The Weekly Writer’s Reference
October 5th to October 11th, 2025
by Micah E Weiss
Last week was a little grim, so despite the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and the Hamas attack on Israel two years ago and the war in Gaza that continues, I decided to forgo writing about those topics.
This Week in History
October 5th is the birthday of architect and urban theorist, Le Corbusier. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, he would become one of the most influential thinkers in his fields. Le Corbusier started out as an artist, but he was something of an autodidact in architecture, eventually revolutionizing the field.
I am no expert on Le Corbusier, and I fear it would take some years to become one, but his influence on theories of urban design and modern architecture is a matter of general agreement. He was a complicated man with many ideas and accomplishments, theories and essays, buildings and projects.
Le Corbusier was by no means the progenitor of the catastrophe that is 20th century art and architecture, there were many others who came before, and others that deepened the problem. I’ve written about art in this format already concerning this descent into mediocrity and aesthetic nihilism, however, architecture and urban design had more serious and direct social and cultural impacts that Le Corbusier is at least in part responsible for.
His perspective is worth noting. Like many of his generation and the one that followed, the automobile posed a great challenge to the urban centers of the time, some of which had been continuously inhabited for hundreds and even thousands of years. Starting in the 1920s, the urban landscape was cluttered with cars and trucks creating a demand for a new way of designing cities. Enter Le Corbusier. His solution was the super-block, the mega-highway, and geometric monstrosities of glass and steel for buildings. These innovations destroyed neighborhoods and all but eliminated beauty in architecture, diminishing the human, and put the neighborhood and the street corner at the mercy of the grand flow of mechanized traffic.
For those like myself who trace the rise of The Machine back well beyond the internet, Le Corbusier is like the chief architect for Satan, and his acolyte Robert Moses plays the Anti-Christ. And I use religious terminology quite on purpose and not as hyperbole. One of my favorite commentaries on Le Corbusier comes from Marshall Berman, a political science professor at The City College of New York. In an interview for New York: A Documentary Film, he said:
There’s a wonderful passage from Le Corbusier. He walks out on the streets of Paris near the university, and he feels very nostalgic. And he says, “In the good old days, when I was a student, we used to walk these streets, and stand in the street and argue, and we could have races with each other and we could play games, but now, we’re swept away by the cars.” And he’s very bitter about that. And he says: “What can we do?” And then there’s a kind of cognitive leap, which is we have to somehow merge with the cars. . . If we can completely identify with them and forget this paradise-lost from our youth when the streets belong[sic] to us, because that’s the refrain, the streets belong[sic] to us then. But if you can forget that and repress that part of you that loved the streets and felt at home in them, and feels very angry that. . .there’s too much traffic for you now, that you don’t fit in, that history has surpassed you, you can make a leap and surpass it. And the way that he did was through this concept of the highway system and the flow that would never end and the traffic would always be moving. And what he wanted to do in Paris and New York was to basically kill the street, tear it all down, and put up giant slabs connected by highways. I think he’s probably the greatest metaphysician of the highway system anywhere. And Moses was certainly his greatest disciple.
And so he was. Humanity needs community, of course, and what humans built in cities up until the car were microcosmic communities called neighborhoods. Most people lived and worked and went to school and the doctor, etc., in their neighborhoods. That people of all kinds huddled together in urban villages of just a few blocks, with stores and play and life, was the saving grace of the mega-cities industrialization created. The density was still real, but as reformers starting with Teddy Roosevelt brought sanitary living conditions and basic housing regulations, and limited the number and impact of tenements, people built their little worlds into thriving communities. You knew your neighborhood, the people that lived there, the norms of the community—you recreated the stetl. There are still places like that, Le Corbusier and his ilk didn’t fully succeed in destroying the great cities of the past, but as Atlanta, Huston, Phoenix, and the Southern California cities, all of which were built with Le Corbusier’s ideas in mind, continue to grow, the alienation of urban existence that they perpetuate continues to take its toll. The alienation of the suburban silos, the catch-as-catch-can communities sorted by interest instead of proximity, the continued dependence of automobiles, the corralling of the poor into segregated inaccessible block housing, the congestion (a problem that, despite Le Corbusier and Moses—and so many others—promised but failed to address), the disjointed characterless subdivisions rammed through with elevated highways, the economic and environmental blights of un-walkable strip malls, all of it will only worsen. To say nothing of the scars that remain in many places left by such storied gashes in the landscape as the Cross Bronx Expressway. Or the continuing miasmic failure of the super-block Project Housing complexes that isolate poor communities from the neighborhoods in which they live. La Corbusier’s theories are, as far as I can tell, a great example of the path to hell being paved with good intentions, in this case literally paved in steel-reinforced concrete.
