Recently in A Sense of Place Category

Here I am, late at night, with my bare feet up on the hearth, warmed by the dying embers of the fire, lit from within by a bottle of 2007 Grenache from a California producer called Dobra Zemlya. A friend from Alaska, an Orthodox priest friend who lives near the vintner and who introduced me to Dobra Zemlya's wines on a back porch in Eagle River this summer, was kind enough to ship me a couple of bottles today. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is why life is so good. This is my terroir: in my cottage, feet on the hearth, drinking good wine and reading a good book ("Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters" by Jonathan Nossiter, more on which in a moment).

This wine makes me so happy and nostalgic. It takes me back to this summer, sitting on Eric's back deck, when I was first introduced to the stuff. And later, in the living room of the St. James House, late at night, drinking and talking. It's pleasing to me that i can't separate the experience of this wine from that place and those people. Anyway, the Dobra Zemlja Grenache is so lithe, but also masculine and aggressive; it makes me think of a shortstop bobbing on his calves, waiting for the crack of the bat. Drinking a wine as forward as this makes you realize how most of the wines you drink, even the good ones, are so settled. Julie doesn't care for it; she thought it was too forward. But I adore it. Yes, the wine is young, and somewhat raw and alcoholic. But the fruit is so ruby-like and bright, with a long, herbal finish, and the acid is just about perfect. I can't imagine drinking this wine with anything; it's so dramatic and lively you only want to think about it. This is a tense, muscular, lean wine, brusque but captivating. Its tannins are restrained, allowing the fruit to express itself delightfully. Two years from now, this wine is going to be stellar. Tonight, it's made me glow like the embers in my line of sight, and I'm thinking that I need to contact the winery and order a case of their best. As I recall, everything Father Stephen poured from Dobra Zemlja was deeply pleasing. Please, order some of this wine. It's special. This is a wine that demands your attention, and rewards it.

Can I just tell you that Jonathan Nossiter is a bullsh*t artist, and that I love his book? Check this out, in his discussion of the wines of Burgundy:

In their intangibility and their deceptive resilience, they're closer to the experience of poetry, particularly as practiced by the ancient Greeks and, say, the classical Chinese or, not coincidentally, by the modernist poets since the turn of the twentieth century who've sought inspiration in the staccato lyricism of the Greeks and in the mellifluous indeciperability of the Chinese.

Don't you want to slug him? But In the very next paragraph, he confesses to being guilty of the "greatest pretensions." Which he plainly is. But how invigorating it is to read someone who is outrageously opinionated and sure of himself! I love this guy. I love his definition of taste:

For that matter, what is taste? It could be described as the expression of a preference between, say, A and B. But what distinguishes taste from mere opinion is that such a preference emerges from a sensory, emotional reaction with the subsequent ability to intellectually decipher that reaction for the self (and, if really necessary, for others). But ultimately, the defining characteristic of taste is the coherent relation of that preference to one's own conduct, to an ethical relation to oneself and to the world.

Read that a couple of times, and contemplate what it means to relate one's aesthetic preference to one's own conduct. i'll tell you what it means. It has something to do with what happened when Julie and I, through the generosity of friends, had dinner at Aurora, one of Dallas's best restaurants. Julie said at one point in the extravagantly delicious dinner, "This food makes me want to be good." I wrote a column about it.

Early in the book, Nossiter writes about the concept of terroir, which is hard to translate (this is not a bad place to start), but which broadly connotes a distinct sense of place. Strictly speaking, when one talks of terroir related to wine, one speaks of how a particular wine expresses the sense and spirit of the place where it's cultivated -- the physical qualities of the soil, and so forth. But Nossiter has an expansive view of terroir, which he calls "an evolving expression of culture," of particularity. He writes that maintaining a true sense of terroir is vital, because it preserves memory against homogeneity. To lose a sense of terroir is risky, he writes...:

Because it risks wiping out historical memory, which is our only safeguard agains the devastating lies of marketing and the cynical exploitation of global markets, culture and politics.

