cattle robbing excursion orchestrated by Bandini’s unstable next door neighbor to address their starving poverty. There’s the awkward short-story-in-its-own-right scene between Bandini and 14-year-old Judy, who indulges Bandini’s delusion that he’s a famous American writer. There’s the deformed vulnerability of naked Vera Rivken whose “old child’s eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.” And of course, Camilla’s descent into addiction and desperation haunts the whole short novel.

But despite these well-rendered glimpses into human yearning and suffering—often set at night where carbon monoxide and “the smell of gasoline makes the sight of palm trees seem sad” or set in stark rooms “like ten million California rooms, with cobwebs and dust, her room, and everybody’s room … a few boards of plaster and stucco to keep the sun out”—the novel as a whole is insular without revelation.

My disappointment also comes despite Fante’s woke narratives about race. I must give Fante proper credit here. With calm insight, Fante makes Mexican American, African American, Asian, and white minority ethnicities—Italian and Jewish—front and center in this novel of precarity as his cast of outcasts circle one another with postures framed by vulnerability.

I am so glad this hyper-eloquent book exists.

It’s an even-keeled contemporary history of the emergent YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement, which the author, a calm, thorough, and earnest Melbourne-based academic, traces to San Francisco circa 2013. That was when pro-density agitators and newcomers started challenging the city’s anti-housing development rules and its “‘hysterical hippies’ who care more about their vegetables than about people becoming homeless.” One agitator explains: “When you ask people if we should have more housing, they say, ‘absolutely’ but if you say ‘do we need more development’ they’ll answer ‘not at all.’”

I actually started reporting on Seattle’s YIMBY push for more density in exclusionary single family zones back in 2004, including a pro-missing middle housing feature story I wrote for the Stranger late that year; I had been profoundly influenced by this pro-density October, 2004 New Yorker article “Green Manhattan,” which counter-intuitively identified cities as engines of environmentalism.

This was all happening in the wake of George W. Bush’s November, 2004 re-election which seemed to codify the rural/urban split in American politics, and motivated our already urgently pro-city paper to turn up the editorializing on urban sustainability. (For a special issue that year called “The Urban Archipelago,” an electoral organizing strategy our editor Dan Savage championed in the wake of Bush’s win, we called on Democrats to play to their city base. The feature included a piece that my newsroom colleague Erica C. Barnett and I wrote together channeling New Yorker writer David Owen’s “Green Manhattan” mantra by identifying cities as solutions to global warming; scroll to the “Urban Independence” section here .)

By 2007, pro-density, pro-pedestrian, pro-transit sentiment was full blown in the Stranger newsroom, and also on original Seattle YIMBY Dan Bertolet’s new blog, HugeAssCity. Fortuitously, when I exported this urbanist political aesthetic to my online-only news start-up, PubliCola, in 2009, a green group called Futurewise was pushing YIMBY legislation in the state legislature to up-zone neighborhoods adjacent to transit stops. It became PubliCola’s first editorial crusade. The legislation lost, but the fight served to introduce nascent YIMBYs to one another.

This isn’t meant to dispute Holleran’s San Francisco 2013 premise. The impromptu urban planning happy hours he describes where pro-housing activists, political operatives, analysts, and young people just feeling squeezed by the housing market got together at default organizing meetings in S.F. bars and breweries, were also happening in Seattle circa 2013. I remember being on an email list at the time called “Urbanist Happy Hour.” It was at those meetings—just as Holleran sees it in S.F.—that the YIMBY fight became less about piecemeal legislative efforts or specific initiatives or campaigns and more about an overarching political philosophy that helped pro-city, pro-density voices analyze a host of issues through a coherent lens. In this sense, Holleran is totally right. And his play-by-play report on San Francisco, and its original YIMBY group, BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation) works perfectly to set up a cohesive, compelling narrative of YIMBism. The cheekiness of the BARF moniker also works as an instructive moment for a movement that plays to Millennial social savvy.

Mainly I’m glad this book exists because Holleran is a skilled writer who ably articulates the essence of the YIMBY cause for more housing (while turning zoning and housing debates into a dramatic narrative). More so, he’s also able to clearly explain the nuanced political challenges YIMBYs face, most notably the strained and ongoing stand-off the predominantly white YIMBYs have with a group that should be their natural allies: the anti-gentrification, social justice groups and the largely POC communities they represent (along with those communities in their own right.)

Holleran simultaneously, shows how it’s the YIMBYs’ direct foes, the Baby Boomer NIMBYs, informed by 1960s and 70s counterculture, but transformed into a parochial homeowner class, who’ve been able to make common cause with the POC victims of gentrification.

In his excellent chapter on supposedly progressive Austin, Texas and their resistance to changing the city’s tight single family zoning code, Holleran writes: “In fact, many YIMBYs…run into a double bind: their pro-growth stance makes housing activists wary of their solutions, which bring in developers, while homeowners dislike them for the same reason. In some cities this has put welathy homeowners and poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods on the same side: opposing growth.”

Thankfully, Holleran’s also very good at explaining why this situation is deeply ironic, and moreover, comparing it to MAGA’s “Build a Wall” mentality, why it’s hypocritical on the part of the white Boomers to resist new apartments in their exclusive neighborhoods to protect the “neighborhood character.”

In addition to quoting [italics mine] a pro-YIMBY African American named Tommy Ates who calls out the fallacy in the NIMBY narrative that adding density displaces black communities—”the current code [that prohibits density] has destroyed the community,” Ates notes—Holleran zooms in on urban liberal Boomer hypocrisy:

“The desperate scramble to protect home values reveals a kind of left-wing double standard in which empathy is something saved for those who live far away and with whom one does not have to share parking, schools, and hospitals.”

Holleran deftly titles this chapter on Austin’s ex-hippie class and its single family zoning zealotry: “Exclusionary Weirdness,”

“Keep Austin Weird—and white” might be a more appropriate slogan for their anti-density sensibility. Holleran quotes one Austin YIMBY’s rejoinder to the “neighborhood character” defense: “‘I think neighborhood character is enhanced by having more characters in my neighborhood.’”

Holleran’s concluding chapter offers a solution for the YIMBY movement, one that pushes back against the YIMBY free-market orthodoxy of pro-any-and-all-housing. Instead, Holleran, sides with a targeted focus on putting development in privileged neighborhoods. YIMBYs, he urges, should aim to share the density, rather than settling for any development they can get, which typically, and unfortunately, means clustering new development in low-income communities that lack political clout. He couples his insistence to add housing stock in more privileged neighborhoods with the warning that YIMBYs are missing a zeitgeist chance to capitalize on the political will government and regulatory agencies have right now to enact policies that prioritize sustainability and resilience. In this context, Holleran recommends, YIMBYs need to partner with government and advocate for a more interventionist model that includes social housing.

*Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey, ©1821*

With all the philosophical throat clearing, intellectual asides, and long winded analogies that come with this circuitous 19th century prose, I couldn’t quite track De Quincy’s thesis here, but summarizing as best I can, it was something like: The straight world should not pass judgement on opium addicts.

I read this book (as part of my own city studies seminar) expecting more poetic descriptions of De Quincey’s stoned nighttime perambulations through the streets of turn-of-the-century (1700s into 1800s) London, but there wasn’t a lot of that. The poetic passages are reserved for his tortured, opium-addled nightmares.

“The waters now changed their character. From translucent lakes shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans…The sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens. Faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by generations, by centuries. My agitation was infinite — my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.”

The more entrancing part of this brief book comes early in De Quincey’s narrative when he documents his descent from being an academic standout at an elite university (and a cocky, well-read rebel) to becoming a homeless wanderer in and around London. De Quincey lovingly details his threadbare existence as a squatter where he teams up with a “hunger bitten” 10-year-old servant girl:

“From this forlorn child I learnt that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came, through the hours of darkness. The house was large, and from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing of the spacious staircase and hall—and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but, alas, I could offer her no other assistance.”

