Invisible Cities

In 2012, I got the chance to travel to New Orleans, Louisiana, for a Jeopardy tryout that was being held there for folks who did good enough on the online test back in February of that year to be considered for the show. It was August, so New Orleans was particularly muggy even early in the morning (I remember going outside one day at about nine in the morning and being alarmed at how hot it already was), and from our hotel room in East New Orleans we had a bit of a journey to make to get to Canal Street, the main street of the city. Now, I'd been to cities before (New York once in 1997, Washington DC a couple of times, Atlanta enough to know that I didn't even want to think about living there, and Greenville if you want to count it as a "city" compared to the other ones), but New Orleans was different. For one thing, it took a hella long time to drive there (duties for driving split between my sister and I, my future brother-in-law along for the ride as it was a month before the planned wedding and this was the closest they could afford to a honeymoon). For another, we were coming to a city that, between the three of us, we knew almost nothing about. I had read The Moviegoer years back (wasn't yet in my Walker Percy appreciation phase; the trip to New Orleans helped), and also A Confederacy of Dunces, but apart from jazz music and Hurricane Katrina, I was woefully ignorant about the Cresecent City.

It's interesting how, in Digital Detroit, Jeff Rice addresses the idea of cities having narratives, and how those narratives affect our perceptions of place, because when I got to New Orleans there was still evidence of Katrina's destruction, either manifested in ruins and abandoned buildings, or in the psyche of people we met, the people whose livelihoods depended on bringing people in to see their city not as a casualty but as a phoenix, rising again from lowdown no-good times. In order to get to Canal Street from our hotel, we had to drive past a crumbling mess of what had once been a building, lorded over by construction workers in hard-hats and working through the rubble with power tools and vehicles; it didn't matter if the building was demolished because of something non-Katrina related (after all, we visited right before the seventh anniversary of the storm; it would seem an awful long time for something to be a heaping pile of rubble without just now being sorted over), it came to symbolize in my mind the work that still needed to be done, to rebuild not just the city but its people. The narrative of New Orleans had once been as the birthplace of jazz, as the home of Mardi Gras, as a destination for sin and depravity deep in the conservative Bible Belt; now it was the city whose destruction at the hands of an unimaginable force uprooted more than a third of its residents, turned its sporting arena into a ghetto for the unwashed and unloved, and merited little more than a cursory glance by our then-President, who proceeded to keep on flying and ignoring the problems of the city that neither he nor his family gave a damn about because they weren't his kind of people (yes, I just referenced Kanye West in a Digital Humanities context. I am ashamed).

Detroit is another victim of narrative, this one of racial disharmony and corruption on all levels that has left the ordinary citizens as lone survivors of an apocalyptic terror that really took hold in the era of Bush and bailouts, but whose seeds of destruction were sown long, long ago. I read Charlie LeDuff's searing look at his hometown over the summer (definitely not "light, fun beach reading"), and I can grasp a little of what makes Detroit unique in the annals of "failed cities." Unlike the ghost towns of the American West, Detroit was tied to something a little more labor-intensive than gold-mining (manufacturing cars for the world), yet it fell pray to the same forces that doomed the silver and gold towns that once doted the landscape between here and San Francisco: people found a better way to do what Detroit did best, and the demand went with it. Where the ghost towns ran out of precious minerals, Detroit ran out of interest from the outside world in what it was selling. Henry Ford would be turning over in his grave right now if he could see Detroit.

Which isn't to say that Detroit didn't deserve it, in some sense: the concept of manufacturing on an assembly line, with little or no allowances made for the workers, is horrifying because of its automated nature (and attractive to the very same capitalists we see celebrated in glamorous profiles in business magazines, all because a lot of them manage to outsource that kind of labor far from prying eyes). When a city, when a factory town, is tied to a mode of production that is ultimately doomed, with no allowances for change, it's hard to see much in the way of sympathy. This isn't to say that I want to see Detroit razed to the ground, left to crumble like an ancient Mayan civilization, the decals on the factory doors serving as hieroglyphs for future scholars to puzzle over. But there's a good chance it'll happen.

Rice mentions Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a work that I'm familiar with thanks to my World Lit class when I was an undergrad. In the book, you have a series of cities described (some briefly, some in detail) over the course of the work (it's hard to classify, it's a work of fiction but not necessarily a novel, except maybe in a modernist sense). When I went to New Orleans, I had some experience with cities real and imagined (I was an avid reader of works that took place in big cities, because as a small-town boy I had to believe there was a bigger, more exciting world out there than the one offered by my humble home town), but this was one of the few times I'd been in a real city, and it was overwhelming. I remember beginning to walk down Bourbon Street on a Sunday afternoon, all the sex shops and racy souvenirs (and all the people walking down the street), and I had the very "small town" response that I would've thought I was too sophisticated for: I felt out of place. I made a joke to my sister later, about how all those people should've "been in church," but the truth is a lot of them probably *did* come straight from church, at least the well-dressed ones.

Growing up in a small town is frustrating when you have dreams of greater, grander things, but I guess it helps you appreciate the majesty of big cities more than you might if you grew up right in the heart of Manhattan, New Orleans, or Atlanta. Walhalla, my home town, will never win any claim to being a sophisticated city; you drop the main drag of town, the street where most of the businesses are located, right in the center of Manhattan and never touch Harlem to the north nor Wall Street to the south (though you'd have an invasion of hipsters from Brooklyn because of all the antique shops that Walhalla has. They'd say they're being ironic but I think they'd be genuninely thrilled at our stock of vinyl records and crappy, broke-down toys). I've always had a problem envisioning cities bigger than Walhalla, more contained, more spread-out but not in a country way (i.e., you have parts of Walhalla that you get to only by driving down lonely-looking back streets full of grass, trees, and other non-urban trappings). I've been to big cities that stretched on forever, that included neighborhoods where I might be best advised to steer clear of (either because of my ethnicity or because of my gullibility when dealing with someone looking to seperate me from whatever cash I have on hand).

When I went to the University of South Carolina, I was right in the heart of an urban enviroment. I lived in a dorm that was in the middle of campus, yet not far removed from the downtown section, right around the State House; there wasn't much beyond a news stand, a CD shop, and some boarded-up buildings, but I remember taking epic walks around the area surrounding the State House (usually in daytime, though I did like a night stroll from time to time). I didn't drive yet, but there was no need; most everything was within a short (or long) walk from my dorm. There were parts of Columbia that I couldn't get to by walking, of course, but that's what I had friends with cars for. I'm sure a lot of the time, people who worked downtown or knew some of the dangers posed by a big city (even one like Columbia) wondered who the crazy-ass white boy wandering around was, but truthfully except for a few times I never really felt any danger or unease. To this day, my narrative of Columbia is based on those jaunts I took, especially when I should've been studying for class instead, but I don't regret it, really.

So if a city is a database, its various inhabitants can create a narrative to suit their purposes. For me, my narratives are thus:

New York: imposing, overwhelming, exciting, not terrifying too much to be in a tall skyscraper (this was pre-9/11).

Washington DC: spread-out, old-fashioned architecture, good touristy sights (Air and Space Museum), powerful but folksy.

Atlanta: murder to drive through, no idea where anything is, a nice place to visit but you couldn't pay me to live there.

New Orleans: reminded me of what a small-town kid I really am, exhilerating, bewildering, magical, scary, fantastic, I'd like to go back (but not in August; way too hot that time of year).