Rich Mintz  

I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history and cultural studies, which won’t surprise anyone who knows me; I’ve been teased (accurately) as one of the few people who’d buy pay actual money for a book about the history of the Postal Service. But for any of you who think I read only nonfiction (are you listening, Boon Companion?) — well, it’s just not true. About every fifth book or so, I need to dig into a really meaty novel and not let go until I’ve eaten the whole thing.

The last meaty novel I read, back in the spring, was Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, really six novels, comprising her Balkan Trilogy and her Levant Trilogy. Spanning the years from just before the Second World War through roughly the end of it, these books are the thinly fictionalized account of what she and her husband lived through as British citizens in Romania, Athens, and Egypt as the war coursed through the region. But the war came to an end, and so did the books, and I went back to my regular diet.

I tried a couple of novels in the intervening months, but nothing seemed to stick.

But last week in Providence, at Myopic Books in Wayland Square — along with a biography of Alexander the Great and a book on Southern culture — I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’ve been meaning to read for the better part of a decade. I started it and quickly got drawn in, and am finding myself carving out a little extra reading time every day. Now I’m 200 pages in, and well immersed.

The experience of a long-form novel is something you don’t get on the Internet (although, of course, you do get other things from the Internet), and it’s only in the most immersive nonfiction (like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, which I loved) that you get anything that approaches it. You build around you a personal perspective on the venues and trajectories in the novel, come to inhabit the characters’ motivations and to see them from all sides, to anticipate and fear their interactions. You live for a time in someone else’s world. And if (as I did with Manning’s six novels) you come to be comfortable there, it’s a moment of great sadness when you come to the end, especially if you’re reading a dead author who’s not going to be producing any more.

Until I finish, I won’t say any more about London Fields itself, except to say that it takes place in London and it’s more substantive than I expected from the playful Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, whom I can’t endure).

I spent almost an hour tonight reading Patrick Chovanec’s six-part dispatch from North Korea, linked via Matt Yglesias. I too am fascinated by every fleeting glimpse over the border of what is probably the most isolated and reclusive nation on earth at this moment in history. Chovanec is heading back into North Korea in a few days, apparently, so I’m looking forward to more.

Dear editor of New York: The Novel for Kindle — the person whose name you render as “Marion ‘The Swamp’ Fox” is not a fictional character named Marion Fox; he is Francis Marion (1732-1795), known as “The Swamp Fox” for his elusiveness, an important historical person of the Revolutionary War era and one of the great heroes in whom South Carolina takes pride. There is not a schoolchild in South Carolina who has not been told, in hagiographic fashion, of his exploits. Indeed, I would wager that if you (yes, you) have only heard of two South Carolinians who died before you were born, one of them is bound to be Francis Marion. (The other is probably John C. Calhoun.)

The fact that this editor would think “The Swamp” is conceivable as a nickname for a historical person may suggest that Amazon’s ebook production is being outsourced to some country where knowledge of English is, shall we say, contingent. Or perhaps it’s just a typo in the original, but that seems exceedingly unlikely, as this is a reputable novel that seems to have been carefully copy-edited on the whole.

Ta-Nehisi Coates excerpts this long comment from a reader (obviously an American history professor or comparably interesting person) about 19th-century American hunting practices, especially in the West. Interesting stuff, especially given all the reading I’ve been doing this year in early American history. Given the sweeping conclusions of historians, I forget sometimes — and anecdotes and snippets like these remind me — that history is at its foundation a pointillist affair; it’s a matter of millions and billions and trillions of collective experience that form themselves into shapes on a canvas only when seen from sufficiently far away,

I’ve just watched “Fresno: A City Reborn” all the way through. It’s a documentary commissioned (and “presented as a public service”) by the pioneering shopping mall architects/urban renewalists Victor Gruen Associates in 1968, and it’s at once fascinating and horrifying, given our 40 years of hindsight on these all-or-nothing redevelopment projects of the 1960s.

