Out Of Stock Pt. 1
(A paper for the 244th Congress of the Forum for American Folklore.)
It is the human lot to be discontented with the disarray about us. People aimlessly sweep through it, wondering at what is hidden within. They grasp at whole communities growing through the mess, looking to uproot one entirely, encouraging another immoderately in hopes that it will vanquish all the rest. They give up on what is at hand, and look instead at neat words and diagrams that are supposed to represent it. Often, out of frustration, they end by resolving to mow it all down and start again.
A city is, in the final analysis, another such heap of problems; quite possibly it is the very emblem of all the rest. To temporarily exchange the actual city for a postcard view, or a dot on a map, or a spreadsheet, can salve its difficulty but not solve it. Worse, the many such incompatible attempts to tame it, the myriad of applied policies, plats, and plantations, actively contribute to the ongoing disarray in physical reality.
Evidence has never stopped people from creating and sharing a variety of ways to make sense of the city, which have over time grown into their own ideological tangle. Any attempt to fully account for such means would be its own sort of folly. Nonetheless, it may prove profitable to catalog simplifications of the city, in the same way that we have enumerated ballads, or fairy stories, or string figures. If we borrow the term “urbanism” from the professional literature to describe such simplifications, it is used here in a more pejorative spirit – as a habit, a tic, a crutch, something applied without consideration. Far from being coherent bodies of analytic deliberation, such “urbanisms” are best understood as tropes, cobbled together to tell passable stories.
As a practicing folklorist, I have dedicated much of the last twenty-five years to gathering characteristic tropes in urbanism, as they are found in the professional and lay literature. I have begun my work with United States in the 20th century, in despair of getting anywhere without limiting my scope. In combing through the era’s journalism, commercial literature, belles-lettres, and other ephemera, I have identified to date 413 distinct varieties of trope, tentatively divided into three phyla, 17 orders, and 46 genera. A selection of my findings to date follows.
1.3.1.3 “Purple Crayon”
The crucial thing about drawing the city in advance is not that it allows you to be precise – no! Never draw in pencil, because then you would begin wasting time in erasing and drawing again. The city should proceed not in the stately way of your mind; but as crookedly as your hand, according to every shiver and every forgetful thought.
Paul-Louise Gaspardin, The Shape of Urban Order and the Order of Urban Shape, Knapp University Press, 1929, p. 11.
1.3.1.7 “Memphis”
5. SAND OFF all the edges. Nothing rough! When you touch your hand to the model you should like what you feel.
6. FILL all pores. It shouldn’t breathe – that’s your job.
7. FOLLOW every line with your eyes. Do your eyes feel good? Then you’re done.
-Bowles Sharpe, Design to a Fine Point, Phaistos, 1985.
1.4.5.18 “True Love”
You have been tossing back and forth for a long time on a cheap mattress. A very high buzzing sounds in the air. You squint at the pink flicker behind the lurid blinds. You’re in a really deep mood! You put on a coat; walk past the dark storefronts, and walk into the bright storefront you have often passed: a small fortuneteller late, late, just after the rain has fallen, and you ask her before even sitting, my proposal, my design, should it be the brackets, or the giant eagle? The rook-and-bishop? The weaver’s spindle? What will it be, to second the face of my love?
-Dana Ascherbach, “The Back Alleys of Architecture,” in Provocations, ed. Fuller Bannock, Phoenix Architectural Press, 1989.
1.5.7.27 “Tabletop”
Yes and a mayor will dreamily move the saltshakers/
around and airily sculpt the neighbors in town
Tovah Kimbell, “Saltshakers.” Pennyfarthing (August 1993), p. 41.
1.6.11.38 “Refuge”
Isn’t there another city out there, Paul? A place made just for mixed-up people like you and me?
-Roderick Pill (screenwriter), The Roaring Devil, Paragon Pictures, 1948.
1.6.12.44 “Unsayable”
Far away, under an Alaskan mountain, make a city with penal convicts devoted to every unsayable proposition. Punish them all in turn by making them serve as objects in each others’ fantasie. Tantalize them by ending their fantasies just before they are consummated. Film the proceedings. Use the resulting images in a disciplinary fashion for the normal but tempted people back home.
-Richard D. Filpitt, “The Dividends of Crime,” Torch of Liberty (September 1975), p. 60.
1.7.13.59 “Plant Cell”
To understand how this would work, imagine a planned community without streets, only a grid of lots enclosed by fences. These fences are outfitted with gates regulated by a series of protocols customized to follow each homeowner’s preferences. To make sure of free passage through their neighbors’ lots, the residents must cultivate goodwill. Otherwise, they face an escalating loss of mobility.
-Elizabeth Morales, “Access and Ethos,” Query (March 1997), p. 29.
1.7.18.105 “Paracosm”
…for in this city each man must dwell alone – a few windows his only insight into the doings of his fellows. He is charged at birth with a mission: to describe with total accuracy the environment in which he finds itself. When ready, he must submit that description in a single envelope provided to him, through the slot in his locked door. If his description is judged to be true and correct, he will be released and allowed to see for himself.
P. Frederick Echols, “The City Drowned in the Bathtub,” Universo (March 1936), p. 40.
TO BE CONTINUED.
