terra incognita

yesterday's new york times promised "a map of every building in the united states" in, seemingly, an "interactive feature" and "a poster sized view of one of six major cities, depending on where you live" in today's paper...

and so they did...a stunning four page fold out map of chicago and a significant chunk of its western suburbs delivered to my doorstep down here in back-yard goat tending indiana...the boondocks where cornfields and apple orchards ( and oh my, there is an entire post about fucking orchards just waiting to be written ) abound...

unfortunately the map ends abruptly at the state line and indiana becomes terra incognita for the urbane west of the border...no guide to those rural wonders is deemed necessary by the editors of the times in their profound urban bias..the "new urbanism" is something they adore, subconsciously if not overtly, and if it isn't urban it is mostly disdained...

and there are rural areas...once you get south of the subdivisions of mcmansions alive with folks who have fled the big city and its taxes and it's politics and what is quaintly termed "urban blight" and made a new home in the boonies...that is a soybean field ready to harvest for the unfamiliar...

there's dense yellow # 2 down here as well...feed stock for all those extruded hot pockets and mountain dew that are ubiquitous...even in chicago...

i actually ran across farmer brown harvesting some of that corn yesterday...keeping the industrial food pipeline flowing...from conagra, staley's, and nestle to your table...which brings us to the actual point of this screed ( about time, right? )..in "the structures of everyday life" fenand braudel wrote "the town only exists in relation to a form of life lower than its own...there is no town, no townlet without its villages, its scrap of rural life attached; no town that does not impose upon its hinterland the amenities of its market.."...what braudel fails to mention is that, in their urban bigotry, the "new urbanists" and city dwellers fail to recognize that no city is self-sufficient...solar panels and vertical farms aside they do not produce anywhere near the material support their existence demands...they are delusional in their denial of what economists would term "externals"...braudel is correct...the city does not exist without its "scrap of rural life"...he simply neglects to factor in the city's preeminence as sink for resources and an epicenter of greed...chicago became wealthy by underpaying rural produces and over charging urban consumers..i have no use for cities or urbanist fantasies...old wendell berry is far too utopian in his view of the rural life...his is a bias in the other direction...still...a more palatable vision that that of the times.

a scrap of rural life

"there is no town, no townlet without its villages, its scrap of rural life attached: no town that does not impose upon its hinterland the amenities of its market, the use of its shops, its wights and measures, its moneylenders, its lawyers...it has to dominate an empire however tiny, to exist." fernand braudel. "the structures of everyday life: civilization and capitalism 15th-18th century, volume 1._________________________well...fernand is an historian and like all historians he is biased...the honest ones share their biases upfront and i have to admit fernand puts his in the title...credit where it's due...and he highlights the exploitative nature of capitalism in that quote in masterful fashion...unwittingly perhaps...he is a booster of capitalism form page one and that howler was probably written in all admiration...his contention that "towns are like electrical transformers" holds water too...because they do not produce their own energy...they get it from outside...no town is self-supporting...that's why it has to "dominate" that "scrap of rural life"...and it does so by setting up an extractive system to take as much as possible with as little return as it can give...summed up nicely in the list of things the town must "impose" on the "hinterland" to survive...like "the amenities of its market, the use of its shops, its weights and measures, its moneylenders, its lawyers..." ( "take back everything you can" william s burroughs. deposition: testimony concerning a sickness. )his honesty in exposing the exploitative nature of capital is, i suspect, accidental...he is too innocent for the history business...an ardent lover exposed as a fool...