jacobs_cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/rereading-jane-jacobs-lockdown/"></div>Throughout the fall and winter of 1958, Jane Jacobs huddled wrapped up on the bed in a room on Bethune Street in Greenwich Village. The room was often unheated, and the bed was warmer than sitting at the desk. She lived around the corner, on Hudson Street, but her home was always chaotic and bustling, and she needed a quiet place, “a room to work in, where I am uninterrupted by people, telephone, etc.” In this studio which she rented for eight dollars a week, Jacobs wrote what would later come to be known as one of the most important nonfiction works of the 20th century.
Rereading The Death and Life of Great American Cities during the pandemic is something of a masochistic act, an utter failure at the escapism that I’ve otherwise tried to engage in for the past two months. The first time I read it, I was far away from any American city, but I read it again as soon as I arrived in New York City, soaking my skirts in Washington Square Park fountain, the ink from my scribbles bleeding across the pages under the water spray. From where I sat I could see straight up Fifth Avenue; in Jacobs’s time, the fountain was 22 feet further west, tucked away off-center and more sheltered from the thoroughfare by the Washington Square Arch. Whenever I look through it I’m reminded of a January night in 1913, when there was a policeman stationed there who happened to wander away from his post.
He’d been assigned to patrolling the arch a few months earlier, when it had been discovered that a vagrant had been living inside it, drying his clothes on the parapet. While the officer was away, the downtown painters Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Drick, and John Sloan, and Provincetown Playhouse actors Forest Mann, Betty Turner, and Charles Ellis, snuck their drunken way up the one hundred and ten unguarded iron stairs and onto the roof of Washington Square Arch. They lit a bonfire and passed around wine, then read a declaration consisting solely of the word “whereas” repeated over and over, and then ended by proclaiming their territory the Free and Independent Republic of Greenwich Village. They signed a parchment with the Great Seal of the Village, fired pistols, released lanterns, tied red balloons to the arch, and wandered off at dawn. The door to the stairs at the base of the arch has been permanently locked ever since.
I have always spent countless summer hours soaking in that fountain with a novel or a notebook, dreaming about the characters who have passed under that arch over the past century, and about the ones that pass under it today, the musicians and the hipster typewriter-poets, the yelping children and the man who makes human-sized bubbles for them, the green human statue named Juan. The joyous and madcap activities that have found safe harbor in this park long predate Jane Jacobs, and certainly the chaos continued during her reign over it; Washington Square Park has always been my first New York reminder of why, so often, I find a specific kind of peace and joy and comfort in strangers that I do not find in even in my loved ones. The fountain usually turns on this month; this year I likely won’t know when, if at all, it does.
There are, of course, far worse problems that New York City is dealing with right now than the death of its bustling street life. But Jane Jacobs would have been 104 years old today, and her birthday seems an appropriate day to remember what there is to look forward to whenever we can safely emerge again, and to appreciate from afar the small urban joys that have up until this point been the core of lives like mine.
Under quarantine I have seen people making greater efforts to reach out to the people in their lives, to check in on friends and family more, especially those get-togethers that in real life are often postponed. It’s been touching to be surrounded by these gestures of care, particularly since they are gestures I myself am quite poor at. But while many of our relationships with friends and family are, blissfully, able to attempt this gentle and only sometimes awkward transition into the virtual, there are many other relationships that by definition cannot do this; relationships that by definition are attached to the constant and comforting physical space they occur in.
One of the critical experiences Jacobs articulates about life in big cities is that of privacy; it is a rare and very valuable commodity, and one of the things that makes city life so attractive. But it also exists, she points out, in a delicate state of balanced layers. Privacy is made possible by the complete anonymity of the city, but complete anonymity does not support the kind of trust that Jacobs contended was vital for cities. An essential middle tier of people — the people who are unfailingly, consistently on the periphery of one’s day — guarantee this privacy, and therefore this other kind of trust. Of these people, Jacobs writes,
<blockquote>The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop eyeing the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded&#8230; Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial, but the sum is not trivial at all.</blockquote>
This middle tier — those who are neither friends or family nor strangers — keep a city alive. The falafel seller outside our office building who is always ready with our lunches but also often offers lighters and cigarettes as easily as his food, who always has a running list of regulars who take sodas on credit, who frequently loans me orange juice if I look too hungover, is not someone I can get on the phone with now, though I have spent days having a meaningful conversation with nobody in my life but him. Neither are my bartender, who keeps refilling my glass into the late hours as I sit alone at his bar and read or write or work, or the men who run the bodega around the corner where I will sit on the floor for hours as people come and go, rocking back and forth and hugging the shop cat. These are men who have held onto my secrets that may be harder to share with family or friends, my house keys and my mail that may be harder to share with my next-door neighbors. According to Jacobs, this is because people in their position have so many relationships just like the one they have with me, that they are not particularly interested in my private affairs.
This distance is crucial to the specific trust we share. “It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense,” Jacobs writes. These relationships are possible, and important, “precisely because they are by-the-way to people’s normal public sorties.”
In New York, a really wonderful walk is made up of its detours; a really lovely day is made up of the by-the-ways.
But there is no by-the-way about a Zoom call or a Google Hangout; there is an intentionality about interactions and relationships in the age of this pandemic that is completely absent from some of the most interesting interactions that take place in the city — ones that simply offer a certain kind of freedom, a unique combination of anonymity and intimacy, that cannot be found in my interactions with loved ones. In talking to a stranger at a bar, rather than the coworkers or friends that I didn’t come to the bar with, I am in a way talking to myself, or to the city.
Jane Jacobs didn’t want to be an activist. She wanted to be a writer; she wanted to follow her senses all over the city, writing about the intense pleasures and oddities that filled it. Robert Moses kept messing up this plan, forcing her out onto the streets with his absurd proposals; if she’d felt she had the freedom and the room to pursue her career without risking the death of her neighborhood, she might easily have become a reporter and chronicler of city life akin to the likes of Meyer Berger or Gay Talese, whose metro reports in The New York Times contain some of the most memorable details ever captured about the city.
Long before she became a Greenwich Village fixture, Jacobs was writing sensory, new journalism-style magazine pieces for Vogue about the garment and diamond districts near Seventh Avenue, the flower markets, the leather industry, all offering a glimpse into the business of fashion. From her little apartment in Brooklyn Heights, she would get on the subway and emerge at various stops at random. One day she got out at Christopher Street, because she just “liked the sound of the name,” and ended up spending the entire day walking the streets of the neighborhood.
Greenwich Village was one of the few neighborhoods in Manhattan that deliberately did not follow the grid system, and therefore didn’t have the artifice of the rest of Manhattan. Jacobs wandered around the bakery selling nickel-loaves, the candy store, the speakeasies, the craftshop, the cheese shop, the second-hand bookshop, and the mysterious streets that disappeared after only one block; she finally trudged home at the end of the day, and hauled back at the first opportunity. Within a few months she was living in the neighborhood where she would spend the next three decades.
That there is no alternative to the lockdown makes it all the more saddening to think of the city in the summertime, and all of the spontaneous moments and urban joys that cannot be replicated within the confines of a little New York apartment. But nevertheless I have found it somewhat comforting to reread Jane Jacobs recently, like keeping a photograph of a long-distance lover tucked into the pages of my bedtime novel, looking at it constantly as though to remind the both of us of the weight and beauty of what I hold, until the other can heal and is safe to come home again.
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Photo: Phil Stanziola. New York. December 5, 1961. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, &lt;www.loc.gov/item/2008677538/&gt;.
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Rereading Jane Jacobs in Quarantine

storyteller

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/information-experience-walter-benjamins-storyteller-essays/"></div>On November 1, 1755, around 9:40 in the morning, an Englishman was sitting in his ground-floor apartment in Lisbon, finishing a letter in his nightclothes, when his entire building began to shake. The upper stories crumbled and fell; everything in his apartment was thrown out of place. The sky became dark with dust. The earthquake that struck Lisbon that morning was one of the worst in European history; it generated waves 20 feet high and killed 60,000 people in the city. The Englishman survived, saved by his hesitancy to immediately run out of his apartment in his nightclothes.
This man is a character in a radio spot that Walter Benjamin wrote for children in 1931, to educate his listeners about the earthquake. Between 1929 and 1933 Benjamin wrote children’s history lessons extensively for the radio, broadcasted in 20-minute spots. “I feel like a pharmacist when I tell you stories in my radio broadcast,” he said to the children, weighing out “all the substances and powders needed for the finished medicine on a scale with very delicate weights,” and measuring his time on air carefully to include just the right amount of every element. This man’s report, Benjamin said in his broadcast, was an essential element of the story of the earthquake.
The Storyteller Essays, a new collection of Benjamin’s writings published by NYRB Classics, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, aims to tell the story of Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay by the same name, tracing the various forms and ideas that he worked with in the decade leading up to the publication of “The Storyteller.” In 1929, Benjamin presented a radio spot about the poet and short story writer Johann Peter Hebel, underlining to his audiences the distinction between the historian and the chronicler. Hebel’s tales of tricksters and thieves, which Benjamin marveled at as a kind of “folk art,” stretched through history and across time and space; he was a chronicler, not a historian, Benjamin emphasized, because while “the historian limits himself to ‘world history,’ the chronicler recounts the way of the world.” Folk tales are at once local and universal, their characters both intimately familiar and exotic. In the simplicity of stories about small-town life and the way they were told, there was for Benjamin a profundity missing in modern storytelling practices.
Benjamin’s broadcast about Hebel began a long line of thinking and writing about the art of storytelling. Hebel introduced Benjamin to Nikolai Leskov, whose work became central to “The Storyteller,” and introduced in Benjamin’s work the particular style he would come to use for children’s radio spots. The following year, Benjamin wrote that “nothing kills the spirit of storytelling as thoroughly as the outrageous proportion the reading of novels has attained in all our lives.” In “The Crisis of the Novel,” a short essay he wrote for a German literary journal in 1930, we see hints of the same sentences that later make up “The Storyteller,” and the distinction Benjamin makes — as with the historian and the chronicler — between the storyteller and the novelist. The storyteller of an epic, he says, can “lie on the beach, listen to the surf, and collect shells.” The novelist, on the other hand, will “sail out to sea and cruise on the open water&#8230; the novelist has isolated himself from the people and their activities.” The most sacred aspect of storytelling for Benjamin was the sense of collective that it offered, the sharing of wisdom and experience with communities and generations.
These were relatively new ideas for him; between 1906 and 1912, Benjamin wrote several fragments of fiction, collected for the first time only three years ago. Unlike the few pieces of fiction in this new collection, written in the early 1930s, those stories don’t fully adhere to the definitions of stories that Benjamin puts forth in his essays about storytelling; they don’t always offer “counsel” or neat endings, or an understanding of the “way of the world.” And in 1913, he wrote a manifesto about the dangers of worldly “experience” stifling youthful enthusiasm.
But sometime in the early 1920s, witnessing the disastrous effects of the war — which is an underlying subject of “The Storyteller” essay — Benjamin perhaps became more protective of the narrative form, of the communal nature of storytelling, and of the essence to a story of communicable “experience,” which, after soldiers came home, had “fallen in value.” Still, what is more relevant perhaps is Benjamin’s limited interest in the very distinction he draws repeatedly in this collection, the distinction between the storyteller and the novelist, between stories and information: his own writings were far too dynamic and resistant to fixed form to be categorized even by him.
In 1932, Benjamin’s friend’s child fell ill, and the friend recounted to Benjamin the movement of his wife’s hands when she was nursing the child. “Their movements were most expressive,” he said. “And yet, you couldn’t describe what exactly they were expressing… it was as if they were telling a story.” Benjamin’s feelings for children were not limited to fatherly love; he held children in the highest regard for their ability to tell and inspire in adults the purest storytelling. He had the same kind of hopeful notion about children as he did about “folk art,” both being, as they were, a kind of remedy in a world increasingly defined by technology, mass media, and global capitalism. He recorded carefully his own son’s “opinions et pensées” and recalled a habit young Stefan Benjamin had of searching his mother’s body before plucking something invisible off her clothes and sticking it in her mouth — a “story,” that Dora then had to swallow and repeat to Stefan. Many anecdotes like this one, and a long list of Stefan’s words translated into adult, fill Benjamin’s notebooks; he clings to his child’s ability to understand and demand a story, and the parameters that make a story worth a child’s attention — an impulse that is consistently evident throughout his career.
Perhaps the most valuable thing about this collection is the inclusion of other authors Benjamin was reading, whose styles he was mimicking and experimenting with. In Paul Valéry’s lamentation that “the era is past when time did not matter,” or Ernst Bloch’s insistence on the mystical powers that tinge fairy tales, we see the impact that these authors had on Benjamin’s own writings and ideas. Because of these authors, we are able to see Benjamin reuse the same ideas and phrases, tinkering with them over the years and fitting them into different contexts: couched in a tale from Herodotus, in a 1933 short essay, three years before the publication of “The Storyteller,” is the argument that “nothing occurs to the story’s benefit anymore, but instead all serves information,” echoed almost verbatim three years later.
Reading novels, then, is “a voluptuous act of absorption, not an act of empathy.” These short pieces, published after his death, seem almost like notes for “The Storyteller,” and what is most remarkable and most Benjaminian about them is how uncategorizable their form is; they are simultaneously parables and literary criticism, fiction and essays; they house both character and concept, but, for the most part, and also characteristically of Benjamin, they remain “free of explanation.”
Benjamin’s insistence on the need for this “purity” in storytelling, for experience over information, calls to mind Susan Sontag, who was, in many ways, his intellectual heir. Some two decades after Benjamin’s death, the then-33-year-old Susan Sontag wrote her renowned essay, “Against Interpretation,” a biting criticism of her intellectual contemporaries and the dominant mode of art criticism that valued the intellectual over the spiritual or erotic. That Sontag also famously had trouble even registering her physical environment, and went on to become known precisely for criticism that tended toward the intellectual over the spiritual or erotic, was not lost on anyone; but her authority on the matter of “an erotics of art” remains unquestioned nevertheless. The density of Benjamin’s more famous works, and the centrality of ideas and the intangible in his essays about stories and storytellers, might tempt one to identify him as the very opposite of a storyteller by his own definition.
The year Benjamin published “The Storyteller,” he wrote a letter describing his “long-time preference” for storyteller over the novelist — but his own style fails to conform to these categories, and it teaches us that their distinction may not always be useful. Benjamin’s criticism, short fiction, theory, and fairy tales all blur together — the element that centers all of them, and him, is the fragment. The fragment was as sacred to Benjamin as the story: a natural resistance to the capitalist totality the modern world was hurtling towards. Rather than the idea that the whole explained the fragment, as his friend Theodor Adorno argued, Benjamin held that the fragment revealed the whole — and held the power to escape its totality. Benjamin’s fragments, these uncategorizable pieces of writing, sometimes abrupt, sometimes neat, sometimes with counsel and sometimes without, with characters couched in literary criticism — these defy his own binary between the storyteller and the novelist, between information and experience.
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Between Information and Experience: Walter Benjamin&#8217;s The Storyteller Essays

Between Information and Experience: Walter Benjamin&#8217;s The Storyteller Essays

urbanism

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/late-life-urbanism/"></div>There is a life hack I learned in my early twenties and now see being used to full effect all around me now in New York City: to pretend that old age does not exist. Specifically, our own old age, but also, significantly, the old age of others — people whom we would otherwise have to look at on the street, to take care of with our taxes and our public property, and, generally, to wait for. America, I learned upon moving here, is excellent at eternal debt accumulation, debt that it will talk itself out of tomorrow, confident in the shiny-eyed bubbles of tech and housing and youth. America is chronically young.
This aggressive picture is, fortunately, being questioned in various ways politically, but it’s worth continuing to try to re-center the elderly in our conversations about the future, especially since aging populations around the world are rising. This is the focus of the latest issue of MONU, a Rotterdam-based publication about urbanism and the future of cities, which looks at, among other things, the demographic of the “young-old,” a relatively able-bodied and leisurely population. This is the demographic that drives the “<a href="https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friends-family/info-2017/age-in-place-village-movement-fd.html">village movement</a>,” which aims to establish more stable environments for Boomers to “age in place,” a movement around trying to prevent the elderly from being priced out of their homes. Over 200 of these villages, which function somewhat like retirement communities, now exist in the United States.
The largest retirement community in the world, the Villages in Florida, is a settlement of about 120,000 residents, consisting of a series of gated communities, or “villages.” The Villages was designed by one of the architects of Universal Studios; it has an eerie Disneyland aura (and is often called “the Disneyland for the retired”), with a downtown that aspires to a Main Street feel. The settlement is built around leisure rather than work. This shows in the details of its design: golf cart lanes as general infrastructure for daily use; entire strip-mall structures that consist solely of healthcare facilities. It is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country. The Villages is governed largely by private developers and has unique laws around development because of its particular requirements. There are many of these self-contained utopias in the US, which involve high membership fees to cover the costs of caretaking staff and social events and facilities.
But urban models based on isolation and self-containment are just that: models, except in those instances where <a href="https://www.bankrate.com/financing/retirement/can-you-afford-the-villages/">over two million</a> dollars can be collectively spent every month in dues. Frank Lloyd Wright, wholly taken with the Valley, an idyllic green space in Wisconsin where he spent much of his childhood, carried into his designs for cities an obsession with proper spacing, with some image of an isolated utopia. Broadacre City, perhaps one of his most well-known legacies, remained a model as well, for what would have been a highly exclusive and unrealistic city-village.
The integration of certain slices of the population into the larger urban design and narrative is the opposite of self-containment, of segregation. Sustainable ways of adapting to and normalizing the presence of more elderly people in cities cannot assume that these elderly people are white and wealthy; the social norms and urban design for the general populace needs to encompass the needs of old people, just the way it needs to encompass the needs of children, or the unemployed, or the homeless — all social groups that offend our wild, urgent need for efficiency and productivity.
The true test of a city’s design is how well it serves its least profitable users. Designs for integrating old people into everyday city life — green spaces and public spaces, benches and other places to sit, angled curbs that can accommodate wheelchairs, longer traffic lights for vehicles to allow for easy road crossing, wider footpaths, accessible and functioning public transport — are designs that would largely help improve a city more generally as well.
Hyper-dense cities are forced to be more creative in the way they integrate the aging population into urban life; they do not have the luxury of being able to create expansive, self-contained retirement enclaves. This issue of MONU gives the example of Seoul, a potential “heterotopia” to contrast with the homogenous utopia of The Villages. “We are in the epoch of juxtaposition: the epoch of the near and far, of the side-be-side,” Michel Foucault writes in his essay on heterotopias. Digitization creates multiple cities in a single space; about 93 percent of the population of South Korea uses the internet, making it one of the most connected countries in the world. Hyper-dense cities like Seoul have to use their urban spaces, now increasingly digital, to juxtapose their various populations and functions.
Historically, Seoul’s infrastructure has relied on narrow alleys and informal spaces for its economic activity; the lack of formal public squares or plazas, with its underground markets and production spaces that opened with the subway system, have made it a naturally integrative city, capable of catering to several demographics’ needs at once. These mixed-use spaces are essential for integrating the city’s less “profitable” population: they are places of rest, recreation, trade, production, and movement. By fulfilling many different functions, an urban space becomes a potential home, temporarily, to many different kinds of people.
England’s High Streets offer a very similar variety of uses — these local environments offer economic, social, and physical familiarity and comfort: a “combination of public café, charity shop, children soft-play area, and a range of spaces available for daily activities.” The local elderly population reported that these streets are packed with small storefronts, with short distances between each store and bus stop, that make them easier and more enjoyable to navigate.
The most important thing about the High Streets, though, may be the fact that they are seen by so many of their locals as almost an extension of home. The familiar landscape encourages many old people in their neighborhoods to socialize, gives them a space to meet the same people daily, and provides a repository of memories; many reported being motivated daily to just get out and about. Especially for a population whose social circles might be dwindling because of age, meaningful social interactions are essential for urban life.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, most of the residents are retired and have lived there for decades and have vibrant social lives at almost every establishment in the area. My mother, walking in the park or playing at the local bridge tournaments, routinely meets ninety-somethings who can match her high energy and enthusiasm, who have aged healthily and gracefully because, perhaps, they know they would be missed when they die. They congregate in green spaces, at chai stalls, at street corners where coconut water is being sold; they drop in on their neighbors unannounced for tea and gossip. When I go home, there is a languor that I suddenly feel I am allowed, in the middle of this enormous, hyper-dense city. The streets leave room, in many areas of my city, not only for old people but for anyone wanting to pause for a moment, to breathe, to waste time, to live for small pleasures.
But in cities like mine, as well as in Seoul, it has been a common practice for multiple generations to live together, a tradition that is now receding as young people move away from their parents to be closer to expanding work opportunities and cultures. In Seoul this is leading to a relatively newly-alone elderly population that suffers from anxiety and loneliness.
New urban designs, from public spaces to housing for cohabitation, have the potential and, perhaps, the responsibility to create this feeling of home in public spaces. This is particularly important with the more vulnerable sections of a city’s population, who are so often and so easily made invisible, for the crime of not serving a particular purpose. But the truly successful city is a “heterotopia” — it encompasses many worlds, many homes, many selves. It is equally real in different ways for different people. The conversation around “aging in place” is necessary but thoroughly incomplete, obscuring the point that it is not just the elderly but all vulnerable groups that ought to be protected to the fullest extent possible from gentrification. A city or a neighborhood that fails to serve as a true home for old people, has failed in the same way as a city that fails to serve as a true home for children, for poor people, for people of color. We need age diversity in the same way we need racial and class diversity in our public spaces to remind us that we do not live in a machine, are not being made by a machine.
In 1920, Walter Benjamin, mourning the effects of the war, wrote a meandering essay about Nikolai Leskov and the act of storytelling. “Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent, not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” he implored. “Experience which has passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. Experience has fallen in value.” A few years later, Mary McCarthy would write her memoir, and note the difficulty of “the task of recalling” for an orphan like herself. “The chain of recollection — the collective memory of a family — has been broken.”
Age is ugly; it is, perhaps, particularly ugly in America — America the beautiful, the playground of constant speculation. America’s future is bigger than its past, but part of the project of normalizing aging is recognizing the importance of the past, of memories; the value of experience that has been already had, over experience that is yet to be had. A culture that desires rather than merely tolerates its elders might be the one, then, with strong memories, with powerful stories.
“Elderly age, replaced first by public libraries and later by the Internet as a major source of public knowledge, remains the greatest source of living experience,” writes one contributor to this issue of MONU, “and the increase of the mean age of the population is probably mankind’s greatest opportunity to learn from experience.”
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Late Life Urbanism

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/consider-cop-show-brooklyn-nine-nine/"></div>I used to be wildly, irrationally, embarrassingly jealous of Amy Santiago. Jake Peralta would be much better off with me, someone who wouldn’t give him a hard time about his shitty second hand mattress or the trash in his desk drawer (because I have those too) or his less-than-fancy neighborhood (because I live there too). And I hadn’t met many characters who seem like they’d be a better time than Jake. Which is part of why it was so hard to begin to unhook myself from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which was picked up by NBC last month after Fox announced it wouldn’t be renewing the show for a sixth season.
The public disappointment on hearing the news that the show, which often challenged stereotypes and gave us the feel-good conversations and relationships we yearned for, had been canceled (right after the same station renewed a show where the main character recently spent a whole episode wondering whether her Muslim neighbors were making a bomb) was understandable and predictable. I expected to feel the same way, but instead, very strangely, I felt something like relief.
The level of fondness I’ve been feeling for a group of fictional NYPD officers has been making me uncomfortable. The almost-end of Brooklyn Nine-Nine feels like an appropriate moment to reconsider the role cop shows play in our lives, especially now — and also to remember just how pervasive they are in our culture. It’s also important to rethink the “pride” or trust or expectations in our police force that these shows might be inculcating (or reinforcing) in us. Cop shows have long worked towards influencing public opinion about the police, especially in cities where this relationship is fraught. These shows have resulted in a very skewed impression of what the police department actually does, how their days are spent, and most importantly how effective they are. A <a href="http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/28/0093854815604180.abstract">study</a> published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior found that in SVU, The Mentalist, NCIS, and Criminal Minds, the police solved 85 to 100 percent of their cases. The NYPD’s clearance rate since last year is about <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/clearance.page">30</a> percent.
The study suggested that part of the reason cops’ work is seen as so sympathetic in popular television is that their lives are often portrayed as extremely busy and exciting. This is far from reality as well; the description of police work as “99 percent boring and one percent sheer terror” has become something of an adage. That paperwork that Jake is always refusing to do is actually what occupies most of a police officer’s hours.
These shows also portray police brutality as a response, almost solely, to provocation or threat by suspects. Their violence never comes off as unjustified. Police in crime dramas also routinely threaten, blackmail, and lie to suspects, but only ever for very strong, consciously-scripted reasons. These are dangerous inaccuracies that allow viewers an uncomplicated view of their protagonists. But even in real life, this is legal, some might argue. And they’d be right — most of the crimes that the NYPD commits are all legal, including physical abuse and murder. Legality doesn’t necessitate morality.
Inaccurate fictional representation is normal, though — the problem here is the fact that it’s an inaccurate representation of the police.
In real life, just across the park from where Jake and his squad put away the bad guys and charm us to no end, young activists are calling for police abolition; they’re suing the NYPD for the level of militarization they display at public events; they’re creating rapid response networks with their communities so that no one will ever have to call the police for anything. A short subway ride from the 9-9, members of the Strategic Response Group — a heavily-armed anti-terrorist outfit — patrol Crown Heights and East Flatbush, doing policing as minor as handing out traffic tickets. The SRG has no business being in communities, doing the work of local police officers; it’s murdered local residents before. The public opinion that cop shows work towards creating is exactly what these activists have to fight against when they rebuild their communities after police brutalities.
The right to create fiction is a sacred one, and it’s silly to expect police shows on popular television to mimic everything that their audience or newspapers say. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s characters are very good company for a night in bed with pizza after a terrible day; they give us lots of laughs and lots of respite from the real world. But the real world of Brooklyn seems like an inappropriate one to forget or deliberately set aside, even if it is just for the 30 minutes that we watch the show. What does one make of fiction that turns an institution that killed 100 people in one month in 2016, into a group of cuddly, woke, racially-diverse sweethearts?
Something strange happens when the name of a place becomes a familiar name in pop culture, suddenly uttered more frequently across entirely removed contexts. Places float out of the physical world for a time, and the idea of them is hijacked by fabulists. “Brooklyn” is a fun word to say, a fun place to talk about, to create a world in, to easily characterize. So are “Bushwick” and “Crown Heights,” both neighborhoods and film titles. Indulging in this strange process of extracting a place from itself, and maybe sometimes even dehumanizing it, even if it’s only by watching an unrealistic film or TV show, is made uncomfortable when the place and its people face threats to their lives and livelihood that aren’t addressed.
