My girlfriend has been talking about about how people move to the suburbs to get away from the "friction" of everyday life. But once you remove yourself from friction, you lose the ability to actually, I dunno, do things.
I have definitely noticed that my friends from Long Island and New Jersey are far more likely to have their hackles raised when we meet in Manhattan than my friends who are either transplants or from the city proper. That low level anxiety in cities that you describe seems most prevalent if you had to travel into the city as a kid.
What a great account of public life, despite everything, in a chain sandwich shop. Well, despite almost everything: the broken table and the single evident electrical outlet maybe amount to what English teachers call the plot's initiating event.
It's all so Richard Sennett, whose The Fall of Public Man I've been reading again. At the Panera, the eighteenth century has invaded twenty-first century! In the nineteenth century, Sennett argues, we stopped acting in public spaces (I'll take the liberty of quoting at length): "A few people continued to express themselves actively in public, continued the imagery of man-as-actor which oriented the ancien régime. These active few had by the mid-19th Century become professionals at it, though; they were skilled performers. Another identity grew up alongside this one; it was that of the spectator. And this spectator did not participate in public life so much as he steeled himself to observe it. Unsure of his feelings and convinced that, whatever they were, they were expressed wholly beyond his will, this man did not desert public society. He clung to the belief that outside the home, in the cosmopolitan crowd, there were important experiences for a person to have; unlike his predecessor in the ancien régime, for him this fulfillment in public was to be not of his social being, but of his personality. If he could only prepare himself, above all if he could discipline himself to silence in public, things would happen to his feelings which as an individual he could not make happen for himself." (page 195)
And if he could only discipline his kids, too: "DADDY, WHAT IS THAT. . . "
My girlfriend has been talking about about how people move to the suburbs to get away from the "friction" of everyday life. But once you remove yourself from friction, you lose the ability to actually, I dunno, do things.
Yep
I have definitely noticed that my friends from Long Island and New Jersey are far more likely to have their hackles raised when we meet in Manhattan than my friends who are either transplants or from the city proper. That low level anxiety in cities that you describe seems most prevalent if you had to travel into the city as a kid.
The assumption that pointing and staring is rude is also culturally relative.
Really?
What a great account of public life, despite everything, in a chain sandwich shop. Well, despite almost everything: the broken table and the single evident electrical outlet maybe amount to what English teachers call the plot's initiating event.
It's all so Richard Sennett, whose The Fall of Public Man I've been reading again. At the Panera, the eighteenth century has invaded twenty-first century! In the nineteenth century, Sennett argues, we stopped acting in public spaces (I'll take the liberty of quoting at length): "A few people continued to express themselves actively in public, continued the imagery of man-as-actor which oriented the ancien régime. These active few had by the mid-19th Century become professionals at it, though; they were skilled performers. Another identity grew up alongside this one; it was that of the spectator. And this spectator did not participate in public life so much as he steeled himself to observe it. Unsure of his feelings and convinced that, whatever they were, they were expressed wholly beyond his will, this man did not desert public society. He clung to the belief that outside the home, in the cosmopolitan crowd, there were important experiences for a person to have; unlike his predecessor in the ancien régime, for him this fulfillment in public was to be not of his social being, but of his personality. If he could only prepare himself, above all if he could discipline himself to silence in public, things would happen to his feelings which as an individual he could not make happen for himself." (page 195)
And if he could only discipline his kids, too: "DADDY, WHAT IS THAT. . . "
"SSSSSH!"