Matthew, my oldest son, photographed me tonight as I was reading and drinking wine by the fire. I'm wondering now, as I hear him rustling around in his bedroom with his Legos, trying to avoid going to sleep, what I would have him understand is his father's personal terroir. My terroir is the hearth and the black iron pot. It's Randy Newman's melancholic piano, Bach's solo cello suites, Diana Krall's love ballads, old Van Morrison, Billie Holiday's blues, REM's "Nightswimming." It's pot roast and brussels sprouts with bacon, sausage and apples and Irish oatmeal. It's where hobbits live. It's autumn, and crisp air with a hint of wood smoke, and tulips in the springtime, and mustard greens and bourbon and the South, especially the way south Louisiana smells on a wet fall morning. We do not speak ill of the French on my terroir, but hope to learn from them. It's laughter and conversation, and the metallic taste of raw oysters washed down with crisp white wine. My terroir smells like church incense, and it has about it an air of seriousness of purpose, but also generosity of spirit. We love the saints in my terroir, and I stand ready to hear your crazy-ass woo-woo story, as long as it's a good one. On my terroir, I lay a generous table, where the only guests banned are those without generosity of spirit, and a sense of humor. There are books everywhere in my terroir, and the aromatic smell of decaying binding is cherished, especially when enriched with the stout aroma of strong coffee. We love Champagne there -- we really do, especially Veuve Clicquot -- and we wish we lived in a perpetual New Orleans of the mind. Children and old Southern ladies who say "I declare" live in my terroir, and so does Flannery O'Connor, and the dusting of nutmeg on my mint juleps, which I learned from reading Walker Percy. If you walk on my terroir, you have to have stepped lightly through Spanish Town in Baton Rouge, having brushed your cheek with an elephant ear in a stranger's garden, and raised a beer with the beloved Barbecue Lesbians, who smelled, it must be said, of lighter fluid, and are all the more dear for it.

We love going places in my terroir, because there are new friends and new tastes there -- but our favorite journey is always Home.

And I've only begun to tell you about my terroir. I cannot imagine a wine that captures all these tastes, but I think I had a bourbony, bittery Manhattan at the late, lamented Colonel's Club under the Perkins Road Overpass in Baton Rouge that came pretty close.

Tell me about your terroir. I really do want to know.

UPDATE: Mike Steinberger, Slate's wine writer, thinks Nossiter is a pompous gasbag. I think Steinberger is almost certainly correct. Maybe that's why I am enjoying this book. Weird.

Oh, and yes, that's me in my pajamas. I don't go out in public looking like that. At least not always.

UPDATE: If you deduced from this post that I am something of a pompous gasbag, I would congratulate you on your discernment.

Joel Kotkin says that more Americans are staying put than at anytime since the Second World War -- and that that's a good thing. You're thinking, "Well, duh; if nobody's hiring, people aren't going to be able to move." Kotkin counters that the staying-in-place trend started before the recession hit. He adds:

Our less mobile nature is already reshaping the corporate world. The kind of corporate nomadism described in Peter Kilborn's recent book, Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's Rootless Professional Class, in which families relocate every couple of years so the breadwinner can reach the next rung on the managerial ladder, will become less common in years ahead. A smaller cadre of corporate executives may still move from place to place, but surveys reveal many executives are now unwilling to move even for a good promotion. Why? Family and technology are two key factors working against nomadism, in the workplace and elsewhere.

Family, as one Pew researcher notes, "trumps money when people make decisions about where to live." Interdependence is replacing independence. More parents are helping their children financially well into their 30s and 40s; the numbers of "boomerang kids" moving back home with their parents, has also been growing as job options and the ability to buy houses has decreased for the young. Recent surveys of the emerging millennial generation suggest this family-centric focus will last well into the coming decades.

Nothing allows for geographic choice more than the ability to work at home. By 2015, suggests demographer Wendell Cox, there will be more people working electronically at home full time than taking mass transit, making it the largest potential source of energy savings on transportation. In the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, almost one in 10 workers is a part-time telecommuter. Some studies indicate that more than one quarter of the U.S. workforce could eventually participate in this new work pattern. Even IBM, whose initials were once jokingly said to stand for "I've Been Moved," has changed its approach. Roughly 40 percent of the company's workers now labor at home or remotely from a client's location.

