New York City 1834 - 1851

City scapes and spaces: lflynn's Delicious Stack for New York City 1834 - 1851

The Shakespeare Tavern: Moved to the corner of Williams and Duane near five points and city hall after the tavern was dismantled in 1836. Run by Robert Anderson in directory of 1842 and in 1848 a meeting place for German immigrants and refugees of the 1848 revolutions in europe. Still in operation in 1860. Image from NYPL Digital Images Collection

"He looked at the cowrie, “Awright, may you come and get it, may you na’,” he threw his arm back, slung it far as he could toward the shore; and as the ship’s wake passed over that little holy land cowrie, as it drifted into the deep sediment off the far branches of the Hudson River, deep pockets of mud, layers from the early peoples, from the land animals, ancient things down there, more ancient than the name of our lord, deep brine of the beginning. So too like all before it, the little cowrie reached the mud and stuck, forever swallowed and no amount of hope from a twenty-two-year-old would be able to resurrect it."

And more, including but not limited to: a NYC 19th c. Timeline; Walt Whitman Walking Tour, 1841; maps, guides; prints; histories; directories; narratives; etc

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Two Men at Dickens World

flâneuse or places ... wicked choice. Paris, well then it would have to be the contrary flâneuse, but Dickens' London, although city and dss chapter, is not Paris and shares cityspace and citylit. Space and lit places. The coin comes up for places along the way, a distinctly odd blog where Mountainair rubs shoulders with world cities, real cities with imagined ones...

Sam Anderson on Asad Raza in the New York Times:

A few words about Asad, who appears in the essay only as a shadowy figure: my anonymous "friend." In reality, he was a huge part of my trip: driver, companion, interpreter, guinea pig, canary in the coal mine. Asad and I met 10 years ago in grad school, where I found him to be so intimidatingly smart, so effortlessly fluent about esoteric subjects that I’d never even heard of, that I almost dropped out of the program after two weeks. I stuck with it, though, and eventually Asad and I became friends. He's still the most naturally critical person I know - not in the narrow sense of being negative about things, but in the large and exciting sense of taking things apart, analyzing them, concocting theories. Walking around with him feels like carrying a philosopher in your pocket.

Because we studied Dickens together at school, and because Asad lives in London now, it seemed only natural for me to bully him into coming to Dickens World. He agreed and, true to form, kept up a brilliant running commentary about everything we saw.

In my favorite picture from the trip, Asad stands on top of a very high railing in order to peer ecstatically over the wall of Miss Havisham's garden, still discoursing.

Asad was on fire, interpretively, for the entire trip. Only Dickens World, it turned out, could make his critical motor grind to a halt. As soon as we entered the park, it was like he’d been shot by an arrow. You could feel the energy draining out of him.

Two Men at Dickens World. More here.

Information is many places along the way

UCBerkeley video: Cognitive Science C103 - Lecture 3 History of Information More

Remember Spain

Spain is definitely high on my personal "places along the way" list... read and experienced IRL...

James R. Martel (SFSU): What Equality Would Actually Look Like: Lessons from Anarchist Spain on Equality, Temporality and the Art of the Possible .... The Genius of El Cid: How the Spanish superhero — outnumbered and under siege — broke out of Valencia, crushed a Muslim army, and inspired Christian crusaders. 

An interview with Javier Fernandez Sebastian on the Ibero-american world as another political powerhouse for modernity during the Revolution Age, thanks to the analysis of the history of concepts in the English and Portuguese speaking Atlantic. 

.... Many will remember Spain’s socialist prime minister for his mishandling of the economic crisis, but his legacy in other areas — particularly social reform — is substantial. 

From Books and Ideas, Jeanne Moisand on protectionism and the birth of Catalanism .... A review of Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation: Gibraltar in the Modern Legal Context by Keith Azopardi. 

.... Atlas Obscura visits the Josep Pujiula Labyrinth, a wonderland replication in progress by one persistent man.

Read all of Remember Spain at Omnivore

On the Travelogue

The Significance of the Travelogue

It seems as inevitable that voyaging should make men free in their minds as that settlement within a narrow horizon should make men timid and servile. HG Wells, 1922

The first men were wanderers and their lives, if brutish and short, were a journey too, marked by constant movement and discovery. Unsettled and unencumbered, early man explored the globe. He left Africa 70,000 years ago. Thirty thousand years later, he reached Australia, and by the time a new man – the farmer – was sowing the Fertile Crescent’s first crops, the wanderer was navigating the Amazon River in a dugout canoe.

Agriculture brought settlement, cities and, six or seven thousand years ago, writing. Although man first wrote to keep account books, by 2600 BCE he was starting to inscribe his people’s tales in clay and stone, giving a stable, solid structure to narratives told loosely by earlier men. Writing made final what had been fluid before, which suited man’s new stability and the growing scale of his society, and like everybody who has sought a place in the world since, the first writers were primarily concerned with explaining their origins.

read the rest of On the Travelogue at Old World Wandering: A Travelogue

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