For another, less chatty look, go here.

Richard Florida in his book Who’s Your City, suggests that there are many leaders in today’s Western world who believe that good schools, safe streets and up-to-date infrastructure – basic needs in other words  -  are all that’s needed to establishment  great communities. Everything else – recreational and arts facilities, museums, libraries – is a luxury, of  interest only to the affluent, privileged classes – yuppies. These should come only after communities become wealthy;  it’s jobs and basic services – so these leaders say – that make us rich.

Florida contends that these leaders are wrong;  that great communities -  places which make us truly happy -  exist precisely because they don’t get trapped in such zero sum game trade-offs; rather, they provide for both.  Citing several major ‘happiness’ surveys, Florida identifies five specific community attibutes: physical and economic security, basic services, leadership, openness and aesthetics (physical beauty, amenities and cultural offerings), and reveals that while all five are important, two top the list: aesthetics and basic services. There is no trade-off.

If we believe these surveys, and that the role of government is to provide not only ‘peace, order and good government,’ but also  conditions that promote happiness, then it’s time to call bullshit on Stephen Harper and others of his Library and Archives-chopping ilk; those who persist in telling us that jobs, and hospitals, and infrastructure and competitive tax rates for corporations, are the only things that count, and that culture must be placed on hold until we can afford it.

The two are equally important; one shouldn’t be financed at the expense of the other. Narrow-minded politicians and their corporate supporters, those who in many cases are complicit in and responsible for the economic mess we currently face, should not be allowed to spout their specious, dumbed-down life-and-death rhetoric without at least some push-back. If they have their way, we stand to lose whatever interest our cities may hold for creative, intelligent people who crave ( and contribute to) vibrant, cultured places in which to live.  What good is prosperity if all you’ve got are a bunch of unidimensional materialists sitting around, whose sole idea of a good time is to compete with eachother to see who can make the most money?

Sure, having a job is better than not having one; but in hard times, isn’t it just as important to have places to go to, and things to do, that will spark your curiosity, enlighten your mind, give you a new perspective on life?  This is what art and history offer. This is why the budgets of institutions connected with these worlds must not be cut.

Millenium Library

Why Norwich?

According to the Norwich Writers’ Centre website:

“Norwich has a sensational literary past, from the first battlefield dispatch (1075) to the first woman published in English (Julian of Norwich – C15th), the first recognisable novel (C16th), the first blank verse (C16th), the first printed plan of an English city (C16th), the first published parliamentary debates (Luke Hansard – C18th), the largest concentration of published dissenters, revolutionaries and social reformers (C18th /19th ) including Tom Paine and the 30 million bestseller, Anna Sewell; the first provincial library (1608), first municipality to adopt the Library Act (1850), first provincial newspaper (1701), first British MA in creative writing (the first student of the first MA was Ian McEwan (1971)…”

Time to put Norwich on your itinerary. Visit the Tourist Office here.

Looking for great, exciting writing that illuminates the cities you visit?  Then check out Oxygen Books’ innovative city-pick series featuring some of the best-ever writing on favourite world cities. It’s already been called ‘superb .. like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes’ (London Times), ‘wonderful’ (London Guardian) ‘sublime’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) and praised for its ‘super-relevant destinations’ (Lonely Planet Magazine)

Each paperback book includes over fifty writers, fiction and non-fiction, past and especially present, including newly translated writing. So far there are titles on New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin – St Petersburg, Istanbul and Jerusalem/ Tel Aviv follow soon. For more details, visit www.oxygenbooks.co.uk , ( available in North America at www.bookdepository.com ). In the meantime, enjoy a little taste of Venice, here from Henry James’ Wings of the Dove (1902):

“Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it can be at all managed–you know what I mean–some fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves, with a cook, don’t you know?–with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement. [...] Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us back to our truth of a moment ago–the fact that, more than ever, this October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship.”

Here from Jane Langston’s The Thief of Venice (1999)

“At the east end of the thronged square the Basilica of Saint Mark loomed out of the grey fog like a dream of oriental splendour. In the mist the brilliant colours of the mosaics and the marble columns seemed a little washjed out, as though every tourist snapshot had stolen here a blush of rose, there a glitter of gold. On the balustrade above the central protal the bronze horses pawed gthe mist, two with the left foot, two with the right.”

Simon Luff, Diary (2006)

“Coming out of the dim, leather-smelling cave of the handbag shop into the unique dazzle of a Venetian afternoon. Yes, it’s the light, the light and…so much else.. But the light above all. I don’t think even Canaletto got it right. Not quite.”

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice (2009)

“Piazza San Marco, so lovely in photographs or at dawn, so pigeon-congested once the day got going.”

Edmund Wilson

Paul Auster

Harlan Coben

James Fenimore Cooper

Stephen Crane

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Norman Mailer

Dorothy Parker

Philip Roth

Gay Talese

Edmund Wilson

Contrasting the young, who favour classic authors and judge ‘smaller’ less consequential contemporaries with ‘superb severity’, with those passing into adulthood, who seek the fellowship of other human beings, and pardon a lack of inspiration among contemporary writers for the sake of something that brings them closer, Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Hours in a Library’ in the Essays of Virginia Woolf  Vol 2 ( Ed.Andrew McNeillie, HBJ, 1987), writes:

“Thus to stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful that the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall. It is not perhaps so exalted. But the old hunger to know what the immortals thought has given place to a far more tolerant curiosity to know what our own generation is thinking. What do living men and women feel, what are thier houses like and what clothes do they wear, what money have they and what food do they eat, what do they love and hate, what do they see of the surrounding world, and what is the dream that fills the spaces of their active lives? They tell us all these things in their books. In them we can see as much both of the mind and of the body of our time as we have eyes for seeing.”

Apropos of this, I must confess to being a solitary youth who has taken a long time to grow up.  I still think that time, on the whole, is best spent with the greats;  however,  in recent years, contemporary poetry, Canadian in particular, has for me, grown in importance. The quest to find and celebrate that which is truly of the first order, from work which has been produced by members of ones own community,  is without doubt, a useful, fulfilling, and connecting exercise.

“Edward Thomas’s biographer Matthew Hollis gives [The Guardian's] Sarah Crown a tour of landmarks of Steep, Hampshire, where the first world war poet lived and worked. Hollis discusses Thomas’s life and writing in the tiny village and explains how the area shaped the poet’s work. He also explores the influence on Thomas of American poet Robert Frost”

When First I Came Here

Edward Thomas