Mallaise!

For my thesis field work, I have visited every single retail bookstore in Los Angeles County. Ninety-seven in all. Just about every weekend I spent six to eight hours on the freeways and arterial streets of L.A. Most of my time was spent driving between bookstores, for my time within each store took less than five minutes.

The built-up urbanized area of Los Angeles is depressingly consistent. It's difficult to tell one sprawling city, incorporated or not, from one another. Each freeway looks exactly the same, each run-down commercial strip looks alike, and those communities that have built their "historic" Central Business Districts into a quaint shopping district looks alike. To borrow from the title of James Howard Kunstler's book, this is indeed the "Geography of Nowhere."

After visiting five or more shopping malls in a single day in search of more bookstores, I lose my orientation, I lose my car, and I find that I'm even a lot more tired than I'd be if I had spent those same six hours driving north on Interstate 5 to Northern California.

This "Mallaise," as William Kowinski refers to in his great book The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise, strikes hard - it's so severe that it actually took me a few hours to recuperate after arriving home.

Kowinski defines the symptoms of Mallaise as 1) dismallcumbobulation ("The similarity of one mall to another is disorienting"), 2) inability to relate to others ("It's impossible to talk to someone when you're shopping at the mall.") and 3) plastiphobia ("fear of being enclosed in a cocoon of blandness").

I had all three symptoms so my diagnosis was accurate. The only cure (and prevention) is to avoid malls, so, to the chagrin of my wife, I must continue my ongoing recovery and avoid them ;-)

I'm thankful that my field work is done and that I can say that I visited not only every bookstore in Los Angeles County, but that I also visited every single shopping mall -- I'm glad it's over!

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