One-Way Street

North to Nimrod Nation

I'm off to Nimrod Nation for the next week or so. I will be back by July 10 or 11, depending.

The Life and Death of a Suburban County

Michael Gecan has a long and thoughtful essay about DuPage County, a popular reference point for discussions about the general economic and political state of American suburbia. DuPage County, Gecan argues, is already showing signs of the type of decline that Chicago, New York City, and other urban centers underwent in the 1960s and '70s. "No longer young, no longer trendy, no longer the place to be, no longer without apparent limitations or constraints," Gecan writes, "these places, like people, have developed ways of avoiding reality."

One could take issue with some of Gecan's points. For one thing, he tends to conflate the city of Chicago with Cook County. They are two entirely different political entities, as my cousin, who works for a County Board member, reminds me in almost daily emails about the venality of the Board President, Todd Stroger. And like families, decayed cities are unhappy in their own ways, so one municipality's tale of decline and revival isn't neatly comparable to another's. Stranded in the Midwest, Chicago does not have New York's easy access to foreign capital and markets, not to mention the human capital of Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Minneapolis are very nice places, but they're not throwing off a lot of sparks.

A place like Bartlett, a suburb on the north western edge of DuPage County, would seem to be a counterexample to Gecan's argument. I grew up there, and the town is more crowded than when I was pedaling my Schwinn around town, but it has plenty of green space, a shiny new library, and an actual Cuban restaurant in the building where ill-tempered German immigrants used to sell stale candy and bad coffee. Everything looks better than ever, right? Well, Gecan has an evocative image from his childhood spent in near Garfield Park on Chicago's rugged west side.

There was no way to know, in the 1950s, that we were living at the city’s high point. The massive economic and political, civic and religious institutions had seemed as solid and stable as glaciers to those living with them or in their shadows. From the second floor of our double-brick corner house, we could see the tavern that we once owned, the then-modern building that housed Newark Electronics, where my father and I would someday work, and the row of houses that blocked a view of Tootsietoy Company, where my mother would be employed. Four blocks north was our parish, Our Lady of the Angels. Many thousands attended Mass each Sunday. Sixteen hundred children packed its classrooms.     

By the mid-1980s, it was all rapidly declining. Today, our home, along with thousands of others, is abandoned. A state social service center fills the old electronics plant. Tootsietoy’s products are mostly made in China. And the parish church and school have closed.

As Gecan points out, appearances can be deceiving. One can move to the suburbs, and then further out into the suburbs, as my family did, but one can't escape history. A town is a dynamic, living thing, and no amount of Chem Lawn is going to stop it from changing, for better or for worse.

One of our close family friends from Bartlett, a woman who was never a victim of crime in her life, has left the town. She now lives in a nearby gated community.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.

Office Space

Over the Christmas holidays the company for which I work moved to an open workspace environment. It was an idea hatched by managers who weren't going to actually have to sit in open cubicles, but I have to admit I don't entirely hate the arrangement.

Traditionally office spaces are arranged so that management offices line the windows and the peons are jumbled together in cell-like cubicles in the middle of the floor, deprived of light, air, and a reason to live. The new open workspace reverses this arrangement: managers' offices--dramatically reduced in number--are huddled around the central core of the building, while the cube dwellers get the windows and an extra level or two of managers dispersed among them to make sure the peons behave themselves. Cubicle walls are lower than before, or in some cases eliminated altogether, so that light and noise can flow freely over the newly emancipated cube dwellers. In effect, the cube peons gain sunlight at the cost of the last shreds of their privacy.

The cube dwellers' renewed connection with nature, however, is only a tangential benefit of the open workspace. Corporations sell the concept of open workspaces to skeptical workers and middle managers as enhancing Team Work and Open Collaboration (sic). (In corporate written English, capitalization indicates importance rather than a proper noun. Redundancy is another indicator of importance.) But the real benefit of open workspaces is that they save Money. Offices are expensive and wasteful, as are the people who inhabit them, and open cubes can be arranged in pods, which are, basically, cubicles for four people.  It's an efficient use of space, but horrible feng shui.

