Gotham Diary:
Flou
11 December 2012
You may think that I’ve been playing with Photoshop, but (sadly), no. Our windows have been covered with “clear” plastic tarpaulin, and this is what we see when we look out the window on a sunny day. On a day that isn’t sunny, the view is much less of a view. A demoralizing mess is what it is.
Even through the tarp, regular readers will see at a glance that the balcony railings haven’t been touched. The balcony floor has been sealed with waterproofing — and that’s where we are. Nothing has happened since the middle of last week.
As if to make up for the blur at home, I spent about an hour yesterday with Google Maps’s Street View, dashing up and down North End Way, in Golders Green, London, looking for a house that photographer Richard Hooker captured in his study of London bus stops. I encountered the study at The Morning News, and flipped through the images collected for the interview with TMN‘s Rosecrans Baldwin. The North End Way photo was one of the last. Unlike the others, it seemed to be more about the people coming out of the house than about the young man with the mobile standing alone by the post. I was unable to find the house in Street View, and this made me wish that I could go to London right now and look for it in person. I wish that I could explore the really rather vast region of Hampstead Heath, which is certainly a park, but also a place where some rich people live, rather as some rich Americans live “on” golf courses. Hampstead Heath seems the very opposite of our Central Park in having no distinct perimeter. London is so much more interesting that way than New York. It is also much lovelier. I really wished that I could be there.
But perhaps not in December. And even if I found myself standing opposite the house in Hooker’s photograph, right this very minute, there would probably be no hint of the family drama, if that’s what it was. Why is the man, who is not wearing a jacket and therefore does not seem to be leaving the house, bending to one side? Why does the woman at the passenger-side door seem to be ignoring him? With her pink trainers, is she more likely to be his child than his partner? Nor would there be any sign of the young man on the pavement, totally engaged with whatever it is that is making him smile. Standing on the other side of the post that marks the bus stop, and backed by dense, green foliage, the fact that he is in another world — the world of adolescent inattentiveness that strikes me in retrospect as a Garden of Eden of self-absorbtion, the ultimate expulsion from which marks the beginning of adulthood.
***
Yes! I am reading feeds again. One day last week, I accepted as fact that I would never so much as glance at the thousands of feeds that had piled up, unread, since August, and I saw that the only way forward was to “Mark All As Read.” Once the number of unread feeds dropped to zero, and all the boldface was cleared away, I began to manage the list, consolidating folders and eliminating a good many feeds. There is still plenty to be done, but at least I’m back in the habit of reading feeds. It was heaven not to, for a while, but also insupportably uncivil. You can’t write for the Internet without reading what other people have been writing.
One writer whose blog will almost certainly survive all further culls is Levi Stahl, of Ivebeenreadinglately. Levi works at the University of Chicago Press, I believe, although his profile doesn’t say so. (Maybe he used to.) The latest entry begins with the characterstic humor that it is always a pleasure to read.
I’m traveling for work this week, so posting will be more of the quote-and-run variety than the usual longform, print-and-bind-that-brilliance-and-be-sure-to-put-a-copy-in-the-next-Voyager-as-an-example-of-the-best-humanity-has-to-offer sort that you’re used to in this space.
Indeed, I recall that, just last week, there was a rumination prompted by the death of Dave Brubeck that was definitely of print-and-bind caliber.