The City on the Page

Why there’s no French for “Leafy Suburb”

I came across an interesting (and rather old) question online today –

I was wondering how the french said leafy suburb…. I really dont think banlieue feuillue is right.

The interesting answer is… they don’t, not really. Idyllic and peaceful suburbs are a US and British concept, and the image of outlying residential annexes (or banlieus) in mainland European cities like Paris tends to be pretty bleak. Why is this?

In the US and Europe, from the late 1800s onwards, the Industrial Revolution brought an influx of population towards the cities for organised employment. After World War II however, Western economies such as the US and Britain lifted tariffs and outsourced most of their manufacturing industries. The resultant change to a services economy made ownership of a car more feasible. . New zoning laws and the expansion of interstate highways in the US allowed for the expansion of the city. Those that could used their new higher standard of living to move out of the decaying industrial areas of the city centre which were now giving way to office blocks and skyscrapers.

In mainland Europe, however, the cities tended to continue to sustain a steadily increasing populace. Real estate values remained high and attempts to bring big business into the mainly residential city centre tended to be unsuccessful – see the pretty dismal and lonely Tour Montparnasse in Paris, as an example. Suburbs in Paris were built as a solution to the ever-expanding population stretched further by an influx of economic migrants from former French colonies.Urban decay in France tends to be manifested in these peripheral areas at the outskirts of the city.

In the US, as the middle classses fled to the suburbs the city centres suffered urban decay. American city planners like Jane Jacobs lament “if only we Americans had not gone through the cultural convulsions of the post-war era and tossed our cities into the dumpster of history.” , Rénovation Urbaine in France is the aim of Government initiatives such as La Politique de la Ville whose stated objectives would be just as at home in a statement by the NYC think-tank Centre for an Urban Future.

Employment, isolation, education and security have been identified as priority areas of government action… Other features aimed at improving the standard of living focus on the living environment, safety, community life, housing, health, culture …

from Espoir Banlieu

Category: Cities, Paris, Urban Planning

My Top 10 Books about Paris

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As a compulsive list-maker, I have a number of ongoing lists of Paris recommendations that I add to with every visit. I’ve been postponing settling on this one, intimidated by the image of the perfect Paris reading list, but the sunny weather in Dublin at the moment makes me want to spend my days eeking out noisettes in the Café de la Mairie so I’m beginning it as a poor substitute and will leave it open for subsequent tweaks.

A friend and I studied for a year in Université de Paris in 1998/99 where we spent a couple of months rooming in opposite wings of the Cité Universitaire in the 14th. We griped about the inconvenience of the rooms, which we judged reachable only by the intimidating rubber smelling RER, (in hindsight, within easy walking distance of the city centre) and used to sit at the bar of the Irish pub we worked in debating the merits of a 48 Franc taxi home. It wasn’t until we moved into an old sublet apartment in the Latin Quarter that we started to charge out into the surrounding city more and really get to know the quartiers. I’ve been back at least once a year since and it has never lost its appeal, nor has reading about it.

This list is not all literary – it’s a mix of sources on the city, either fiction or guide or both.

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.”

Every student seeking to raise funds from a remote benefactor should study this example of The Poor Mouth in Paris. There’s no doubt that Orwell lived it (but why?). His self-imposed poverty delivers highly memorable descriptions of filthy greased waiters emering from the bowels of the kitchens, cleaning plates with spit-moistened thumbs and straightening their backs before entering the dining room as well as a couple of handy tips for the modern shoestring traveller such as fooling an empty stomach by rubbing garlic on your stale bread.

The poet John Ashbury apparently said that having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris but the quote most often rolled out in relation to the lasting effects of life in Paris is Hemingway’s uncharacteristically gushing one from his ultimate guide to the Latin Quarter:

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Gertrude Stein did the sparse prose style better, but Hemingway’s skill is to pass off suppressed emotion as ambivalence in his simple and evocative descriptions of the struggling writer’s life in Paris. We all want to be cool in the face of Paris’ intimidating desirability and this little book pulls it off.

