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Saturday, May 13, 2006

Sign them up for CONtemporary Civilization

While I don't think it would rate even a sentence from Joseph Mitchell [Note to readers: If you want to see what the English language is capable of in the right hands, you should obtain this book as soon as possible. Oh, sorry . . . I mean this book], there's a minor little slice of New York life in the current New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pages that I enjoyed reading as a former resident of the neighborhood in question.

Some of you may have wondered, "How did MWR become such a worldly fellow living in places like Seattle and Cambridge, Massachusetts?" Well, I also spent a few years living at 108th Street and Amsterdam Avenue (as it happens, at the top of the tall building in the lower left of this photo, also seen at the apex of the missing wedge here--and you should have seen the view of the Cathedral, but I digress). I know the Manhattan Valley neighborhood has probably improved a bit since I lived there back in "Dinkins Time," but I sincerely doubt that many Columbia students would see much point in wandering around intersections like 107th and Columbus (if they were heading for the park entrance at 106th and CPW, that's a different story, but there's no indication of that). I have to think that the con artists were on their way to an actual target-rich environment when these two rubes wandered by. Lucky day! (Seattle translation: think of a steelhead jumping into the passenger seat as you load your Subaru for the fishing trip.)

I'm sure it's not considered P.C. in Columbia's freshman orientation to give the little dears the lay of the land, but that wouldn't be the worst idea. We can't all have a moot court partner who learned the word "disemboweled" from a news story about something that happened in Morningside Park when she was growing up. At least Francis and Nick had the good sense after a year of Contemporary Civilization not to be lured to the "pharmacy on Fifth Avenue," a scary-sounding and probably fictional locale next to which the actually-existing Duane Reade on Amsterdam probably seemed to the two pigeons like a kind of Santa Maria Novella.

By the way, I would love to see "The Con Issue" of the New Yorker.


posted at 10:06 PM

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