The Demise of Stacey's Bookstore

I am currently reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I am only half way through, but the book already has me seeing cities through different eyes. The story of Stacey's Bookstore is a case in point.

---

In March of this year, Stacey's Bookstore, not long after celebrating its 85th year of existence as an independent bookstore, closed its doors for good. I used to frequent Stacey's. On the second floor, there was a large sunlit reading area where readers could read free of pressure to consume. No Starbucks or Seattle's Best attached. The reading area was often arrayed with rows of seats for the appearance of guest authors and a weekly lecture series. Employees were most often middle-aged or older, well-read individuals who were long-time San Franciscans and could speak passionately about their favorite titles or reading spots in the city. As someone who wants eventually to be a bookstore proprietor, I appreciated Stacey's as a cultural asset, a place that strove to be a community center, a cultural hub in addition to being a place to buy books.

When I first saw signs for the clearance sale that anticipated the store's closing, I felt along with other loyal patrons that something special was being lost. It was easy to understand, though. The economy was in shambles. Online retailing had long ago changed the landscape of brick-and-mortar book sales. And how was a mom-and-pop store supposed to compete with national chains such as Borders or Barnes & Noble? It was easy to cast Stacey's Bookstore as the unhappy victim of changing economic and social circumstances, and that is precisely how the story was reported.

Now, reading Jacobs' book, I am beginning to understand the demise of Stacey's Bookstore in a new light. Stacey's Bookstore, located in San Francisco's Financial District, was doomed to failure from the get-go as a result of its specific location in San Francisco's urban fabric. What now seems remarkable to me is that the bookstore lasted as long as it did. Applying the analytical framework developed by Jacobs in her book, two factors are prominent:

1) The Financial District, as one might infer from its name, is not a district that boasts great functional diversity. People work in the Financial District. One does not go to the Financial District for entertainment or commerce or for its cultural vitality, and one certainly does not live there. The result is extremely lopsided pedestrian traffic. Venture into the Financial District Monday through Friday nine to five and it feels quite lively, but it feels quite like a ghost town outside standard work hours and weekdays. Business at Stacey's was premised on weekday noontime and after-work pedestrian traffic. That leaves for a lot of dead hours in between, and it is extremely difficult to sustain a bookstore let alone a cultural hub in this context.

2) Aged buildings in the Financial District are nonexistent. As pictures show, Stacey's Bookstore resided in a building that looks and feels very new, surrounded by office buildings that also look and feel very new. The advantage of aged buildings in cities is that they usually require lower capital and maintenance costs, demanding lower rent. As a result, aged buildings are better able to support businesses with lower profit margins, ideal for small independent establishments. Without aged buildings, you get a lot of franchise stores like Quizno's, Chipotle, Subway or Staples. As Jacobs writes, "great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes" (212). No wonder then that the Beat writers hung out at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.

In short, the Financial District is not really a place that is equipped to support a viable center for cultural activity. This reality is a property of the city, its layout and urban planning. The demise of Stacey's Bookstore can in large part be understood by the overwhelming dullness of San Francisco's Financial District. Its vacated space remains vacant.

Hating on Agribusiness

It's so easy to hate on agribusiness these days. Such industrial behemoths as Monsanto and Cargill, they are the bullies in our story, the Goliaths, the colonial oppressors against whom it is our moral obligation to fight the good fight. They've infiltrated Washington, D.C. with their lobbyists, co-opted the political process, insulated themselves from popular pressure in order to pursue their single-minded pursuit of profit. They pillage our planet with their environmentally destructive practices; they ignore the welfare of animals, workers and family farms; they feed the masses with diabetes-inducing Frankenfood, helping us along in our journey to exploding the national healthcare budget. Oh, they are so evil. It is so, so easy to hate on agribusiness.

Hating on agribusiness has a long history, beginning with Upton Sinclair's muckraking in The Jungle. More recently, books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillema, documentary films such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc. have helped fan popular resentment of agribusiness. But as with all such linear, good versus evil stories, we should view this tale, which has so captivated popular imagination, with some amount of skepticism.

Rather than blindly throw our weight behind Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, the organic food movement or small-scale farms or the holistic, wholesome grass farming methods of individuals such as Joel Salatin, we should listen to the views of dissenters. For many environmentalists, the ruthless efficiency of agribusiness and the use of genetically engineered crops are in fact an environmental imperative. James Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia, writes:

As I have said before, we cannot farm more than about half the Earth's land surface without impairing Gaia's capacity to keep a comfortable planet. Sadly, at our present numbers the lower productivity of organic farms compared with intensive agriculture makes it a dubious enterprise. (121)

Lovelock goes on to argue that we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that all "man-made chemicals" are harmful with "natural chemicals" somehow beyond reproach and always salutary. Stewart Brand, in a recent TED Talk, echoes these concerns about the too-easy categorization of agricultural methods and the land-intensity of agriculture as he comes out strongly in favor of genetically engineered crops. What to do about these concerns that detract from the linear simplicity of the story told by agribusiness-haters?

As ever, a Manichean worldview serves us poorly. There are never easy solutions and always trade-offs to be weighed and considered...

What I've Read This Year

Once you graduate from college, you no longer have a syllabus to dictate your reading material. During my first year out of college, I read books that had some way or another found their way onto my bookshelf in previous years but remained unread. The result was a fairly random selection of books with little in terms of coherence or focus.