October 7th is the birthday of the writer, poet, and playwright, Sherman Alexie. Born in Spokane, Washington, he is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe of the Spokane Reservation where he grew up. Sherman Alexie was the first modern writer to really highlight the troubles and tragedies of growing up and living as an American Indian in modern America. Though much of his work comes from his own life experience, he is one of those great writers who has the good grace to fictionalize his stories, rather than embracing the false-pretense of personal memoirs (a topic I will write about sometime). The high levels of poverty, lack of opportunity, rampant alcoholism, and general degradation of reservation life is depicted by Alexie with a tempering humor, delightful characters, and bizarre but believable plots.
His works include numerous poetry and short story collections including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), for which he also wrote the screenplay for the film (titled Smoke Signals), and several novels including the critically acclaimed The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), (which he followed up with a memoir that, because of my previous comment, I am tastefully ignoring).
From what I’ve read, there is an extraordinary tension that runs through his work of being an American Indian in the present. Not just because of the bigotry they can face, but in a more complex sense, the strange nostalgia for a time before “the white man” mixed with the understanding that there is no going back. Alexie himself was born with hydrocephalus, and without surgery at 6 months old, he would not have survived. I don’t know if he’s ever commented on this, but to feel the pull of the past towards a way of life that has been lost, and know in some sense you owe your life to the technology of your conquerors must be a strange feeling. I think that conflict is present in many poignant moments in his writing.
The other thought Alexie brings to my mind is the almost monolithic ignorance of what has happened to the American Indian tribes in the larger American culture. Nearly every student in a public school is taught a not entirely untrue story of disease and land grabs, broken treaties and massacres, and Americans feel guilty about these 19th century events, at least when we stop and think about them. However, the real story of the Indian Reservation system, the poverty, degradation, and suffering there from, is a story that comes from public policies established and prolonged through the 20th century. For a brief moment, the American Indian Movement tried, and ultimately failed, to shed some light on the realities not depicted in Westerns. Even a critical study of the Western as a genre reveals a retrospective view of the American Indian that, starting in the 1950’s, is apologetic and respectful in the main, but totally ignorant of the modern realities American Indians face. Alexie changed that, and recent works of popular culture like the television shows Yellowstone, and Reservation Dogs owe a great deal to Alexie for bringing the current issues of reservation life, as well as the wider experience of the American Indians today, into the public consciousness.
This is important not just because it helps degrade the nostalgia-infused guilt for a past that cannot be changed, but also because the challenges faced by American Indians today are in need of attention. There has been a kind of guilt-industrial-complex, a set of shibboleths and bits of received knowledge that most Americans repeat with almost religious regularity about the events of the 19th century concerning all that “stolen land,” etc. Land acknowledgements might be the apotheosis of this useless mindset; they romanticize the plight of the Indian tribes, robbing them of the agency they had at the time, infantilizing them in the present, turning them into noble savages in a too-convenient post-colonial narrative. This perspective isn’t entirely wrong, but for too long the exercise of repeating this narrative as a kind of intellectual self-flagellation has served only to distract from real action that can and should be taken to provide better opportunities to the nearly 600 registered Indian tribal nations that still exist (I’ve written about both land acknowledgements and my use of the term “Indian” here and here). You could argue that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, but as it stands today, I don’t expect the modern left to do either. And neither do many American Indians, apparently–Donald Trump won that demographic by 4 points according to NPR. That reality is yet another massive swing in voting patterns in yet another demographic group that Democrats and progressives claim to speak for. You would think that would signal to the left how well received those land acknowledgments are, but then. . .