There’s no doubt that Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of the most harmless shows we have as far as cop shows go. It’s addressed some important issues of the cultural moment, and in simplistic terms the characters do a good job of keeping up with progressive conversations. But a lot of this progressiveness is the bare minimum that we should expect from the culture we consume. It’s certainly easier to throw racial diversity into a cast of cops than to really address the fact that the police force is a legacy of slave patrol, or the violence it inflicts on racial minorities in this country.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine straddles progressiveness and totally out-of-date-ness, through both its immediately recognizable conversations as well as its active avoidance of other conversations. There’s no need for their characters to agonize over what inappropriate workplace misconduct or consent really means — we know what’s acceptable and what isn’t. On the other hand, it’s okay for Jake and Amy to race to lock up low-level offenders based on a bet they have with each other, and we’re expected to assume that this problematic motivation does not lead to any wrongful convictions. But a different kind of pressure on cops in real life has done just that — broken windows policing in Brooklyn has led to the police having, outrageously, arrest quotas that they fulfill at the <a href="http://indypendent.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Indypendent%20Issue%20203%20Opt.pdf">expense</a> of residents in poor neighborhoods.
In a much-exalted episode last season, Brooklyn Nine-Nine addressed racial profiling, where Sergeant Terry Jeffers is subject to a random stop and frisk by a white cop in his own neighborhood, and then convinces his Captain to submit a complaint. The spirit of it is a little misleading (as the Black Panthers asserted repeatedly, a more diverse police force does not equate to a less discriminatory one, because it is not white cops who are the problem but the institution of the police force, which is a white institution; I have met several activists who have been assaulted by cops of color who sneer at the Black Lives Matter movement). And closer look at the conversations in that episode also gives us members of the squad being a little bit too confused by Terry’s significantly telling them: “I got stopped by a cop for walking.” Rosa, another woman of color, insists innocently that that doesn’t make sense before realizing, in what seems like a too-scripted way, “Oh, wait…I see what happened,” (not something we would expect someone in Brooklyn to say in a conversation in 2017), and Jake expresses not-exactly-cute bafflement that he himself has never been stopped by a cop doing “way more suspicious things” than being black. Yes, Jake, that is exactly the point.
The point is that the woke conversations that were happening on Brooklyn Nine-Nine in 2017 were still years behind us; if we’re going to value a TV show for being current and relatable, we should also expect it to be less forced. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is in many ways more beautiful and enjoyable when it isn’t actually trying so very hard to be “the good guys,” even though that is exactly what the NYPD, fictional and real alike, believe with all their hearts that they are.
None of this is to say that to stop watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a warm collection of stories about some of the most lovable characters currently on television, directly solves any of our very real problems about police violence. We all need and deserve respite from the rarely-inspiring news cycle in the form of entertainment, and there are far worse things to complain about than this recently rescued department with the cutest detective ever.
But nothing about what makes us love them really needs them to be police officers. I never really watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine for the endearing Encyclopedia Brown-like way they do their police work; I watched it because the squad is funny, because their friendships are nuanced and heartwarming, because of literally everything Gina says. These characters could probably have been anyone, representing any industry. And it’s easy to believe that if I or a lot of the girls I know who have a crush on Jake Peralta met a real life version of him, they’d be a little more skeptical of him as an NYPD officer than they are of his character. But, as co-creator Dan Goor <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/andy-samberg-wants-some-brooklyn-nine-nine-action-im-hoping-that-eventually-someone-fires-a-gun/">said</a>, “A police station was a shortcut in some ways…you know instantly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.” Viewers deserve more nuance than this “shortcut,” and especially considering how misleading it so often is.
Maybe there is something to say for the vigilance and critical eye with which we should read woke culture that is produced by massive industries for our consumption. I had already started trying to decouple from Brooklyn Nine-Nine (along with all the other cop shows I lovingly grew up with) by the time its cancelation was announced, and I will continue to even though it’s been picked up again. It belongs to a huge category of TV shows that help build a public opinion that many activists are struggling to undo so that they can do their work — in this context, I can’t help but think that one less cop show might not have been the worst thing for us right now.
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Consider the Cop Show: On Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Consider the Cop Show: On Brooklyn Nine-Nine

