Pynchon : Sprawling toward Bethlehem.

[Erik T. Burns]

foax:
possibly of interest
etb

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Sprawling toward Bethlehem.
Jeffery, Clara
266 Words
01 July 2004
Mother Jones
88
ISSN: 0362-8841; Volume 29; Issue 4
English
Copyright 2004 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

A Field Guide to Sprawl By Dolores Hayden. Photographs by Jim Wark W.W.
Norton. $24.95.

In The Crying of Lot 49--Thomas Pynchon's 1966 satire of suburbia and its
discontents--Oedipa Maas looks down "onto a vast sprawl of houses which had
grown up all together, like a well-tended crop" and is reminded of her first
peek inside a transistor radio. "The ordered swirl of houses and streets,
from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected,
astonishing clarity as the circuit card had." Sprawl was a relatively
limited phenomenon then; today it is omnipresent, and epiphanies about it
are hard to come by. Nevertheless, Yale professor Dolores Hayden has, with a
pinch of Pynchon, written g Field Guide to Sprawl in hopes of prompting a
re-examination of what freeway subsidies, commercial-property-tax waivers,
and exclusionary developments have wrought. By pairing the aerial
photography of Jim Wark with her own devil's dictionary of 51 terms--from
"alligator" (a failed subdivision) to "zoomburb" (think Sun City,
Arizona)--Hayden makes an often depressing and wonkish subject lively and
provocative. Some of her terms are clever, like "privatopia" (gated
community), while others feel a bit tired, but no matter. In the end, it is
Wark's bird's-eye view that allows one to see anew what has been festering
all around us. By book's end, the reader, much like Ms. Maas, cannot help
but imagine that sprawl is no accident, but a vast conspiracy of banality.


COPYRIGHT 2004 Foundation for National Progress