I'm a project manager, so theoretically the Open Collaboration environment should reduce the time and effort I need to browbeat people into doing work on the projects I manage. But as office environments have evolved, so have the people who work in them. My offshore development coordinator, who is responsible for making sure I know as little as possible about what's going on in Chennai, sits in one of the dark slum sections of our office, so I have to make my way through a warren of desks to find him--then I have to find my way back to my cube, which a week after we've moved here is still a challenge. Plus, I'm starting to believe he changes cubes every few days. One particularly ingenious developer has avoided the increased surveillance of the open workspace by packing up his family and moving to Indiana, so he now enjoys that other newfangled form of office workspace: the home office. Another member of my project team works remotely from North Carolina. One day, when she was complaining about not being able to hear attendees at a meeting over the speakerphone, her husband sneaked into her home office and snapped a photo, then sent it to us. It showed a glass of red wine next to her laptop.

Because I have to be physically in the office so my project stakeholders can harass me, I can't work from home, let alone sneak an afternoon drink. But I got lucky in my cube placement. I'm near a bank of windows that overlook Wolf Point, where the Chicago River splits into north and south branches. The photo above was taken from my cube. The big green building on the left is Kohn Pedersen Fox 's 333 West Wacker Building, one of my favorite buildings in the Loop. My cube is small and gray, but throughout the office space the walls are painted in tasteful and subdued tones of red, blue and green. There are halogen lights everywhere, even in places where they're not needed. Supposedly the space was created by the same people who designed Google's open workspaces, and the whole place has a high tech, loft-like feel to it. Our office space is supposed to be green, so we've been issued LEED-certified water bottles, so we can retire the planet-killing bottles we've been using. I still don't know where I'm going to display pictures of my kids and Walter Benjamin, but I'm working on that. Now, if I can just figure out how to get myself into an office.

Happy Holidays

This is it for me for the rest of the year. Except for some hand-wringing in the film world about poor gate receipts this Christmas season, nothing much is going on in the places I usually visit. I'm also off from work for the rest of the year because my office is moving over Christmas week. We're moving to an "open office" environment, about which I'll have some grumpy things to say in the new year.

Happy holidays everyone, and thanks for reading. I'll see you January 2nd or 3rd.

The Department

The MLA is coming to Chicago, and while I vowed to avoid it, last night I rashly promised my three-year-old son Ben that next week I'd take him on a train ride to downtown to see the "towers" (anything taller than three stories is a tower, and he loves them) and maybe the Shedd Aquarium to look at the clown fish and the sharks.  It's possible that I might bump into a Victorianist briskly confident that she knows exactly where the Arthur Hugh Clough panel is located or trip over a drunken comp lit grad student curled up in a little ball because he didn't get a job interview. So to remind myself of the world I used to inhabit, here's a dead-on satire of academic life in the form an Office episode, complete with a shaky video camera, awkward but meaningful pauses, and secret drinking. The setting is the poli-sci department at Harvard, but except for the matching chairs and better lighting, it could be any department in any research university in the country.

Now take away the shaggy hairstyles and that guy with the bow tie, and you're right back in the corporate world.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm off for the rest of the week to eat turkey and root for whoever is playing the Packers. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and I'll see you next Monday.

Meet Wyatt and Seamus

Speaking as someone whose son is named Benjamin (I swear we didn't intentionally name him after WB, but . . . ), naming your children after poets seems like a cool idea. Congratulations to Bud Parr (Chekhov's Mistress) and his wife on the birth of their twins, Wyatt and Seamus. The Parr family also includes an older son named Auden.

In those midnight feedings Bud and his wife can recall these lines from Sir Thomas Wyatt:

Lo see mine eyes swell with continual tears,
The body still away sleepless it wears,
My food nothing my fainting strength repairs,
Nor doth my limbs sustain.

Play Ball

A few years ago Philip Roth caused a stir when he announced that he was giving up rooting for the Mets and switching to the Yankees. "Why should I continue to feel obligated to schoolyard allegiances?" he asked.

