Babble Book Club: Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

What are LA novels? Do you mean novels set in Los Angeles, or something else?

Well, the class blindness goes back to Jane Jacobs. This is why I'm so thrilled with the Parisian trams - on travel boards, one hears arch comments like "why would anyone want to go from slum to slum?" (Which is a gross stereotype about working-class suburban towns with a lot of brown and black people). These trams really improve mobility for people living in these densely populated areas, who may well be working in another suburban town rather than Paris proper.

Obviously greater Paris is very far from perfect - the riots breaking out after teens who are usually African (north or west) or other non-pur-porc origins are killed by police, and that take on a more general fed-upness attest to that - but there has been some response to people's needs.

I really must read his book. I'm not really interested in the Interstate except as a negative, but it is important to look at disastrous development as well - disastrous development in cities also includes much of the postwar Urban Renewal that destroyed so many established popular neighbourhoods - in terms not only of architecture, but of human relations, networks for work and support and everything that makes up a life (the horror following Katrina is a far more recent example). Not just in large cities but smaller ones, such as Ybor City in Florida, where Spanish, Italian and Cuban cigar workers with anarchist and socialist backgrounds formed not only trade unions but a host of co-operative societies: a library, clinic, building societies etc. All their built heritage was destroyed by HUD, and of course the remaining veterans of these movements were displaced.

It is ironic that he seems to celebrate Vancouver development, while he also seems very fond of Montréal, which has to a large extent maintained its "vernacular" endless streets of triplexes.

It is a good time for a lot of people who have flexible schedules; I can usually go to events on Friday afternoons as it is rare that clients who contact me on a Friday need work done before Monday morning, and there are many educational institutions where few or no classes are taught on Fridays, but it is hard to find a time that is good for everyone, and of course that is still late morning on the West Coast.

lagatta wrote:

What are LA novels? Do you mean novels set in Los Angeles, or something else?

Kind of. I usually use it to refer to early c-20 American novels set in LA which deal with familiar themes like broken dreams, social collapse, and torrid love affairs. They often use LA's urban and environmental quirks as allegory: winding, decentred highways and streets, hot Santa Ana winds, unchanging climate, the far frontier and so on. Examples would include Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, anything by Raymond Chandler and my personal favourite, James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I also found Grescoe's take on suburbia to be pretty simplistic and a bit outdated. I prefer to live in th city too, but while he takes great pains to point out the socio-economic factors that led to the formation of the suburbs in the first place--and even mentions that now white professionals are returning to the cities while families and workers of colour have to flee out of necessity--but he doesn't turn this into a critique of urbanism or looking at the imaginative ways suburbia is being transformed across America. His conclusion is just: density good, sprawl bad. Not a lot of imagination there.

I imagine you will say what we have to click on?

Think there are far more than two sides to this issue.

We're supposed to get your storm aroung midnight, Kaitlin.

It's supposed to be snow when it reaches us.

Well, we have sleety snow, and I had to go into full cookery mode so as not to feel the melanistic wolf of winter depression come on. That and billing clients (which I hate doing, but no other way to get $€, hein?) Caissa, you might get the same sleety snow we have. It is precisely 0c here, so slippery roads (no bicycle for me today - if it had been a bit of straight snow or rain, I'd have run an errand cycling).

Made a variation of a cottage or shepherd's pie with bison, leeks (already seethed) and diced tomatoes (from a tin, and pre-seasoned). Of course more complicated than that, involving a roux made with the brown stuff in the cast-iron pan from cooking minced bison, flour, olive oil and a tbsp of red wine... and a pee wee egg beaten in with the potato mash topping (I'm omitting some details from both layers). Vegetarians can sub lentils for the meat, or something like seitan if you can find it. Lentils will also produce nice brown gunk for the roux...

And grilling some eggplant slices, which I must not forget as I work in my office!

Kaitlin, I thought we'd have to click on a chat function, but see that the chat will be right here on the babble thread.

Well, Grescoe is a very impressionistic writer, which is at once his strength and his shortcoming. I never finished his book on Québec because I thought it lacking in historical depth.

I only had time to skim through the book, although of course I read his final pages on Mtl in detail. Indeed he seems short on the HARM done by gentrification. I'll try to read the Paris and the Toronto chapters before the discussion (focus on cities I'm actually familiar with, having lived in them). Don't think he mentions Rome - a horrific counter-example, despite the city's charms!

It's been awhile since I read the book.  I'll re-post my comments from March 13, below.

I finished the book about a week ago. I found it a bit of a hard slog until I forced myself to finish it on a vacation day.I felt the book didn't seem to know what it was: part travelogue, part critique and very short on prescription.

Indeed - he doesn't discuss either Turcot in southwestern Montréal or the proposed Notre-Dame "boulevard" in southeastern Montréal, which looks like a reprise of the Décarie expressway disaster that destroyed entire working-class immigrant neighbourhoods in NDG and CDN.

Or the lack of funding that meant the Blue line (which runs roughly east-west through central-northern Mtl) has never reached the highly populated districts of Saint-Léonard, Ville d'Anjou or Montréal-Nord (where riots broke out a few years back after a police "bavure" killed and injured local youths of colour, in an isolated working-class immigrant neighbourhood). While these grew out of villages that are as much as 200 years old, perhaps more, most of their growth was postwar. Still, they are mostly multifamily housing, and the density is certainly high enough for a public transport mode with a carrying capacity greater than buses.

The part of Montréal he describes is well served by the métro (though it is a few blocks away in either direction) and frequent bus lines, and is easily cyclable into the city centre.

Kaitlin McNabb wrote:

It seems kind of negative, but I don't think promoting transit around environmental effects and health really works. Or it works, but only for a short amount of time.

Do you guys agree? Disagree?

I have to disagree on this one, given the present climate crisis. It took big sections of NY being submerged, but the climate crisis is now a very potent issue with the potential to put thousands into the streets participating in direct action. We face a dichotomy, a fossil fueled future characterized by urban freeway expansion and a low-carbon future characterised by electric public transit. Freeway construction is a great target for pro-transit climate related direct action, because it takes place in urban areas. (I participated in a 13 day freeway construction site occupation in North Delta (Metro Vancouver) - we didnt stop the direct target South Fraser Perimer Road but stopped the North Fraser Perimeter Road.)

Kaitlin, to a large extent I agree with Grescoe about how to promote utilitarian cycling, though of course he took these ideas from urban planner Jan Gehl and associates in Copenhagen, and perhaps the popular Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic blogs.

Cycling has to be the best alternative for people to keep doing it on days like today! (it is snowing today in Montréal, and the weather in Copenhagen is just as shitty right now, if you look at the Copenhagen cycling blogs). Do remember that Scandinavian cities PLOUGH their cycle paths though!

However, environmental and safety issues played a very big role in reviving the bicycle, which was losing ground to cars in the postwar period, from about the 1960s (remember that due to war devastation, this started a bit later there than in North America, as they had to clear rubble before rebuilding). There was a very large and concerted campaign in the Netherlands, "stop the child murders", against the upswing in road deaths in those years, especially among children.

Here in Montréal, some of us (yep, including myself, if I do say so) mobilized in Le Monde à bicyclette for reasons of environmental, safety and urbanistic convictions, and well, because we liked to ride our bicycles, as in the Queen song... And we did win bicycle paths and other infrastructure, though not nearly as much as we would have liked to achieve.

Eric, I agree that Sandy, as it hit one of the most important centres in the capitalist world, has been a tipping point.

Unlike Katrina, which hit picturesque but deprived New Orleans, and was mainly an opportunity for "disaster capitalism", as Naomi Klein put it.

Freeways OUTSIDE Montréal are causing huge problems, as no matter how walking and cycling-friendly we make our central city, it is ringed with cancerous carcentric sprawl. Local media are discussing the growth in the number of cars in Greater Montréal being twice the growth in population - almost all of this is from the "Third Crown" of bedroom communities farther out than the older large suburbs such as Laval and Longueuil, north and south of our island.

I think it's fair to say that Grescoe wasn't writing a deep critique of transit and its more of a "love letter"--but that doesn't stop him from making political statements about eliminating jobs through automized systems, encouraging certain privatization measures, and dismissing the concerns I low-income groups (like his glib dismissal of the LA bus riders union).

So yes, he wanted to reach a wide audience, but that doesn't need to come at the expense of grounding it in solid progressive politics.

Kaitlin McNabb wrote:

 

I'm gonna repost Catchfire's comments here in reference to the Montreal highways, and more specifically the line "the rich don't suddenly work in the people's interest when they agree to build a subway" and I think Vancouver is a major example of that.

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Very true. And I think it is quite interesting that freeway builders also tend to like subways. One of the main reasons for buiding subways rather than surface rapid transit is to get transit out of the way of the private automobile. Certain powerful developers want to sell high-end condos along the Broadway corridor in Vancouver, therefore they want a subway rather than a much more cost effective surface light rail or bus rapid transit line. Basically, the subway is largely about preserving space for the 1%'s Range Rovers.

PS - I don't think trolley buses and bus rapid transit gets enough serious consideration in Canada - http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/commentary/humble-trolley-bus-...?