In Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (2013) – in many respects the movie equivalent of a full-scale city novel – the protagonist Jep Gamberdella describes his arrival in Rome, at age 26, as being hurdled down into the vortex of high society. Gamberdella talks of high society and worldliness, but he is in essence describing a founding scene from city literature: the arrival from a young man from the provinces in the disconcerting metropolis.

It’s fascinating how throughout the centuries, the arrival into the metropolis has been described (in literature, in particular) as a descent into a violent vortex or maelstrom. This experience is firmly intertwined with a sense of what it is to be modern. The image of the maelstrom is referred to on numerous occasions in Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, and Berman claims that to “be modern […] is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom” (Berman 1982/1989: 345–346). Berman wants to describe the actual experience of modernity, but repeatedly turns to literary texts for his dissection of modern experiences. His analysis of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise; 1761), recounts such a sense of shock born from the confrontation with the city:

“This atmosphere – of agitation and turbulence, physic dizziness and drunkenness, expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul – is the atmosphere in which modern sensibility is born.” (Berman 1982/1989: 18)

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From La Grande Bellezza:

“Quando sono arrivato a Roma, a 26 anni, sono precipitato abbastanza presto, quasi senza rendermene conto, in quello che potrebbe essere definito “il vortice della mondanità”.”

(“When I arrived in Rome, aged 26, I rushed early enough, and almost without realizing it, in what could be defined as “the vortex of high society”.)

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For the maelstrom in Finnish turn-of-the-century literature of Helsinki, see a brief introduction here; Ameel 2014: 51-52.

New article in the Guardian concerning the Helsinki Guggenheim.

(source: Next Helsinki)

No really new information on the Guggenheim project, though, it would seem that most of the arguments have been heard.

New, of course, is the interesting counter-competition by NextHelsinki.

The question I struggle with most, however: why are there so few voices that call for strong, innovative cultural arenas in the newly developing Helsinki waterfront – West Harbour, East Harbour, Kruunuvuorenranta?

In a move aimed at creating bridges between planners and citizens, Helsinki has announced that it will hire 8 young artists to develop the city. Congratulations to Helsinki and the artists in question!

Cultural (and, as I would put it, narrative) planning taking seriously.

Quote from the article at hel.fi:

““The expertise of the artists and methods of art offer us new ways to bring together citizens. It offers us ways to engage citizens in a process to reflect how they could develop their living environments and what opportunities, even dreams, there are,” says Taina Seitsara, a special planner at the City of Helsinki.”

http://www.hel.fi/www/uutiset/en/kaupunginkanslia/young-artists

A few years old, but this overview of 10 diagrams visualizing urban planning concepts have lost nothing of its appeal. Such visualizations, too, or forms of authoritative narratives – shaping the world as much (or more) as they reflect it.

http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/11/evolution-urban-planning-10-diagrams/3851/

And to prove the point, this recent article from the Guardian returns to the whole idea of Garden Cities – with a nice new diagram – and its impact on urban planning theory:

Source: The Guardian, Monday 8 September 2014

Came across two interesting sources I will have to get back to in more detail:

A special edition of New Formations, devoted to the Spatial Imaginary (already from 2005-2006):

http://www.newformations.co.uk/abstracts/nf57abstracts.html

Particularly promising: Peter Brooker on terrorism and counter narratives in De Lillo’s New York, and Andrew Thacker on The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography.

Literary Geographies brings me to a book that has recently come out, and deals with on one of my favorite NY novels, McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.
Sheila Hones’s Literary Geographies.Narrative Space in Let The Great World Spin was published by Palgrave last August. >

Hones’s Literary Geographies> http://tinyurl.com/lxbw8zg

Teju Cole, one of my favorite New York authors, rereads James Baldwin and writes a personal account of being black/African American in Alpine as well as in urban space.

The Dutch translation of “Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”” appeared last week in De Groene Amsterdammer. The original article appeared in the New Yorker.

Teju Cole about his sense of a “body-double moment”:

“The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone. And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; …”

There are numerous other writings of Cole I  would like to link, for now, this interview by Aleksandr Hemon

http://bombmagazine.org/article/10023/teju-cole

Cities as the shells for the hermit crabs we are:

“As for cities in general: I think they might be our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance. In a village, you can’t stick out too much. In the city, if anyone judges you, you tell them to go to hell. So, there’s that positive side. But the other side is that they are simply so congested with material history and the spiritual traces of those histories, including some very dark events. Your contemporary Chicago is haunted by the Chicago of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Chicago of innovation and of systematic exclusions. Rural landscapes can give the double illusion of being eternal and newly born. Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.”

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(Note on the Dutch translation: as usual in De Groene, highly enjoyable translation. However, (and unusual) no mention of the translator or of the original source of publication. And the article mentions that Open City will be published in Dutch this week – it has been translated and published years back. What is meant is the publication of “Every day is for the thief” in Dutch.)

The New Yorker’s recent article “Why Walking Helps Us Think”, by Ferris Jabr, starts out with Nabokov and Joyce, and takes a stroll through the work of – amongst others – Woolf, to evaluate how walking, writing and reading the world are intertwined.

Credit Photograph by Alex Majoli/Magnum

see the full article here.

Key words: participation, urban culture, innovation.

http://socialinnovatorsconnected.org/

And more about New York literature:

Refreshing reads about NY books at the Big City Book Club of the New York Times, for example this post about Bright Lights, Big City:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/discussing-bright-lights-big-city-with-gary-shteyngart/

And the discussion of Brooklyn by Tóibín here.

I’ve recently been re-reading Patell & Waterman’s Literature of New York (2010) while working on an article on New York in Bright Lights, Big City. Concise and lucid collection of articles.

http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2010/04/16/the_cambridge_compan.html