The Book Shopper

(Frisco) Maps I Love #5

I have another entry for my Maps I Love Collection, a series of blog postings celebrating maps that display in imaginative ways where we are and where we have been. The new addition is Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010), a gorgeously published book by the University of California Press.

I have only been to San Francisco a couple of times and that was decades ago, but that matters little because Solnit's collaborative effort – where she enlists the help of other writers along with cartographers and artists – is more about our relationships to a place than a simple Rand McNally travel guide. Solnit summarizes her atlas in the Acknowledgements as a “valentine of sorts to a complex place...one that tries to see the place whole, with its toxic sites and crimes and tragedies as well as its treasures and cultures.”

Using variations of 22 maps of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, Solnit and her co-creators deftly juxtapose seemingly disparate subjects: Culinary landmarks with toxic sites, murder statistics with locations of Monterrey Cypresses, butterflies and the gay population (both “come out,” so to speak) or the locations of the area's shipyards and its rich musical heritage, both heavily influenced by the great Southern black migration of World War II that supplied the labor for the building of navy vessels at the rate of one a day. (The Joshua Jelly-Schapiro essay begins with the Otis Redding lyric from “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”: I left my home in Georgia/Headed for the 'Frisco Bay). Other essays focus on a particular district like the Mission or Fillmore neighborhoods or more singular subjects like the importance of coffee or a tour of film sites via Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

After you have finished savoring this book, which deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully, you feel like you have been living for decades in San Francisco. And you also wonder, “Doesn't every place deserve such a bittersweet love song?”

 

Rethinking with Netherland

One of the best books I've read in a while is Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2007), which I purchased last month while browsing in a book shop in Nova Scotia.

Part of the decision to buy the book was that the narrator Hans van den Brock lives at The Chelsea Hotel in New York (shown left), which is a section of New York I have developed an affinity for while visiting my step-daughter over the past couple years. Hans is sorting out his life after his British wife left him and took their son back with her to London. Hans is a detached narrator – partly because he grew up in the Netherlands  and he seems a little on the vanilla side especially when compared to the novel's other main character, the cricket-obsessed, indomitable, but shady Chuck Ramkissoon, an entrepreneur who emigrated from Trinidad as a young man.

What makes this short novel so remarkable is O'Neill's description of a nervous, post 9-11 New York whether it be on Fifth Avenue where Ramkissoon has an office, the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel or the city skyline during the 2003 blackout when New Yorkers feared another terrorist attack was imminent. Since the book was pre-owned with a failing spine, I didn't hesitate to mark the pages with a pen and a highlighter. (I know it sounds terrible!) Usually I make notes on postcards and file them in the book for future reference, but there was just too much good prose here for one or two postcards.

The following scanned (not torn, please!) passage of O'Neill's fine prose describes the aftermath of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade as a Ronald McDonald balloon is being deflated:

 

This excerpt also demonstrates the power of great description. Too often we just snap a picture with our phone and email it, forgoing the opportunity to really describe something or add a touch of wit and reflection to the experience. 

The Book as Art Exhibit

On my day off I stopped by The Book as Art: No Jacket Required exhibit at the Art Institute of Atlanta/Decatur in downtown Decatur. The exhibit is being held through September 18th in conjunction with the Decatur Arts Alliance and is part of the AJC Decatur Book Festival.

It's been a tradition of mine to always check out book art exhibits whenever I stumble across them. (See related posts.)  Like these artists, I prefer the tactile qualities of the book over the convenience of audio and digital books.  However even  a funky book of "mixed fibers and found objects"  when nailed to a wall like Susan Lenz's  Book I, Book V, and Book VII, (shown above)  does limit one of the best product  features of the traditional book --- portability.

Another favorite of mine among the 33 artists and approximately 40 installations, is Ania Gilmore's Library of Alexandria, (shown left), which is described in the exhibit notes  as: an "altered book, (with) rolled and burned pages, wax, shellac ink."  From now on, I will think twice before loaning a book to somebody, especially an artist.

If you're going to the upcoming Decatur Book Festival on Labor Day weekend, be sure and check out the Art Alliance gallery on Ponce de Leon. At the DBF, you will need a break from  the elements (heat, rain, humidity, maddening crowds of children with sticky faces) and No Jacket Required provides an excellent refuge.