Reading: Middlemarch and The Geography of Nowhere

Listening: How Green Was My Valley. When I do walk to work, which I tell myself I'm going to do tomorrow.

Watching: "Dirty Rotten Scroundels" last night

Moving: Except for not walking to work, I've been better since Wednesday (today's only Sunday, and I except Friday too). Swam 2K today.

4 August 2002: Denver

A really good day. I shouldn't read stuff like The Geography of Nowhere just before Dot Org moves to the hinterlands because it only makes me grumpier. However, this book, like Suburban Nation, allows me to articulate the grumpiness a little better than "Blarg. Wrong. Damn it. I hate it. Ratzenfratzen nasty stupid plan."

James Howard Kunstler, the author, has previously been a journalist and a novelist, and the novelist is the stronger aspect. Besides that he's right, he doesn't have much of an objective stance. "Reagan professed to believe literally in the fundamentalist Christian doctrine that the end of the world was at hand. At the very least, this should have called into question his concern for the nation's long-term welfare" (110).

He calls a house's "charm" what makes you care about it. I assume that a suburbanite might care about her home, but her house? I care about mine, and it might (just maybe) be my bias that I think a suburbanite couldn't. How could she?

(Kunstler used the masculine third person singular pronoun throughout. I used the female for the closest parallel to moi, and also in response. This reminds me that I said something or other about a "waiter" to Jessie so I corrected myself with "server." Not my flub but the fact that my correction is still masculine in construction though ungendered in context made me next mutter "Christ" and again correct myself to "Christess," which cracked me up.)

If the author made up the word "lumpenprole" he is my new favorite person. No. Maybe he was the first to marry "lumpen" to "prole," but Merriam-Webster defines "lumpen" as the lowest, most uneducated caste of society, and dates the word to 1941 without a source. I actually looked that up in book form, in a ninth collegiate. Nope, nor was he the first to join the two words. Online, I find "Etymology: German Lumpenproletariat degraded section of the proletariat, from Lump contemptible person (from Lumpen rags) + Proletariat. Date: 1936."

I see the correlation of a local economy to a local community, just as the soulless, McDonaldized suburb exploded in step with with the mondoconglomerate. But I do wonder how Kunstler would encourage the lessening of consumption that must happen for localized economies to thrive again.

One problem: on p. 208, he writes, "The standard rap about LA is that the car created it. This is not so." At this point I had to pause, not the book-shutting, tear-enducing halt that the violent climax of Empire Falls inspired ("I knew it couldn't be that but I didn't anticipate that it would this other thing," thought I at the bus stop, turning my face from the other passengers' ["faces" elided, apostrophe correct]). Up to here I had seen flaws in his premises and conclusions but forgiven him because I agreed with him and especially because he recognizes that the New England village is the best of all possible towns. But that statement was sheer lunacy. Then he continues, "Rather, the pattern was established by the railroads and their little brothers [why not 'siblings'?], the electric trolleys." Okay, mass transit might have made a pattern, but cars made the LA of today, of the postward period.

Suburban Nation talked of the social and emotional impact of sprawl and the automobile-based culture-replacement. The Geography of Nowhere points out something else I hadn't thought of yet: the "country" towns in which houses can be built on no less than five acres do not preserve country, wild or captive, any more than sprawl does. The specific figure of five acres reminded me of someone's five acres of treeless, critterless, untilled grass adjoining a cornfield and the viscerally negative opinion I have about that.

Just as I felt more of a connection to Fast Food Nation because Schlosser used Colorado Springs and Weld County (heaven help me) as examples, I liked Kunstler's brief history of Saratoga Springs. I don't have a clue about the actual New York town, but I read that history in relation to the "Schuyler Springs" and North Bath of Nobody's Fool, which is, again by way of Empire Falls, very much in my forebrain.

Kunstler doesn't cite as well as Schlosser, though. He says that 80% of everything ever built in the United States has been built since WWII. And that is probably true, but does he mean that if previous structures hadn't burned or been bulldozed, that figure would be different? Is it 80% of all square footage, cubic footage, or some other measure? And he says that the best educated citizens are the most likely to uproot themselves, which is contrary to my (infallible) intuition.

I read that in bed this morning, at breakfast, and throughout the afternoon on the porch swing. After breakfast, we walked out to the farmer's market, which isn't anywhere near as fabulous and varied and year-round as Nisou's in LeMans, but we bought fresh bread, a mound of basil, a watermelon, and a bunch of junior sunflowers (the absence of which from my garden breaks my wee heart. Fucking squirrels). I hung out the wash, biked to the pool and swam 2K, then spent several hours on the porch swing eating cherries and reading my book. In the evening, we ate pesto'd pasta and a tomato-cucumber-basil salad that grew from my own garden (minus the olive oil, because I can't do everything). Then I made pesto of the bought basil, and as soon as I buy some plastic wrap I am going to make a freezerful of pesto cubes in ice trays to last the dreary basillessness of winter. I love my house and I even liked my city today.

A book like The Geography of Nowhere certainly makes me feel justified, if not self-satisfied, in my house, neighborhood, and mode of living. When in June a Connecticut acquaintance saw a picture of the exterior of my house and exclaimed, "Oh, it's cute!" I was pretty sure she meant "small." Many, many people unfamiliar with the bungalow style have been surprised by the contrast of its interior space to its modest façade. Whatever. When Nowhere praised deep porches, minimal offsets from the road, sidewalks, mixed-income and -use neighborhoods, being able to walk out for a loaf of bread, public cultural space, and mass transit, and I read that praise while sitting on my porch swing, in view of our single car that we haven't used for commuting in three years, smiling at passersby with their dogs and bikes and strollers, yeah, that made me happy.