Andrew Hui's "The Study"

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the study is a reading of a beautiful painting of the Annunciation by Domenico Ghirlandaio. I do an analysis of its formal pictorial elements and how they gesture to deeper theological significance. I then talk about how 'volume' means both a space and a book. This is within my Chapter 3, “Bookishness and Sanctity,” which explores how the Renaissance iconology of the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome depicted both saints as bookworms, thereby elevating bibliophilia into a form of holiness. This is part of my broader argument about the genesis of the personal library, or studiolo, in early modern Europe.

I’m delighted that Marshal invited me to do the Page 99 Test again (I did it for my previous book A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter). The Page 99 Test is one of those charming literary parlor games that flatters our sense of the microcosmic—the idea that a single page, plucked like a Tarot card, can reveal a book’s “true” shape. It’s deliciously self-deluded, like squinting at the corner of a Vermeer and deciding you’ve understood the early modern Dutch Republic (although...maybe there is something to that...). There’s a fractal allure to it, certainly, but why not page 42, or 287? Perhaps analysis always lies in the interstices between the allegorical and the arbitrary.

And yet, perhaps it is fitting that it is page 99—a number with its own mystic aura—that gives us the Annunciation, and with it, the Virgin Mary herself. For believers, the Virgin is the font of all honors and virtues, the sublime mediator between heaven and earth. How charming, then, that she should appear at the axis mundi of the text, the book’s golden mean—page 99—the liminal point from which everything unfolds. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of coincidence medieval thinkers would have loved: neither wholly arbitrary nor entirely rational, existing in the space where grace and geometry intersect.

Learn more about The Study at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Theory of the Aphorism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Ekman's "Timing the Future Metropolis"

Peter Ekman teaches the history and theory of landscape and urbanism in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He is a postdoctoral fellow at USC's Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and at the Berggruen Institute.

Ekman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us in the middle of a discussion of two curious works of urban analysis published in the first half of the 1960s: The View from the Road (1964), by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer; and Signs in the City (1963), by Appleyard and Lynch. There is also discussion of “Designing and Managing the Strip,” a 1974 working paper by Lynch and Michael Southworth. All three attempt to reckon with the changing forms of the American metropolitan region in the age of ascendant automobility — without simply writing them off as “formless,” although that vocabulary appears here — and to mark out strategies by which planners and architects might redesign cities and highways to enable more pleasing visual experiences at high speeds.

The View from the Road, a minor classic of postwar urban studies, employs colorful language, evoking mechanized movement in terms of various senses and media: quoted here, “episodes” of automotive perception are “like a magazine serial” or an “articulated but ‘endless’ composition, of the kind typified in jazz or medieval polyphony.” View was a publication of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, an interdisciplinary institution based simultaneously at Harvard and MIT, and this page occurs within a broader discussion of the group’s equivocal efforts to “go public” with their thinking, whether in greater Boston — then planning the ring road that gave rise to this study — or elsewhere.

Page 99 certainly does not encapsulate the book, but how it diverges from the rest of the text is diagnostic, both of some failures of the Joint Center, the group through which the book narrates a broader intellectual history of planning and urbanism in the U.S., and of my own path to the topic.

The tension between “basic” and “applied” urban research recurs across all six chapters, and the Center never truly resolved it to their satisfaction or anyone else’s — e.g. the Ford Foundation, their main funder, who sounded these notes repeatedly in their periodic reviews; ordinary residents of Boston, who bristled at the Center’s tentative forays into urban redevelopment; and the residents of Ciudad Guayana, in Venezuela, of all places, where the Center helped plan a city from scratch in partnership with a regional development authority modeled on the TVA. This last episode is the focus of my fourth chapter, and there we reencounter Appleyard and Lynch. Lynch visited Ciudad Guayana as a consultant; Appleyard analyzed its central avenue as a case study in “sequence design” and later published a whole book, Planning a Pluralist City (1976), on the New Town. It is in that context, not on page 99, that readers at last see some of the remarkable visuals from The View from the Road, which include diagrams of drivers’ projected sightlines and hand-drawn images of the landscapes those drivers would be seeing, frame by passing frame, from various points along Boston’s circumferential highway.

More fundamentally, the split between the styles of thinking represented by Lynch, a central figure in postwar urbanism who grounded all of his work in a deep concern for the physical form of cities, and the majority of Joint Center principals, who overruled him and drifted toward aspatial, less richly visualized, often quantitative approaches heavily indebted to the social sciences, represents another core tension in postwar intellectual life on which my book dwells. Although it is basically a work of intellectual history, I am a geographer by training. Geography has perpetually been riven by similar splits — between quality and quantity, absolute and relational space, materiality and representation, form and process. And, as I discuss in the book’s first chapter, the discipline was being downsized across the U.S. — following the all-important closure at Harvard in 1948 — precisely as the Joint Center and other “organized research units” oriented to “urban studies” began to take the place of academic departments of geography, which, I tend to think, might have done some of the same work more compellingly.

In short, the Page 99 Test works imperfectly, but this page nonetheless offers glimpses of the larger book and documents some possibilities for postwar urbanism that remained substantially untapped.

Learn more about Timing the Future Metropolis at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Cannell's "Blood and the Badge"

Michael Cannell is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. His previous books are A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

Cannell has worked as a reporter for Time and an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications.

Cannell applied the “Page 99 Test” to Blood and the Badge and reported the following:

Page 99 of Blood and the Badge recalls a true story from the Brooklyn streets. On the late afternoon of September 3, 1987, a mid-level mafiosi named Frank Santora was walking down Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst, a quiet stretch of shops and well-kept homes, when a man crept up from behind and unholstered a .38 revolver. Santora was not the target. The shooter aimed instead at Santora’s friend, Carmine, a member of the Lucchese crime family. Carmine fell dead on the doorstep of the Bath Avenue Dry Cleaning and Tailor Shop. Meanwhile, Santora took two stray bullets in the torso. He dribbled a trail of blood as he stumbled to the doorway of a delicatessen, G & T Salumeria, but did not enter. Instead, he teetered and fell to the ground in an alley between deli and dry cleaner. He was pronounced dead thirty minutes later at Victory Memorial Hospital.

This lurid incident does not reflect the overall story of two decorated NYPD detectives who acted as double agents, and assassins, for the Mafia.

Santora’s accidental murder is, nonetheless, critical. It was Santora, after all, who connected his jailhouse friend, Burt Kaplan, an exalted drug dealer, with his cousin Louie, a corrupted cop, and his partner, Steve. Santora told Kaplan that Louie and Steve could do more than run license plate numbers or share sensitive information aboutwho the police surveilled and which Mafia soldiers had turned informant. The detectives would do anything, Santora said. Anything.

Visit Michael T. Cannell's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Limit.

The Page 99 Test: The Limit.

My Book, The Movie: Incendiary.

My Book, The Movie: A Brotherhood Betrayed.

Writers Read: Michael Cannell.

My Book, The Movie: Blood and the Badge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Smith's "Word across the Water"

Tom Smith is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, and American Nineteenth Century History.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Word across the Water finds us at the opening of the book’s third chapter – the last of the book’s three chapters on Hawai‘i before the second half discusses the Philippines. The page describes how Native Hawaiians writing to newspapers in 1911 criticized descendants of Protestant missionaries in the islands who had denigrated the performance of hula dances as obscene and immoral. These Native Hawaiians instead defended the hula as a dignified tradition of historical narration. They argued that any perceptions that the hula was a corrupted or indecent activity resulted not from the hula itself, but from outsiders’ failure to truly understand it. At the same time, the page introduces the fact that some descendants of missionaries around this time were in fact breaking away from negative representations of the hula, coming to appreciate it as an aesthetic form.

The page illuminates many of the book’s key themes. The work as a whole explores how historical narration became an important mode through which US Protestant missionaries and their descendants working in Hawai‘i and the Philippines came to understand their relationship both to US empire and to the places in which they worked, around the time at which the United States colonised both island groups in 1898. It argues that, as we see on page 99, historical narration was contested terrain at these sites of empire as missionaries sought to establish the authority of the written word and of religiously inflected narratives over Indigenous forms of engagement with the past, represented on page 99 by the Hawaiian hula. The book also argues, however, that the distinction between missionary and Indigenous forms of historical narration was not as clear-cut as missionaries would have liked their audiences to believe. As they sought to style themselves as experts and authorities, missionaries and their descendants engaged with local traditions in ways that drew them away from an overarching sense of US imperial or historic purpose. The end of page 99 suggests how we see this in Chapter 3 – some descendants of missionaries who had grown up in the islands began to celebrate the hula and to style themselves as experts on it. They missed, or indeed deliberately obfuscated, the dance’s profound political and historical meanings for Native Hawaiians, but through supposedly objective study of it navigated their own anxieties about existing between the imperial and the local.

Learn more about Word across the Water at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue