Larry Bennett, editor of Reclaiming Modernity: Essays on a Paradoxical Nostalgia, answers questions about his new book.
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
As I indicate in the Preface to Reclaiming Modernity, there was a series of small steps that brought me to writing the book. But the particular, near to the commencement of writing jolt came from press reports about fights over whether or not to save modernist buildings. I became fascinated with the pros/cons of these often very contentious public squabbles. My inclination, I suppose, is to presume that most buildings, simply as an environmental matter, should be saved rather than demolished and replaced. But I was also aware that in some cases the demolition advocates made strong cases for why some modernist structures should be jettisoned. Ultimately, this was the spark for my interest in nostalgia for modernity: whether or not there were justifications for saving, say, Brutalist buildings, apart from stylistic preference.
Q: What is the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your book?
I won’t call it quite a “discovery,” but in researching contemporary Detroit—one of the subjects of Chapters 3 and 5—I became aware of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, his remarkable re-imagination of his home street in Detroit. Heidelberg Street, like so much of residential Detroit, had suffered from terrible physical decay by the 1980s, and Tyree and one of his relatives began to collect discarded toys and other household items and use these cast-off materials to “redesign” the street. Is this assemblage nightmarish, visionary? Certainly there is a component of nostalgia that contributes to its uniqueness. For his part, Tyree Guthrie, in effect, remade himself as an artist through this project. In various ways the Heidelberg Project embodies the core concerns that I brought to my text.
Q: What myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your book will help readers unlearn?
I suppose I’ll stick with Detroit in answering this question. I would like readers to realize that seemingly dead or obsolete places like Detroit are neither dead nor obsolete, and beyond that, that there are Detroiters actively engaged in pushing their city through to its next phase of life…whatever that may be.
Q: Which part of the publishing process did you find the most interesting?
I have to say that the manuscript review process is the most interesting part of the process. One wants reviewers to like one’s work, but at the same time, as a writer I recognize that different reviewers bring different attitudes, expertise, and levels of interest to the process. There are critical reactions that, as a writer, I just have to attribute to a poor fit between my aims and skills and the attitude/expertise/level
of interest of the reviewer. In other instances, I can learn from very critical commentary, that is, commentary that may find fault with my approach but which “comes halfway” by reckoning with my text in a way that is consonant with my aims as the writer. You can learn from criticism, by my oh my it is at times very hard on one’s ego.
Q: What is your advice to scholars/authors who want to take on a similar project?
Give yourself plenty of time, and when you feel comfortable, share your ideas, and if you are far enough along, your words, with people whose judgment you can trust. Writing in a vacuum is to be avoided.
Q: What do you like to read/watch/or listen to for fun?
My “entertainment” preferences are, I suppose, wide-ranging. If I don’t screen/rescreen an Alfred Hitchcock film every six months or so, I feel deprived. In general I can watch and enjoy any film noir from the 1940s/50s. I love the music of Charles Mingus and had the oddest of experiences seeing/hearing him once perform, on what at the time in New York City was called the “Jazzmobile,” a truck fitted out with a “stage” on its rear flatbed. At the time, I was a graduate student sitting, as I recall, mournfully, in Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan…and there it was: the Jazzmoble with Mingus and the remarkable group of musicians in his jazz workshop of the late 60s/early 70s. What this group played over the next 30/45 minutes utterly washed away my self-pitying mood. Perhaps I have just specified an instance of nostalgia for modernity.
Larry Bennett is a professor emeritus at DePaul University and the author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism.