einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr

This list of Some Things I Will Miss About Berlin was drawn up hastily on June 26, 2013, and revised, NYE-style, December 31, 2015. Evidently in my barely-employed Hausfrau years I only ate, drank, and bicycled the hugeness of Berlin...

21. Lunches at Primo Maggio

maw

The half-crazy super is sorting the garbage as I'm coming back into the building and waylays me with an obscenity-heavy disquisition on the garbage and recycling iniquities of the other superintendents on the block. The lecture is so intricate that, in the final analysis, I'm unable to figure out whether he supports a regime of recycling, with its rules and sorting requirements, or not. I gather, at least, that "in the 70s" the building's waste bags were impossibly heavy, bulging with every kind of thing. I also gather that the sanitation patrol people exercise their fining powers with vengeful pettiness. The super lauds their efforts for the most part, even as he expresses bitter resignation at the fact of their powers. But in the case of a fellow super – "a fucking idiot" who argued with a sanitation patrolman, who then radioed an NYPD car and lied to the real cops about "the idiot" having put hands on him – my guy's attitude turns to bitter hatred of the authorities.

Later in our "conversation," he describes a woman who liked to dump her household garbage in the public basket on the corner. A sanitation patrolman patiently stakes out the location, then catches her redhanded one morning and writes the ticket. With a shake of his head, the super stabs the air with his voice like a dull knife: "100 bucks!"

"Well," I circumspect, "the city has to make money somehow."

"No. This city is never satisfied. Not in a million years."

Look both ways!

You on Amsterdam glide
mid block without the light
then turn, like a leaf out of season
red against my bicycle bell.

Madame Bovary, c'est moi.

"What word would you use," the psychoanalyst asks while my eyes seek the canyon of Manhattan towers visible from her window, "to characterize the feeling in all these things you've been describing?" Me: "Elegiac."

     Since I respect you, let me tell you a secret.
     As a cow devours grass, so literary themes are devoured; devices fray and crumble.
     A writer cannot be a ploughman: he is a nomad, constantly moving with his wife and herd to greener pastures.

After ripping through the first section, Juan García Madero's journal from November 2 to December 31, 1975, it took me months to fall back into the The Savage Detectives. Then, momentum: I take the last third or so of the novel in great gulps, mostly on the 1, nearly missing my stop every time, accompanied by a rising, heaving disillusionment at not having lived like a visceral realist or an infrarealist — hard-boiled. Bolaño didn't believe in exile, "especially when the word exile is set beside the word literature."

The momentum carried me headlong into Cole's Open City, which I had begun in Berlin and abandoned in a kind of panic, like catching a glimpse of yourself reflected at an unexpected angle in the bus window against which you've been resting your head; and for a moment you forget where you were going in the first place. This time I finish. The two, The Savage Detectives and Open City, pass through each other in Liberia, as though a minor character in Arturo Belano's travels there has wound up in a Queens detention center: Saidu telling his story though plexiglass to Julius. Now I fret that there is something equally despicable in my past that I have secreted away, even from myself, and that the therapist will uncover soon.

Directly on the heels of Open City, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love completed what now feels like a coincidental symphony — through Shklovsky's compressed exile in Berlin, a mental or spiritual breakdown between the lines of an epistolary novel that, like The Savage Detectives, ranges freely and idiosyncratically over a literary tradition and its recent politics. For both RBA and VBS, detection and the detective novel were special keys, but for opening what door? while Julius wanders to know himself, like the lunatic quoted by Benjamin: "I travel to know my geography."

...Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life, Alya, and you know how that was and how it is; but you turn up in my book like Isaac at the fire built by Abraham.

If ever a lady doth-protested too much, it was me writing dustily on the board clack tsssh click that the characters in the novels we will be reading this semester are not people; do not (for you cannot) identify. Drops the chalk into the tray.

Authentica Habita

Photo by Carmen Young.

As I was saying, The Decline of the German Mandarins is a terrific companion for The University in Ruins.

§

Visited PK + RS in PDX over the holidays. PK asked how things are going in NYC. I repeated something that I've been saying to MK for awhile: that I've begun to feel...not uprooted, but un-rooted. I no longer feel at home anywhere. I move from city to city, always just a year or a few years too early or too late. Always -jected in some way, floating. Desychronized from my own prior experiences of a place, a scene. Not there.

falling up again

A couple weeks ago, my bag stuffed to overflowing with groceries from the (can I just say insane) Trader Joe's on 72nd, I was calmly riding my bicycle north, homeward, on Central Park West. Somewhere in the 80s I semiunconsciously noticed the numbers were going up and started: "Oops," I thought, and turned west at the next street and then turned again; and as I began calmly, smugly even, pedaling south down Columbus, I realized with a bigger start that I was now going in the wrong direction...and had to turn around again. So strong is my residual homing sense from the few years that I lived in The City before – years ago, on Broome St – that this is the third or fourth time since returning here that, in a kind of trance, I have begun going south in order to go home.

heterotopia

In the spring of 2004 my friend OF and I exchanged approximately 950 emails that rambled on about architecture and cities. (I have saved all of the emails in a folder titled "millesmessages." At one point I thought it would be cool to put them all online somehow. I am wiser now, and OF is now a practicing architect.) To my recollection the correspondence developed and was underpinned by twin themes: the aesthetics of infrastructure; and the paradox of designing urban space so as to enable the accidental.

