bryanmckay:
“What if Los Angeles had city squares? Places where people (strangers) collected to think and interact and work. The beach acts in the opposite of a gathering place. People go there to get away and there’s a general annoyance with anyone who sits too close to anyone else’s personal beach space. The idea is to turn off and in no way be close enough to hear conversations or notice the unpleasant bodily details of strangers. Angelenos go to public areas, notably sidewalk brunch cafes, hiking trails in populated canyons, and farmer’s markets, for leisure. The result is that much serious thinking and productivity and general intellectual stimulation takes place privately. This might explain why people in LA are often perceived of as shallow or dense.”
— [Yvonne Georgina Puig](http://yvonnegeorgina.tumblr.com/post/118603587/what-if)
I’ll be in Los Angeles in four days, after a year in Spain (and some time in Boston), and I’m thinking a lot about plazas, about how public space & culture transform each other. Cities are odd animals.
We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. For example: the Mexican sierra has “XVII-15-IX” spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from a formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth “D.XVII-15-IX.” There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed—probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.
It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way…. [W]e were determined not to let a passion for unassailable little truths draw in the horizon and crowd the sky down on us. We knew that what seemed to us true could be only relatively true anyway. There is no other kind of observation. The man with his pickled fish has sacrificed a great observation about himself, the fish, and the focal point, which is his thought on both the sierra and himself.1
John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
Via Edge of the American West.
“Granular” facts:
From a journal to which I was hitherto a stranger, Heating and Ventilating Engineer, [Harrison] has gleaned that in the UK, the “average living room was over 5° Fahrenheit warmer in 1970 than in 1950[.]”
and:
A. J. P. Taylor’s celebrated English History 1914–1945 has stuck to the Velcro of my memory, for example, partly because of his use of the brilliant cameo biographical footnote of which the second one in his first chapter was particularly unforgettable: “George V (1865–1936), second son of Edward VII: married Princess Mary of Teck, 1893; King, 1910–36; changed name of royal family from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, 1917; his trousers were creased at the sides not front and back”.
From a Times Literary Supplement review of Brian Harrison’s Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951-1970. Again via Light Reading.
