Coming back

So, in the past two weeks, I participated in the world's largest scavenger hunt, took the GRE, and got some sort of horrible plague, the combination of which has detracted somewhat from my ability and volition to write. The Scavenger Hunt, incidentally, is run by the University of Chicago and is amazing. This year's list had 286 items, including makeshift elephant polo (teams built a litter that looked like an elephant; 4 people supported it, while a rider hit balls with a polo stick) and a miniature steam engine. My favorite item was the Job globe, a snowglobe that, when shaken, causes disasters of biblical proportions.

To cities: I don't really have any really solid topic to write about tonight. The biggest news is the new Brookings report: "State of Metropolitan America." There is so much data here, it's hard to comprehend. It focuses on, and classifies cities accordingly, on education, diversity, and population growth, but also has reams of data on topics like commute times, age demographics, and family and household breakdowns. It's huge and intimidating, and I will almost certainly revisit it.

Some other things:

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a sort of magical realist elaboration on the Odyssey where the author crafts 44 episodes that imagine the main characters in different circumstances with different emotions. BLDBLOG has a post on a chapter where Agamemnon creates a vast fortress on the plains of Troy dug into the sands of Troy. The post discusses the feasibility of such a palace, and other details of the architecture of sand, (which is really, really pretty.)

But later in that chapter, Agamemnon tasks Odysseus with a book comprising all the knowledge in the world. Part of the book describes the “hidden language of cities”

“A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.”

This is a fantastic image of the vitality of urban life, conjuring the idea of a city map as a conversation, or hundreds of conversations. I tried to do more with the idea, but the only significant insight I had was that such a description of cities reminds urban planners that we can only put the skeleton of a sentence in place; we can't force the actions around it.

And finally, I found some more new buildings that look like the buildings I described earlier. I didn't take pictures, but there are two new apartment buildings by UT and a new place at 12th and Lamar that look substantially like the triangle, the domain et al. Disturbing indeed.

I intend a series of short posts over the next few days to let my thoughts catch up with my output. Regular posting, hopefully, resumes next week.