The Virginia Creeper vines in the alley on the building behind us have mostly died off by now. It wasn’t a lack of ambition that did them in, it was the supply chain. Living in the city can be tough if things don’t go just right. I wrote about the verdant vines this past spring, but the heat and lack of rain have killed them now, and the bees in the building wall are struggling because they used the vines for shade and cover.

Listen, things are tough all over. The bees are just trying to keep working, but the squeeze of labor shortages and supply chain difficulties are making things problematic. What’s a bee to do?

I put out water for them, but I’ve resisted putting out sugar syrup for food because I don’t want to make problems with my neighbors. Besides, a writer ought not get too involved with his subjects. I’m here to observe and comment.,

I have good friends who are famous writers. I am not a famous writer, so in my view, I have the best of all worlds but some of my famous writer friends don’t see it that way. One of them tells me I am not a writer at all, though I am a good writer since I refuse to write much or to take it seriously, and since (he says) I do not write like it is a job and a career I am not really a writer at all.

Artie Shaw—one of the greatest clarinetists and bandleaders ever—quit playing the clarinet for a long period of time and just did math and wrote books. We are not always what we are doing at the time.

Another famous writer friend told everyone they were writers. If you write at all, he said, you are a writer. I think he was equally wrong. He was paid handsomely to lie and condescend and encourage bad writers, but that’s another story.

Sometimes I write, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I roll cigars. Sometimes I make bacon or bourbon. Sometimes I bartend. I can understand someone sitting at my bar saying “Well, he can’t be much of a writer if he’s tending bar.” Just like I can understand someone reading my books and saying, “I can’t imagine he’s a very good bartender the way he writes.”

This piece will be all over the place, and I don’t know if it’ll wrap up neatly or not. We’ll see. I bet it does.

There was a great writer who was a city planner and a historian. He was a renaissance man you probably never heard of, though the fingerprints of his thoughts are all around you and you see them every day. If you’ve ever taken a highway exit that circled around so you could eventually go another direction, you know him. His name was Lewis Mumford. You should look him up.

Was he a writer or an urban planner? Yep.

Mumford was a philosopher-poet who studied cities and wrote about urban planning and how industrialism and technics shaped society. He was one of the principal architects of the urban planning explosion of the 1930s through the 1950s. Think cloverleaves and highway bypasses and urban sprawl) and later he regretted a lot of what he wrote about cities.

That’s a sign of a good writer and thinker. Regret.

Mumford was a prophet and a man who went to war against the preconceived notions and fallacious presuppositions in his own mind. He realized later that efficiency and specialization would make men increasingly stupid.

No one involved in the planning, organization, revitalization, or management of cities should be allowed to stay in their position for long without reading Lewis Mumford. I recommend his Technics and Civilization (1934) for his early, optimistic view of the city and technology. But, I highly recommend his books The City in History (1961,) The Highway and the City (1963,) and The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970,) for his more pessimistic view of human nature, industrialism, consumerism, and the city. Pessimism is not automatically a negative thing. Once we understand human nature, we’ll know better what not to do. This seems like I’m assigning you some dry, technical reading, but Mumford was a beautiful writer. His words sing, even though his thoughts were deeply genius.

Mumford believed that the clock and not the steam engine was the central invention that brought about the Industrial Revolution (*My comment here: and, ironically, precipitated the series of events that will end our run at civilization.) He was right. And I will be right.

Once the man had his head on straight, he had some great things to say about how the way we think about cities and their possibilities can shape our lives and our happiness.

Here are some Mumford gems for you to think about, but really… read a couple of Mumford books if you can. Don’t be satisfied with these tidbits. Read him. He’ll make thinking happen even if you are not used to it:

“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”

And on beauty:

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”

This one is especially important (because if your view of revitalization is focused solely on vehicular movement and traffic and parking rather than creating a space for beauty and culture and business to cohabitate, you will fail like those before us have failed,)

“Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.”

“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.”

And this advice we never heed:

“Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.”

And this warning to Elon Musk and his AI ilk:

“The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run by automatons or by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.”

“One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.”

And this warning to all of you with your phones in your faces:

“In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end -that of freeing mankind for higher functions- if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel-cage.”

This is one of the reasons I warn against the over-investment in the performance and visual arts and the under-investment in the written arts. Stick with me…

Dumbing down the people is a means of making them live increasingly according to their wants, which can be easily manufactured for them. I could write a book on this topic alone, but you wouldn’t read it because reading has become hard work.

Irony is a fantastic bitch.

You can’t just get on the internet to check the weather anymore. For a second you look at your phone and you have 15 notifications and 3 minutes later you’re watching an endless series of short videos of talentless people lip-syncing to other people’s content. We have monetized IP theft and made it an addiction. And the dumber it gets, the more people grow addicted to it. One of the dumbest things ever said to me is that my writing is too long and that I use too many words. Your decreased capacity for understanding anything longer than a few sentences pasted on a picture is not my problem. I am encouraging you to read Mumford instead of memes, not because you are too intelligent to read long prose, but because you are losing the capacity and the attention span to read anything longer than a meme.

Check this out… it’s true and scary:

The more your food is chewed for you, the weaker your teeth become. This is a biological fact. Most of the subsequent health issues and need for perpetual medical intervention comes from the weakness of our teeth. Our ancestors had to chew their food for minutes. In Wall-E you drink your meals and go everywhere in a motorized cart. Try blue. It’s the new red.

Once you leave off reading, or if you never learn to read anything substantive, and once your reading is replaced for you by other forms of the transmission of ideas and concepts, you become increasingly dependent on pre-manufactured soundbites. The professional liars gain ascendency. All the while you think you are more intelligent. You think life is getting better because of specialization and efficiency, but it isn’t. You are just dumber and less vital.

Then the rain stops and the heat hits and you were doing so well, creeping up the side of a building, thinking you had it made. There is a parable about good ground that applies here.

“Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.” ~ Lewis Mumford

We’ll see how the bees do. And you all too.

Michael Bunker