How do we choose which teams to root for? For many people, it's a matter of geographical fate. I was born and raised north of Chicago's Madison Avenue; therefore, I'm a Cub fan. Move my childhood only a few miles to the south, and I would be a White Sox fan. But I spent a good portion of my adulthood--eleven years--in Philadelphia, so I'm also a Philliies fan. When I walk around the Chicago area with my Phillies cap, especially downtown, I get a lot of mildly suspicious looks, as if I were flying the flag of a foreign nation. It's not quite like being a transplanted Chicagoan in Wisconsin, where Packers fans regard a Bears fan like he's in a terrorist cell, but the hostility pops up every so often. Walking around the Loop one day in my Phillies hat a grandmotherly type snapped at me, "You can't wear that around here."  Then my family complained when I gave my son a Phillies hat, a souvenir from a business trip to Philly. Finally, unwilling to interpellate my son into the vagaries of my own biography, I bought him a Cubs hat for his third birthday—interpellating him, of course, into another ideology. But I'm glad to see that he prefers wearing his Phillies hat.

My son knows what baseball is, but he has no concept of the Major Leagues or even teams. One trip to Wrigley Field will imprint the Cubs on his brain forever, just as it did me when I was six years old. But why should we get assigned our fandom identities before we choose a career or a life partner, and why can't we freely choose who we want to root for without having to explain our choice all the time? Why can't I be a Cardinals fan, a much more sensible choice given the histories of the Cubs and the Phillies? We think of America as a society of self-fashioning in which we freely create our identities in a particularly linear manner. Recall that Huckleberry Finn, generally regarded as the first truly American novel, is the story of a boy who leaves home and doesn't look back. So playground allegiances shouldn't be so hard to shake, but they are.

Maybe we need some identities that we don't choose, that are imposed upon us at birth and never leave us, for better or for worse. Maybe we all have a psychical bartering system that recognizes some immutable but unfortunate identities while allowing us to keep all of the other identities more provisional. I'm a Phillies fan partly to recognize a discontinuity in my life--the Chicago to which I returned a few years ago is different, and not altogether better, than the Chicago I left--and partly to keep open the possibility that I could move someplace else. To have the freedom to choose where one lives also means that there's always another, better, truer home someplace else. Sports team allegiances are a form of localized identity, and as such they're major markers in the narratives we construct about ourselves.

So yesterday was an interesting day: the Bears lost, badly, but the Phillies beat out the hated Mets for the Eastern Division crown. The Cubs clinched a few days ago in their typically diffident way, unlike the '93 Phillies, who charged right into the World Series. There's a realistic chance that the Cubs and the Phillies could meet for the NLCS, and should that happen, I'll suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I know that my old playground allegiances will reassert themselves. Sorry Phillies.

The Art of Getting Things Done

Sometimes I kill time by surfing productivity sites. If you implement every one of their suggestions, you can be productive 24/7--even in your sleep. I even read a blog that detailed how to read magazine articles while flossing your teeth--one of the few activities, I would think, that you couldn't multi-task. (Yes, you can multi-task during that one, too, as Paris Hilton has proved.) If Russia ever launches its nuclear warheads against us, it's comforting to know that I could still get through my to-do list before the bombs land.

The master guru of the personal productivity world is David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I've been a devoted GTD'er for months now. Up until very recently I would have dismissed Allen as another no-money-down huckster, like that guy who claims you can become a billionaire by working four hours a week. I'm also suspicious of anything designed to make me a more efficient employee. American workers achieve their vaunted productivity rates because they spend long hours hunched in front of a computer. The French out-produce us on an hourly basis, although not by much, and they work only thirty-five hours a week. Every undergraduate business major wants to be Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but most likely they'll end up a glorified efficiency expert in some vast corporation, trying to squeeze incremental productivity improvements out of ever-shrinking budgets  and sullen workers.

But there comes a time when you have to get organized, or the only certainties you'll face during a day is stress and exhaustion. Having a second child in March was the tipping point for me, when the 45 minutes of leisure time I had enjoyed a week got shaved down to about two minutes.  I came upon Allen's book while reading a literary blogger (I can't remember who) and thought I'd pick up a few pointers. Five pages into Getting Things Done I learned I was doing everything wrong. That to-do list I maintained on my BlackBerry only covered a small fraction of the things I needed to get done. The fundamental principles of Allen's system are ingenious: write everything down that you need to do--everything, however mundane or speculative. Process those jottings in a leak-proof system that you trust so that you can be confident that you're working on the right task at the right time--and so you know when it's okay to stop working. Don't distinguish between work and personal tasks; everything you do is work upon the world. This last point is, I think, Allen's most valuable insight. Erasing the boundary between work and home is a way around, if not through, the pernicious ideology of work as a form of suffering, that the only real work is those activities that make you suffer.

