Lucy Sante is destroying city after city. Girl Godzilla crushing my ideas of Tokyo. After I finished Low Life, CS sent me a text recommending that I also read her similarly told urban history: The Other Paris. Like a fool I ordered the book and it was here the following morning. Why can't Sante destroy Amazon next?
When Raquel and I went to Paris I had a rather traditional list of places that I wanted to see, mostly due to our time restrictions. I wanted some time to wander through the streets that I had read about in 19th and 20th century literature, but assumed that might just happen naturally, that the Paris of my mind would be there for the taking. That (other) Paris never emerged. Everywhere we went was contemporary, aesthetically, in temperament and in tone. With just enough design flair, history, and the occasional building of antiquity to negate my fantasy ideas of the place, leaving me somewhat confused and disappointed. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, nor did I find much of what I was looking for.
I had read The Paris Dreambook, but we hadn't exactly established an itinerary around it. I thought that somehow the 19th century version of Paris was still there, that it just maybe wasn't in the same neighborhood as the Pompidou. I dreamed that there would be wooden basement doors along the sidewalk that smelled of leprosy, madness, and which would suggest a dark entrance to the famous catacombs.
I was wrong. Everything was.
There are, of course, vestiges of the ancient Paris left, but not very many, says Sante. I believe her. I've felt it myself, without knowing exactly what it was I was feeling. Other than the city not being built around a grid it felt terribly contemporary to me - too clean. Too much of what I believed I loved had been left behind or replaced. I expected to see the worn down stone corners of time everywhere, an almost breathable sense of decay. Instead it felt as if I was in a very well kept park built to honor the memory of Paris. It is famously the city of love and/or lights, but is also the city of death, suffering, and six million underground skulls. The birthplace and spiritual center of urban ennui.
In some small way it is like Sante's NYC. Paris has been rebuilt many times, a cascading palimpsest*. Keeping at times only the thinnest evidence of its own identity intact. Sometimes for the touristic purposes, often because the buildings that make up the area are far too valuable as they are, and other times because it is not yet worth a developer's money to completely obliterate the past. It is this last area that Sante focuses her attention and ire (at least in the first two chapters).
Soon cities will be a place that you can only meet a certain type of person: one who can make enough money to live there. This cultural flattening might appeal to those that can afford to live in cities, and do, but what many of them have probably come to believe are the very reasons that they would ever wish to live in a city are now all but gone. Something vital about what makes a city desirable has already been lost.
It is an interesting talent for an historical writer - to simultaneously destroy and rebuild within someone something that they already love, and to readjust the focus of my fascination beyond the years my own life.
Well, that's my book report on the first two chapters of the book I'm currently reading. I didn't take notes, nor do I ever underline books any more when I am reading them, making references and quotations possible. Something vital and desirable about doing so has already been lost.
* - Her word, not mine. I aspire to one day be a more honest thief.
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