Archive for January, 2008
My dream of anarchy
People think of the word “Anarchy†as meaning chaotic disorder, or else they confuse it with a sort of extreme libertarianism. The bomb throwing Bakunin or John Galt in a backwoods cabin. Neither view is wrong but I want to coöpt the label for a utopian vision of my own. Whereas most political ideas come [...]
Postcard from Paris: The Museum of Invention
There is a marvelous museum in Paris. So much so that I’m writing this postcard not as an analysis or some attempt at sociological insight, but simply as a fan. It’s the Musée des Arts et Métiers, and it was founded in 1794 as a result of the efforts of Abbé Henri Grégoire, an enlightenment [...]
Postcard from Vienna: Art and abandon
Vienna is the most fantastic city for art. Its many museums, housed in magnificent palaces or outrageous and wonderful modern structures (KunstHaus Wien!) have at every turn the famous, the obscure-but-great, and in the end the just overwhelming. There is the Venus of Willemheim, Portrait of a young girl by ??, and Schiele’s The Embrace [...]
Postcard: Death in Venice
Here in Vienna it is bitterly cold. I’m sure it would be worse if it were windy, or snowing more than the occasional icy flake, but it’s enough to be a palpable force – something each inhabitant must push against with coats and gloves and hats, both physically and mentally, in order to function each [...]
Postcard from Italy: Mountains
Today I passed a hundred mountains; snow covered or with groves of olives and oranges. Some were rock and erosion, some wild, others bearing ancient hill towns or cut through by the tunnels of the autostrade.
Each has a history, a geography, a name. But names evaporate like the dews of summer. Even geology need only [...]
Postcard from Gallipoli: the old men
This postcard was going to be about the old men of Italy, but it’s turned out to be first about communications and how we’ve come to take good infrastructure and easy access to information for granted. Several things happened at once – we hired a car which we drove to Gallipoli, a tiny medieval town [...]
Postcard from Naples: via Tribuniale
Naples belongs in Asia rather than Europe. It’s narrow busy streets are exactly like Macau down to the washing hung out each window of the dirty tenements. But if the city is in the wrong continent, via Tribuniale on a Sunday after Mass is a street which is in the wrong century.
Families throng around stalls [...]
Postcard from Rome: the ant-hill of civilization
Rome is a beautiful, chaotic, dirty, wonderful, run-down, vibrant, and most of all historic city. You can walk for miles through twisted alleys filled with Vespa scooters, tobacconists, and cobblestones. You can also walk along miles of rather anonymous high rise apartment blocks. I’ve never seen a city quite so much like an ant-hill.
It’s also [...]
Postcard from London: Dinner in South Kensington
We ate potato pancakes, cabbage rolls, and stew. Drank wine. Tipped the waitress £10. The kids were overjoyed by the icecream. A smiling old lady, mostly blind, was helped to her table by her aged family. Two Polish girls at the next table discussed the American elections.
Warm and satisfied we hunched our shoulders against the [...]
Postcard from London: Edges are fun
Have you ever noticed that some places are teeming with a great variety of life, while others are featureless and boring? Think about a pond, which has 5 sorts of amphibians, countless dragonflies, beetles, snakes, fish, crabs, worms, eels… and that’s before we start counting waterbird, mammal and plant species. It’s a rich environment. The [...]
Postcard from London: Kindness at Paddington Station
As some viners already know, I’m on holiday just at the moment, far from sunny summery Tasmania in the freezing uncharted wilds of Europe. But being addicted to NV means I can’t just be quiet for 6 weeks so I thought I’d send you all some postcards.
This concerns the stationmaster at Paddington Station – which [...]