This desperate partnership immediately foreshadows De Quincey’s next friendship with a prostitute named Ann, his “orphan companion…this poor friendless girl [who I had] rested with on steps and under the shelter of porticoes.” They have a brother/sister relationship and on one hopeless night resting on the steps of a house off Soho Square, Ann saves De Quincey’s life by “paying out of her own humble purse, when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessities” to get provisions and stave off his withering starvation.

Despite De Quincey’s many attempts elsewhere in the book to write a philosophical treatise—wordy attempts loaded with allusions to Wordsworth and Greek mythology that make up the majority of this memoir—the de facto short story he writes detailing his spiritual bond with Ann emerges as the defining center of this book. It helps that he writes it more as a literary narrative than as lecture, relaying a near biblical parable that tracks De Quincey’s doomed effort to repay Ann for saving him, including their poignant, botched rendezvous on “Great Titchfield Street, which had been our customary Haven, as it were, to prevent missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.” Despite his frantic search, he never sees his “youthful benefactress” again. “How often in succeeding years, standing in solitary places and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love.”

De Quincey, a humanist in general, also comes across as something of a woke feminist when it comes to his friendship with Ann as he tries to help her regain her footing and “avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered her little property.”

De Quincey writes: “Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence, and one which, if London beneficence had better adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might oftener be interposed to protect and avenge. But the stream of London charity flows in a channel not readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers.”

Of course,De Quincey is also clearly well ahead of his time by intimately portraying drug addiction as a complicated disease rather than as a disgraceful sin. But, in my opinion, it’s his contextual narrative on poverty and economics—including a nuanced, sympathetic section on Jewish money lenders— that struck me as the heart of this classic.

*Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole, ©2007*

I continued my urbanism crash course with Teju Cole’s “Lagos Novel.” This is his first book, published in 2007, an autobiographical novella about his return trip home to Lagos after an abrupt, and evidently on the sly, bolt out of there to the U.S. for college 15 years earlier. As the book starts, he’s now a post-doc in New York City. The novella is told in a series of stand-alone, philosophical, and compelling vignettes culled from his month-long stay at his aunt and uncle’s comfortable home in their leafy, Lagos neighborhood.

Told with a sense of comedy and tragedy, the vignettes often dramatize the ubiquitous, low-level scams, shakedowns, and larger corruption shaping Lagos economic life—and Lagos life overall. The hustler touts—“the original wiseguys of Lagos”—are the tricksters who define Lagos for Cole. “Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world…They do not go home in the evening and stop being touts. The thing is bound to their souls. The regular non-tout-Lagosian, too, has to share this attitude” or else become another one of their “victims.”

Cushioned by his privilege, Cole isn’t at the total mercy of the larceny-by-1,000-shakedowns that he encounters here (the passport and airport rip-off artists, the traffic cops on the take, the wily gas station attendant, the CD pirates, and the danfo touts.) Nor does he seem ultimately threatened by the constant potential for violence that accompanies daily routines. In one scene that takes place in a lot behind a local school where Cole’s family is meeting a truck loaded with goods they’ve ordered from overseas, including books and a car, the group of “area boys” who are circling and demanding money “or else” certainly create tension, anger, and tears. But it never quite rises to the level of a crisis as much as moment of introspection. “Crazed by the situation and the need for an end to it, I no longer know myself.”

Just as the cozy shower at his aunt and uncle’s home washes off the sheen of red dust that comes with Cole’s out-and-about city adventures, his economic class—epitomized by the refuge of the house (though, one subject to the daily power outages)— creates a buffer that allows him to reflect on larger, adjacent narratives such as the public belief in magic and religion, along with the anti-intellectual culture that drove him from Lagos as a precocious teenager in the first place. “There is no battle over versions of stories that marks the inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices?”

Yet here’s the enticing friction that colors these philosophical and sometimes catty musings: He’s forever drawn to Lagos. From the noisy markets, to the crowded danfos, from the neighborhood labyrinths to the shops and bars, from disappointing, lackadaisical local museums to the striving music school, his observations are sewn with love and affection and hope for Lagos. “The champion of the people was also the fiercest critique of the people,” Cole writes about Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, spelling out what he quietly and clearly sees as his own, if not a bit cocky, compassionate mission statement.

Cole weaves family history and visits with past school chums and an old girlfriend into his local account too, adding yet another layer of warmth—and poignancy—to the occasionally didactic report on his flawed home city.

The closing chapter (about an alley where coffin making shops have clustered) works as a perfect example of the tenderness Cole conjures from the labyrinths and mazes of Lagos; “the shavings fall in a nest about his feet…There is a simple dignity about this little street. Nothing is preached here. Its inhabitants simply serve life by securing good passage for the dead…a comforting sense that there is an order to things.” For Cole, Lagos’ labyrinths and mazes themselves highlight the concomitant contradictions of his home city. Cole defines labyrinths as “winding paths [that] lead, finally, to the meaningful center,” and mazes as “full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, false signals; the trickster god’s domain.”

*Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention, Ben Wilson, ©2020*

Intent on finding the next book for my own private city studies seminar, I went to Elliott Bay Books a few weeks ago and made a beeline to their urban planning section. Typically, when I’m trying to dig into the city canon, I turn to city-based novels, like one of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo epics or one of Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe tales set in hard-boiled Los Angeles. But I was hungry for some data and information this time. Unfortunately, everything seemed to be yet another man-splainy book about density and sustainability; a shelf full of dudes trying to be the next Jane Jacobs without coming up with anything new. But then, there on the bottom shelf, I spotted this. Rather than all the pontificating, it looked to be a bona fide history of cities that promised to show me how they came to work, not tell me how they ought to.

The book is a delight. Starting with Uruk, Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago (around 4,000 BC), author Ben Wilson chronologically charts the evolution of cities. Each successive chapter is dedicated to a specific city (Babylon 2,000 BC, for examples, follows Uruk), as Wilson documents the way urban culture developed, using each city to represent a significant, emergent urbanist tenet. Chapter 5, “Baghdad, 537-1258,” for example, maps the rise of the city as an international crossroads documenting how Baghdad became a magnet for multicultural talent and thought.

Through it all—from Athens (507 BC-30 BC) and its vibrant civics, to London (1666-1820) and the rise of sociability as a creative function; from Chicago (1830-1914) and industrial capitalism’s default outcast class of slum district innovators, to Los Angeles (1945-1999) and the new, aggregate city of meshed suburbs—Wilson’s larger thesis emerges: A city’s duality of organization and chaos—with the latter being a magical ingredient forged from urban density —is the most powerful and positive natural force in world history.

The final chapter, “Chapter 14: Megacity, Lagos, 1999-2020,” wraps up this theme with literary flair. As if penning a cyberpunk novel, Wilson writes about Otigba Computer Village, the city’s unwieldy, square-kilometer hive of off-book tech entrepreneurship and its “staggering daily turnover of $5 million.” “In this bustling unregulated tech village, the largest gadget market in West Africa, over 8,000 big, small, and individual businesses and 24,000 traders and geeks offer the latest smartphones, laptops, and accessories alongside repaired and repurposed devices,” Wilson writes. “They fix screens, upgrade your software, perform data recovery and repair motherboards. Big tech companies compete with individual traders and artisans to capture a slice of the eye-popping $2 billion annual turnover.” Criticizing the authorities for trying to “sweep it away,” he identifies the “warren of scammers, technicians, freelance IT technicians, danfos [mini-buses], vendors, hawkers, and piles of keyboards” as the power button of this booming, 21st century megacity, concluding that with its “unregulated trade associations, internal government, and justice system” Otigba Computer Village is the “DIY urbanism that keeps Lagos going.”

