Total Mule

[poliphilo]

I hate being drunk. I hate the fakiness of it; the feeling of being brilliant when you know- with that maidenly part of the mind that has stood apart- that you're actually having difficulty putting one foot in front of the other. And then, of course, I hate the comedown. No brief moment of blokey exaltation is worth that long night of having to hold onto the bed in case its pitching and rolling throws you off.

Yesterday was a very quiet day. I finished Mrs Dalloway. And I'm going to follow it up now with Michael Cunningham's The Hours (which Amazon's courier delivered to the door this morning.) Judy advised me I should do this, and I must respect her judgement very much because I'm a total mule and reject most such suggestions out of hand. Sadly she won't read this little tribute. I keep trying to get her to invest in a LJ, but she remains stubbornly faithful to her first on-line love, the political chat-rooms.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You understand London. Yes, it's beauties have to be looked for. And it is an organic city. The writers- Dickens, Conan Doyle etc- have rather emphasized the squalor and the (now vanished) fogs, but there is another London- the London of Blake and Woolf and (oddly enough) Canaletto- which is a version of the New Jerusalem.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

The beauty of London is that all of its times coexist in one harmoneous example of city "non-planning"; the dickensian squalor might have been done up and turned into 500-grand flats and houses, but there are still distinct traces of the ancestry of each neighbourhood. My ex and I moved in together in Tufnell Park, and on Tufnell Park Road you can actually still see "gate posts" marking the entrance to the estate of Tufnell Park, evoking the days before it was turned into suburban terraces.

And I should hope i understand London, yes; at least as much as any foreigner could... But again; the two years at the school of Architecture has given me a few tools for approaching the built environment (i.e. the urban environment), so to me a city can be read the same way you'd read a book. The signs are all there, and just as when reading a book, it is hard not to start making interpretations of them. Cities can easily be seen as semantic representations of the people and communities that inhabited them through the years, and a city such as London chronicles the life of its people from the Roman invasion to the present.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, London is a palimspest(s?) Layer upon layer of history- all the way back to the Romans (at least) And none of those layers has been entirely erased.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

He who tires of London, tires of something... I cannot help but love it!