Allen himself comes across as pragmatic and genial. His only non-material claim is you'll get what he calls "a mind like water" if you use his system. Judging from his hyperkinetic presentation style, his mind is like a gushing faucet.  The GTD crowd--they're too affable, Allen's system too quotidian, to be called a cult--is viral, and they've turned GTD into an open-source system. Hardly anyone, it seems, implements Allen's paper-based system exactly as he prescribes it. There are GTD technologies (iGTD for Macs, ThinkingRock for all PC's) and GTD anti-technologies (the Hipster PDA, which has a large following of its own). In fact, the paper-based v. PC-based system is one of the livelier debates among the GTD crowd; the debate is played out in the two major GTD sites, Lifehacker and 43 Folders.

My own GTD system isn't leakproof--in case you're wondering, I use OneNote for processing, with a BlackBerry and a Moleskine notebook as capture tools--and like a number of GTD'ers, I straddle both the OSX and Windows platforms. Making a GTD system work across platform is one of the last frontiers of GTD research. I continue to search for ways to improve my system. One of the problems with Allen's system is that tending to the system itself is sometimes more interesting than doing the work you need to do. It's a kind of play, of course, which may be the real point of the GTD system.

Beckett for Babies

Yesterday my wife and I learned (re-learned, actually) a valuable lesson: never, ever mess with small children's nap schedules. We took a trip back to our old 'hood in Oak Park to pay my last respects to my favorite wine shop, Cabernet & Co., which was going out of business. By Sunday all that was left of the stock was a bottle of champagne, a couple of very pricey Bordeauxs, and an excellent riesling. I bought the riesling in anticipation of a nice Sunday dinner.

On the way back home the kids fell asleep for what couldn't have been more than five minutes. Consequently, they steadfastly refused to take their regularly-scheduled naps, so for the rest of the day we had to deal with a three-year-old and a six-month-old on extended crankiness benders. Finally by early evening they'd spent themselves and we got them to bed. I made some pork tenderloin and my wife and I sullenly consumed the riesling in peace.

In his last years, exhausted and ill, Samuel Beckett told George Plimpton why he continued to work:

With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility.

Diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence--what an apt description of parenthood, which is why "Beckett for Babies" is such a brilliant idea. Stephany Aulenback at the Crooked House blog came up with the idea for a book of Beckett quotes for babies, but so far she hasn't found a publisher. Beckett knew all about filial struggles, having battled for much of his early career with the overwhelming influence of James Joyce. It's no accident that Beckett finally broke with Joyce--aesthetically, that is--and happened upon his own ground-to-the-nub aesthetic during a visit to his mother in 1945. As Aulenback learned from dealing with her own baby, lines like "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful" perfectly express the existential crises my six-month-old daughter goes through four or five times an hour. The pared-down gloom of Beckett's prose expresses the mood in which you find yourself when confronted with a three-year-old who has thrown himself onto the floor because you stirred the yogurt and he wanted the fruit on the bottom and he didn't buy your attempt to unstir the yogurt. You try to point out that there's still quite a bit of fruit left at the bottom and gently suggest what he really needs is a nap, but your attempts to reason with him only provoke more crying. Beckett invented the language for living in a loud world where no one can hear you.

But if there's a limit to the lessons Beckett can teach us and our children, it's the one lesson he failed to learn from Joyce: try not to compromise your moments of happiness when they come, as they inevitably will.

Stormy Weather

We've all seen the photographs of the dramatically reduced Alpine glaciers and the polar bears trudging through puddles. But when will each of us have our first direct experience of global warming? The weather in the United States has been haywire all summer. My father and stepmother own a cottage on the Wisconsin-Michigan border, and it's been so dry up there that there's an extra ten feet of beach surrounding the lake. The water is so low it's not safe to take a boat out. A co-worker who lives in drought-ridden North Carolina can't leave so much as a drop of water on her kitchen or it will be swarmed upon by thirsty ants.

Last Thursday afternoon storms blew through the Chicago area, bringing 80 MPH winds and torrential rains. The hardest hit area was Wilmette, IL, where I live. Our basement flooded, a large tree branch crashed into our house, and we were without power for three days. We still don't have cable TV or broadband. Most businesses in the area were closed because of lack of power. The whole town was a disaster area. The parkways are piled high with tree branches--and often entire trees--along with the entire contents of people's basements. We have a neighbor who's lived in his house for over 50 years and he says he's never seen anything like it. Supposedly, Wilmette made the national news, but we've been in a complete news blackout for days.

I'll try to get back to regular posting as soon as I get things straightened out around here. I don't know, however, if this was a once-every-fifty-years event or if we should be preparing for similar extreme weather to strike every summer. I don't know if there is any way to prepare.

Unpacking My Library

"I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am," Walter Benjamin declares at the opening of his essay, "Unpacking My Library." He's standing among the packing crates that have held his books for two years. A failed marriage, the inability to land an academic position, the uncertain life as a freelance writer, and political instability meant Benjamin led a peripatetic life, so reacquainting himself with his books must have been an immense relief and a great pleasure. The order in chaos quality of the collection, the way fate and the passions play themselves out in the private library, had special meaning for Benjamin. He even points out that people have gone crazy, or were reduced to a life of crime, when deprived of their books.

We moved into our new house three weeks ago, but it was only yesterday that I finally unearthed my copy of Illuminations, in which "Unpacking My Library" appears. I'd been looking for it since we arrived. With a new house comes a new arrangement for books. Once the last box has been unloaded from the truck, finding a place for my books is the first decision I have to make in every domicile I've ever moved into. This weekend I set up a triple front of bookcases in the living room (another triple set will go in the finished basement). For the first time in years I've felt settled enough to arrange them in order: literature chronologically from the top, the Greeks to late modernism, followed by literary criticism, film studies, and a row of philosophy ending in a special section on Walter Benjamin. The bottom shelves house contemporary novels in hard cover, primarily to stabilize the bookcases. The historical sweep of my collection, I can now see, is like a sine wave, with certain periods well represented, and others still to be retrieved by the act of purchasing books. "To renew the old word--that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things," Benjamin writes. He tells the story of the lengths he went to so he could procure an 1810 edition of the memoir of a physicist told in the form of an obituary of a supposedly deceased friend. The strange book is "the most important sample of personal prose of German Romanticism," according to Benjamin. An entire epoch of intellectual history dwells in the autobiography of an obscure German scientist. In a sense book collecting is a way of writing one's own obituary in the form of an collection of dead authors--but it's an obituary that fends off death, rather than hastening it. 

Benjamin lingers over the act of unpacking his library. At the conclusion of his essay he's working past midnight going through the crates. Each book reminds him of the place in which he bought it. The entire geography of his life is laid out before him, from his childhood in Berlin to Paris, where he made his final home. Tyler Cowen claims that we buy books in order to enhance our sense of self, but reading Benjamin on collecting we realize only dilettantes buy books to shore up their egos.  For Benjamin the serious book collector lives the "disreputable" but glorious life behind "the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm,''' because the inside the bookworm

there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for the collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.

The Re-Distribution of the Sensible

As I've mentioned before, last weekend we moved from relatively urbanized Oak Park to Wilmette, which is definitely suburban. On one level, the environmental differences are definite but not overly striking: more trees, far fewer pedestrians, bigger lawns. Last Saturday morning we walked to a Corner  Bakery for breakfast, eating outside. It was nice to get a refill without elbowing out someone trying to get the last drips from the decaf pot. I was used to much fiercer competition for coffee. We strolled back at a noticeably slower pace than we used to in Oak Park, which has some of that amphetamines-in-the-air feel of Chicago and, especially, New York City. In Wilmette the whole experience of going out to breakfast was weirdly relaxed.

