reading traffic ideas cars books
right: ‘On Reading in Public’ on Park(ing) Day - Portage Avenue, Winnipeg Manitoba. September 20, 2013 facing page: left: Ted Landrum,WORDpark, a graphic poem right top: André Kertész,‘Dog Walker and Book Vendors, Paris 1927’. ©Estate of André Kertész/ Higher Pictures middle: André Kertész, ‘Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 1928’ ©Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures bottom: André Kertész, ‘Paris, 1928’ ©Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures 1
reading in public | traffic in ideas not cars by ted landrum
park(ing) day word park The above snapshot poses a commonplace hypothesis, in situ and à la mode : vital cities have ever increasing kinds and rates of traffic pulsing through intertwining sites of resilience, heterogeneity and exchange. Sometimes we manage to go along with this Heraclitian traffic, finding ourselves cooperatively empowered (both individually and socially) by its ostensibly progressive yet inherently turbulent and ambiguous forces. Just as often, we must stand off at a distance, until, merging cautiously, we find our place amid the contending, creative rhythms of an ever-developing urban flux. If, eventually, one wakens to another city more ethically and culturally troubling than it is technically and aesthetically sophisticated, then some portion of us might (however gladly or gruffly) go against its homogenising thrust. Here, in Winnipeg, or rather this time, in September, it was not just the annual Park(ing) Day activity that held my attention along central Canada’s famous Portage Avenue, but also Marshall Berman’s passionately anti-urbicide and modernolatry- bashing text All That is Solid Melts into Air , written between 1978 and 1982. His words remain relevant: The tragic irony of modernist urbanism is that its triumph has helped to destroy the very urban life it hoped to set free. 2
Meanwhile, buzzing past the telltale traffic cone, comes yet another #20 bus, barrelling unhindered through the gauntlet of well-intentioned Park(ing) Day pop-up stalls toward one of its most popular stops, Portage Place — the under-appreciated downtown shopping mall where more radical variations of the sort of counter-culture loitering I am indulging in, above, are forcibly prohibited. The graphic poem (opposite), WORDpark , was written in anticipation of two civic festivals overlapping by several busy days: the Winnipeg Design Festival – organisers of this year’s Park(ing) Day, and Thin Air – the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival. Since Park(ing) Day happened to fall on the opening day of the literary festival, I decided to participate in both events, and to follow through with the WORDpark project intiatied by the poem. I did so by occupying several of the pop-up parkettes: as a curious interpreter of them, as someone who enjoys reading in public, as an amateur photographer aspiring to the example of Andrés Kertész, as a mild mannered agitator advocating for print culture over car culture, as a somewhat didactic but uninhibited person who happens to live in the neighbourhood by choice without a car, and, finally, simply as a member of the public trying to participate in the festival that every city has always aspired to be. c
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1 André Kertész, On Reading . New York: W W Norton, 2008
2 Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York & London: Penguin, 1988. p169
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