These home-based workers become critical to the localist economy. They will eat in local restaurants, attend fairs and festivals, take their kids to soccer practices, ballet lessons, or religious youth-group meetings. This is not merely a suburban phenomenon; localism also means a stronger sense of identity for urban neighborhoods as well as smaller towns.

[H/T: Reader Sarah Sheldon]

Here's a great piece from the new issue of The Atlantic talking about all the experiments in green, affordable housing springing up in hurricane-devastated New Orleans. Bizarrely, the actor Brad Pitt is a huge player in this market. Sounds like he's doing a lot of good there, though I personally side with the rebuilding aesthetic and ethic pushed by Andres Duany, who doesn't go for the modernist and/or non-local-vernacular designs favored by those surrounding Pitt. Duany hits on a brilliant observation about New Orleans in this passage:

"When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty," said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. "And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean."

Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of people living in them today, and few of them meet building codes. But no one worries about paying mortgages or insurance. "The situation is that the housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people to accumulate leisure," he said. "What's special about New Orleans is that it's the only place in the United States where you can have a first-rate urban life for very little money." What happened after Katrina, Duany said, was that FEMA and others came to town with detailed requirements for record-keeping and property titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might seem like common sense, he said, but it's "essentially unworkable for a Caribbean city."

So the central problem, according to Duany: "All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt," he said. "They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they're destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It's being measured by Minnesota standards."

I'm going to have to think about that for a while: New Orleans as a Caribbean city. More broadly, you could think of South Louisiana, even the non-Cajun parts, as essentially Mediterranean. This is especially visible in the non-Cajun parts, such as where I grew up. Most of us were Protestant, but boy, did we feel different from North Louisiana.

Anyway, this from the article is the best definition of sustainabilty I've ever seen:

Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. "The very core of sustainability," he said, "can be found in a simple question: 'Can it be loved?'"

Think about that as you're driving around your town, city or suburb today. Look at the buildings around you and think about which ones can be loved, and which ones can't. The ones that can be loved are the ones likely to be there 50 years from now. Here in Dallas, we've just opened a couple of big, expensive, starchitect-designed arts buildings. I've not been to either, but neither one looks especially lovable. Cool, but not lovable.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a short, but piercingly poignant meditation of obesity, black culture, and shame. Here's an excerpt:

The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you'll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who've lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.

I was there among them--the blacker and fatter--and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all--and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor--the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.

He goes from there to talk about how internalizing shame over the condition of black folks, and imagining that white folks have always have it easy, motivates him (and all black people). Coates admits that he knows the world isn't like this -- i.e., that it's always easy for whites -- but knowing something in your mind isn't the same as knowing it in your heart. He quotes Bill Cosby's line -- "My problem is that I'm sick of losing to white people" -- and says its what every black person thinks all the time. Coates admits that every time he sits down to write, he thinks that this time, he's got to show them.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. It's beautifully written and painfully honest. And you know, I have to admit that it revealed something to me about myself, and why I have so much anxiety over obesity, and my own struggle with weight. It's not far from Coates' own story. When I was growing up in the rural South in the 1970s, the only obese people you ever saw were poor white and black people. This was before obesity became mainstream. In those days, if you saw an obese white person, chances are he or she was poor or working class. I grew up around these folks; a few of them were in my extended family. I remember the women especially, how they had to sew their own clothes not so much because they couldn't afford better, but because it was hard to find clothing for massively fat people in those days.

Today, of course, obesity is far less of a class marker than it was a generation ago (smoking among white people over 30 has taken the role obesity used to have), so what I'm about to say will sound foreign to many readers. But when I was a kid, in my part of the world, white obesity often (but not always) correlated with other class markers, re: behavior. There was racism, of course, differentiated from the casual racism that nearly all white people had in its degree of snarling nastiness, much of which surely came from an emotional need to have someone to look down own, to make one feel better about one's own miserable lot. But there was also loose, chaotic morals; a willingness to use foul language in everyday conversation, even among children; a propensity to violence, especially when disciplining children; and a lack of concern about social respectability that amounted to contempt for the opinion of others.