Fresno’s Fulton Mall pedestrianization project (which was originally planned to cover roughly a 20-square-block area) was the largest of its kind I’m aware of in any American city, and was hailed (in part by Gruen) as a transformative model. We all know what happened to those pedestrian malls, which were all the rage for about 10 years; their regravitation of their city centers was no match for the centrifugal force of suburbanization, and in any case (we know now) came too late. With very rare exceptions (like Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Santa Monica’s Third Street, both of which have been carefully curated and serve populations that include hundreds of thousands of strolling tourists), this kind of brutal pedestrianization has been a failure, at least on its own terms. (In contrast, more organic and porous pedestrianization and “auto diet” programs very often work well, like the new plazas along Broadway in Times and Herald Squares.) Only a force greater than urban renewal — namely, the organic reurbanization of America over the past fifteen or so years — has been able to start bringing the people back to places like these and reanimating them with some of the spirit they were originally intended to have.

This video is worth a watch if only to capture the sense of hopefulness in the narrator’s voice. There’s a wistfulness to the experience. Everyone was so sure this was going to solve everything! In Fresno, I can assure you (having stood on Fulton Mall myself roughly halfway through its current lifetime), it didn’t. Despite the blistering heat in the summer of 1986, I enjoyed my visit to Fresno, which had a sense of place and pride that was missing in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in; but it was in spite of, not because of, Fulton Mall. But oh, how I wanted to believe!

History and photos are on the excellent Downtown Association of Fresno Web site, which is also the source of the postcard photo you see above.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates put in a plug recently for Yale Professor David W. Blight’s lectures on the Civil War, available free on video. Putting these on my to-watch list…

If you have today off work (as I do) and you’re spending the day (as I am) catching up on some combination of [laundry|dishes|work email|bills|picture-hanging|TiVo|letters to family|closet organizing|etc.-ad-nauseam], don’t forget to take some time to reflect on why today’s a holiday in the first place. Maybe you want to start here, with “Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said” (video, 2 min.), from Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine hip-hop video blog. (Posted by Sam Graham-Felsen.)

If you’re feeling more substantive:

• Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (video, 22 min.)
• AFSCME documentary on the Memphis sanitation strike (video, 10 min.)
• David Halberstam, The Children (via Amazon.com)

As I sit at home eating Greek honey cookies I brought back on the plane, I note that if you had said to me two months ago, “Rich, there’s a Greek fishing village in the Tampa suburbs about a mile from US 19, half an hour from the Tampa airport, whose primary industry is sponge boats owned and operated by generations of Greeks, followed in economic impact by tourists who stroll up and down Dodecanese Boulevard, stopping off to eat grilled fish and Greek pastries and drink muddy coffee,” I would have replied, uh, are you high? But, well, there it is.

Oh, and yesterday was Tarpon Springs’ first annual Manatee Celebration Day. Photo taken on the door of the Tarpon Springs historical museum, where the inimitable Julie Peeler gave us the nickel tour after hours. In the museum, along with local historical artifacts, are replicas of the eight ten-foot murals about Florida history (painted by Tarpon Springs artist Christopher Still) that hang in the Florida State House in Tallahassee.

Incidentally, Hellas Restaurant was already in the Foursquare database, although it was listed as “Hella’s…”

Someone worth learning more about: Piet Hein, the Danish physicist and mathematician, designer, poet, and political activist. I’m going to go learn more, but for now, here’s the poem that became a graffito and inspired resistance to the Nazis across the country:

CONSOLATION GROOK

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

In this post, Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes a short list of American history titles cited by Professor Ari Kelman of UC Davis (and of the group blog The Edge of the American West) — titles chosen for the “non-expert reader seeking to understand America.”

I want to give my own special shout-out to one of the titles on Kelman’s list:  American Colonies: The Settling of North America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor.  I read a fair amount of American and European history for pleasure, and this book (which I read in 2005) is certainly the most engaging book of North American history I read during the decade.  In particular, it effectively illustrated for me, as no previous book had done, the extent to which the European settlement of North America was a complex interplay of political and social intrigue between the European settlers and Native American communities (and of American, British, French, Spanish, and Russian colonial interests, and of course the economic interests of large planters and manufacturers) that lasted for well over a century.  From the moment I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down — the narrative of settlement, made up of dozens or hundreds of factions each acting in its own interests, propelled me forward.

The book also includes an annotated bibliography, which I remember aggressively mining at the time for further reading.