Jane Jacobs
NEW YORK (AP) – Jane Jacobs, an author and
community activist of singular influence whose classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities'' transformed ideas about urban planning, died Tuesday, her publisher said. She was 89.
Jacobs died at a Toronto hospital, which she entered a few days ago, according to Random House publicist Sally Marvin. The author, who would have turned 90 on May 4, had been in poor health.
A native of Scranton, Pa., Jacobs lived for many years in New York before moving to Toronto in the late 1960s. She and her husband, architect Robert Jacobs Jr., were unhappy that their taxes supported the Vietnam War and moved to Canada. Robert Jacobs died in 1996.
Jacobs, who based her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand observation, challenged assumptions she believed damaged modern cities – that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street was safer than a crowded one, that the car represented progress over the pedestrian.
Her priorities were for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believed that economies need to be self-sustaining and self-renewing, relying on local initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies.
Jacobs received a number of prizes, including a lifetime achievement award in 2000 from the National Building Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Category Archives: Books
shit-eating grins, Nyarlathotep, and LiveJournal
Like many humanoids, I have several friends who use the expression "shit-eating grin" on a regular basis. Probably more than they use their shit-eating grin muscles. And, unfortunately, like most of the world, they're using it wrong.
Every. Single. Time.
The expression "shit-eating grin," which surely deserves to go down in history as one of the 20th Century's greatest contributions to vocabulary (think about it…vocabulary of the 20th Century…you take my point) was originated, like white suits and pretentious hepcatism, by American author Tom Wolfe. It comes from…oh god, I hope I can find it before WordPress goes down again…lately it's been up and down more than a toi- what was I just saying about 20th Century vocab? See!
Ah, bugger it! When in doubt, go to memory. Since I haven't read that piece for at least ten years, I'm quite impressed with my own memory. It's from "Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers," of course. And it's the expression the poor white flack-catcher affixes to his face for the duration of his verbal beat-down by the Samoans.
The man is being paid to go out there and listen to these people, or at least to sit there and take shit and nod as if he's paying attention, and then to go away and undertake lengthy and expensive therapy to forget about the whole thing. And he has to sit there and take this shit with a polite, encouraging smile on his face, which is somewhat hard to do in a room full of hostile, seven-foot, three hundred pound Samoan activists who are pounding on the floor and chanting. And so his grin becomes fixed. It becomes a rictus. It becomes the grimace the kindly country doctor finds on the face of the mindless yet still uncannily animated corpse of the poor sap who only came out to Arkham to do geneological research and has instead glimpsed the undisguised visage of Nyarlathotep and now cannot stop giggling. And crying.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what a shit-eating grin truly is.
So…
I have one on my face right now, for lo, thanks to Gawker I have found something of value on LiveJournal.
Fuck.
P&Ls and how books make (or don't) money: part the first: the mass market original complete failure
In which I explain how we figure out how much money to pay authors for their advance, and also in which I explain how sometimes books make money and sometimes they don't…
Which is really just a more detailed version of something Lori Dunn did at the Shebeen Club a few months back. Sooo nice to be ahead of Manhattan. Still, I'll be an wizened old grannie by the time Gawker gives ME a shout-out. Mark is so much more accessible!
Operation Global Media Domination: Politics Day
Today, as you may have noticed, was Politics Day at the ol' raincoaster blog. And, surprisingly, I find that the only thing which out-pulls sex and/or curling (curling porn was a top search, btw) is politics. Glad I found something that did. Getting a wee bit tired of the eedjuts coming to this blog via searches for "Mango Porn."
I am indeed a famewhore of the highest order (the lower orders have to sit on the unshaded side of the temple and stick to beige robes) but even I am not gonna be rooting for more dead Canadian soldiers or pissy, self-serving and moronic Tory policies from the remarkably lifelike Stephen Harper or the remarkably simian George W. Bush. Although I do admit a peculiar fondness for the video of that funny little Chaplin impersonator and that funny Turko-American writer fellow.
At last, a CIA program even *I* can support!
No, seriously. Thanks to my beloved paranoiacs at Cryptome I’ve found a CIA program I can actually support. Cheer. Rip off, even. And I encourage you and everyone you know to do the same.
George C. Minden, who for 37 years ran a secret American program that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
Mr. Minden was president of the International Literary Center, an organization financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable in their own countries. The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogs and Parisian fashion magazines.
The people who received the reading matter were generally Communists or professionals and intellectuals working for Communist regimes. They thought the books were being donated by Western publishers and cultural organizations.
The C.I.A.’s purpose was to offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture. Mr. Minden did not see a need to bluntly refute Marxist dogma, on the theory that people could use common sense and their own observations to reject Communist arguments.
The project became something of a personalized book club; files were kept on recipients’ reading tastes, so as to better satisfy them in the future.
Hmmmm, I always wondered about the forehead from which Amazon sprang, fully-formed…now we know.
Mr. Minden wrote in an internal memo that the West‘s main obstacle was “not Marxist obstacles, but a vacuum,” and that “what is needed is something against frustration and stultification, against a life full of omissions.”
Proselytizing for freedom of choice and independence of thought sounds like a pretty noble set of goals for the CIA, and they deserve a big hand for undertaking this project. Let’s keep the dream alive by doing this on our own, shall we? You know that’s what Minden would have wanted.
Suggested targets of this consciousness-raising guerrilla intelligence action include: Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Indonesia, the Sudan, Uganda, and the United States of America.
My First Book Review: well, since school anyway, and there we always had to conclude that Dickens was the greatest prose stylist the universe has ever seen
A review of The Dream of Rome, by Boris Johnson, who is on the blogroll over there if you look closely. And all of this was posted over there anyway, but give the man a click. It's the least you can do since none of my readers will ever vote for a Tory anyway.
First off, I don't review. I opine. This will hopefully excuse much.
As an introduction to the Roman Empire and the reasons for its long-running success, The Dream of Rome is perfectly marvelous. Boris obviously loves his subject, knows it fluently, and isn't afraid to go to the experts when he's at a loss. Picks interesting experts, as well. And of course the writing flows like the river in a Hudson School painting. It's quick, it's beautiful, and it's sometimes challenging.
And, like the contemporary Hudson river, it's sometimes full of crap.
As an explanation of why the EU is doomed to failure, however, The Dream of Rome fails to prove its case. Really, it must be said that it doesn't seem to try very hard. Boris has some policy points to make, and he makes them, but any examination of the EU is glaringly incomplete without mention of our apparently limitless desire to form meta-states like the UN, NATO, G7, NAFTA, etc etc. There is a reason behind this, and it's not mere economic advantage. Nor is it mere ego.
The only emperor-manque the world has who has any sort of real power is Osama bin Laden. So it's easy to see the point of the Americans who don't want his videos and audio broadcast, lest they start a cult of personality. His power comes from the fact that he writes the cheques. Once that stops, he's over.
William S. Burroughs, who had a knack for being as right as he was wasted, wrote a fascinating piece on why we don't have grand Augustus figures anymore. Here it is:
No More Stalins, No More Hitlers
We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.
–William S. Burroughs, "No More Stalins, No More Hitlers," from Dead City Radio, Island Records, 1990; and Interzone, Viking Books, 1989.
raincoaster 