Reaktion Books, London. 2009. US$27 / GBP 16.95
This is New York kvetching at its best. Michael Sorkin, an architect who lives in the City (i.e. Manhattan), walks twenty minutes every day from his 5th floor, rent controlled apartment to his studio. In this book, he describes what he sees in the landscape around him and his opinions, usually strongly held, about the way the city has taken shape.
Growing up in the carefully manicured Garden City of Singapore (which gets a few mentions in this book, as does our dear "Uncle Harry"), I am quite a naif about how 'real' cities come into being, grow, and are shaped by multifarious forces. The book was a crash course for me on the ins and outs of concepts like rent control, landlord-tenant relations, fire regulations, building codes, and city zoning, things which are not immediately obvious to someone who's lived in a landscape dominated by highly similar high-rise public housing.
Sorkin is keen on the work of Jane Jacobs, and he mentions her influential work The Death and Life of a Great American City several times. He is quite clear about who he doesn't like: rapacious developers, Robert Moses, the Modernists (especially Le Corbusier - "Corb"), Donald Trump.... This dose of crankiness can be quite excessive - I didn't think a whole chapter on the weasel-ways of his landlord was entirely necessary - and it sometimes strikes me as being simply reactionary. Beneath all the complaining, though, what Sorkin fundamentally argues for is a vision of the city (and urban life in general) as being scaled to the human being. He argues for walking over automobiles, lively streets over condos for the jet-set, equitable housing over gentrification, and for architectures that are designed for their climate and environment, rather than being hermetically sealed glass-and-steel towers. At first glance this book is about architecture and urban design, but it's really about society and the human being as a social being. In this context, his long rant about the landlord makes sense: it's really about social altruism, its fragility, and its ease of frustration; as a guide to the tragedy of the commons it is particularly eloquent.
I must admit that I was quite underwhelmed when I visited the great city myself - how could anyone love such an icky, dingy place? Compared to the great shiny cities like Shanghai or Dubai that are being built with amazing speed all over the developing world, New York could do with a facelift and some tidying up. But the point that Sorkin makes is that the 'tidying up' that well-intentioned (or corruptedly profiteering) city planners and developers push for will eventually end up killing the soul of the city, destroying its naturally-formed communities, and homogenizing it into a world where human relations matter less and less. And maybe it is worth having the streets a bit dingy and the walls a bit crusty if we can defer that bland, soulless future for some time yet.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Empires of the Indus - The Story of a River / Alice Albinia
John Murray, London. 2009. $16.20 (pbk) Book website.
The Indus River is a bundle of contradictions and disappointments: the origin of the name 'India' and yet in Pakistan, one of the classical rivers of fabled fecundity and yet now dammed to near-death, the source of one of the world's most splendid early civilizations and yet flowing through what are some of its most dangerous and economically backward places. The title of this book and its jacket design in friendly pastel colors, both bringing to mind exotic travelogue mingled with exotic culture, belie the real story that Alice Albinia is telling, that of the disappointments and tragedies wrought by history, and of the humanity caught up in its flow.
The premise of this book is a daring one, and despite the easy flow of the narrative, the actual journey that the author herself took must have demonstrated her resourcefulness and courage. She travels from the delta of the Indus, now brackish and more an inlet than a river mouth, up its course until its source in the high mountains of Tibet, and so accumulates a roster of some of the most notorious places in the world: Pakistan, the Pakistan-India border, Afghanistan, Tibet. Concomitant with her trip to the source of the Indus is the historical story told in reverse, from the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, to the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the geological origins of the river itself.