Tied to the idea of sweeping away (or burning down) urban chaos, another overarching theme that runs through Wilson’s city history is the reactionary politics of anti-urbanism, which he traces back to the bible’s inaccurate depiction of Babylon as a sinful and crooked den of apostates and hucksters. Chapter 2 on Babylon (“Sin City, 2000-539 BC”), Chapter 3 on Athens, (“Cosmopolis, 507-30 BC”), Chapter 4 on Rome (“Imperial Megacity, 30 BC- AD 537”), Chapter 8 on London (“The Sociable Metropolis, 1666-1820,”), and Chapter 11 on New York City (“Skyscraper Souls, 1899-1939”) track the persistent anti-Babylon theme throughout world history while simultaneously documenting how these cities, despite populist animosity towards them, drove, and have been driven by ingenuity, idealism, and profound achievement.

In a clear defense of cities, and a not-so-veiled affront to today’s MAGA nativists, Wilson highlights Athens’ idea of kosmopolites, the citizen of the world, which distinguished the super city from its neighbors. “The stunning success of Athens in the fifth century BC was in large part ascribed to the fact that over a third of its free population were foreign born—a radical statement in an age of fiercely xenophobic city states…The dynamism of Athens…was in large part a result of a citizen population that rocketed from around 30,000 in 480 BC to 50,000 by 450 BC, the result of immigration. Athens allowed access, through its public spaces and open institutions, to an array of newly minted citizens. The congested urban environment facilitated the circulation and exchange of ideas; its cocktail of politics, philosophy, art, retail and business at street level gave it its remarkable effervescence.”

“Chapter 12: Annihilation, Warsaw, 1939 -1945,” brings the history of anti-urbanism to a terrifying climax, as Wilson documents Adolph Hitler, the ultimate reactionary, and his obsession with deracinating Warsaw. Wilson has a knack for interpreting the nuance and dualism of history, and uses this chapter about World War II’s unprecedented assault on cities—he details the siege of Stalingrad here as well—as another way to tell the tale of the ineradicable human networks at the root of city living.

Wilson concludes this chapter by talking about the DIY economy and improvised markets of Tokyo that guided that city’s inexorable re-emergence from the ashes of WWII. “Tokyo laid the foundations for the city’s rise from devastation to become the great global metropolis of the second half of the twentieth century. Informal settlements and high density emergency shanty towns became the platform for urban growth.”

It’s the perfect example. It also highlights one not insubstantial quibble I have with this otherwise informative book. Given that Wilson instructively weaves Asian cities such as Tokyo into his narrative quite often (“Hong Kong and Tokyo,” he writes off-handedly, “are examples of cities that have managed to combine skyscrapers with a pulsating street life, retaining a mix of shops and activities at the ground level, in striking contrast to the sanitizing and deadening effect of other skyscraper cities”), the book is oddly negligent when it comes to giving a proper primer on Asian urbanism. Tokyo, for example, surely deserved a chapter of its own for unique innovations like its vertically stacked shops (Zakkyo buildings), not to mention its world renowned mass transit. Mass transit in general is curiously absent from Wilson’s historical tally of core urban attributes and world-changing innovations.

Wilson’s Eurocentric narrative—Lisbon and Lubeck (?) headline Chapters 7 and 6, respectively—also gives short shrift to the history of Latin and Central America cities; this is especially notable given that the book’s conclusion focuses on Latino Urbanism as he posits that mega-metro-L.A. is the harbinger of our “urbanburb” future. (To be fair, he does write about Tenochtitlan, the original Mexico City in the 16th century, but only briefly, and only in the context of Spanish imperialism.)

I will say: I strongly agree with Wilson’s conclusion that urbanizing the suburbs is the key to a sustainable future. He writes: “What I am talking about is the urbanization of metropolitan neighborhoods—the suburbs and peripheral neighborhoods—so that they take on the forms and functions, the density, diverse uses and spatial messiness associated with city centers.” I often push the same idea —share the density—in my PubliCola column.

In fact, I think I agree with Wilson on a lot of things—including his taste in movies! About a year-and-a-half ago, I found my way to an obscure 1932 pre-code Hollywood movie called Skyscraper Souls. I watched it on YouTube, special-ordered the out-of-print novel the movie is based on, and even tracked down a print of the vintage poster. I had it framed and hung it on my wall as an emblem of my interest in urbanism.

Fast forward: After buying Wilson’s book and devouring the opening chapter, I flipped ahead to peek at the pictures section. Bam! The first thing I see: a reprint of the Skyscraper Souls poster; this corresponded, I soon discovered, with Wilson’s New York City chapter, which explored vertical Manhattan in its early 20th century heyday. The chapter also included Wilson’s synopsis of this long lost MGM melodrama. Wilson was evidently my skyscraper soulmate. After finishing his book, I slipped it onto my bookshelf right next to Faith Baldwin’s novel Skyscraper, the aforementioned inspiration for Skyscraper Souls, another gem in the city canon.

*Open City, Teju Cole, ©2011*
I actually set out to read a different Teju Cole novel, his Lagos novel, 2007’s *Every Day is for the Thief*—which I learned about from Ben Wilson’s *Metropolis: A History of the City*. I’ve wanted to learn more about Lagos ever since the *Washington Post* profiled the Nigerian coastal city in late 2021 as the mega-city of the future. I ran out to buy Cole’s novel, but I ended up buying his 2011 follow-up, *Open City*, instead.
This one is a New York City novel. And Even better: A flaneur’s New York City novel. The main character, Julius, an intellectual Nigerian ex-pat who’s finishing med school with a psychiatry residency at a Morningside Heights psychiatric hospital, keeps an immaculate diary of his after-work, citywide peregrinations, chronicling the minutiae of his walks with loving, thoughtful, and literary care. Set in somber and lonely post-9/11 Manhattan, Julius is often the only person out and about from Wall Street to Central Park to Harlem to the George Washington Bridge making his gloomy observations about the color of the sky. The painstaking attention to detail in *Open City* stretches the picayune into the poetic: “No one sat at them or played chess. Around the tables, where they sank into earth, moss grew, spreading up the concrete and into the ground so that it seemed as if the chess boards had grown roots.”
Julius’ earnest inner-monologue often ricochets along stream of consciousness lines—giving us glimpses into his personal history: his longing to reconnect with the mysterious German grandmother he bonded with as a child; his estrangement from his impersonal mother; his high school days at a Nigerian military academy; his father’s premature death and tricky funeral; and his mixed emotions about his recent Ex.
Most often, though, Julius’ ruminations quickly lead to erudite and impromptu TEDTalks on whatever museum exhibit, photo show, classical concert, play, or historical sidewalk plaque he’s reflecting on. In passing, Julius’ fairly remote, academic flights of fancy take up, among many subjects: Mahler symphonies, the 1930s Berlin photography of Martin Munkasci, Chinese poetry, 17th century church architecture, bird migration, jazz great Cannonball Adderley, and the science of bed bugs.
The history lessons here also include a startling discussion about 17th century Dutch American colonist Cornelius Van Tienhoven, who slaughtered New York’s native Canarsie and Hackensack tribes; and another equally brutal discussion about City Bank of New York President Moses Taylor’s ugly connection to the sugar slave trade. These two mini-dissertations loom larger than Julius’ other reader-friendly history lessons because they work in concert with Julius’ present- tense Manhattan diary, which mostly features the alienated lives of black and brown people; it’s notable that one of few recurring characters in the novel, Julius’ now-elderly, former undergrad literature professor and mentor, Dr. Saito, was held in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. In short, the victims of intertwined American capitalism and racism are persistent concerns in this novel.
Indeed, this is a story told by Nigerian immigrant, who finds New York City magical, but shares his fellow outsiders’ wariness of some lurking discrepancy here. “Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren’t we all,” one of Julius’ academic, immigrant friends says, pointing to a tree outside his Upper West Side apt. window that reportedly arrived in New York from China in the 1700s. This formulation of immigrant self doubt strikes me as Cole’s broadened definition of what goes on in an “open city.”
Most of Julius’ chance encounters are with fellow Africans, African Americans, and POC. Just a sampling from his random excursions: There’s a pseudo intellectual Black Power poet who works at a nearby post office (“I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future”); there’s a suddenly distant Uber driver who turns the greeting “brother” into a fraught dynamic; there’s an MTA HVAC repair man who “seemed surprised anyone noticed him at all;” there’s an unctuous Caribbean immigrant at a Financial District Bar whose “tawny eyes were immobile… Then it struck me that his eyes were asking a question. A sexual question;” there’s a Liberian detainee at an immigration detention facility. However, this is not a “woke” nor ideological book. Julius is a thoughtful, even-keeled narrator whose meditations on race are nuanced, grounded, and humanist.
The novel’s most dramatic—and surprising—scenes, a back-to-back pair of troubling finales that stand out from the otherwise lackadaisical, non-linear narrative—complicate the novel’s left-leaning themes. In fact, the second, and more meaningful of these dramatic climaxes recasts Julius’ character as a villain in prescient (for 2011) #Me-Too feminism terms. This turn of events brings some sudden clarity to Julius’ non-stop academic tangents, which, though fascinating, also obscured the personal trek at the center of the novel. “When we don’t choose good, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves,” he rationalizes.
In the next, and final, chapter, Julius ignores the startling revelations and simply returns to his intellectual meanderings. With this, it becomes clear that while Julius’ catalog of academic lessons stand in as instructive metaphors about the book’s larger political themes, there’s perhaps a more harrowing message about Julius himself in these stories. And more so, in Julius’ need to constantly linger behind them. In this final chapter, Julius goes to a Mahler concert at Carnegie Hall—“the third movement, the rondo, was loud, rude, and as burlesque as it could conceivably be”—before taking a detour on his way home along the Chelsea Pier. There, a friendly boat tourguide invites Julius to tag along on a random late night cruise into the Upper Bay past the Statue of Liberty. Cole ends the novel there with an anecdote from 1888 about fourteen hundred birds flying to their death in confusion at the sight of the Statue of Liberty.
*On a personal note: As opposed to many modern progressive voices that confront the realities of racism, Julius (Cole?) is learned about, and attentive to, antisemitism. He made a point, it seemed to me, of including the tragic Jewish experience as part of the novel’s inquiry into the “epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world.” In this context, it was engaging, as opposed to dogmatic lefty fare, when Cole introduced a zealous and youthful African Marxist character who thinks Palestine is the paramount issue of the times. Cole dedicates a few pages to the realistic discussion.

*Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, John Szwed, ©2015*

Author John Szwed’s cocky intro to his book offers a grand mission statement: He’s done with the countless Billie Holiday biographies that revel in her sad life as a means of casting her trauma in the role of artistic DNA. Instead, he proclaims, he’s going to focus solely on her artistic craft and dissect Holiday’s music itself. How does her music tell her story, as opposed to how does her story define her music? I definitely like Szwed’s premise as a response to the pseudo intellectual “Rosebud” approach to biography, which mystifies art and artists as magical mediums rather than discerning them as skilled human beings. As a teeny bopper Marxist, I used to derisively call the psychologically Romantic approach to arts criticism “The Beethoven Thing,” frowning on its non-material explanations, and its lean into the supposed supernatural power of genius. And so, Szwed’s alternate tact had me.

A hyper academic, and a jazz musician himself, Szwed, who is a professor at Columbia University and a former director of the Center for Jazz Studies there, ultimately succeeds.

Unfortunately, the first 100 pages of his exercise are frustrating. By curiously and immediately leaping into a discussion of Holiday’s controversial 1956 memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, Szwed gets stuck in the very trap he’s trying to escape; the famously unreliable memoir, which was published three years before Holiday’s death, and co-written by her friend and journalist William Dufty, is the source of much Holiday myth-making. Szwed’s opening foray into supposedly setting us straight, simply bogs down in the maddening flaws of Holiday’s book itself: It feels random, anecdotal, disorienting, and mythological, while chasing name-dropping tangents that raise more questions than they can possibly answer. First and foremost, why am I reading so much about Hollywood kook Tallulah Bankhead or Orson Welles? Next, in chapter three, “The Image: Film, Television, and Photography,” Szwed takes on what he sees as the other culprit in Holiday mythology, her media presence. This section, dictated by an ultimately random set of media data, is as desultory and circuitous an approach as chasing Holiday’s confusing memoir. Ultimately, the reader gets bogged down in long side stories about, for example, Hollywood optioning battles.

Thus ends the “The Myth” section of the book and we’re on to “The Musician.” Szwed starts off going deep into the history of the musical styles that lead to Billie Holiday: Tin pan alley, blues, torch songs, jazz, “coon songs,” and minstrelsy. This seems logical and would otherwise be on-point, but given that we land in Szwed’s long-winded minstrelsy lecture, more a hodgepodge of chosen examples than the traceable history, the book continues to bewilder.

At this point, I’m only sticking with the book because 1) As disorienting as all Szwed’s bingo history is, he’s clearly brilliant and earnest and seems somehow on the cusp of telling us something interesting, and 2) I’m obsessed with Billie Holiday.

Starting with Chapter 5, “The Singer I” (we’re 100 pages in to a 200 page book), we get into Billie Holiday’s craft. Here, Szwed, a musician and erudite music and cultural history professor, begins to tell a much clearer story. We hear from early advocates and critics about Holiday’s signature morose delivery—"she sounds like she’s asleep”; we get an insightful account of her every day speak/sing aesthetic; and an academic, yet accessible description of her deft ability to sing behind the beat.

I loved this account of “dual-track time”: “there are two beat systems functioning simultaneously, one governing the accompaniment and the other regulating the vocal line… These two parallel strands organizing the passage of time might be irreconcilable, yet they have to be grasped simultaneously because that is the conceptual challenge of Billie’s art.”

The book’s powerhouse (and well-worth-the-wait) finale comes next, in the closing two chapters: “The Songs I” and “The Songs II.”

These two chapters chronologically catalog Holiday’s recorded repertoire with fascinating academic insight about her obbligato, inflection, and paraphrasing to explain why her early work with pianist Teddy Wilson and clarinet player Benny Goodman, her classic work with saxophonist Lester Young, and her belittled late work, druggy and set to strings, sounds the way it does.

Here’s Szwed on the breathtaking set Holiday recorded in 1935 as 20-year-old with pianist Teddy Wilson’s small group combo: “Billie Holiday, like all great jazz musicians, was first and foremost and improviser and secondly an interpreter, and when a tune like ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ offered her little in the way of melody or lyrics, she compensated by detuning the melody, shifting the rhythm accents around, and ignoring the moderato tempo indicated on the song’s sheet music, taking it instead at a stomping-ly immoderate presto.”

Per Szwed’s mission, learning about Holiday’s musical choices and decisions helped me learn about her.

Yoko Ono’s brief musings—written as instructions for absurdist art performances—read like poetry. And more specifically: like precursor counterculture poetry. Most of these arty, Dadaist, and hilarious missives are from the early 1960s—and some are from the 1950s. But they have a stoned and protest-kid edge that hint at the anti-consumer, anti-war-machine verse of the late ‘60s hippie era.

What distinguishes Yoko’s writing from other 1960s broadsides against mainstream culture is a kindness, care, and warmth that accompanies her prankster-ism, not unlike the 1960s poetry of Richard Brautigan.

A PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA

Count all the stars of that night

by heart.

The piece ends when the orchestra

members finish counting the stars, or

when it dawns

This can be done with windows instead

of stars

1962 Summer

Most important, or more defining: Ono’s penchant for landing cosmic punchlines that re-position mundane routines, such as putting away the leftovers, boiling water, or setting your alarm clock, continually make the reader pause to consider the universe.

*Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery, ©2023*

One review of this novel—a coming of age, page-turner about a lost young woman working as an invisible cog in Andy Warhol’s Factory—posits that the obvious comparison is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The review claims, “the two books share a lot of DNA… both tales of 1960s New York.”

