The rise of the smartphone has made it easy to pretend you’re not a tourist. A befuddled backpacker with a clunky camera on his neck and a guidebook on the table, holding a map upside down? Not something you see so much these days, because the functions of those objects have all been absorbed by our handsets.
If you want to feel like a local in a new city, however, it’s time to pick up a book again. Specifically, an architecture guide. Don’t let the name turn you off; there is no jargon in these tall, narrow paperbacks. Sure, they’ll tell you who designed which structure. But more often than not, they answer a more fundamental question that I find myself asking every time I’m in a new place: What is that thing? Why was it built, and when, and for whom? Providing this context is the core purpose of the architecture guide, and it unlocks a deep sense of where you are.
Yet all this – the dedication to a free and suitable space for news and discourse, the emphasis on independence, openness and civility – contains perhaps the biggest lesson the history of the coffeehouse can impart. The coffeehouses fundamentally served their customers because, whether in 18th-century London, 19th-century Paris, early-20th-century Vienna or elsewhere, theirs was a fiercely competitive market. Typically, the establishment of one coffeehouse was followed by many more nearby, all competing for an extremely mobile clientele. Some advertised the superior quality of their coffee, but this was secondary (the coffeehouse addict Pepys did not even like the taste of the drink) to the much more existential competition to offer the most convivial and lively environment for reading and discussion.
Now here’s something you don’t come across every day: a mash-up of a Western, a serial-killer mystery and a feminist-inflected tale of life in a bordello. But Jane Smiley’s “A Dangerous Business” is all that — and, amazingly, it works.
The Belovéd is here, at his old desk, in the dark wood attic of the mind—
A starling sits in a chair, a student who brought a poem, learning love’s mind.