“Paris is a big city, in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages, and Zurich a backwater.”

The alternative city guide to Paris. This almost perfect book sits right at the intersection of things I love. White’s ever-candid accounts of cruising on the Vert Gallant may rule it out as the guide you’d recommend to a relative but his observations about the paradoxes of daily life in Paris are spot on.

Like all good history books, Seven Ages makes you aware that for the people in every period described in it their time was very much their own present tense; modern, complex and with the future still worth bickering over.

“No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” Ernest Hemingway on Sylvia Beach

The Shakespeare and Company bookshop in the 5th is in fact a second incarnation of the original opened in the 6th by Sylvia Beach in 1919. While the modern shop has promoted itself as a bohemian one-at-a-time hostel for writers coming to Paris the original was a English lending library around which expat writers congregated having moved to Paris for the low cost of living and to escape prohibition. Fitch’s tone has all the seriousness of an American concentrating hard on Europe, and her style makes you feel a little like a external thesis examiner, but it’s worth it for the cinescope of 1920s writers that her investigation projects – lots of Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and the “crooked Jesus” Joyce.

Paris’ quartiers seem endlessly explorable, it’s supply of restaurants endless.
The late Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy analysed the three stages of civilisation as Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, characterised by the questions, ‘How can we eat?’, ‘Why do we eat?’ and ‘Where shall we have lunch?”. In a city where the opportunity cost of a bad meal is so high it’s worth allowing the wisdom of crowds, or at least a collection of gushing Americans to dictate the answer to the third.

Andrew Hussey’s Secret History rummages around in the filth of ages and fully investigates the squalour that makes Paris the setting of novels such as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume.

Austin served his guests a first course of smoked fish and a salad in a mustard vinaigrette and a second of lamb shoulder stewed with onions, tomatoes and white beans. Then he passed around a big smelly platter of oozing cheeses, though privately he knew that chalky goat cheeses dusted in cinders were more “distinguished” than these runny Bries and Camemberts, and that skipping the cheese course altogether was still more aristocratic, but he also recognised that he had to fill his skinny young guests up. For dessert, like all Parisians, he bought bakery sweets, since no one in his own kitchen coudl rival the layered and unidentifiable mousses that the French admired and Americans dismissed as “synthetic”.

White does what Hemingway could not, combining adequate writerly reverence for the Parisian experience with the gushing and conspiratorial style of a French society gossip columnist.

Little picture books about Paris abound – and most contain places you suspect the au courant Parisian would avoid at all (high) costs – just one of which could sour a city break. This Taschen collection doesn’t shy away from including the famous Paris institutions, but only on merit, providing a well-rounded visual tour of some of Paris’ best spots.

I love maps (a lot) and still treat the snail of arrondissments coming out from the centre of Paris with the network of streets, cafés and restaurants as a memory game whose layout is to be re-enforced with each visit. Paris is a city of quartiers (arrondissements) with where you live defining your mini network of suppliers, similar to the relationship with one’s local pub in Dublin. This little guide, maps each arrondissement onto 2 small pages and since every street name has its arrondissement above it, does indeed make it, as it so Frenchly clips, “l’Indispensable”.

Category: Uncategorised

An Awkward Situationist

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When Will Self flies from Heathrow to LAX he walks nine miles from his home in London to the airport and upon arrival walks from LAX to Hollywood. He’s been at this for a few years now but has just recently published Walking to Hollywood, a book of stories some of which document these walks.

I had a little bit of a Will Self obsession in college – loving My Idea of Fun and the Cock and Bull novellas because they were both psychedelic and bleak. I read How the Dead Live and Grey Area but by the time I had begun, and then given up on Great Apes I had admittedly dismissed the books as belonging to a bit of a “phase”. The extensive press on Walking to Hollywood makes it tempting – but I have reservations.