I mean, yes, both young narrators, awkwardly attending glamorous apartment parties with their respective newfound, besty urban sherpas, are struggling to find footholds in glitterati Manhattan? But the very first sentence of The Bell Jar references the electric chair death sentence for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an infamous McCarthy-era, i.e., 1953, milestone. This sets Plath’s Esther Greenwood very intentionally in stultified Eisenhower America—a completely different world than Warhol’s dark Edie Sedgwick/Velvet Underground/Midnight Cowboy Manhattan. This is not nitpicking. The late 1960s setting is key to this new novel.

To me the obvious, and immediate comparison is Emma Cline’s The Girls, a fictionalized account I seem to come back to a lot about a lost teenager who becomes a peripheral character in Charlie Manson’s hippie cult. Both novels, written by young women, swing the camera away from the charismatic male gurus at the center of these famous/infamous late ‘60s downers—Manson’s Spahn Ranch and Warhol’s Factory—and train the lens instead on the young women who made the slippery segue from America’s new youth counterculture to the un-moored, precarious life of dreamers and runaways who joined these bleak scenes. Both books also feature flash forwards to the 21st century, giving us the main characters’ matured perspective on the otherwise roiling teen narrative.

The dark side of the 1960s is very important context to this debut novel by talented, young Irish writer Nicole Flattery (who, LOL, calls subway cars “carriages”) because ultimately, this is a novel about idealistic rebellion petering sluggishly out—much like the ambitious 1960s gave way to the morose early 1970s overall.

Close friends of mine like Valium Tom will know the 1960s, youth narrator context had me at “1966”; the dust jacket text begins: “New York City, 1966, seventeen-year-old Mae…” It does not get closer to my inner life than this!

Unsurprisingly, I dug it. It’s certainly riveting for about 100 pages anyway as Flattery writes perfectly clipped and neat paragraphs with surprise, poetic punch lines. “I wanted to deliver a sermon. I wanted a milkshake” one of Mae’s exegesis narrations concludes.

Flattery’s near-perfect exposition tracks Mae’s truancy as she rides the Macy’s escalators all day, has a listless, first sexual misadventure with a jerk, and lands a “job”—through a very creepy “Doctor”— as a typist at Warhol’s Factory. This was news to me, but in real life, Warhol published a novel in 1968 called a, A novel based on taped verbatim conversations of his insouciant, droll “stars,” such as Pope Ondine, Paul Morrissey, Ingrid Superstar, Sugar Plum Fairy, and Warhol himself. Warhol, a background specter in this novel, apparently hired a pair of high school-age girls to transcribe the tapes. This fictionalized account casts one of those young women, Flattery’s Mae, as the narrator of this, fast-paced sad novel.

Warning: the book definitely loses some focus halfway through when Flattery starts pin-balling from existential tangent to existential tangent, trying and failing to portray the tapes—and the act of listening to tapes—as a profound metaphor for alienation. But Flattery re-centers at about page 170, and the last 60 pages of this short novel deliver by focusing on the poignant and tender relationships she’s expertly crafted here.

There’s Mae cosmic friendships with her fellow teenage typist, the awkward and unfashionable, yet oddly confident and wise, Shelley. Throughout the novel, as they explore the grungy city together, their connection is steeped in flip teenage candor that, ironically, and ultimately, cannot bear its respective secrets. Those secrets—about class trappings, aspirations, letters home, vengeance, and sabotage—are grist for a succession of finale scenes that Flattery turns into nuanced short stories in their own right. For example, when Mae sneaks out of her mom’s apartment for the final time, supposedly on her way to liberation, she lands at her new, default home, the Factory, stumbling upon, appropriately enough, Shelley’s humiliating late night screen test. “When I pulled open the elevator door I was struck by a blinding light…” Then, eyes adjusted, Mae witnesses the reality of her new family: Warhol’s camera crew becomes a vicious firing squad armed with probing questions and mocking demands. “The silence in between each question and her answer was a pit. I watched her slip out of her dress.”

Mae’s relationship with Mikey, her alcoholic mom’s well-intentioned, bohemian boyfriend, also provides a series of literary moments. In a moving scene on the night before Mae quietly quits high school, she goes to an independent film with Mikey (I’m assuming at the Waverly in the Village!). Flattery concludes the scene with a dose of poetic writing that reflects back on the ineloquent and faltering parental heart-to-heart Mikey had attempted before the lights went down: “The film started in black-and-white, and then color seeped in. The color made the sets look bright and fake. The color concealed everything that should have been revealed.” This moment foreshadows the Wizard of Oz jolts Mae ultimately finds behind the curtain of the Factory and at all the aimless pill parties.

I use “aimless” as a euphemism for tragedy as Flattery transforms the fundamental aimlessness at the heart of the Factory into heartbreaking revelations. The novel’s standout scene describes Mae’s dismay when she suddenly finds herself privy to Pope Ondine’s desperation. Mae is on the elevator at the end of a long work day heading down to E. 47th St. when Ondine, her favorite voice on the cassettes, rushes on board: “He was counting a few grubby bills that he’d clearly just stolen from Anita’s drawer. When he turned to face me, I couldn’t believe how fragile he looked up close. ‘You won’t tell anyone will you?’”

Mae does not. But Flattery’s novel does, and more.

*Kenyon Review, Summer 2023*
Right now I’m reading the “Nature’s Nature” section, an annual feature they do that’s dedicated to nature poetry … or eco poetry! I’m comforted that 3 of the 5 featured poets are some of my modern favorites: Arthur Sze, Victoria Chang, and Joyelle McSweeney. The thing I like about about McSweeney, who writes a poem here called “Death Styles, 1/8/21,” is that she doesn’t fit today’s woo-woo zeitgeist. She’s very clearly a death metal poet and savors words such as “immiseration” and “transoceanic grafting.” Wonderfully fitting, the poet she presents here, Santiago Vizcaino, writes macabre verse that sounds a bit like her own. (Each of the five featured poets was tasked with championing the work of an emerging poet they like)

*Letters to a Young Poet , Rainier Maria Rilke, first published in German in 1929 and in English translation in the U.S. in 1934. ©2023*

Poet Rainier Maria Rilke’s 1923 Sonnets to Orpheus is on my poetry Top-5-Favorites list (and on the right day—i.e., a dramatic and ethereal day!—it totally takes the #1 spot). So, I was excited this month to read his classic, Letters to a Young Poet—which I’d never done before. W.W. Norton & Company, the original publisher of the famous book, is celebrating their centenary this year (they were founded in 1923 as the People’s Institute Publishing Company, simply putting out prints of college lectures to make extension courses more widely available), and they’ve marked this 100-year anniversary by releasing a gorgeous hardcover edition of Letters to a Young Poet, one of their historically prized publications from the 1930s. The classy new cover and blue-inked pages caught my eye at Elliott Bay, and I couldn’t resist.

This is Rilke’s super famous set of letters to a young fan, military academy cadet Franz Xaver Kappus. Like my great friend Noah C. sending his geeked out letter to REM’s Peter Buck in 1983, Kappus wrote to Rilke in 1903 while reading an early collection by the still-not-famous-at-all Rilke. Upon receiving the fan mail, Rilke clearly saw a kindred spirit in the frustrated youth. Rilke, who was a military academy drop out himself, was less than 10 years older than his star-struck 19-year-old correspondent, and in the ensuing exchange between 1903 and 1908, Rilke wrote a remarkably heartfelt and earnest set of 10 letters about art, love, and depression to the young cadet.

Rilke’s soothing words are wise and zen with an intellectual candor bordering on outre. They aren’t gold, though, and can be a bit ramble-y and pseudo-cosmic, and also a little trite and cringe-y when it comes to the subject of sex. I think it may have simply been the peek-behind-the-scenes vibe of the spontaneous storybook circumstances that turned the letters into a hit.

More importantly: Norton’s slim volume introduced Rilke to U.S. readers; Rilke (1875-1926), originally from Prague, was strictly a European poet, novelist, and public intellectual during his lifetime.