In other words, rednecks.

I wasn't a redneck, nor was I raised in a redneck household, so why do rednecks make me feel a sense of shame. Because where I come from, unless you were born into a land-owning family -- I most definitely was not -- you may not have been a redneck, but chances are either your forebears were, or somebody close to you was, or is. Besides, it was a small town; everybody knew everybody else. One of the most admirable things about my mom and dad is that they are not and never have been snobs. They both grew up poor, and worked hard to get into the middle class. Having prospered through middle-class virtues of thrift, self-discipline and so forth, they have firm, clear ideas about morality and propriety. But they get along with everybody, and treat everyone the same. I have literally seen millionaires and rednecks both entertained at my mom and dad's table, and they both got the same treatment; it wouldn't occur to my folks to do any different. I hope I can live up to the standard they set in this regard.

Yet the Ur-Redneck looms large in the mind of cosmopolitan white Southerners like me. I can remember the fat, foul-mouthed girl in my 9th grade English class, whose parents both worked as prison guards, who made fun of me and anybody else who participated in class discussion. She was aggressively ignorant, and stood in my mind for the worst of redneck culture. And yet, she and I got to be friends later on, and I had to admit that though she was no less a bigot and a bully than she ever had been, there was something admirable about the way she was loyal to the people she took into her circle. Flannery O'Connor had the number of white Southerners like me when she wrote about Asbury, Hulga and other intellectually prideful characters who had transcended the quotidian bigotries of their culture, but who had become inhuman in the process (one suspects she was also writing about her own temptations, given how she struggled with her mother Regina). The middle-class striver is always afraid of sliding back into the lower class, which is why bourgeois people are often so quick to judge others, and to distance themselves from the trashy. On the other hand, it could well be that middle-class people who have enough memory, either personal or cultural, about how much had to be overcome to raise oneself and one's family out of the degradation of poverty culture are desperate to build an unbreachable psychological wall between themselves and the barbarians (so to speak). Both, I think, are true. What is the opposite of nostalgie de la boue? Fear of it? That's the middle class person's condition.

Anyway, reading Coates's piece made me reflect on the love-hate relationship I have with the South, which is my native culture. It's not that I carry around with me a burden of shame and an "I've got to show them" competitive mentality, as Coates does with reference to blackness. Living in the North for so long -- and culturally speaking, Washington DC and South Florida are the North -- made me appreciate what was deeply good about the South. That's something I didn't see when I was a young man, and could only see its flaws. Maybe I came to terms with my inner redneck; in any case, I came to see rednecks with a lot more nuance than I did before. And being around Northern white people, so many of whom were full of self-congratulation about their social progressivism, not realizing how provincial and bigoted they were, made me profoundly identify with Randy Newman's famous satirical song "Rednecks." It really is true, I think, that the only kind of person its perfectly safe to piss on in smart company is white working-class Southerners. "Sweet Home Alabama" is the classic, anthemic f-you by people who don't think they have a damned thing to be ashamed of. I love this song because it makes me forget that I chose to leave, and am something of a fraud and a poseur because of it.

And yet, when the South keeps coming up last in many quality of life measures -- health, education, unwed births, etc. -- it's hard to deny that there's something particularly wrong with us. It's redneck culture -- white rednecks and black rednecks both, people who live chaotic lives, dwell on grievance and resentment, and despise boring bourgeois standards of sobriety, order and respectability. It seems like we can't overcome it. A fellow Southern exile once said to me that it's so easy to love where we're from when we don't live there, because we can edit out the stuff that's hard to live with. That's very true. And yet, I confess it's hard for me to feel quite at home anywhere else. When I go back to visit, there's something about the place and its people I dearly love, and treasure as part of myself. I don't feel, as Coates does about black folks, a sense of shame over the woebegone state of Southern whites, or of Louisiana life. But then again, unlike Coates, I don't live with it. I chose to separate myself from it (and anybody who thinks Dallas is the South is sadly mistaken; it's the southernmost Western city). Shame motivates Coates and his writing, but for me, it's a sense of cultural rootlessness, and a craving for a sense of belonging to a place. Too much has happened to me over the years to form the kind of man that I am to make me feel at home in my actual homeland. And yet, when I'm away from Louisiana, I think about it a lot, and long for it. True story: I used to walk around Brooklyn romanticizing Louisiana, then go back to Louisiana and after a few days, start pining for my old borough home in Yankee Babylon.

