Re: Universitatlity

On Sun, Dec 7, 2003, Omlor@aol.com said:

>Me, too. And I'm young enough to be the illegitimate grandson his daughter
>had when she was still in high school. Or thereabouts.
>
>It's not whether you were there. It's what you know about the "there."

Hmmm. My father was rather older than most of the fathers when I was
growing up, and was born seven months before JDS, and my mother was about
Holden's contemporary, so I suppose he doesn't seem that far in the past
to me.

But precisely, John. A lot of it is knowing the period. Except for my
sojourn (trying to see how Thoreau managed to survive) living in New
Hampshire (no, not THERE in New Hampshire), I have spent virtually all my
time in NYC. Half the time (shoot, 80% of the time) my mind is back in a
place far prior to my adolescence or even my birth. Some people immerse
themselves in Elizabethan England, some in Proust's Paris. For me it's
New York from the 30s to the 50s that holds my fascination, a close
second to Paris (a city I love and visit often) of the 1920s. Call me
cliched, but there I go, without apology.

I live in a New York neighborhood riddled with places where people I
admire used to live or work, and can't walk down a single block here
without noting a house or apartment where a writer or photographer or
actor once lived or still lives. Or died -- I'm but five minutes from
the spot where Dylan Thomas took his last drink, ten from the hospital in
which he expired, and five in the other direction from where Bob Dylan
walked down the middle of the street with his girlfriend Suze on the
cover of an early album. My close friends sometimes tease me that I
should be a tour guide, albeit of a bizarre tour.

But that is the view I have of the city, and while I never made it to the
Stork Club and I'm not particularly interested in the still-standing
"21," I'm aware of them and their historical places. (I was in the
Copacabana on a most miserable date, and based on that experience, at
least, I can say that I would not be the most ideal candidate for Cafe
Society.) Penn Station may be long gone, but it lives in my head every
time I go up or down Seventh and Eighth avenues.

For those who may share my love of the past and are either physically or
spiritually in New York, please see this web site:

    <http://www.forgotten-ny.com/>

I guess I am (as John suggests about knowing about the "there") in this
time and place but not of it. I earn a living with computers, but I can
take or leave the technology. I live in the media capital of the world,
but I can't tell you the last time I watched TV. (I listened to the
radio during the August blackout.)

So, to me the world Holden inhabits is not lost, though I recognize that
it is BEING lost, gradually. I still cherish the parts that manage to
stay with us (the museums, Grand Central Terminal, Park Avenue) and am
saddened by the losses (I'll never understand the destruction of Penn
Station; I've made a cottage industry of acquiring books and pictures of
the station).

The only reason I care for cell phones is that now I don't stand out when
I walk down the sidewalk talking to myself; it seems that eight of ten
people out there are doing it too, except that most of them have a little
microphone attached to a phone. But I resent the technology that forces
one to be connected all the time, and whenever I can turn off my phone, I
do. I no longer carry a pager, thank god, and to the extent possible I
try to make myself dispensable, so that I can go for a walk in the park
and not have to worry that people are having a stroke because they can't
reach me. Where I work, people carry, on average, one hospital pager,
one hospital cell phone, one personal cell phone, one Palm-like device
(often connected wirelessly), and at least one other gizmo of some sort.
 I am forced to carry a university phone, but that's it, and I'm the only
person who doesn't raise a stink about how lousy the coverage is and how
difficult it is to get a signal. I'm glad when the little radio signal
dwindles down toward null.

I just picked up a "centennial edition" of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which has a new foreword by Thomas Pynchon (another ubermensch we
occasionally discuss here) that absolutely captures for me the awful
slide our culture has taken. Pynchon focuses heavily on the politics of
it -- which I will omit here because it's not the place and I don't want
to start a squabble -- and the way American society has eased alarmingly
closer toward Orwell's vision of Newspeak. As I recall, Pynchon doesn't
talk about technology (except to take a swipe at the Internet, which he
feels is more a menace than a benefit), but he does turn his gaze on the
sociology of living in this part of the 21st century. I'm reading the
novel again slowly. It holds up uncomfortably well. Especially if you
live in George Bush's America.

Well ... by this point you should all be yelling (viz. Catcher in the
Rye) "Digression!" at me, but there you have it. Where are the riches in
this life if not in digression?

Check out that web site. Soak in the past. Until they start rewriting
it, it's the only past we have.

--tim

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Received on Sun Dec 7 13:02:21 2003