Rilke’s weird and magical poetry was just beginning to get traction among U.S. publishers when W.W. Norton released Letters to a Young Poet in 1934; it was originally published in German in 1929. It’s the Norton backstory that makes Norton’s new, celebratory edition such a wonderful read. The inky, elegant book comes with a new foreword that lays out the story of Norton’s unsung co-founder Mary D. Herter Norton, whose husband William Warder Norton (i.e., W.W. Norton) long overshadowed her role. It wasn’t until the 1980s that feminists started telling Mary’s story. The insistent (almost bratty) foreword here, by translator and scholar Damien Searls, goes into an exciting play-by-play account of Mary’s philosophical approach. Mary was the Rilke fan, translated the book, and wrote the original, riveting afterword, known as the “Chronicle,” a keenly researched, calmly incisive, and disproportionately lengthy—in comparison to such a short set of letters—biographic finale to the Rilke letters.

Additionally, this new edition comes with a fantastic afterword of its own by W.W. Norton’s current president, Julia A Reidhead. She connects the focus of Rilke’s advice to his young fan (work rather than think) to the focus of Mary Norton’s observations in the “Chronicle” (the quest for knowledge is the work at hand) while distilling both into a powerful feminist reading of this 20th Century literary classic. “Reframing requires materials,” Reidhead writes, “and when telling stories, those materials come ideally in the form of primary documents. Fortunately, Mrs. Norton gave the company its most influential and enduring document…”

If you read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet back in college, I’d highly recommend checking out this edition with the updated context.

*I Do Everything I’m Told , Megan Fernandes, ©2023*

The New Yorker (which rarely writes full-fledged reviews of new poetry collections) wrote about this book in its latest issue—6/26/23.

After a busy and tiring Friday at work, I sat on the edge of my bed and drank in the review like it was the cold beer I craved. Fernandes’ celebration of city living sounded like something I needed to have on my poetry shelves. So far, I’m liking it a lot. …

UPDATE: This was not quite as exciting as the New Yorker made it seem. But per the review, this collection is a satisfying meditation on cities. “For Megan Fernandes, ‘here’ often seems to designate a city…the proliferation of these cities imbues them with a sense of unreality; the poems don’t feel so much set it in the cities as gestures toward them from some other place.”

In other words, she finds traces of urban magic wherever she is. City-ism as a solution, perhaps, to the human condition! Imagining Fernandes as a fellow zealot, I raced out and bought her book. She’s definitely a comrade in the cause—“I leave an MTA card and a wild daisy” (on Ezra Pound’s grave)—and she can heighten consciousness with her closing lines: “Yes. It was joy, wasn’t it? Even if it was ugly, it was joy.”

The centerpiece of her collection is a set of 9 sonnets, each named for a certain city—“Brooklyn Sonnet,” “Los Angeles Sonnet,” “Philadelphia Sonnet,” for example, along with the last two that remake the batch through clever recalibration: “Wandering Sonnet” and “Diaspora Sonnet.” But as you might glean from “Brooklyn Sonnet,” the book can, at times, be a bit too steeped in hipster observations and diary-like memos; there’s a poem here called “Fuckboy Villanelle.”

Having said that, this book is definitely crowded with electric poems and killer lines (“spotting land, at last,/grow gills at its sight.” … “One must look for signs/to believe in them.” …“When we play back to hear/from the dead, we expect a song. What we get/is a warning that goes on and on and on.” … “and can’t tell/what is kink or worship or both.” … “There’s nothing/at the bottom/but a view.” …)

*My Hijacking, A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, Martha Hodes, ©2023*

Stick w/ me. I get critical. But this book...wow.

I was drawn to this memoir because of the dramatic/historic subject: a 1970, Palestinian hijacking operation.

While 1970 is a minute or two early for me (I’m more of a 1973 little kid), this era—and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular—is rich and roiling for me, a secular-left American Jew growing up during the intensely politicized early 1970s. To be clear, I was a little kid, and certainly not political, but it was an unavoidably stormy time, impossible not to absorb the currents: Vietnam, the hippies, women’s lib, the counterculture, Watergate, Patty Hearst(!), Black Power, and yes, all the hijackings, AK-47s—and the Marxist demands.

And here comes this new, on-topic memoir. And with such an exciting origin story: The author, Martha Hodes, is a successful academic—she’s currently an NYU professor specializing in 19th Century American history (President Lincoln, slavery, race). She goes to pitch her next book to her agent (publish or perish)…and after rattling off her big ideas about the 1830s and the runup to the American Civil War, she says, and, oh, lately I’ve been processing the time when I was a 12-year-old girl held hostage in an international hijacking. (?!?)

And it turns out: a major, headline hijacking,

On September 6, 1970, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked 3 airplanes to bring the plight of displaced Palestinians to the world’s attention. (Oh, how I long for the early 1970s when terrorists—called Guerrillas!— were secular, feminist, Marxists—or Maoist! in the case of the PFLP. As opposed to today’s religious reactionaries, the “Third World” revolutionaries of the 1970s espoused super woke rhetoric; several of the hijackers were women.) The PLFP commandeered the planes to the desert floor just outside Amman, Jordan where Palestinian refugees had essentially set up a shadow state and were nudging Jordan into a low-level civil war. The PFLP held the planes in the desert for six tense days in early September 1970 demanding the release of Palestinian political prisoners in Europe and Israel, threatening to blow up the (now-dynamite-rigged) airplanes with hostages on board, including 12-year-old Martha Hodes.

Umm. Write THAT book, Hodes’ agent told her. And boy did she.

Hodes' story is steeped in the times. Her divorced parents, a pair of avant-garde modern dancers working for their mentor Martha Graham (!), split up when her mom moved to Israel to help start a Graham dance troupe in Tel Aviv (the mom was also having an affair with a handsome Israeli dancer). The dad, a Lower East Side bohemian in NYC, gets custody, and the author (named after godmother Martha Graham, btw) visits Israel every summer with her "groovy" older sister, Catherine. On their TWA flight back to NYC after their annual summer with mom in 1970, the PLFP strikes.

Again, 1970 is a minute or two early for me. But I definitely identified with young Hodes, a precocious, secular, Lower East Side little Jewish girl who kept a diary at the time modeled after Anne Frank, but slyly, she reports, consciously switched to "the scoffing voice of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye."

Unfortunately, Hodes’ "My Hijacking," while riveting at first—after all, she’s chronicling a first-person account of a charged, historic event that commanded the full attention of the New York Times, Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and CBS' Walter Cronkite for a solid week in 1970—starts to flag several chapters in. Or at least, it becomes increasingly frustrating to read. It turns out Hodes doesn’t remember much of the experience at all. And the book starts to become a repetitive account of the few things she does recall (like a hijacker’s gun at the co-pilot’s neck and the fact that the airplane’s toilet is clogged). It’s also repetitive in the sense that she keeps ruminating on her psychological brick wall itself. Yes. We get it, despite her 6th grade-going into-7th grade contemporaneous diary, she doesn't remember much. Moreover, the book's tightly objective, academic tone highlights the lack of moving details; hilariously, it's unsurprising (and symbolic of her stoic approach as an academic today) that no one she tracks down and interviews seems to remember her childhood presence on the plane. "I'm not sure Susie remembers Catherine and me at all. Another reminder of our seemingly phantasmic presence on the plane in the desert."

There’s a meta aspect to the book as she turns to her historian training, applying her research skills to overcome her own lapsed memory. In addition to trying to stir her recollections by interviewing people she’s tracked down from the time (stewardesses, pilots, fellow passengers, her older sister, her now-elderly parents), she also combs through old government records and interviews from the time, and she reviews contemporaneous news accounts and TV footage—it’s freaky how she sees video of her younger self.

She also delves into PLFP accounts and documents. Yes, sorry to surprise all the non-Jewish lefties out there: She’s quite sympathetic to the PLFP cause—as she was at the time. LOL. She notes how 12-year-old her fully understood that the Black Panthers, who she and Catherine idolized, marched for, and supported as smarty Manhattan Jewish kids at the time, found common cause with the Palestinians.

Anyway, I started getting grumpy with the book as Hodes repeatedly failed to come up with any revelations or transcendent details. Additionally, her clunky “literary” conceit of quoting Le Petit Prince—the classic French novella that precocious her was obsessed with that fateful summer—becomes unbearably cringe-y; okay, okay, the tween-conscious narrator in Le Petit Prince is ALSO stranded in the desert after an airplane crash. Talk about ham-fisted.

However: Whoa. Please stick with this book—and Le Petit Prince's disdain for adults. Just as the Exorcist (1973!) is not about 12-year-old Linda Blair’s Satanic possession, Martha Hodes’ story is not about a hijacking. It’s most certainly about her absent mom and divorce. Transcending the wildly colorful politics of the early 1970s to tell a distinctly universal and personal story takes some high-wattage writing, and despite the trivial flaws here, Hodes nails it in the closing chapters when, a half century later, she (and her husband) visits Israel for the first time since the early 1970s. She also visits the hijacking holding site in the desert and, breaking down in tears, the Amman hotel where the guerrillas eventually released her and her fellow hostages. She also uncovers reel-to-reel tapes of a startling and totally forgotten (to her) interview that she and her sister did with the Boston Phoenix alternative-weekly immediately after the hijacking. This proves to be defining documentation of the psychological games Hodes’ mind has been playing.

This is a breathtaking, remarkable book about psychology, memory, and childhood.

I’m hoping my smart-as-hell memoirist pals Erica C. Barnett (Quitter), Zoe Zolbrod (The Telling), Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble), and Kristi Coulter (Exit Interview) have some time to read this book. So curious to know what they’d make of it.

*The City-State in Five Cultures, Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas, ©1981.*
…really just the introduction and the first two chapters: Ch. 1 Sumerian City-States and Ch. 2 The Greek Polis.

*Billie Holiday. The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Melville House/Penguin Random House, ©2019*

Wonderful to eavesdrop on Billie Holiday’s speaking voice (brain power) in these transcripts of radio and TV interviews. Much like her memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, she’s far out ahead on the issue of drug addiction as a disease.

One serious complaint, though: I was disappointed that the racially & politically cognizant introduction to the book, which opens w a discussion of “Strange Fruit,” leaves out the fact that “Strange Fruit” was written by a Jew, Abel Meeropol. Meeropol was a public high school teacher in the Bronx, a Communist, poet, musician, and civil rights advocate. (He was James Baldwin’s high school teacher!)

Cline wrote one of my favorite contemporary novels, Girls (2016), which puts the Manson Family girls front and center in a fictionalized account of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. Cline’s conceit? Instead of having her main character, Evie, a pensive teenager, fall under Charlie Manson’s spooky spell, Evie falls instead for the hypnotic Susan Atkins character. Cline’s account of Evie’s amorphous, listless coming of age story in eerie, late 1960s California among Manson’s street-smart acolytes also includes Evie’s strained relationship with her concerned mother, her estranged father, and his girlfriend. It’s a minimalist story of details and internal monologues.

With the same poetic attention to detail—sentence after sentence reads like a quiet allegory (“Alex cut the pizza into ragged squares with a bread knife”)—Cline’s new novel, The Guest, evokes a similar languid, tense, and thoughtful mood. (It also has this quotable quote: “Dresses with some of the same sad reach for elegance as a prom dress. Girls clutching a purse with both hands. Girls in drag as girls.”)

Just as the Manson Family girls broke into Beverly Hills homes on their “creepy crawly” reconnaissance and burgling missions, the main character in The Guest, Alex, with a second nature for survivalist kleptomania, spends her time breaking into wealthy homes; though, in this case, she uses her wiles as a con-artist, gaining sunny admittance by befriending unsuspecting marks as she surfs through this novel’s micro-odyssey of small disasters.

As opposed to late-60s California, The Guest is set today in a super wealthy Long Island summer community. Alex, 22, is a grifter with a murky backstory as a failed, expensive sex worker, who owes a lot of money to an ominous, though maybe equally hapless pimp named Dom. Evidently, having alienated everyone she knows in New York City, the novel starts as Alex lounges away her days at the beach, high on pilfered pain medication, having found brief, safe harbor as the mistress of a wealthy older man named Simon. She has moved in with him at his summer home. But just 50+ pages into the book, after one of Alex’s alcohol and pill-induced mishaps at a neighbor’s cocktail party, Simon clinically ends the relationship; he asks his assistant to drive Alex to the train station. With no footholds in the City—and, worse, with the apparently volatile Dom stalking her, Alex doesn’t get on the train. Instead, she floats back into town to hide out as an uninvited guest.

Comparisons to John Cheever’s great short story The Swimmer are inevitable as Alex’s odyssey of desperation momentarily touches down in the homes, summer clubs, swimming pools, and comfortable, yet strained, lives of the rich. More to the point: Like Cheever’s Neddy Merrill, Alex’s plan is openly delusional and doomed from the start. I also couldn’t help thinking of Rebel Without a Cause: In one of the final segments, Alex lands with her last sitting-duck, a troubled teenage boy, in an abandoned home where they play house for 48 hours in the run-up to yet more wreckage.

And I don’t know what to make of this: The Guest reads more like a short story than a novel, lacking the ties to a more fully drawn world that you typically feel when you read a 300-page book of fiction. Perhaps that’s intentional—meant to highlight Alex’s untethered state? Anyway, like a short story, The Guest is both accessible and mysteriously pliant.

One weak point: Alex’s pitch perfect ability to soothe the often distressed people around her. Her calm, mature, articulate, and wise empathy for others, seems out of sync with her own impulsive, reckless, and ill-conceived behavior. A neat juxtaposition? Sure. But it was hard to believe.

I will say, at first, I was disappointed that of all Alex’s temporary sidekicks, Cline chose Jack for Alex’s lengthiest, penultimate, and climactic vignette. Jack’s standard story line—caustic, controlling yet distant wealthy Hollywood father, nervous-breakdown expulsion from fancy private high school backstory, and tender-yet-sullen-and-violent male character trope—was not as interesting as the other vulnerable people Alex glommed onto. There was Jack’s friend Max, a townie who seemed to share Alex’s outsider, criminal wits; Margaret, a super sad sack lonely teen, lost among her wealthy friends; and most of all, Nicholas, a hardworking domestic staffer (for one of Simon’s rich colleagues), with a soft working class charm behind his butler expertise. Nicholas, one of the few characters who rejects Alex’s sexual advance, seems to be the novel’s moral center during his all too brief cameo. (The Nicholas segment includes Alex’s most symbolic mishap, which is also the novel’s best literary turn. I’ll just say, it involves a valuable piece of art.)

Having said all that, Cline eventually brings the Jack plot line to life with the aforementioned Rebel Without a Cause set up as Alex and he find a fleeting reprieve from their respective rootlessness by playing house. Only Alex seems to know it’s a ruse.

*Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant, Mary Quant, ©1966*

In my ongoing list of Urbanism all-stars, I add Mary Quant to Billie Holiday, Jane Jacobs, and Frank O'Hara.

In my firmament of city gods, I’m trying to make sure all the tenets of Urbanism get a patron—or that is to say, that each patron represents a city tenet: Currently, I’ve got 1950s Trinidadian-UK calypso star Lord Kitchener representing local music scenes, city planning theory sage Jane Jacobs representing pedestrian street life, and I recently added pastoral cityscape artist Edward Hopper to represent infrastructure. There are many more concept slots to fill: mass transit, diversity, counterculture, density, innovation, commerce. Of course, I’ve slated Billie Holiday as the overall Goddess of Cities.

Today, I’m adding London’s Mary Quant to represent one of the most electric tenets of Urbanism: Youth.