cubicle

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/smells-like-work-labor-leisure-charles-bukowski-hunter-s-thompson/"></div>Henry Chinaski’s wife decides that they must both get jobs. “To prove to them that we are not after their money,” she says, referring to her rich family. “To prove that we are self-sufficient.”
“Baby, that’s grammar school,” Chinaski replies. “Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job. It takes a wise man to make it without working.”
Henry Chinaski is Charles Bukowski’s alter ego, and his whole notorious life as a “dirty old man” was spent trying to prove this proclamation true. For his decade as a clerk and mailman for the US Postal Services, Chinaski was perpetually drunk, he frequently called in sick, he got up for breaks as often as possible. He would have taken pride in a Worst Employee of the Year award.
The fiction of Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson has many such examples of terrible employees, from Chinaski in Post Office and the inept private detective Nicky Belane in Bukowski’s Pulp, to the hedonistic journalist Paul Kemp in Thompson’s The Rum Diary. These are men who very clearly reject our society’s common assumption that holding a job is necessarily difficult, or even some kind of respectable achievement.
As I see my hometown suddenly overridden with luxury workspaces like WeWork that are intended to change the way people think about work — that somehow the aggressive friendliness of beer and skateboards and dogs in an office negates or obscures the labor hours that we give to large companies — I feel a strange, old-fashioned nostalgia for the griminess and grumpiness of shitty work life. As a friend of mine put it, “I don’t want a bad job, but I want to be allowed to dislike my job.” These hip, shiny workspaces do make it, in an odd way, less acceptable to dislike a job or a boss; they are supposed to make us want to give our hours away.
In a world where productivity is still something we’re all supposed to aspire to, the terrible workers of Thompson’s and Bukowski’s stories provide a refreshing perspective. Mirroring their authors’ lives in many ways, they all seem to lack any sense of ambition or existential comfort about their jobs — all things we deem respectable in our society. There seems to be something worth quietly celebrating about the way they stumble through their days and into work, barely scraping by with their tasks, but also completely unfazed by their companies’ or their clients’ meaningless goals, and determined to live a life that they enjoy.
Bukowski’s and Thompson’s characters, Chinaski and Kemp and Belane, are blue collar workers (journalism was not a glamorous job — Kemp worked haphazardly for a cockfighting syndicate before moving to San Juan to write for an English daily, and one of his colleagues came to journalism from working on a freighter) with little interest in their jobs but with engaging personalities and intuitive knowledge of how to survive bad bosses, bad landlords, and bad jobs.
Acquiescing to his wife eventually, Chinaski goes around looking for work. “I went to two places and both of them hired me. The first place smelled like work, so I took the second,” he narrates. “So there I was with my gummed tape machine working in an art store. It was easy. There was only an hour or two of work a day.” He keeps busy building things out of plywood, and when he gets bored the truck drivers bringing in supplies find him sitting in a coffee shop down the alley, talking to the waitresses. Later, when he returns to the Postal Service, he stumbles around a church, hungover and looking for the mailbox to deliver letters; eventually he goes into a basement, drinks some holy wine, takes a shower in the church bathroom, dumps the letters in the basement, and leaves.
Their own incompetence doesn’t bother any of these men; they have no pride in their responsibilities to their clients, or their bosses, or their landlords. In a strange way, it’s this very incompetence that ensures that they actually own their jobs, rather than the other way around. In many of these stories, it’s often hard to tell which is worse, the employee or the job; and perhaps this is the point. Paul Kemp, a reporter for the Daily News in San Juan, frequently goes in to his office very late and only after having a several-hour long breakfast of meat and rum at the local watering hole, uninspired by his editor who has “lost sight of the line between business and conspiracy,” and is “making more money than he knew what to do with.” These characters are entertaining and ridiculous in their incompetence, but they’re also very useful fictional tools to depict the drudgery, and often cruelty, of work. Chinaski’s boss Mr. Johnstone sends the mail carriers on their routes late and expects them to finish on time by cutting into their lunch breaks; once, he shouts at Chinaski returning from getting a drink of water, “You’ve left your seat twice in thirty minutes! Suppose you worked at a machine? You couldn’t leave your machine twice in thirty minutes!” Chinaski’s irresponsibility on the job is probably more a reflection of his employer, rather than himself. A bad job makes a bad worker, not the other way around.
People can be irresponsible with their work. But work is also irresponsible towards people, in the sense that it doesn’t see people as people, but rather as their money’s worth, their output value. After too many impossible schedules and arbitrary pay cuts, Chinaski files a report against Johnstone. The man at the Postal Service waves the report in his face and screams at him, “Wise son of a bitch, you’re one of those sons of bitches with a vocabulary and you like to lay it around! Mr. Johnstone is a fine man! MR. JOHNSTONE HAS BEEN WITH THE POST OFFICE FOR THIRTY YEARS!”