One last note about Sherman Alexei. When his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was published in 2007, he refused to let his publisher release it in digital form for e-readers. It was the first time I noticed a public figure pushing back against The Machine, and while his reasons are his own, I have come to respect the forethought of what was to come.
Also on this day, in 1927, the first moving picture with a simultaneously recorded, synchronized soundtrack premiered. The Jazz Singer was the first “talkie” and it’s almost odd to think about how revolutionary it was, considering all that’s happened since in the world of cinema. I have not seen The Jazz Singer in its entirety, and what I have seen is somewhat dated and difficult to digest. For example, there is a five and half minute opening overture of mediocre orchestral music, and it’s still more of a silent film with “talkie” scenes, mostly of songs. But after researching the film and its critical reception from recent years, it’s clear that it is a very complex, somewhat out of time exploration of identity, culture, and America itself.
Certainly what everyone who knows of the film, what I knew for decades before viewing a single minute of it, is that Al Jolson, the star of the film, wears blackface while performing Jazz songs. That was enough to repel me from even looking into the film, and much of its reputation is based on that single plot point. As usual, it’s bit more complicated than just racism. When understood in the greater context of the plot and the historical moment in which that plot unfolds, The Jazz Singer is a deeply touching story of a young Jewish man trying to square his passion for the music of America with his obligations to his family and ethnicity, for he is the son of a Jewish cantor. To paraphrase some of the critics, the putting on of black face in this film isn’t a mockery of black Americans, but more following the conventions of Broadway of the day, and for the character, black face acts more as an embrace of America and its music. There is a beautifully explored conflict in Jolson’s character, himself Jewish, as he feels pulled in two directions: what is authentic to his family and culture, and what is authentic to his soul. This conflict has been so explored in our culture that a dozen different films and novels have explored this theme from a dozen different ethnic points of view. Sherman Alexei is, in his way, exploring similar conflicts.
The film was a commercial hit in the US and worldwide, clearing five times its budget, raking in close to $60 million adjusting for inflation. And this was a time of terrible antisemitism. Jews were still locked out of many so-called “restricted” institutions, the Ivy league and other elite colleges had Jewish quota maximums, and the American Nazi Party wasn’t yet formed, but it was right around the corner. Just two years before the Jazz Singer was released, a Jewish peddler had been lynched under false pretenses in North Carolina (though castrated, he survived and sued those who falsely accused him). To make a Jewish tale like The Jazz Singer replete with the sounds and images of a cantor singing in a synagogue into a popular and commercial success at that time was somewhat extraordinary.
The Jazz Singer, in an ending I won’t spoil too much I hope, comes to a theme of joining the old with the new, the single ethnic identity with the whole of America. Assimilation, cultural appropriation, whiteness, when these and other pseudo-academic, politically infused terms of resentment and bitterness and grievance and other agendas, fall away when looking at stories like this, and the essentially American challenge of the merging of peoples, perhaps we will again understand what The Jazz Singer did nearly a century ago. That America isn’t the story of a nefarious assimilation, but an exercise in cultural reciprocity. The pathos of losing the stetl, the village, the blood and soil of the past is always with us, but our forebears came here and added to the culture, changed it, melded it into something new, and our ethnic past was the price. And it’s everyone, not just Jews and Italians and Irish and black Americans, etc. Even the whitest of the white people I know here in New England sometimes think of the simplicity of their past with a certain longing just like that depicted in The Jazz Singer.
It’s a truly American story; one with which we are not yet done.
Poem of the Week
[There is no Life or Death]
by Mina Loy
There is no Life or Death, Only activity And in the absolute Is no declivity. There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There is no Space or Time Only intensity, And tame things Have no immensity.