Starting when she founded her independent Kings Road clothing shop, Bazaar, in mid-1950s Chelsea, Quant ushered in a fashion revolution that Vogue editor Diana Vreeland eventually dubbed the “Youthquake,” as its mass produced and affordable affront to Haute couture clothing jolted the world in 1965. With Polyvinyl Chloride, mini-skirts, bobbed hairdos, stripes and zigzags and dots, Quant’s mod concoctions made cutting edge fashion comfortable, accessible, and on-point for young women, for teenagers. Quant also integrated London’s 1950s nascent counterculture of coffee bars, late night jazz clubs, and pop music into her aesthetic.

Quant on Quant, a memoir she wrote when she was just 36 at the height of Youthquake fashion in 1966, begins with an account of her early days as a DIY designer wielding scissors and a sewing machine on her bedsit floor as she alters Harrods prints into dresses she liked. It’s like a Lee “Scratch” Perry dub remix.

Documenting her rapid success after opening Bazaar, the book turns into a fast-paced chronicle of her day-to-day business operations as she strikes deals with major retailers and puts on shocking fashion shows (defining the modern runway aesthetic we know today; by the mid-60s, she was including an American garage rock band I’d never heard of, The Skunks, into her shows in mainstream U.S. stores.) Her stories are colored with anecdotes from dressing rooms, hotels, airplanes, elevators, cocktail parties, NYC corporate suites, and JCPenney outlets.

Along the way, Quant, a casually disarming pop philosopher—think Warhol, but boisterous rather than bitchy—tosses off substantive asides and aphorisms, that seem to carry ideological implications beyond fashion. “Girls…are busy people who have no time to switch clothes during the day…They want clothes they can put on first thing in the morning and feel right in at midnight; clothes that go happily to the office and equally happily out to dinner.” “What ready-to-wear does today, the couturiers — even the Paris couturiers — confirm tomorrow.”

Quant’s asides—”when you start a distinctive trend in fashion, you are also digging its grave”—capture the interesting contradictions of a populist uprising that brought high fashion out of the Paris atelier to the teeny bopper set, or “birds” as Quant calls the girls buying up the “Look.” These contradictions: revolution versus capitalism, bespoke design versus mass production, feminism versus sexy fashion persist today—as does an empowered, self-conscious youth culture that Quant helped create 60+ years ago.

This timelessness is matched by on odd detail about Quant’s account. She doesn’t give any dates. This reflects, perhaps, the out-of-breath sense Quant had when she was writing the book: The exciting events at hand were, well, at hand.

Clearly a rushed attempt to capitalize on her sudden notoriety, Quant on Quant is also—in addition to being a memoir—an important contemporaneous artifact itself. It’s peppered with casual references to the Rolling Stones, Patty Boyd, Vidal Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, and, as I said, The Skunks?

Given the historical nature of the book, it’s frustrating that she didn’t include any dates. I’ll add the key ones: She graduated from college in 1953 and she opened Bazaar in 1955. It’s also fitting, however, that she overlooks dates. As I noted, the story line of youth culture as society’s change agent is a timeless tale.

I savor this subscription. Mesmerizing short stories in this issue.

*Chuck Berry, An American Life, RJ Smith, ©2022*

The lead anecdote about the Smithsonian’s efforts to get Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac for its new African American history museum was fair warning that this book was another banal exercise in rock and roll hagiography.

*Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, ©1916*

Mr. Joyce, it turns out, is not a God. This is an energized, addicting, and experimental book that keeps you on your toes with its classy literary imagery (and gruesome, death metal imagery), witty dialogue, Irish politics, and lectures on the philosophy of art. But it’s not—as I had imagined since putting off reading it in high school—a holy literary scripture. Stephen Dedalus’ coming of age drama is a predictable—per other late 19th Century and early 20th Century novels—adolescent wrestling match with parents, religion, class, sexuality (heavy on the sexist tropes), and individuality, as he contemplates his own voice.

My favorite thing about the book? All the walks around the sodden, windswept streets & bridges of Dublin. I don’t mean to sound blasé. I liked this novel a lot, and there are rich literary layers here—many that surely went over my head. But I wanted fewer lectures and more story telling, more meaningful vignettes immersed in the book’s expertly crafted atmosphere, which was hallucinatory yet simultaneously firmly set in the material action of everyday life.

I’ve set out, unsuccessfully, to read this famous collection of James Joyce short stories several times before. My high school best friend Marty was a Joyce fanatic, but, despite his enthusiasm, I couldn’t crack it. At best, I remember reading the story Araby, which I actually associate with my sad stint in Minneapolis and my accompanying sad apartment. This was nearly a decade after high school, and now, decades ago.

This time, the idea of a “City Canon” (my imaginary greatest-hits list of books, movies, and music about the city) sparked a sincere interest in Dubliners, and I wolfed it down. And well, wow. This collection (published in 1914, but written between 1904 and 1907) is an obvious masterpiece. And a page-turner at that. I’m not a literary scholar, so I’ll simply say these enigmatic parables about personal revelation capture life’s intimate doldrums with succinct, poetic prose.

But it’s the City Canon subject matter that swept me away: trams, bar districts, shops, municipal politics, slang, live music, quays, artistes, and late night perambulations.

My favorite bit of slang in the book, spondulics, shows up in the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room—a dialogue-driven story about city election canvassers, Irish nationalism, British “shoeboys,” and the politics of nostalgia.

Spondulics means money, or specifically, spending cash. (Shoeboys means boot lickers.)

*The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, Edited by Robert Hass, ©1994*

*Palace of Desire, Naguib Mahfouz, ©1957*

Upon which, I finish the Cairo Trilogy! I read Book 3 (Sugar Street) in 2021 and Book 1 (Palace Walk) in 2022. I liked both of those novels better: Sugar Street translated Cairo’s factional early-20th-Century politics—the Wafdist nationalists, the Marxists, and the the Muslims— into poignant, literary parables; and Palace Walk teetered into transcendence with its poetic story telling and imagery. By comparison, Palace of Desire, though set in the same mesmerizing coffee houses, alleys, shops, and brothels, felt a bit rushed and slightly trivial. Not that Mahfouz’s knack for casting his characters in the throes of psychological tumult, highly symbolic dramas, and philosophical crises is absent here.

Certainly, Mahfouz, who writes like a 19th Century Naturalist or Realist novelist (or even a Romantic novelist) more than a 20th Century one, still draws readers in with his page-turning family melodramas and diligent character studies. But unlike the other two books in the trilogy, the existential stakes don’t seem as high in Palace of Desire. Here, we simply have young Kamal (Mahfouz’s stand in) obsessing over his rich, best friend’s Westernized sister, Aïda—and getting crushed. And we have his father, the hypocritical patriarch, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, visiting the same prostitutes as his shit-show (older) son, the dissolute Yasin. In the other novels, the personal dramas merged with life and death politics. In Palace Walk, for example, we have Fahmy, the third brother, whose existential journey leads to martyrdom in the 1919 revolution.

The default short stories that make up the chapters of Mahfouz’s huge novels are also more profound in Palace Walk and Sugar Street, particularly in Palace Walk; I’m thinking of the car accident that injures Kamal’s mother in the hectic bazaar, after she and Kamal surreptitiously visit the local mosque.

I do love Mahfouz’s go-to trick (here and in the other two books) of having his characters’ internal monologues read in stark contrast to the out-loud conversation at hand, revealing both banal and grand contradictions of daily life and pointing to the greater mystery of the human condition.

One of my favorite scenes in Palace of Desire is when Kamal’s easy-going best friend, Husayan Shaddad, and his sister, Kamal’s super crush, Aïda, take Kamal out for a joy ride in their fancy car. They drive to the pyramids where they have a picnic and, eventually, a strained political conversation that stands in as an alternative narrative for Kamal’s endless brooding. Really though, I liked being out and about in Cairo and realizing that the magnificent pyramids are simply part of the local landscape.

Get on the Syllabus: What I’m reading and where it takes me.

Other Seismic Moves Include…

Absolute Beginner Blues