“What does that have to do with it?” Chinaski asks, alarmed.
“I said, MR. JOHNSTONE IS A FINE MAN!” the man screams.
Neither his being a fine man or his years with the Postal Service, as Chinaski points out, reflect Johnstone’s responsibility or humanity as an employer. In this context, Chinaski’s terrible behavior, his drunkenness on the job, his excessive breaks, his alarming habit of showering and drinking in the church he delivers mail to — all of these things seem like tiny yet radical acts. (In specific anarchist circles, this is encouraged in a more intentional way; “monkeywrenching,” not overthrowing a system, but grinding it to a halt.)
Stuck on several cases and frustrated by a frightening landlord and several threatening clients, Pulp’s hack private investigator Nicky Belane gives up and says, “The office walls hold no answers,” and leaves for the racecourse to think, drink, and simply converse with people who are not trying to get something out of him. Decadence and desire and bad behavior can be antidotes to uninspiring workplaces and unsympathetic people.
Our corporate-minded society looks down on unproductivity and self-indulgence as “laziness,” but in a way this is what makes these unencumbered characters all the more charismatic and frustratingly appealing. We believe our jobs define us in some way, that they speak something of our dreams or our hearts; we’re used to immediately asking people we’ve just met, “What do you do?”
I wrote ad copy for newspapers and casinos, Paul Kemp muses grimly, I was an utterly corrupt restaurant critic, a yachting photographer, and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. Here one might imagine Thompson himself reminding us: I lied about my age and pretended I had graduated college to get a job at a paper that fired me over a broken vending machine. I retyped entire books by Faulkner and Steinbeck to teach myself rhythm. I sold my blood to pay the bills while my pregnant wife worked as a motel maid.
The most obvious thing that Bukowski’s and Thompson’s sleazy male protagonists are known for, of course, is their love for drink and women. But the less boring similarity between them is that they aren’t, in fact, lazy or unambitious at all — they have dreams so big they don’t fit into the lives they yet know, or they’re unwilling to see their dreams as simply a next step of what they have now. These dreams can only be articulated clumsily and vaguely. “I wanted the whole world or nothing,” the mailman states, and after 11 years he finally brings himself to resign and write his novel. “Danger made my ears tingle and my butthole pucker,” the private detective says, so desperate for newness that he simply concocts leads, much like the way Thompson liked to “work against a crisis, and if he didn’t have one, he made one,” as Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner recalls. I was always looking for the rich heiress or fat job at the far end of the next plane ticket, says the reporter, who has spent his days travelling Latin America, Europe, the Far East, jumping from English daily to English daily, restless, unencumbered, anxious.
Perhaps people are stagnant at work because work is stagnant. But the world is not stagnant; the world is overwhelming. Sometimes the world is beyond the reach of what our respectable employment can bring us. And sometimes it feels like the only way to conquer the world is to hunt down pleasure, rather than salary, hunt it down like our lives depend on it. It takes a charismatic kind of shamelessness, of fearlessness, to want the world without working for it. To smooth talk stupid clients into paying hefty advances for their cases, or to avoid getting beaten to death by your landlord’s stupid hit men by pointing water pistols at them. To avoid getting fired by simply being entertaining or likeable to your boss at a place that doesn’t “smell like work.” To smile strangely at your raging, threatening newspaper editor, and say, “A man never knows when he might have his head twisted.”
It’s hard to imagine the kind of world where one can get away with such wild, brazen disregard for cultural norms, this invisible point at which a job might become so bad, so meaningless, that it’s almost liberating; where it becomes impossible to bully labor out of someone, because money means nothing; where money means nothing because work means nothing.
Personal excess and self-indulgence are so much a part of American literature that it borders on cliché, but it would be unfortunate to allow this sense of cliché to take away from us the joy and the sparkle — and the defiance in the face of authority — that we might find from such literature. The mad, frightening, rum-soaked worlds of Bukowski and Thompson make me oddly envious, and somewhat nostalgic for younger selves of mine whom I’ve abandoned; lives where I stumbled into, and managed to keep, jobs where I could get away with almost anything, jobs I maintained entirely by accident, or by kindness, or poor competition, or my bosses’ failures (or their indifference to my failures), or by being more entertaining than the alternatives.
It’s difficult to ignore, in my own romantic longing for these hopeful worlds where desire reigns king, the many ways in which hedonism is collapsed with sexism when it comes to Bukowski’s and Thompson’s characters, who, as they’re known to, often reek of misogyny. Throughout my admiration bordering on envy, I have also felt angry at these sleazy men for hijacking the glamorous world of rebellion and filth. When I was a lost freelancer, sitting on Mumbai beaches at nine a.m., drunk on rum or port wine and contemplating whether to go into the office or not, these men were my only company when I needed reassurance that my less-than-stellar resume need not determine my whole life — I have no doubt I might have done with better company.
