Amanda Goldblatt
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading, and why. One Note 005: Amanda Goldblatt, Yi-Fu Tuan, Segmented Worlds.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Amanda Goldblatt.
The book I am holding has on it a black and white picture of many rows of houses, torn into jagged thirds. The cover is otherwise a semi-gloss greenish-beige, a linoleum color, Midwestern. A whole into pieces, it seems to be saying. We are together then divided. The book is Segmented Worlds and Self by humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. It was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1982. He is my favorite geographer. I am reading this particular book of Tuan’s because I am working on a long project about writing and bodies and buildings. In one chapter, en route to the thinking about the house as a whole, Tuan takes a detour in the kitchen and dining areas. Commence, fifteen pages about the history of Western European and Chinese dining etiquette. In the Middle Ages, peasants as well as the high-born ate with their hands. By the sixteenth century, an elegant diner dipped into the communal plate with only three fingers… It goes on like this for quite sometime. It goes on like this for long enough to question time spent. But eventually, tables begin to elongate to accommodate all the newly required forks, and beverage-specific glassware, plus bread plates, plus eventually fingerbowls, and then of course the flower arrangements. What a full table, not even including food or elbows! Etiquette literally separates! Tuan reveals. Fork choice causes compartmentalization! Once we ate from a communal plate with our hands, were part of the collective! Now no longer, in this era of our [now metaphorically] long-tabled self-obsession! But he is not as forceful as this. He ticks instead like a metronome, through all this time and all these meals; he merely humbly states; his prose inches. Always with him, I add the exclamations and filigree as if it is a ritual to do so. His theory reminds me that places and behaviors are documents akin to books, are legible in this same way, are rich, have both legacy and meaning. His prose reminds me to take time. This feels important.
Amanda Goldblatt is the author of Catalpa: This is Not True, and the editor of Super Arrow. She lives and teaches in St. Louis.
