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Buzz Bissinger on the American City and the University Press As I prepared remarks for tonight, I became acutely aware that I am standing in front of a very serious and thoughtful and academic and literate group. Given that my most recent book, Three Nights in August, is about major league baseball, this is not something that I have had to particularly worry about in recent speeches. I took a look at the various workshops that have been held here the past several days in conjunction with your annual meeting and I was thoroughly impressed—printing in China, the politics of publishing, organizational models for electronic publishing projects. There was one in particular that interested me—trends in book reviews. I wish I had been a participant at that, because, given that I recently had a book published, I think I can tell you what trends reviewers are likely to follow—idiocy, stupidity, gratuitous negativity, thoughtlessness, laziness and intellectual sloth—in other words a perfect mirror of American culture as it stands today. In thinking about what to say tonight, I also found myself curious about the role that university presses have had in my own life as a reporter and researcher. My second book, A Prayer for the City and published by Random House in 1998, was about urban America through the eyes of Philadelphia in the early 1990s and its wonderful maverick mayor Ed Rendell, now the governor of Pennsylvania. It is because of that book that I am honored to be here tonight, to talk about the American city in general and the city of Philadelphia in particular. Rendell gave me unlimited access to he and his administration during the entirety of his first term from 1992 to 1996. I wanted the access to humanize and personalize the usually impersonal process of politics. The American city at the time was also terribly on the skids—terrible crime, crack, homelessness, bankrupt budgets. No city faced a worse problem than Philadelphia, and I wondered if it was possible for a mayor, a single man, to truly change anything. I wasn’t as interested in the political process of Ed Rendell as I was in his personality, and I have to say that I lucked out in picking the right subject. I had known Ed Rendell before when he had been the district attorney for the city. But I really didn’t know him that well. I had no idea how candid he would be, how honest, but I gained an inkling early in the research. Ed became instantly popular in a city that tends not to like anyone for very long. He had a rock star quality. Voters loved him. People loved him. Everybody loved him and I asked him how that felt, to which he replied: “If voters have a choice between Jesus, Mohommed and Moses, 50 percent would say, ‘Can't we get someone else?'” I gained a further inkling when Ed looked at me in the privacy of his office one day and let me in on the secret of being a good politician: “Ninety percent of my life is spent on my hands and knees sucking other politicians off to keep them happy.” I also found that Ed had a keen sense of the narrative drama that all writers need to tell their stories. During the time I was with him, there came a very tense moment when there was a killing of a black man in a neighborhood of the city by whites. The outrage was appropriate, and certain leaders in the city insisted on having Louis Farrakhan speak at a church. It was an obviously difficult moment for the mayor, but he insisted that Farrakhan be allowed to speak. Then he looked at me and admitted that he had an ulterior motive, given that he knew, just as I did, that a serious book about the American city didn’t have much shot at commercial success given that 20 percent of the country believes that weapons of mass destruction were in fact found in Iraq: “If you’re lucky, there will be violence at the church. Someone will take a shot at Farrakhan. The bullet will miss and will hit me instead. I will die in the church altar and then at least you will have a good ending for your book.” Being a writer first and foremost, I looked at the mayor and said: “God, that would be great.” Obviously, I had no shortage of personality in Ed Rendell as mayor of the American city. But I did want to write something serious. I wanted to learn about the American city, the tides and trends of it, where it had headed and where it might be heading, and I never could have done this book without the role of our university presses. In scanning the bibliography for A Prayer for the City, I am particularly struck by how many books published by the presses that you represent so deeply influenced me:
So I am truly indebted to all of you. Without your commitment to publishing, real publishing, without your commitment to research and intellectual thought, A Prayer for the City would have been a shell of a book, a one-man comedy club instead of an attempt to pull the curtain back on the urban dilemma that faced us in the 1990s. As I said earlier, American cities were on the skids when I began this book in 1992. The problems seemed insolvable, and I didn’t really think that any mayor, no matter how tireless or charismatic or smart, could make a lasting difference. But as the research continued, I realized how wrong I was. Ed Rendell made an incredible difference, and so did his mayoral brethren in American city after American city: Giuliani in New York, Richard Daley in Chicago, Neil Goldsmith in Indianapolis, Dick Riordan in Los Angeles, White in Cleveland, Archer in Detroit. When we look back on the political era of the 1990s, I don’t think we will remember it as the era of the Clintons, but as the era of the American mayor, as fine a collection of politicians as has ever been assembled, empowered by creativity and out-of-the-box thinking and the idea that hope could be grown out of the hopelessness. There was no federal urban policy then, just as there sure as hell isn’t any now, so these mayors also benefited from being able to do whatever the hell they wanted. The American city of today is vastly different than the American city that existed in the early 1990s. Downtowns are booming. Condo conversions are off the charts. Nightlife and restaurants thrive. People who moved out to the suburbs are moving back in droves. It is heady and exciting, miraculous, wonderful. It is good news, but I fear that there is a dangerous and dark cloud behind the shiny façade of the newest Hard Rock Café and W Hotel. Fifty years from now, will every building in America house a Starbucks? We all have a tendency in life to romanticize what we don’t have and bemoan what we do. It applies to jobs, to career, to marriage, definitely to sex, and to the American city. Maybe I am being too negative, but I worry that the downtown explosion of the American city has created a division of haves and have-nots deeper and wider than ever before. I worry that in the thirst to build another new retail urban development, the pockets of poverty that still exist in every city, America’s greatest national disgrace, have become more invisible than ever with no attention paid to them whatsoever. I worry about the Disneyland effect in the American city. I worry that what makes a city a city, variation and difference and old with new and new with old, what Jane Jacobs so wonderfully described as the “sidewalk ballet,” has given way to too much standard gleam and too much standard glitter and too many clean lines, androgynous shopping malls without roofs, gated communities without gates. It’s why I hate what was done to 42nd Street and Times Square, because as a child growing up in New York City, nothing was more exciting or illicit or taboo and affected the senses as walking up and down that chaotic filthy crazy fantastic swath of 42nd Street. It’s why I hate what has been done to Soho, one overpriced store and gallery after another. It’s why I worry about the condo craze in Chicago, huge islands of wealth for the privileged with no integration with the rest of the city, much less any diversity. It’s why I worry that if the middle of the night you exchanged the downtowns of Cleveland and Kansas City and Charlotte and Milwaukee, nobody would know the difference. It’s also why I don’t worry about Los Angeles or Phoenix, because they were always hopeless to begin with. And it’s why I love Philadelphia, not America’s biggest city, not its most exciting one, but its most authentic one. To me at least, no city has more exciting physical juxtapositions. No city has more retained its heart and soul. Under Ed Rendell, Philadelphia grew up. It has become fun and exciting. It has a thriving night life, and that renaissance has continued. Housing prices downtown have skyrocketed and reservations at good restaurants is a matter of whom you know. But the city has not lost its soul. I can tell from the program that you have been busy the past several days, very busy. Most of you will go home tomorrow, but if you have an hour or two before you leave, take a walk down to Old City. It’s just a few blocks from the major hotels, and you will get a feel of what I am talking about. It is an area of the city that has been remade and revived. It has become cool, hip, filled with galleries and restaurants. But the soul of Old City has not been lost. It has not been repaved by some developer. There are mattress stores next to fancy furniture stores; used book shops next to chic boutiques. You can buy a chair for your living room for a thousand dollars and you can get your pants hemmed by a first-generation Italian immigrant for ten bucks. You can gorge on the latest-model martini or go the luncheonette and grab a Rolling Rock. You can still feel the origins of the city, its working class heart and soul, as you walk around. It still arouses the senses in all sorts of ways, things maybe you expect but things you never expect, what life is about, what the American city is about and should be about—diversity physical and social, heart, soul, beauty, grit, despair, delight. Are we in permanent danger of losing that? I don’t know and I don’t presume to know but I do know this—whatever the future of the American city, whatever America’s future is, it will continue to be laid out in the pages of the books that all of you publish. This is a tough time in American culture, a terrible time really. Disinformation has become information. Ignorance has become not just a way of life but a deliberate political philosophy. Want to get your head chopped off in an argument? Be informed. We can bemoan it, and we should bemoan it. We can worry about it, and we should worry about it. But we as a society will not make it if we cave in to our age of ignorance. We must fight. We must persevere, which is why the work that all of you do, as hard as it may be to do, is so crucial. So I thank you. Because what would we be as a nation without incisive thought, without rigid intellectual thought, without rigorous academic analysis? I think we all know the answer. Donald Trump. This talk was originally delivered to the Association of American University Preses on Saturday, June 18, 2005, in Philadelphia, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.
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