As a woman she has access to the women of the households that hosted her, and as a foreigner she could also speak freely with the men, and it is this view of the home life of the people along her route that give this book some of its most poignant moments. There is also the peculiar disorientation when snippets of interculturality turn up unexpectedly; climbing up a hill in rural Kashmir to see a Neolithic rockface carving, a crowd of boys follows her and her guide to see what they are up to:
Another repeating motif on the book is how easily history can become effaced. She visits a Sheedi community in Sindh, Pakistan, descendants of African slaves and immigrants to India from centuries before its colonial era. The Sheedi, despite being slaves, had held positions of responsibility under the Mughal rulers, but with the coming of European colonialism had lost that social position; the British imperial administrators regarded them with prejudice, even as they claimed to be emancipating the slaves. In the 1950s, a Sheedi writer named Mussafir wrote an account of Sheedi enslavement and persecution, informed also by his readings on abolition in America, and worked towards social emancipation of his community by education. Yet today his works are poorly known, even in Sindh, the Sheedi community still experiences discrimination in mainstream Pakistani life, and even Mussafir's legacy has been obscured. Most of his writings have been lost - his son's library was largely destroyed by a cyclone - and few copies remain even of his treatise on slavery, published only in Sindhi. Elsewhere, in the highland Yasin valley, Neolithic stone circles are being carved up for building material or looted for treasure. In the desert near Johi, 18th century tombs decorated with vivid murals are falling apart from neglect.
It is fitting, then, that the site of one of humanity's earliest experiments with irrigation and city-building should today illustrate so starkly the failings of that endeavor. Read this book, not just as travelogue and history, but also as a comment on the human condition itself.
The Indus River is a bundle of contradictions and disappointments: the origin of the name 'India' and yet in Pakistan, one of the classical rivers of fabled fecundity and yet now dammed to near-death, the source of one of the world's most splendid early civilizations and yet flowing through what are some of its most dangerous and economically backward places. The title of this book and its jacket design in friendly pastel colors, both bringing to mind exotic travelogue mingled with exotic culture, belie the real story that Alice Albinia is telling, that of the disappointments and tragedies wrought by history, and of the humanity caught up in its flow.
The premise of this book is a daring one, and despite the easy flow of the narrative, the actual journey that the author herself took must have demonstrated her resourcefulness and courage. She travels from the delta of the Indus, now brackish and more an inlet than a river mouth, up its course until its source in the high mountains of Tibet, and so accumulates a roster of some of the most notorious places in the world: Pakistan, the Pakistan-India border, Afghanistan, Tibet. Concomitant with her trip to the source of the Indus is the historical story told in reverse, from the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, to the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the geological origins of the river itself.
As a woman she has access to the women of the households that hosted her, and as a foreigner she could also speak freely with the men, and it is this view of the home life of the people along her route that give this book some of its most poignant moments. There is also the peculiar disorientation when snippets of interculturality turn up unexpectedly; climbing up a hill in rural Kashmir to see a Neolithic rockface carving, a crowd of boys follows her and her guide to see what they are up to:
"The boys speak little English, but it is the cricket season now, and from the babble of Kashmiri that surrounds me, entire phrases of BBC commentary emerge fully formed: 'Flintoff is coming in to bowl,' says one twelve-year-old. 'It's a bouncer,' says another.'..."
Another repeating motif on the book is how easily history can become effaced. She visits a Sheedi community in Sindh, Pakistan, descendants of African slaves and immigrants to India from centuries before its colonial era. The Sheedi, despite being slaves, had held positions of responsibility under the Mughal rulers, but with the coming of European colonialism had lost that social position; the British imperial administrators regarded them with prejudice, even as they claimed to be emancipating the slaves. In the 1950s, a Sheedi writer named Mussafir wrote an account of Sheedi enslavement and persecution, informed also by his readings on abolition in America, and worked towards social emancipation of his community by education. Yet today his works are poorly known, even in Sindh, the Sheedi community still experiences discrimination in mainstream Pakistani life, and even Mussafir's legacy has been obscured. Most of his writings have been lost - his son's library was largely destroyed by a cyclone - and few copies remain even of his treatise on slavery, published only in Sindhi. Elsewhere, in the highland Yasin valley, Neolithic stone circles are being carved up for building material or looted for treasure. In the desert near Johi, 18th century tombs decorated with vivid murals are falling apart from neglect.
