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The
most frequent references in this collection of sixteen essays about 'the
metropolis as a site of endless making and unmaking' are to two writers,
Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and to two groups, the Surrealists
and the Situationists. Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire captured much about
the ambivalence and paradoxes of urban life--the individual's complicity in
the menacing spectacle of the crowd and his or her simultaneous wish for the
distancing leisure of the flaneur or flaneuse--while Louis Aragon's
perambulations in Paris Peasant and Guy Debord's dˇrives imagine a city
structured like the unconscious. Just as cities are, to use the words of
David Morley's poem 'Special and General Theory' out of context, places which
'build up to things, build down' so our business in them is unfinished and
unfinishable. This is reflected in the restless titles of the essays in Restless
Cities--e.g.,
'Commuting', 'Driving', 'Lodging', 'Recycling'.
The pleasing consistency of the essay titles is reflected in the way the
essays echo each other. So, for Ian Borden in 'Driving', the urban landscape
'becomes a true machine of possibilities' whereas for Esther Leslie in
'Recycling' 'The city is an immense machine for creating waste' and Michael
Sheringham begins 'Archiving' with the proposition that 'One of the city's
archives is its detritus.' The blobs of gum noted by Sheringham are turned
into miniature paintings by Ben Wilson, an artist discussed by Leslie.
Similarly, for David Trotter in 'Phoning' the decline of the public telephone
booth raises the question 'How are we to go on being private in public?'
while Michael Sayeau's 'Waiting' discusses the privatized public spaces of
airport terminals. Other essays share a concern with transience,
permeability, ruins, and collapse.
It's interesting to reflect on how firmly the essays' titling words are
rooted in the present and the future. 'I was a commuter' is a barely
imaginable phrase while the lodger hopes for a future permanent residence and
more and better recycling is a personal, local, and national aspiration that
guarantees the future of the planet. But the city's emphasis on the present
and the future is founded on one of the paradoxes I mentioned earlier: in
cities we are surrounded by the past on all sides and, particularly, by the
re-use of its physical structures. Some examples. A bar and restaurant in
Leicester called Entropy in an old butcher's shop which has
retained the black and gold sign saying 'Purveyors'. The many city centre
bars and clubs in old bank premises in Manchester. A nineteenth century
industrial works in Sheffield turned into artists' studios and rehearsal
spaces.
Pleasure and aesthetic production, then, involve nostalgia and forms of
cultural memory but these examples also remind us that cities are peculiarly
melancholy places, melancholic in the sense of unfinished mourning. The
figures of Baudelaire, Benjamin and Aragon remind us of the importance of
discourses of melancholy within both modernism and early twentieth century
modernity. World War One had revealed basic cultural, social and political
suppositions to be inadequate and had legitimated anxiety and melancholy as authentic
responses. Similarly, modernism's rejection of optimistic Enlightenment
assumptions led to a turn away from modes of meaning that reflected the ideal
life of society to those necessary to contemplate a world of ruins or a world
always on the brink of becoming ruins. Aragon's Paris Peasant was kind of
lament for the loss of the passages of shops in Paris, the passages that were
the subject of Benjamin's uncompleted masterpiece.
If all this suggests that our ideas of modernity are almost a kind of heritage
site in themselves then so be it. Baudelaire's imaginary city and Benjamin's
reimagining of Baudelaire's city still speak to the mix and mash-up of
past/present, memory/forgetting and loathing/desire that characterise the
urban experience. All the essays here are written in an accessible style and
wear their critical and theoretical frames lightly. Here are my particular
favourites. Michael Sheringham's 'Archiving' uses a range of books including
Patrick Modiano's The Search Warrant and Paul Auster's New York
Trilogy
as a way of understanding cities as vast, palimpsestic documents that need us
to be their amanuenses. Matthew Beaumont's 'Convalescing' sketches a poetics
of convalescence in which the recovering patient is 'acutely sensitive to the
life of the streets but at the same time oddly anaesthetized to it.' This
seems to describe a common experience of modern city living. Geoff Dyer's
'Inhabiting' moves between London, Paris, New York and Tokyo in a little OCD
comedy of the search for the perfect coffee and donut combination.
Finally, Esther Leslie's 'Recycling' has the merit of exploring an aesthetics
of rubbish and of drawing attention to Sean Bonney's excellent Baudelaire
in English
(Veer Books, 2008). For Leslie, Bonney exemplifies a new kind of artist who
looks for new ways of being in urban spaces that are controlled by licenses
and profit. Bonney's choked and convulsive typescript versions of Baudelaire
have, she argues, a 'visual and graphic form [that] suggests something
splattered on the pavement' and, one might add, something of the processes of
erasure, demolition and over-writing that characterise the urban landscape.
Bonney's lengthy note to his Baudelaire versions talks about the 'wrecked and
'delinquent' parts of town' as 'the occult secret at the heart of society's
discourse about itself'. This tells us a lot about the enduring fascination
of Baudelaire's unreal city and why Bonney is one of the most important
British poets now writing. Visit his blog, Abandoned Buildings, and marvel at
his poems 'after Rimbaud' and the sweep and crackle of his Commons project. And
buy his Baudelaire in English.
Restless Cities
is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking read but there are a few
oversights. First, the book can seem a little London and European
capital-centric. What about regional cities? More importantly, if would have
been useful to have balanced the book's emphasis on Western European
modernity with something on the mega-cities of the Far East. In parts of
China one can drive for several hours and never see countryside at all: just
vast movements of goods and people through a concrete eternity. Second, one
would have liked more on how fears of crime and of terrorist violence have
changed our view of cities and life in them from about 1970 onwards. Finally,
there is surprisingly little on how cities have been shaped and continue to
be shaped by internal migration and external immigration. For example, the
reputation of nineteenth century Paris as a culinary centre derived in no small
part from the coal trade between the Auvergne region and the capital. Many
Auvergnats settled there and opened the cafˇs and restaurants which made the
city famous. Similarly, Asian and African immigrants have been as important
to twentieth century cities as Jewish settlers were to those of the
nineteenth. It would have been good to have some sense of these communities
and their representations. But for that you'll have to turn to something like
Rachel Lichtenstein's collaboration with Iain Sinclair Rodinsky's Room (Granta, 1999)
or Tony White's Foxy-T (Faber, 2003). White's novel is set in an internet
and international call shop in Bangladeshi East London and told in street
talk from the perspective of an unnamed customer:
Then opposite
the Golden Lion is a old close down Jewish
shop use to
be call Roggs. Left from time man. Since year ago
man say this
a Jewish area init only it aint no more fe real.
Just that man
kept open him deli fe sell all that Jewish food
init but since
none a them Jew live round here him no do no
business and
him close. Is all board up and them upstair
windows open
fe let in the weather and the pigeon so man
know in a
couple year time this all be demolish and turn into
flat or
whatever.
© David Kennedy 2010
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