Mark Ovenden. Transit Maps of the World

Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden



I’ve discovered a love for oversized coffee table books. Unwieldy troves of trivia, in them novelty wins. I’d buy one browse it for a couple months. They’re books to enjoy slowly, over time, digesting niblets of facts on some geeky, specialized subject. Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World fills this niche, it makes the journey worthwhile.



In the preface, he smartly defines a transit system. Urban transit maps remain the book’s primary focus, though, while questionable to some, he defends the inclusion of other mixed systems – those with above ground as well as below ground transit systems.



The book is divided into six zones or sections, the first three of which being the richest. The zones are further divided into cities. Ovenden details histories, from the inception of a city’s urban system to its recent model and also includes proposed plans. These biographies of the cities are filled with beautiful reproductions of the maps as they change, grow, and become standardized.



Yes, standardized. Not only is the book interest in the development of the urban systems, but the maps themselves. Some include topography, landmarks to orient travelers where they are aboveground. Standardized, for cleaner looking maps, rids itself of topography and settles instead for standard angles, equal station distant, black station ticks with open circles, among other practices. The book becomes even more interesting where the cities take risks on the maps, trying out a new design. Some experiments early on are phased out, others became the standard.



For most major cities, the development of the systems started in the late nineteenth century, where exponential population growth created demand. Faced with the population surge above, engineers went underground. This was when the maps appeared. The systems grew, some massively. During the Depression, many plans were scrapped, and some systems were put on hold indefinitely. Several of the cities in the later zones had plans before the Depression, but were hit so hard that nothing was done until as recently as twenty years ago.



The book, for all its geeky pleasure, is not serendipitous. After such richly detailed early zones, the latter zones feel included simply for the tagline across the front cover: “The World’s First Collection of Every Urban Train Map on Earth.” It drags once you understand the transit map’s history and trajectory. Even Ovenden has to devise creative ways to say the same thing over and over.



But for novelty value, the book is worth it.


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My review

Don DeLillo. Cosmopolis.

Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo



Finished 8/22/08



DeLillo is not known for intricate plots. His books are about ideas. This is where he thrives. This is the compensation for an apparent lack of trajectory, or at least a tight;y-paced plot, mostly. But when he abandons all plot and instead engages the character in a series of random conversation, even his thematic issues lack. There needs to be propulsion in his novels, direction. Without, he gives us the lackluster Great Jones Street about a recluse rocker who does nothing but sit in an apartment building. The characters who visit actually seem to offer a moderately interesting plot, but there is no action. The sloth protagonist lies around, bored, and the reader feels the same.



In Cosmopolis, DeLillo offers the same dull albeit silly snapshot: A billionaire rides across town in a limo for a haircut. Yes, a haircut. The trip takes all day due to a presidential visit, a funeral and an assassination attempt… by pie. Yes pie. A pastry assassin makes living, or at least attempts to construct a point, by hitting celebrities in a face with dessert. Odd asides such as this give the book a humorous buzz, but it’s all superficial.

The only ideas that float by worth any acknowledgement is the overabundance of information. Portions of it reminded me of Warren Ellis’ great Transmetropolitan set in the near distant future where human vices have grown as technology advanced. I mention the graphic novel series because it’s the only worthy venture my mind took while reading Cosmopolis. And I love DeLillo.



This is the type of book where DeLillo opens himself up to criticism. Everything he’s faulted for, on full display within. There’s the funeral of rap star Brutha Fez that tightropes between weighty seriousness and farce. Mildly compelling sequence, memorable for how straight-faced he approached the scene despite how ridiculous it all was underneath. Yet one must the point where it culminates with this dozy of a line: “When people die, you weep.” A writer, who’s made a name on modern cultural insights, gives us that profound little nugget. What in the absolute fuck. Avoid.




