Book excerpt: Talk City is a collection of the remarkable blogs the distinguished urban planner Bill Fulton wrote while serving as a member of the City Council in the California beach town of Ventura. The blog started out as a way to explain what had happened at the weekly council meetings. Before long, however, it turned into an evocative, real-time chronicle of what it was like to serve as an underpaid, overstressed, part-time local elected official during hard times. If you like local government and politics, you'll love how Talk City reveals the stresses and strains of serving as an elected official in a typical American city.