Still, it’s worthwhile to remember that the men they were writing about only represent a particular kind of man: poor or struggling or bitter or infinitely bullied men, and not exactly the privileged men that run our patience dry today. It’s also interesting to see how the women in these stories gleam even more brightly than their male counterparts, with defiance and with instant gratification: terrifyingly exciting women who refuse to work, who get served eviction notices because, “I have the money, I just don’t like to pay,” who live off of mysterious traveler’s checks and unemployment checks and weak or stupid bartenders; women who hustle in ways that their men will never understand, and who have some manic grip on these men — Chenault, Paul Kemp’s sort-of girlfriend who refuses to give up her favorite skinny dipping spot just so it will stop driving the local residents (and her boyfriends) crazy; the ridiculous and menacing Lady Death, who threatens Nicky Belane’s life but also protects him from his dangerous landlord; Betty, Henry Chinaski’s old friend and lover who dies of decadence, driving him wild with grief and causing him to run raging to the doctors, “Why do you just let them die? What’s the sin in being poor?”
We do indeed seem to have registered some ugly, subconscious idea that there is a sin in being poor, that poverty and irresponsibility and pleasure-seeking are somewhat interchangeable, and that misfortune is deserved. But this is all the more reason to remember, always, the political value of hedonism and unproductivity. Thompson and Bukowski specifically aside, shamelessness and desire and huge dreams are themselves very feminine traits. In this context, I wonder if my own grudgingness towards their personas is perhaps in part just my longing for this mad world, where people create meaning in their own lives entirely unencumbered by work, where they manage to pay rent late or not at all, where they simply point blindly on maps to pick the next place to live, and get free drinks from bar customers by engaging in friendly barfights, and spend money on fun faster than it comes in through wage labor, the way Bukowski did. Fun is worth more than wage labor, he knew; but as he starved himself to afford writing time and supplies, he clearly also knew that there is a lot else that is worth more than wage labor.
The most important thing about the characters in these stories is perhaps the fact that they are both bored senseless with their meaningless jobs, and thoroughly excitable. They don’t make this seem like a contradiction. Whether it is a violent childhood or the postwar boom, something always allows for the feeling that something important might well happen soon.
Maybe this is the feeling that drives Thompson, at 21, to commit to collecting rejection letters faster than Faulkner, and write, “Until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says, ‘You are nothing,’ I will be a writer.” Maybe this is the feeling that drives Bukowski to write poems in the margins of newspapers that make up the floor of his shack when he runs out of paper, or later lock himself up in rooms to write his 10 stories a week before his all-nighters at the post office. Despite the fact that the world is disappointing them, these characters, like the men who created them, remain filled with furious desire; they still drag themselves out of bed in the morning, hungover but with stars in their eyes.
In this way, perhaps we can all remember that what our gainfully employed work offers us does not limit what we may be able to snatch from the universe, if only we are obnoxious enough, or impulsive enough. If only we can, as Gay Talese recently <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/12/gay-talese-frank-sinatra-book">remarked</a>, “make something happen with your personality, with your goddamn style, your charm, your salesman huckster-ist licorice.” We can celebrate these strange, mad worlds that are both so depleted with alternatives for competent employees, and so enriched with promise of every other sort, that we just might, with some imagination and hustling, get away with late rent payments or only as much work as we are willing to do. The rest of our energies might be spent on dreams that cannot be articulated, on neon immediate desire, on wild, unscheduled stargazing.
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&#8220;Smells Like Work&#8221;: Examining Employment in Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson

Look at the Lights, My Love

Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer based in Queens, New York. She has written for The Point, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She tweets at <a href="https://twitter.com/storyshaped">@storyshaped.</a>

Apoorva Tadepalli

Alone Together: On Annie Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

The Easy Life

Fruit Without Taste: On Marguerite Duras’s “The Easy Life”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"Mere flim-flam stories, and nothing but shams and lies." — Miguel de Cervantes

Literary Fiction

Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer based in Queens, New York. She has written for The Point, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She tweets at <a href="https://twitter.com/storyshaped">@storyshaped.</a>