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My review

Harry Crews. A Feast of Snakes

Part of me hates this book. Hates the characters, their slithery morality and unfulfilled aspirations, hates how the emptiness, the vacuum left is filled with the coiled hissing forms of snakes and how it gets under the skin and into the stomach and bowels. I acknowledge the power and intensity Harry Crews has at his command, but I do not admire his A Feast of Snakes.

Each year in Mystic, Georgia, Jon Lon organizes the Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival that attracts a denizen of unsavory gypsies, thrill-seekers, and drunkards. They arrive in campers and Winnebagos, setup wares, fight dogs, partake in a beauty pageant, and set fire to a thirty-foot-tall snake. So yes, it’s a hillbilly version of the wicker man.

‘Hillbilly’ is an appropriate term, since the Jon Lon’s plight plays out as hillbilly angst. That’s because Jon Lon cannot find love. Not in his wife, his inamorata, his children, his friends, his family, his job, or his position as organizer of the Roundup. No, Jon Lon only laments for the past and his former glories of high school football star and his old girlfriend. One wonders how Jon Lon expects to find “true love” if his definition involves atm, which Crews graphically describes in one of many vile, foul, and cruel sex scenes. So Jon Lon is stuck operating the liquor store once owned by his father and spends most of the day drinking and bitching at his wife. His father isn’t much different except that he bitches at his daughter since his wife killed herself years ago.

The whole book is foul and cruel. Foul because Crews revels in shock. Cruel because Crews casts a hateful eye on all his citizens and puts them through the wringer. Even Lottie Mae, the sole redeeming subplot in the entire novel, is brutalized, driven insane, and disturbed by snakes before she is able to exact an even crueler revenge.

Lottie Mae, a young black girl, is the object of the sheriff’s desire. The sheriff Buddy is a mangled man, a landlocked hillbilly pirate, I guess, with his peg leg. His real leg he lost in ‘Nam. Buddy, too, laments the past for he, too, was once a football star. Most of the male characters were. Now he occupies his time by carrying snakes, one in a sack and the other in his pants. Yes, that is a metaphor Crews pounds in your head, over and over. The phallic nature of snakes. The sexual connotation of Eve’s temptation, of the snake in the garden. And on and on.

I’m exaggerating somewhat, since the snake metaphor is one of the few things Crews deftly handles, despite the overkill. His similes and his prose, however, are dull, at least in the first half. Let me quote a little gem here describing Jon Lon’s wife: “Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way.” Well, that’s absolutely unbelievable! But it gets better: “she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress.” A basketball, no kidding!

The dialogue, mostly in dialect, is authentic, though I questioned some of the intentional misspellings. And the prose does get better in the second half, lyrical at times, but he still stumbles over similes. With obvious imaginative powers, why does Crews stumble with similes?

Rereading what I wrote, I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned the violence. The book’s back cover notes that Crews covers the vices of “adultery, castration, suicide, and murder.” This list, of course, leaves out bullying, rape, drunkenness, drunken driving, fights, lies, animal brutality including mutilation and dog fighting, racism, sexism, abandonment, kidnapping, battered wives, neglected wives, paraphilia, madness, delusions, feces fascination, religion bashing, and idleness. All of which are ingredients for an instant cult classic!

But yes, there is a lot of violence, a lot of touting of masculinity and then more violence. One could posit that Crews argues against masculinity and its corrupting power, which is true. But Crews idealizes athleticism in a well-rendered scene of weight-lifting and dick-measuring, which in the south is how one determines the pecking order. The equivalent of dogs sniffing the other’s rectum.

Despite the Southern Gothic nature, it’s rather insulting for readers to cite Crews alongside the masters Faulkner and O’Connor. Both incorporated humanity in their works, dealt with underlying problems in the south, and both, in the end, were redemptive, even if at times it was a freak show. Crews, however, is just a freak show. With the exception of Lottie Mae, who’s in so little of the book and so distant from the main thread, A Feast of Snakes has little value, which disappoints me since Crews does have intensity as a writer.