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Literary Landscapes

Nik's posting about Sherry Simon's new book intrigues me. "Literary landscapes" seems to be a genre. See, for example Storied Streets by Brian Demchinsky (Montréal, 2002) and Toronto: A Literary Guide by Greg Gatenby (1991), both of which are kind of fun. Do all cities produce such things — guides to both landscapes that appeared in literature and landscapes that the creators inhabit?

Dualities of place

Translating Montreal : Episodes in the Life of a Divided City

by Sherry Simon

Winner of the 2006 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction (Québec Writers' Federation)

"Taking the perspective of a walker moving through a fluid landscape of neighbourhoods and eras, Sherry Simon experiences Montreal as a voyage across languages ... "

http://tinyurl.com/y3xq3n

The first 'note' of San Francisco

One of my all-time, ongoing, favorite moments of travel is the puff of Pacific air that - upon arriving in San Francisco - finds its way between the plane and the jetway: the first breath of the west.

But after years of mentioning this I now confess that I stole it from Henry James. Minus the jetway:

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive--the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile--since the previous afternoon, thanks to this happier device--such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. 

I missed it today. I wasn't paying attention. link

Another book called "Home"

"Home: The Blueprint of Our Lives," introduction by John Edwards, would sound horribly schmaltzy, if designer Michael Bierut hadn't made such beautiful hay out of it-- humanizing the suburbs by, totally counter-intuitively, talking about how modern they are. Like this:

In an expression of wishful thinking not atypical of northern Ohio, every street in our neighborhood was named after a town in Florida: Tamarack, Tamiami, Sarasota. The houses came in two models: ranch and split level. We lived in a split level. The house to our left was a ranch. The house to our right was another split level. It was identical to ours. The house across the street was a split level too, but with the floor plans reversed. Going in that house was always a disorienting, Bizarro World experience. Differentiating each house was its dominant architectural feature: the decorative element on the garage door. We had a star; our neighbors had moons, windows, abstract shapes. Picking this element must have been a moment of truth for the new homeowners, an opportunity to make a "statement," but I don't remember anyone ever ascribing any significance to these insignia. Like the whole neighborhood, they just seemed to appear overnight.

Everyone on our street lived in what would later be called a snout house, that garage-centric building type so reviled today that certain municipalities have outlawed them. My mom didn't care much about urban planning principles; she liked being able to get the groceries from her car to the kitchen without braving the Cleveland winter. It just seemed modern, like the way our dinette area was three steps up from our wood-panelled den, the television fully watchable over the decorative wrought-iron railing. (During breakfast at least: it was off at dinnertime.)

Home Ground

Its heft surprised me. I thought Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, was going to be a little guidebook, not a massive textbook of place terms. Which is a good thing. The other surprise is that it actually seems useful, for those of us in the business of describing places. Like this one, in Brooklyn, "Prospect Heights":

"Heights is a general term for an elevated landform that provides a vantage point from which to view the surrounding countryside...In a suburban context, heights carry a kind of middle-class pretension or snobbery, as if higher ground, real or nominal, makes a better neighborhood."

Or, "desire path":

A close look at any city park or green will typically reveal footpaths that break away from paved walks, trails that countless pedestrians have worn into the grass. Such a trail is a desire path: the route people have chosen to take across an open place, marking a human pattern upon a landscape.

A few more are here. I heard about the book after listening to Barry Lopez interviewed on Forum.