Self’s protest is that the modern city reflects the modern lifestyle of Work Consume Die to such an extent that it is no longer a real place. His walking as a quest to repair this decoupling of physical and human geography. It’s quite a beautiful idea, but to what extent can we translate ideas to life without coming off as ineffectual and pretentious? Self’s commitment is not in doubt, he is indeed living it, citing the mid-century Situationists as an influence while admitting that they were “a tiny groupuscule of insufferably pretentious marxists”. If dedication is not in doubt, what is the difference between pretentious and genuinely avant garde? I think it might be motivation – there is a suspicion of of anger and discomfort in Self’s quest. It’s his raw awkwardness that’s the problem – he admits “Feeling at home in the world is an issue for me”.

See video below a clip from (the brilliant site) A Piece of Monologue

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One thing, done beautifully

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If good blog is one that takes one thing and does it well – Kemp Folds – then a perfect blog is one that takes one thing and does it beautifully – Forgotten Bookmarks catalogues all of the surprisingly moving little bookmarks found by someone working in a used and rare bookstore including a letter from 1876.

Category: Books

Do you mind if we call you Philosophers?

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“There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach you about the raising of the wrist….” according to the Australian philosophers in Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Drinking Song. The more Australian authors I read I’m beginning to think that, rather than an Oxbridge slight against their less sophisticated colonial cousins, the Pythons’ song was a sharp (and hilarious) observation on a characteristically Australian flare for unpretentious deep thinking.


A Fraction of the Whole by Stephen Tolz is a truly Aussie book, it’s big and friendly and thought-provoking and kept me company while I read it* (*testimonial thieved from the back of Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”). It’s deep-thinking but in a homely way – like John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Books like this are a comforting reminder that novels about (albeit alternative) family relationships can be as thought-provoking and powerful as any amount of underfed isolated anguish.

The narrator’s father, Martin Dean is a manic, eratic, philosophising man with a deep hatred of cliché and mindless conformity and a lust for improvement (his own and that unasked-for by others). He is idiosyncratic to the point of parody but his rants and projects (think labyrinth-building) are made believable because they are viewed with the familiar weary mix of bemused amusement and murderous frustration reserved especially for family. The main thing I want to get across about this book is how funny the writing is. At least four times while reading it I guffawed in public. I couldn’t bring myself to write “laugh out loud funny” just there, Martin Dean would have chastised me – that’s company. It draws in a very large range of literary references to wade through during the narrator’s (and his father’s) constant questioning of received literary and philosophical wisdom.

The Pythons’ fictitious Philosophy Department was in the entertainingly non-fictitious Wooloomooloo in Sydney – I can testify to those four pairs of ‘o’s having briefly lived there in 2000. I wasn’t there for long but I’ve always felt a little guilty about not having loved Sydney. I thought it would be like San Francisco (maybe if you squint a little) and wondered if it would be slightly cooler than Melbourne (which it’s not really – and I’m not just saying this to get a quote in The Age.)

It was another Australian para-philosophical book which made me feel I might like to go back and have another look. Peter Carey’s “30 days in Sydney, A Wildly Distorted Account” is the story of the writer’s return to the city told through the personal dramas of his loosely strung together collection of friends. Like A Fraction of the Whole, the narrative of this small book from the Writer in the City series is chaotic and has a healthy dose of artistic license. Carey style, like Tolzs’ is a practical, mocking, discourse with the reader. Carey’s friends are obsessed with architecture and practical reinterpretations of intellectual concepts. The dialogue in the book includes conversations with DeSelby – the fictional philosopher from Flann O’Brien’s Seanchaí story of theoretical physics, The Third Policeman. Toltz, Carey and O’Brien use narratives wrapped around narratives to inject humour and non-conformist intellectualism into their stories. The combination of belly laughs and wonder is pleasantly bewildering but leaves you feeling a bit like the American in the pub, never quite sure whether you’re the victim of the next round of laughter.