For Coates, shame. For me, displacement and a resulting craving for authenticity. But the fact that I chose displacement and exile adds a shake of shame about disloyalty into the cocktail too. Coates ends: "And this is what I think about, almost always,before I write. I think about showing them. I think about showing myself." Me, I don't have anybody to show anything to (this was the greatest gift living and working in New York City gave me). When I sit down to write, almost always I think not about showing myself, but about finding myself.

An astonishing piece of truth-telling by a middle-class black woman, reflecting on the gang beating of the Chicago student last week. Excerpt:

That's because the Derrion Albert video told the world something that we already knew, but rarely spoke aloud: Too many black Americans aren't safe in their own neighborhoods.

When I think about Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death outside his Chicago high school on Sept. 24, I think about the very things my dad was working to protect us from when my siblings and I were growing up in the early '90s. Our home was in Beechview, at the time a quiet, mostly white, working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It made us the butt of jokes from a lot of our black friends, who lived on the east side of town. "No one can find your house!" they'd say. "Y'all live waaaaaaaay over there! Y'all live with the white folks!"

But living with the black folks--in Homewood, Wilkinsburg, East Liberty or on the Hill--was not an option in my parents' eyes. Yeah, our people lived there--but so did the local news.

More:

Dad didn't mind being the occasional butt of jokes for living among the "others"--because at least in our home, we didn't have to try to sleep amid sirens and gunshots. And he didn't have to worry about whether his children would make it home. In his eyes, the best way to stay alive was to stay out.

We loved our people, but we couldn't live with them.

Because she is black, Veronica-Marche Miller, the author of this piece, can say something obvious in public that non-blacks cannot: middle-class people of all races want to move far away from poor black people because they're afraid of violence, which is itself a result of familial, moral and cultural decay endemic in the black community in this country. A similar dynamic is playing out among poor and working-class Hispanics. Everybody knows this, but few people talk about it openly.

I live on a street with black and Hispanic and white people, all of us middle class to lower middle class. It's a good place to live. But we all live close enough to the 'hood to hear gunshots in the near distance from time to time, and to see gang graffiti on occasion. If I thought that blight was moving closer, you'd better believe I'd take my family and go. And so would my middle-class black neighbor. When it comes to safety and one's children, political and racial orthodoxies go by the wayside. If my choice was to live in a neighborhood of poor white people who were violent and otherwise dysfunctional, or a middle-class all-black neighborhood, I wouldn't be able to get to the black neighborhood fast enough, even if my black neighbors were unwelcoming. Nothing is more important to me than my family's safety. And if it was, i wouldn't be the husband and father I'm supposed to be. Neither would Veronica-Marche Miller's father. One of the evils of segregation was that it forced minorities who had solid bourgeois values to remain in place instead of getting out to places of safety.

On the other hand, is it possible to make a plausible case that by forcing the respectable black middle class to remain geographically tied to place, that middle class provided a countervailing force to the forces of decay and despair? I remember once riding in a taxi through a down-at-the-heels part of Washington, DC. The older black man driving me complained bitterly about how all of this used to be a thriving neighborhood back when he was a young man, in spite of segregation. In fact, though I don't recall the specifics of what he said -- this was the early 1990s -- my impression was that he was acutely aware of the ironic likelihood that the neighborhood held together as it did because of segregation. As soon as it became possible for black folks to move, those with means did.

Anyway, when poor or working-class white people pick up and move to a better neighborhood, they aren't made to carry with them the burden of racial or class betrayal. It's my impression that upwardly mobile black people don't have that liberty -- that, like Miller's father, they have to withstand taunts from other blacks that they are sellouts. Am I wrong?