"My Own Good News"

Armed Liberal gets at the essence of City Comforts (the book) and why I so detest star architecture, urban planning mega-projects and their various, mis-directing pretentions in his post here:

"Part of the philosophical change I'm going through is an appreciation of the pleasures of this kind of everyday life; in my own life it's a true gift to have learned that I can have as much fun sitting at Little League closing ceremonies chatting with my neighbors as I can have doing the other, higher-profile things I love.

Much of what I plan to write about in the next month or so is both critical - of the fact that we seem to have trouble with the mundane details of things, and that we look on them as obstacles to the grand Romantic gestures that too many of us convince ourselves are what matter - and hopeful, because when you get away form the Washington-New York-Los Angeles media axis, and out to the Little League fields, lots of people do center their lives around the small accomplishments that real life is made up of.

I don't deny the attraction of Romantic acts, or of introspection, or even of snobbery and elitism - and I think that a world made entirely of dutiful suburban communities would be horribly bland.

But somehow, the pendulum has swung a little to far from those kind of virtues, and I'd like to see it swing back."

Maybe another way to sum it up is "Do you prefer Tolstoy? Or Dostoevsky?" As you might imagine from the very name of my book --- City Comforts --- I very much prefer Tolstoy.