Like the perpetually irate Martin Dean, De Selby was invented by O’Brien and is recycled here by Carey as a provocation – a literary elbow in the ribs. Wikipedia puts it well

De Selby has a host of critical analyzers – the narrator among them – many of whom have highly conflicting opinions of his esoteric thoughts. Although generally held in high regard by these people (many of whom hate each other), he is thought by many to have had regrettable lapses and is even called, by implication, a “nincompoop”.

In A Fraction of the Whole one of Martin Dean’s infuriating trials is his brother’s becoming famous for a book he never penned. A common theme among these pub philosophers that the solemn respect for intellectual property and authorship is something to be mocked and that a little bit of its authors not having existed never hurt any argument. In Aussie rules the facts will suit the narrative, and your name might just have to be Bruce.

Category: Books

Blog Backlog… Anais, Paris and Temple

By posting this evening after work and before a dinner party which will undoubtedly render me unfit for writing tomorrow, I am avoiding passing the month mark without a single post. There’s a bit of a backlog building so I wanted to note a couple of recent reads: there’s a Anais Nin’s diary from the early 20′s – which I suspect, due to a marked lack of erotic content, was the expurgated version. Brilliant reading nonetheless: The original memoir and full of Paris longing…

I’m currently reading The Seven Ages of Paris as repeatedly recommended by multiple people but I couldn’t quite face the big sleeveless blue hardback copy that my father loaned me and only began it in earnest when I found a lovely light chunk of a paperback version in Chapters last week. All of these Parisian reads really merit a Top 10 Books About Paris post but it’s not getting written tonight.

Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation is a sturdy and moving book about making an effort to understand how animals negotiate the world. Grandin, who has Aspergers autism was herself the subject of a fascinating and very touching profile by Dr. Oliver Sacks, in his An Anthropologist on Mars and it feels like she’s re-gifting his patient, insightful treatment to the animal kingdom with her own book on how we make ourselves less human by anthropomorphising animals. It’s a difficult book to categorise as it deals in almost equal parts with autism and animal psychology but Grandin’s analyses of the specificity of animal mental categories and the difficulty they share with Autists in abstracting from the specific have really interesting implications for linguists.

Somehow the quarks and the jaguars are going the route of The American Future and the now-growing-into-a-mental-block Paris Noir… Perhaps a Top 10 Books I think I might never finish post may be more relevant…

Category: Uncategorised

Vienna ranked top for Living (and Decay)

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Vienna has topped the 2010 Mercer Quality of Living Survey followed by Zurich (Monocle Magazine’s choice for the top Most Liveable Cities slot last year).

Mercer’s criteria are aimed at its commercial audience of those relocating for business and therefore include financial services, political stability, schools banking services, waste disposal, standard and availability of international schools and cultural and social elements like restaurants and theatres. The ranking however is aimed at assisting the compensation decisions of companies relocating staff to these cities and as such, lacks a little romance.

When I think of Vienna, I think of two things, first; the beautiful ashen description of the city from John Irving’s The World According to Garp which I read prior to ever having visited Vienna and second; not reading Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé in the cosier than cosy Kaffe Alt Wien. The latter was a classic number three on my mistakes when picking travel reads and remains untouched.

Kaffe Alt Wien, Vienna

Despite my not warming to Canetti, the faded city of the Hapsburgs had fully lived up to Irving’s description (via Garp) of an elegant shell of former grandeur. It’s hard to explain how Irving captures the beauty of a city through the overriding theme of death, of dying prostitutes swathed in furs:

All around Garp, now, the city looked ripe with dying. The teeming parks and gardens reeked of decay to him, and the subject of the great painters in the great museums was always death. There were always cripples and old people riding the
No. 38 Strassenbahn out to Grinzinger Allee, and the heady flowers planted along the pruned paths of the courtyard in the Rudolf inerhaus reminded Garp only of funeral parlors.

I’m not sure it’s a quote any of Mercer’s clients will be using in their relocation starter packs…

Category: Uncategorised

A Picture of Oscar Wilde

I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray last weekend as part of April’s One City One Book.

Struck by the beauty of his freshly painted portrait, Dorian Gray makes a wish:

“that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins.”

