Charles Zoller

Charles Zoller (1854-1934) was a successful furniture dealer from Rochester, NY. home of the Eastman-Kodak Company. He was one of the earliest Americans to use the autochrome color process - 1907 - and an accomplished amateur photographer. Seaside Resort, from the International Center for Photography in Rochester is undated and the location is, as yet, unverified. A perfect summer image.

Morocco

"Husbands in our country are born with an instinct for betrayal."

If most readers know anything of Morocco, it is the bizarre erotic fantasies of American expatriate Paul Bowles's 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. In stark contrast is the first novel written by a Moroccan woman (and in Arabic rather than the colonial French) to be translated into English. The Year of the Elephant explores a classic literary theme: the uneasy interplay between local traditions and global modernism. Abouzeid examine this patriarchal society's devaluation of women through themes of work and of the difficulties of male/female relationships. Here and in The Last Chapter, Abouzeid draws parallels between individuals struggling for independence with the forces of prejudice and poverty and the struggles of Morocco to create a place for itelf in a world largely shaped by outside forces. History is always a silent mover in her writing which is spare but not doctrinaire.

Leila Abouzied (b. 1950) is the daughter of an interpreter for Morocco's former colonial government. A university graduate in London, Abouzeid has worked as a radio and television journalist before turning to writing full time in1992.

Dr, Fatema Mernissi (b. 1940) is a sociologist who grew up in the harem of a Moroccan household during the 1940's and early 1950's, a world in which the family employed a doorman to prevent the women from leaving the house without permission from their husbands, a world of extended families living under one roof. Dreams of Trespass is often poetic in its descriptions of this claustrophobic family life, making the reader feel the sensations of light, heat, tart and sweet, that leaven the boredom of daily life. A graduate of the Sorbonne and former consultant to UNESCO, Mernissi currently teaches at Mohammed V University in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat.For a richer appreciation of these literary works, French writer Annette Solyst's book Morocco is an enjoyable and colorful introduction to the history and geography, art and architecture, local foods and customs.

Unlike many of its neighbors, Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire, only subjected to Spanish and French incursions late in the 19th century that resulted in a joint Protectorate signed in 1912, that ended the Sultan's resistance movement. The Casablanca Massacre of 1954 re3ignited the independence movement, which Zahra, in The Year of the Elephant, takes part in. Independence came in 1956, with the Moroccan Royal Family participating in the struggle. While the French acted as colonial administrators, they boasted that they were training future leaders for the country, but at the time of independence there were only forty college graduates and none of them were women. Indeed, only six women had secondary school diplomas. For tactical reasons, the French had not encouraged a move away the traditions of the local dynasties. Thus, they built a modern infrastructure of cities and roads, but did not foster an education system.

The multi-colored arabesques of the glazed pottery of Fez, , the souks of Marrakech with its spices and foodstuffs are the products of their unique geography, located on the northwest tip of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, a land of coastal plains, separated from the Sahara desert by the Atlas Mountains.

THE YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT by Layl Abuzeid, translated by Barbara Parmenter Austin, University of Texas Press: FIC ABU

THE LAST CHAPTER by Leila Abu Zayd, translated by Leila Abuzeid & John Liechety Cairo, American University Press: 2000 FIC ABU

DREAMS OF TRESPASS by Fatema Mernissi Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley: 1994
964.008 MER

MOROCCO b y Annette Solyst New York, Barnes & Noble Books: 2000 916.4 SOL

Leon Dabo: Evening On The Hudson

Evening on the Hudson by Leon Dabo, 1909, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Putting Parsley Around A Pig

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL by Dolores Hayden

New York, W. W. Norton: 2004 307.76 HAY

You are looking at an aerial photograph of a golf course in Palm Desert, California. The 'parsley' is the pink foliage that protects golfers from seeing the ugliness of the surrounding area. "Putting parsley around a pig" is a term used to describe how developers disguise bad projects.

Architect and historian Dolores Hayden's field guide to development run amok, illustrated by Jim Wark's aerial photography makes appalling, and, at the same time, humorous reading - gallows humor, that is. Who knew that urban planners were such a zany bunch? Maybe it's to keep from weeping at the desecration of the landscape, the trash buildings that sprout relentlessly, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs and subsidies, all of which Hayden lays out in her useful introduction.

But you will remember what you've read because of the nicknames. Zoomburbs are suburbs that grow even more metatastically than Boomburbs. They are filled with Tract Mansions and Starter Castles and for the less well-to-do there are Snout-Houses (pigs get little respect from planners), those disorienting rows of garages jutting out from the houses that are barely visible behind them. New gated communities are Privatopias and for those who like their money and their homes old, there are Valhallas, charming old towns that attract the new rich, who proceed to engulf what first attracted them with...you guessed it...Tear-Downs and Starter Castles. And for your home away from home, there's the Rural Slammer, should you be unlucky enough to go to one of those new prisons.
Commercial developments have their own terms of art. In this lingo, a Duck is a building that looks like what is being sold within, as in the lemonade stand in the shape of a lemon. Billboards are known as Litter On A Stick. And Ground Cover is not pachysandra but, rather, easily bulldozable large scale buildings like self-storage colonies.

And then there are the acronyms. Most of us are familiar with NIMBY, meaning 'not in my back yard.' Add to that LULU, a locally unwanted land use with consequences unforeseen when it was approved, and TOAD, a temporarily obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. Anyplace experiencing hard economic times will be home to many TOADs.
If, after reading A Field Guide To Sprawl, you want to find out more, visit http://www.doloreshayden.com/.