That night a full moon shone directly into my daughter's bedroom, just as the sun did in the morning. The roar of cicadas at night is deafening; my son has already perfected his imitation of it. (Walter Benjamin proposed that children imitating nature was the foundation of our mimetic facility.) The vast parking lots heat up quickly in the morning, but the shady residential streets are much more comfortable. We're close enough to Lake Michigan to feel the cooling effects of the lake.

Moving to Wilmette has been a startlingly new sensory experience. There's a completely different set of sights, sounds, impressions, and language practices. Middle school kids take Latin classes. Things that were once far away--open spaces, the mailman, the expressway, the moon--are now closer. This re-distribution of the sensible recalls Jacques Rancière's aesthetic theory.  In The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible he talks about how societies are divided into discrete groups, with modern art traversing these divisions and creating new possibilities for perception--as well as excluding other possibilities. Art re-scrambles the established divisions between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable. By re-distributing the sensible art becomes political because the political, for Rancière, also intervenes in the stable order of perceptions and language practices, which Rancière refers to, unsatisfactorily, as the police order.

In light of Rancière's theory of aesthetics and politics, it's interesting to note that the North Shore suburbs get progressively more conservative as one moves northward up the lake shore, away from the city. One could attribute the political differences to income levels, but surely there's something in the environment of the leafy North Shore that determines how people relate to the body politic. And the distribution doesn't fall neatly into the polarities of liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican. Urbanized Oak Park was not only a generally liberal place, but it was also intensely political. I'll bet few municipalities, even liberal ones, had anti-war protestors in their Fourth of July parade, as Oak Park did earlier this month. "Broad lawns and narrow minds," was how Hemingway described his home town. Now that the lawns are much narrower in Oak Park, the minds have become more inclusive in certain ways, although they're still narrow in other ways, including architecturally. It will be interesting to see how more architecturally liberal, moon-bathed Wilmette formulates the political.

The Search for the Modern: Cheeverville

Our search for the modern has taken a decisive turn. After a long search for affordable modern design house, we're due to close next week on a 1955 split level in Wilmette, IL. We're buying the house "as-is" and remodeling it. The story of our remodeling effort will be told in a new blog called The Next Mid-Century, which will be maintained by my wife Sarah. (Gee, I hope she links to my site someday.)

Our search for a modern house has been much more difficult than it should have been. Modernist design originally meant embracing the technological and the mass-produced. A century later modern design has become an elite realm of exquisite objects reserved for connoisseurs. A reproduction four-shelf bookcase designed by Marcel Breuer, the last director of the Bauhaus, retails for $2,225. Mass-produced objects from a socialist design school have become as fetishized as any hand-made period piece from the reign of Louis XIV.  It's as if Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was never written.  There are, of course, instances of modern design that attempt to change the world around it rather than sealing itself off within glass walls: Helmut Jahn's Near North Apartments in Chicago and Andrew Zago's Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit are two examples I've discussed in this space. Ikea is another example of modernism for the masses. Still, for the most part the design objects available to people of ordinary means are historically inaccurate reproductions from earlier, less democratic stages of capitalism.

We're not yet sure who designed our Wilmette house, but it's not a typical suburban split level. Best known for its posh pre-World War II lake front homes, a large part of Wilmette resembles the post-war suburban landscape of John Cheever's fiction, with its restless commuters and free-flowing cocktails. We looked at several houses built in the 1950's and early '60's that still had their original owners and much of their original decor. You could practically hear the martini shakers. Our house has gently pitched roofs, off-center lighting fixtures, awning windows, a cramped '50's kitchen, and no garage. The house is near that quintessential mid-century object, the interstate.

We're halfway between the last mid-century and the next, and we're now cognizant of our moment in natural history as well as the history of middle-class American life. So we're going to turn our 1955 house into a green home in order to save the planet. As my wife's blog will no doubt show, going green will not only be a complicated construction project, but also a complex ethical project.  There's a new mid-century modern to be created. Next month we'll start planning it all out while drinking martinis on our back porch.

BlackBerry on the Beach

I'm back from North Carolina. The vacation went pretty much without mishap, except for the time the rental car nearly tumbled down the side of a hill (long story). We joined my wife's parents and her brothers and their families at a pair of beachfront houses on Oak Island. At the eastern end of the island is Cape Fear, the subject of two intense movies but actually a mild body of water. My son Ben (at above left) refused to approach the ocean because the surf was "too loud" and the water "yucky." He occupied himself by building a series of sand castles and playing with his cousins.  My daughter Jillian (below right with my wife Sarah) discovered a new skill: rolling over, which she practiced at every opportunity.

Now I'm back at work, bleary-eyed and stressed. Exactly what benefits are we supposed to get from a vacation? I enjoyed it while it lasted, but I ended up dealing with a project crisis while at the beach, so I never really left the office behind.  Like a lot of people with the standard American two to three week vacation allowance, I've taken my time off and, except for my suntan, it's as if I never left. In fact, in some ways I didn't. The rental house on the beach isn't entirely an escape from the corporate world. As Heidegger noted in his observations on technology, tourism is a means of viewing nature not as a thing in itself, with its own way to relating to us, but as a resource, as a source of profit. As a result, we felt obligated to maximize our time at the beach, and felt vaguely guilty whenever we were inside.

When you think about it, a vacation is an empty thing. Our word "vacation" comes from the Latin vacatio, which as a noun means freedom from occupation. The verb vacare means to be empty, to vacate. In the English tradition "vacation" originally referred to lawyers and judges vacating the courts during harvest time. The tradition was brought over from France by William the Conqueror, and even during the medieval ages it was already archaic. Within the idea of the vacation, then, there's a division between culture and nature. We vacate a culture in search of older ways of relating to nature. On Oak Island, we made sure to buy locally-caught fish for dinner every night. Before the island developed its beach house rental industry, it had been a fishing community. In addition, we experienced an older form of bourgeois existence before the deterritorialization of American industry, when extended families lived more or less in the same place. Our vacation was also an echo of the nineteenth-century custom of vacating the heat and competition of the city for a summer in the country. Really, that's where the pleasure of the vacation was for me: the experience of nature with an extended family. That I never really left work behind is all part of the bargain. I had my BlackBerry with me on the beach, and that was okay.

Summer Vacation

I leave tomorrow for two weeks on sunny Oak Island, NC, where I will be lying on the beach, reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, and losing cribbage games to children who can't read yet. This space will be quiet until I get back. In the meantime, here are updates on some earlier blog entries.

The summer blockbuster season, despite early breathless predictions that Hollywood would have a record-setting summer, has been fair to middling so far, with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Ocean's Thirteen doing reasonably doing well, but not meeting expectations. Knocked Up is the only pleasant surprise so far, but plenty of other films have either barely met expectations (Shrek the Third), have been disappointing (Surf's Up), or been completely abandoned by moviegoers ( the entire horror film genre).  Speaking of disappointing numbers, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End sold "only" 50,000 copies by mid May after landing on the cover of the The York Times Book Review. Among the culprits: sloppy placement in bookstores, a hard-to-remember title, and inflated expectations about what constitutes a successful first novel.

Romanian films continued to do very well at Cannes. This year Cristian  Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or, which Dave Kehr reports was "the most consensual Palme d’Or in a decade."

NeoCon is finally over with, so I can enter and leave the building without trampled by a pair of Manolos.

We didn't invade Iran this spring after all, although Dick Cheney got to mutter some threats, which must have made him feel better.

We're still waiting for the groundbreaking of the Chicago Spire, scheduled for this month. I was at the site a week ago and didn't see anything, but then again, I'm not sure what I should be looking for. A guy with a shovel?

The Trump Tower is one third completed and already it's too tall. The shot at left is from Honorary Trump Plaza, actually an ordinary stretch of Wabash Avenue at Illinois Street.

Today the Cleveland City Planning Commission will reconsider the request to demolish Marcel Breuer's Ameritrust Tower. Last Friday the Commission tabled the demolition request in order to consider alternatives to tearing down the landmark building. The building's prospects for survival are considered dim, however.

Our search for the modern continues, this time on the North Shore, where my wife has taken a school psychologist's job in the Wilmette public school district.  Last night we found a little Cheeverville in Wilmette--a cluster of mid-century modern houses built in the 1950's, many of them with their original owners, as well as their original coat of paint.

Stay tuned.