Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where theaccident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkablevolume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again.
We talked about how strange it would be to begin talking to a complete stranger in the city, but at the same time their repeat meetings may make it less odd to strike up a conversation. Is there a difference between meeting someone in an "obscure library" and a park?
Still all were distinguished by a certain soddenswarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip. There weretwo other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them;
Unlike the protagonist of the Benjamin Baker story, this narrator has been around for awhile, and can recognize the threats of the city
By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied business-like demeanor, andseemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press.
Reminiscent of De Certeau--navigating a city is repetitive and unconscious
For some months I had been ill in health, but was nowconvalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are soprecisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mentalvision departs
Reminds me of Alcott's warnings of catching disease's from, the masses
Increasingly, the eyes of the city's masses-and of the reformers in-terested in providing parks for iliem-were turning to the east. The east was Long Island
While other cities expand outward and grow, New York is limited by its size and cannot expand further. Thus, the city bleeds over into neighboring areas.
Parks had always been a concern of reformers who were fond of referring to the need for "breathing spaces for the slums" or "lungs for the city," and the agitation for increased respiratory facilities in New York-generally for playgrounds in low-income areas-had been long and insistent. But other reform causes had been pressed with more urgency. With so
Relates to our conversation about the true motives for park constructing. They were presented as gifts to the less fortunate but were often built by the wealthy with the wealthy's interest in mind.
Bin, like the English be, stems from the Indo-Germanic bheu, as does the Latin fui (I have been) and the Greek plum (I come to light, grow, engender). But these words also give rise to the German word bauen, to build.
Building then has connotation in the present, past and future. It is more of a continuous process than an action with a clear beginning and end.
The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psychological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body”
Is the city then a site upon which the aforementioned inequalities can be overturned?
Pedestrians, in effect, tell urban stories through their movements. A multitude of intertwined paths and detours weave the urban fabric. They give their shape to spaces and weave together places in ways that potentially transgress, from within, the abstract map imposed from above by the panoptic gaze and administrative strategies of corporate and government interests
Relates to our discussion surrounding Unfathomable Cities. Are locations and neighborhoods shaped by their inhabitants or are the inhabitants shaped by the place?
space organised by the spatial order
Does space when organized by order become place? Does the creation of order fill the negative space?
Struggle, motherfucker. Hustle. Fail, fail again, fail until you forget what succeeding is, and then, on your deathbed, as you’re full of rotten phlegm and regret, you can look back and crack a smile that you won a couple, and survived everything else.
Callous reiteration of Dorot's advice
The only personal journey New York is interested in is the one that ends with you paying your yearly city income tax
Far more dispassionate than in Didion's description
Winter and New York have been at war for centuries
New York is often personified in writing
"One of the indige-nous characters who has figured long in our journals, courts and cities, is 'the Confidence Man'; his doings form one of the staJes of villainy, and an element in the romance of roguery. Countless are the dodges att~ibuted to this ubiquitous personage."
forged out of the particular american identity
Men there are, who, without a pang or gleam of remorse, will coolly wait for character to rot, and health to sink, and means to melt, that they may suck up the last drop of the victim's blood.
melodramatic demonization as scare tactic
The moment the inexperienced youth sets his foot on the side-walk of the city, he is marked and watched by eyes that he never dreamed of.
in keeping with the loss of isolation of city life
I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.
themes of isolation and anonymity
I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the mo-ment it ctually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen t on a cockroach on the tile floor.
telling juxtaposition of lowest life form and man's greatest achievement suggests that Didion feels trapped between these two poles, stuck in limbo state
"New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces." It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised "new faces," there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.
This contradicts the image of New York as a place of endless possibilities and anonymity