It is fitting, then, that the site of one of humanity's earliest experiments with irrigation and city-building should today illustrate so starkly the failings of that endeavor. Read this book, not just as travelogue and history, but also as a comment on the human condition itself.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Judge Dee Novels / Robert van Gulik
Don't judge a book by its cover - nor the reviews printed on the blurb. Going by those, this series of detective novels set in Tang China would be a painful read indeed:
The novels themselves, though they may be chinoiserie, are at least sinologically informed chinoiserie. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat to the Far East, and an amateur sinologist, writing on such subjects as the Chinese detective novel, erotica and sexual life, and the gibbon as a motif in art. The Judge Dee series began as a diversion and soon became very popular. They are based, however, on a historical personage - Di Renjie, who was a Tang magistrate and later high official, who also served under the Empress Wu Zetian. Stories about his ingenuity and integrity were long in circulation, and served as a basis for a 18th century Qing novel called Di Gong An (The Cases of Judge Dee), which van Gulik translated during the 1940s.
According to van Gulik, Di Gong An was more likely to appeal to modern readers of the genre because in some ways it isn't the typical Chinese detective novel. It is relatively short and doesn't name the culprit at the very beginning. He used the characters of Judge Dee and his lieutenants to write his own series of stories imitating the style of the original, including the cheerful anachronisms typical of later Chinese fiction. The stories, though set in the Tang, are really describing life a thousand years later in the Ming, in the details of the exam system and bureaucracy, in the food that people eat, their modes of transport, and their religious practices. Other favorite literary tropes that van Gulik appropriated include the evil monks who feature prominently in the Chinese Bell Murders, one of the earlier books in the series. Their quality, though, is somewhat uneven. The later ones tend to be shorter and pay less attention to the task of imitating the original style, but despite those minor shortcomings, they are still highly entertaining.
So, is this fan fiction? Does what van Gulik do with Judge Dee compare to what thousands of adolescents do with Edward Cullen and other fictional characters (and sometimes get sued for it)? The Judge Dee novels are certainly fan fiction - they fit all the technical criteria of the genre - but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are campy or somehow inauthentic. That anxiety about authenticity is a strikingly modern phenomenon. Recall that the original Di Gong An itself appropriated names and characters from history and literature. This is not just a characteristic of Chinese literature - even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of his antecedents. The Judge Dee books show us what the potentials are for fan fiction broadly construed, and are real good reads in themselves.
- "Judge Dee... is one of those acquired tastes, like the ancient buried Chinese eggs...",
- "His cases are always as lusciously tangled as soft noodles...",
- "I never tire of this ingenious Chinese pastiche cookery...."
The novels themselves, though they may be chinoiserie, are at least sinologically informed chinoiserie. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat to the Far East, and an amateur sinologist, writing on such subjects as the Chinese detective novel, erotica and sexual life, and the gibbon as a motif in art. The Judge Dee series began as a diversion and soon became very popular. They are based, however, on a historical personage - Di Renjie, who was a Tang magistrate and later high official, who also served under the Empress Wu Zetian. Stories about his ingenuity and integrity were long in circulation, and served as a basis for a 18th century Qing novel called Di Gong An (The Cases of Judge Dee), which van Gulik translated during the 1940s.
According to van Gulik, Di Gong An was more likely to appeal to modern readers of the genre because in some ways it isn't the typical Chinese detective novel. It is relatively short and doesn't name the culprit at the very beginning. He used the characters of Judge Dee and his lieutenants to write his own series of stories imitating the style of the original, including the cheerful anachronisms typical of later Chinese fiction. The stories, though set in the Tang, are really describing life a thousand years later in the Ming, in the details of the exam system and bureaucracy, in the food that people eat, their modes of transport, and their religious practices. Other favorite literary tropes that van Gulik appropriated include the evil monks who feature prominently in the Chinese Bell Murders, one of the earlier books in the series. Their quality, though, is somewhat uneven. The later ones tend to be shorter and pay less attention to the task of imitating the original style, but despite those minor shortcomings, they are still highly entertaining.
So, is this fan fiction? Does what van Gulik do with Judge Dee compare to what thousands of adolescents do with Edward Cullen and other fictional characters (and sometimes get sued for it)? The Judge Dee novels are certainly fan fiction - they fit all the technical criteria of the genre - but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are campy or somehow inauthentic. That anxiety about authenticity is a strikingly modern phenomenon. Recall that the original Di Gong An itself appropriated names and characters from history and literature. This is not just a characteristic of Chinese literature - even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of his antecedents. The Judge Dee books show us what the potentials are for fan fiction broadly construed, and are real good reads in themselves.
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