Eredien's Journal

Dear postrodent,

I've been driving around here, around this old city, post-industrial, post-economy, post-life, I grew up in, and thinking how much you would love it. Nothing's whole; nothing's clean. The great granite block of the art museum tries to be modern, but is modern in the sense Stonehenge is modern: timeless, featureless, a square hewn from earth. The Calder on its front lawn gently sits and rusts. Everything is cinderblocks, or brick with crumbling pointing, or void windows into voided buildings. The sky is the same color as the parking lots I can see from both my bedroom windows. The sky's reflection here leaches the color out of everything: roofs, homes, cars. The only shiny things are the ones lit up at night. There's a block downtown, now, with tinsel wreaths attached to all the lampposts; the light there glows yellow onto all the storefronts: a diner, the Catholic book store, the strip club, all cozied up together, huddled behind their security gratings at night like old homeless men. That's one block, the only one lit. That street must be 20 or 30 blocks long. The whole thing is like the ass-end of the apocalypse: a brownfield on the DEC list sits in the center of town; the only legible sign nearby reading "Dry Ice" as if that were the biggest commodity going for a mile square around. The old brick houses have windows half-boarded with plywood that looks wet on the outside, like it would give way if you left it until the spring and then came back and pressed, just a little, your hand over the graffiti which would be the most colorful thing on the building. The warm commercial heart of the city was built on a paved-over swamp; the orchard was cut down and a shopping complex whose logo is a tree put in its place. The only warm and well-lit buildings, the ones the cars and people cluster in around like flies, are the places where people can go to buy and forget and consume, and the whole thing named for that latter process, without irony. We'd wander around talking in the constant freezing damp that always promises snow and threatens rain and produces nothing, and you'd be astonished every fifteen feet, delighted, taking out your cameraphone, giving some rusted-out truss the bright sun of a camera flash, and the architecture would think it was summer.

- eredien

ab3nd and I went to go see the Edward Gorey exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum this weekend. It's $5 suggested admission, which means if you're super-broke you can get in for free, but if not it's definitely worth the suggested admission.

It was a little smaller than I expected, but that was ok because there's so much *in* the drawings themselves to see--all those little Gorey-esque touches--that it felt rather larger. There were also some manuscripts, which I thought were really interesting in terms of the fact that he seemed to compose the words separately, for the most part, from the drawings in his sketchbooks. I'd wondered how he created, and that was really great to see. He also loved using placeholders--for instance, the original name of "The Osbick Bird" is "The Something Bird," in draft; a few different name-choices were considered and rejected and re-considered in marginal notes.

The detail in the original ink drawings, themselves, was stunning, even moreso than in any of the anthologies you may have seen. I don't understand how his eyes didn't go bad in his mid-20's. There was a miniature book there no larger than a postage-stamp, every page hand-lettered.

Some of the works profiled there I hadn't read yet, and some of them I'll likely not see again--the hand-colored envelopes, for instance, in which he posted his college letters to his mom.

The Athenaeum itself is really beautiful, and filled with books (only members are allowed to go beyond the first floor). It's ridiculously hard for me to walk around a place filled with books and not actually be able to pick them off the shelf. It's kind of like a sting operation for readers, scholars, and book-hounds--well, you *can* read this book about Gropius, but only if you become a member....

I kind of want to be a member--for one thing, it looks like a fantastic place to do research into American history--but after being herded out the door, I got a clearer head and reconsidered. Not only are memberships expensive, but that kind of exclusivity to knowledge doesn't sit well with me (though I do understand that it is partially to protect and conserve the architecture and the books themselves, many of which are one-offs and antiques worth thousands of dollars). And Boston is so well-stocked with a wealth of libraries anyway...

I suppose that colleges, and indeed any school, in their way, are also exclusive, but at least most colleges don't outright ban members of the public from using their libraries.

...really, I just wanted to read and was annoyed that I was thwarted. But I don't think it's a bad thing to be annoyed at being thwarted at being unable to read a book.

Definitely an exhibit worth seeing.