Because of reading Jane Jacobs, I could begin to understand this fascinating post by E. M. Risse about trade vs import replacement. I hadn’t before heard his point that between-region trade tends to favor people at the top of the economic food chain. I’m not sure I completely understand Risse’s post but I am intrigued enough to want to look at his (four-volume!) book, The Shape of the Future, shape meaning settlement pattern.
The Cleveland painter Michelle Muldrow was a musician for ten years before becoming a painter — although she got a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) before that. From an unusual background, an unusual creative process:
Interviewer: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
MM: Usually I begin reading about environmental issues, urban development, really anything touching on the subjects of land use, as well American history and fiction. I guess I sort of consider myself a sponge at the beginning stages of work, then usually some travel helps and I take tons of source photos. From there I organize my photos into different obsessions, be it the artificial horticulture and landscaping in the modern developments, or the death of inner ring suburbs, subdivisions, etc, at that point I look for what I am most interested in painting. It’s sort of like all my intellectual obsessions still must go through a filter of how I feel, and that is an important element to my work- nostalgia. I suppose I attribute that to the rootlessness of my childhood, I am always trying to make sense of my landscape and home. Then I begin the body of my work. I tend to approach my work as a series or body rather than as individual images. I always prep, underpaint and paint at least 4-5 paintings all at once, never one at a time. I freehand draw, then do a monochromatic underpainting, and from there, I paint.
Painting, in other words, resembles blogging: You can blog about anything, you can paint anything — so long as you care about it.
One of her favorite writers is Jane Jacobs. She used to live in San Francisco, where there seemed to be no upper limit on the value of property. In Cleveland, with boarded-up homes everywhere, there seems to be no lower limit.
1. About her work, on YouTube (3 minutes).
2. Podcast of her first Massey lecture, about Quebec separatism (34 minutes).
3. To the extent I could figure out her intellectual likes and dislikes, I always agreed, with one glaring exception: She liked Stephen Jay Gould’s work, whereas I thought it was awful. This informative post reminded me of this disagreement; I learned that people in Gould’s field (evolutionary biology) agree with me. One reason I didn’t like Gould’s work was his dismissal of evolutionary explanations as “just-so stories“.
Chris Matthews’ latest book is Life’s A Campaign. “A recipe for sadness,” Jon Stewart called it in an interview that Matthews called the worst of his life:
In Systems of Survival (1992), Jane Jacobs described two ethical systems: guardian (= government) and commercial. Each system consists of rules of conduct (e.g., “be honest” is a commercial value but not a guardian one). Matthews’s book says you should use guardian principles in everyday life; Stewart said that’s a mistake — commercial principles work better. Jacobs said there is a tendency to think that the principles that work well in your system work everywhere. Maybe this is why Matthews seemed stunned by Stewart’s objections.
To Jacobs’ two systems, Chris Phoenix, a nanotechnology expert, has added a third: the “information system“. It is about appropriate behavior — what is seen as appropriate behavior — in the world of open source software and similar goods. Phoenix argues persuasively that a different set of values applies. This is why I asked Aaron Swartz what’s wrong with Wikipedia: It’s not so obvious what the appropriate values are.
Long before open source software there were books: books share expertise. Long before books — at the dawn of humanity, I believe — there were hobbies: hobbyists share their expertise. The ethical system that Phoenix describes is much older and more important than he says. Phoenix acted within that system when he posted his essay on the Web; Jacobs did, too, when she wrote a book. Just as I do by blogging.
Speaking of Wikipedia, the LA Times has an interesting article today about what happened when Jimmy Wales — the founder — posted a one-sentence article about a butcher shop on the outskirts of Cape Town. It was deleted quickly — not important enough — but then a big debate ensued. The Times piece turned to the bigger issue:
Perhaps the granddaddy of all the Wikipedia debates is the question of which information deserves to be included, and which doesn’t. So-called Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful — why not include it? Deletionists, meanwhile, believe that because not all articles are created equal, judicious pruning increases the overall quality of Wikipedia’s information and strengthens its reputation. An encyclopedia, they say, is not just a dumping ground for facts.
While the people who run craigslist try hard to figure out what users want and how to give it to them — starting with the assumption that they themselves do not know — the people who run Wikipedia play God, at least by comparison. In this debate, both sides are playing God. As Aaron Swartz said, it isn’t wise. Jane Jacobs tells a story about a Pennsylvania Girl Scout troop. They were snobs; they made it hard for new members to join (the Wikipedian attitude that Aaron criticized). The girls who couldn’t get in formed their own troop. Several years later the new troop was thriving; the old troop was dying.
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