The trouble with a random selection of books is that it becomes difficult to contextualize what you are reading. Context is precisely what a course syllabus provides, and context is what most enables you to learn and achieve a balanced perspective on a topic. In an effort to increase the efficacy of my reading, I have tried recently to choose books that at least participate in the same conversations. From the past eight months or so, this is what I have read chronologically:

The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones
The Subprime Solution, Robert Shiller
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Iliad, Homer
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins
Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein

The dominance of nonfiction in this reading selection is interesting to me, and I suppose this reflects a change in my tastes and priorities. The fiction I've read has been pretty random, but the nonfiction can be organized according to a number of themes that I find myself caring about more and more. These themes include: 1) sustainability and today's environmental movement; 2) development economics; and 3) behavioral economics.

I want to fashion my future reading lists according to these three broad themes (with the occasional novel to satisfy my cravings for fiction). Next up, I have:

Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

Would love to hear suggestions. Right now, I especially want to find a book that deals with the intersection of urban planning and sustainability issues.

Nuclear Energy?

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock makes what I found to be a compelling case for nuclear energy. While I don't feel well-versed enough in the nuclear debate to comment intelligently on Lovelock's specific arguments, I was struck by his analysis of current popular resistance to nuclear energy. In particular, Lovelock quotes W.J. Nuttall's Nuclear Renaissance at length:

The real opposition to nuclear power within the public grew in the 1970s and the 1980s. It may be argued that this has been a consequence of the rise of single-issue pressure groups and youth culture. That is, as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the late 1960s grew out of earlier Civil Rights demonstrations, so the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the late 1970s arose directly from the Vietnam War protests, once that conflict had come to an end. This, however, is a rather Americanized perspective on what has been an erosion of enthusiasm for nuclear power. In Britain the defining socio-political events of relevance are those assoicated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the late 1960s and resurgently in the early 1980s. Not only was CND passionate and anti-American, but it was also fun and it was cool. This fusion of popular culture with the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s is vividly captured by the present writer's uncle Jeff Nuttall in his visceral autobiography Bomb Culture, in which he describes one CND Aldermaston March as a Carnival of Optimism: 'Protest was associated with festivity.' This important aspect of matters nuclear has only slightly attenuated with passing decades. Those advocating nuclear renaissance ignore such aspects of nuclear power at their peril. (quoted in The Revenge of Gaia, 94)

To this, Lovelock writes: "I agree with Nuttall, and it is easy to see why many greens are so anti-nuclear; they often are the children of a union between environmentalism and the CND...gradually as the Cold War intensified and the two superpowers tested larger and ever larger weapons, the all-pervasive fear of all things nuclear became widespread" (94).

While it is typically easy to view today's issues and groups in isolation of the socio-historical contexts from which they emerged, this analysis of anti-nuclear sentiment highlights the importance of taking a historical view and examining origins. This is the work that has been most thoughtfully done for the environmentalist movement (to my knowledge) by Van Jones in The Green Collar Economy, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in Break Through and by Gavin Hood in X-Men Origins.

Important stuff, I say.

Break Through

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. An excellent read. I am tempted to say that it is for me the most intellectually influential book I have read since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That statement will have to withstand the test of time, but I highly recommend the book to anybody interested in liberal politics, or politics and environmentalism in general.

Explains perfectly why I have never called myself an environmentalist. More on this later...

Goals

I attended a climate policy conference some weeks ago and I was super impressed by a bunch of the speakers but one in particular. Holmes Hummel. She is young, confident, articulate, personable, a Congressional Science Fellow who teaches at Berkeley and consults on carbon-pricing policymaking. After the conference, I reported my impressions to a friend of mine and we came up with the following life goals:

1) Be articulate.
2) Be impressive.
3) Have shit together.

Ideally by age thirty.

Zeitgeist

I watched Fight Club a couple nights ago. The last time I watched the movie I must have still been a freshman in college, so it was interesting to revisit the film.

In one scene, Tyler Durden pulls Raymond K. Hessel, some poor Asian dude, out of a convenient store and puts a gun to the back of his head. Durden--upon learning through interrogation by gunpoint that Raymond had studied biology in community college in hopes of becoming a veterinarian--issues an ultimatum: either Raymond puts himself on the path towards being a veterinarian in six weeks time or he will be hunted down and killed.

A heartening lesson from Tyler Durden with typical Brad Pitt, will-to-power, Randian undertones. The film, and its message, struck a chord in 1999 and ensuing years. It tapped into a deep strain of male anxiety about the meaninglessness of everyday work, of being a cog in corporate bureaucratic machinery, of being trapped in the value system of consumer culture. Forge the life that you want to live, mold your circumstances according to your wishes, be the chief architect of your own life. The film beats this mantra into your head with very little room for subtlety.

In 2009, though, I think the film strikes a false chord. In this great recession of ours, when rugged individuals aren't feeling so rugged, when fatalism is running high, there is a lot of respect to be had for the Raymond K. Hessels of this world, people who are making an honest living and who've adjusted rather admirably to changing circumstances. Tyler Durden, on the other hand, comes off as adolescent in his narcissism, irresponsible. Mischief? Mayhem? I'll pass.

Our zeitgeist is, in my mind, aptly captured in the 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire. D) It's written. How nice would that be?