His wish is granted – Dorian Gray descends further into a life of hedonism and cruelty while his portrait hidden in the attic, becomes withered and ugly. The ending is not unpredictable – Dorian dies and the painting is restored to youth. Although seemingly a fable warning of the perils of vanity – is there a moral lesson to be learnt from the story? In the end Dorian’s attempt to destroy the painting results in his own death but there is no moment of revelation – his final thoughts are unrepentant and selfish:

“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. …[]… It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think.”

The value of the fable is not usually in its ending; the moment when the tortoise paces slowly and gloriously past the hare, or when the lion has a thorn removed from his paw but rather in the identification of the moral characteristics that helped to win out over the usual success paradigms of speed, strength and beauty. If it is not to his ending that we should look then what were the avoidable traits that led to Dorian Gray’s demise? Or was it corruption by others that was at fault?

We meet the young Gray as the muse of the painter Basil Hallward, who is attempting to protect him from the hedonistic seducer Lord Henry Wotton. One cannot help hear Wilde the aesthete in Wotton’s declarations:

“I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream–I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal..[].. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.”

Wilde seems to be trying to warn against the dangers of vanity and appearances yet struggles to go so far as to denounce the adulation of youth and beauty. In the Wildean order of things there is an inverse of the concept of original sin; the young soul is innocent, blameless and therefore beautiful. Suffering and thought scar the soul leading to the ugliness of ageing and ultimately to death. It is to the young and beautiful that we should look for purity and redemption:

“His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.”

The Portrait of Dorian Gray seems to show Wilde’s struggle between his religion of beauty and his knowledge that it was as intangible as his paradoxes. He said:

“No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.”

Wild’s aesthetic life was cut short when he was sentenced to 2 year’s hard labour for “acts of gross indecency” – a Victorian punishment worthy of Hades. De Profundis (from the depths) was written during the enforced reflections of his time in prison and it contains a self-awareness unachieved by Dorian and what could have been his missing final speech:

“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a “flaneur”, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility…One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.”

Wilde’s revelation still contained a disclaimer against morality:

“But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.”

Category: Books

Dublin – One City One Book

Dublin – One City One Book is an initiative of the Dublin Public Libraries to encourage people to read one book in the month of April. Self-inflicted inventories challenges aside, I think this is a wonderful plan and despite having admired the posters, its one I only really learned of today. There’s a little bit of space freed up on the unread book stack too as I have finally (with the help of Project Guttenberg on the iPhone) gotten round to finishing Swann’s Way – more on that later.

There are 6 days left in April but the appropriateness of the idea to both themes of this blog mean I almost have to do it. The brother will also be happy as I’ll finally be reading the pleasing little second-hand green edition that he leant to me a long time ago and, which if things go to plan, he’ll now have back by Mayday.

Category: Books, Dublin

Back to (Augmented) Reality

My last post had, admittedly, a pretty tenuous link to cities being a post on baking – brought on by having watched Julie and Julia and reading lots of 101 Cookbooks and Chocolate and Zucchini. After my most successful bread-making to date with with my year-old sourdough starter (see baguettes below) I proudly set about spring cleaning the starter jar and killed my bubbling baby. After three days of anxiously checking for little bubbles I had to face up to my yeast murder and throw the lot down the sink. ….Lucky I never named it then.

With that I am returning to all things city. Up first: I’ve been looking for augmented reality apps for my iPhone that layer information over the camera view to allow you to essentially browse reality.

The New York Nearest Places App for iPhone

The thing I find interesting about the growing applications for augmented reality is how they are tying our oft-predicted virtual reality future to reality itself. This post on Mashable puts it more concisely than I did:

“While Lawnmower Man may have led us to believe the future was a virtual one, it seems that in fact augmented reality (the overlaying of digital data on the real world) is where we’re headed”.

I’m going to install Pocket Universe and Cyclopedia. Hopefully they’ll keep my mind off my dead starter.

Category: Cities
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