I recall all of this as my Internet begins to fill with news of the death of Lebbeus Woods (see also Steven Holl remembers Lebbeus Woods, not to mention An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World, etc.). I also remember flipping through Radical Reconstruction, which OF had lent me, while lounging on MK's bed in her tiny Fort Greene apartment; that must have been the summer of 2001. Radical Reconstruction hit me like an anvil, though it wasn't until I came to Berlin, perhaps, that its lessons sunk in.

Möbius

Why was the strip named for Herr M and not for Johann Benedict Listing?

The following first appeared on Facebook, July 11, 2012.

‎"'Today, 43 per cent of Berlin consists of forest, lakes, parks and agricultural land -- an area of 382 km2 in total, nearly seven times the size of Manhattan Island (57 km2). Twenty per cent of this open space is protected land -- that's 76.4 km2 to be exact, one and a third times the size of Manhattan Island'" (http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/05/cities-cities-cities-cities.html).


PS--Hey, New York City, oddly, come August 2013, I will be living in you again.

cities cities cities cities

Some years ago the Maggot returned from a local bookstore with a stack of purchases that included an unexpected gift for me, a used copy of John Reader's Cities. We were living in the Bristol Street apartment, if memory serves (and, incidentally, it doesn't...no, it's the other way around: we serve memory).

Reader's book isn't really governed by an argument, except maybe that cities are hard on the environment, which is tantamount to saying that people are (how insightful!). The chapters could be read in any order, really; each chapter pairs a theme and a couple of case study cities, but their sequence isn't important. The prose is sober, bordering on boring. This overall nibble-ability is my excuse for taking seven or eight months to read it. (That, and my sudden interest in second-tier serial television dramas. Seriously.) Cities would make a great bathroom book.

And I feel as though I learned many things that I should already have known (and that I have already forgotten). Here are four I keep turning over:

I. "The traditional view, deeply entrenched in academic literature and popular writing on the subject, is that the development of grain cultivation on the fertile soils of Sumer, and the invention of the plough, enabled farmers to produce surpluses, which not only led to a rapid increase in population but also inspired village communities to coalesce and form cities. Thus the world's first cities are said to have arisen simply because farmers had discovered a way of producing more food than they needed for themselves. But there is an alternative view of the evidence, suggesting that the crucial developments occurred in reverse order - namely that the cities came first and advances in farming technology came only as a response to the demands of the cities" (14-15).

II. "In 1920 the city had extended its boundaries to include the surrounding network loosely linked towns and communities which had always been informally known as part of Berlin but whose regional differences had often frustrated the city's plans for growth and development. Eight towns, fifty-nine parishes and twenty-seven rural estates joined the central districts of old Berlin to create a city which grew more than twelvefold in the process: from 65 to 820 km². Of that area a third (273 km²) was forest and natural landscape; furthermore, the legislation which had created Greater Berlin guaranteed that a large proportion should stay that way. Today, 43 per cent of Berlin consists of forest, lakes, parks and agricultural land - an area of 382 km² in total, nearly seven times the size of Manhattan Island (57 km²). Twenty per cent of this open space is protected land - that's 76.4 km² to be exact, one and a third times the size of Manhattan Island" (284-285; emphasis mine).

III. "No wonder demographers and historians write of the 'urban graveyard effect'. Deaths exceeded births in all great cities. Indeed, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that urban populations became reproductively self-sustaining - when, in other words, the number of births in a city began to exceed the number of deaths recorded each year. Before then, cities needed a constant flow of migrants from the countryside simply to maintain their population size - let alone provide for the astonishing growth that many of them experienced" (217-18).

IV. "Which means that if everyone on Earth lived as comfortably as the average citizen of North America we would need not just one, but three planets to provide for them all" (303).

archipelago

If the cognitive map of The City that grew in me, in my 20s, consisted of a dynamic network of places/spaces in which to drink and smoke, then my image of this city, Berlin, now, is an expanding archipelago of Kinderspielplatzen Kinderspielplätze: Rüdesheimer Platz, Hohenstaufenplatz, Bolzplatz Böckhstraße, Hasenheide, Tempelhof, Grimmstraße ("Grimmi"), Hobrechtstraße at Pflügerstraße (what do people call that one?), Victoriapark, etc. The beer garden next to the Spielplatz in Victoriapark represents a possible, personal sort of point de capiton...