Let’s start this off with a quote from Italo Calvino, an Italian by way of Havana:
“The city of your dream is Lalage. Its inhabitants arranged these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant evrything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly. “
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974. Print.
—
Via the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple reflects upon his visits to New York City, Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans-Cities and Memory: An Englishman reflects on his travels in urban America:
‘The first time I visited New York, between 40 and 50 years ago, it was a place of ill repute, at least among foreigners. Rumor and report made the city sound like a low-intensity war zone, and you would find yourself regaled with advice on how to stay safe there, un-mugged and un-shot.’
and:
‘Just under a half-century later, the level of civility in the two cities has switched: New York now feels safer than London.’
It was the really pretty girls, and the tall, ambitious guys, among my cohort, who made made their way to Manhattan.
Touring the city, I was shown a dream, gazing down from Midtown; a forest of skyscrapers on a clamorous loading-dock. I saw people easily dead within a week, and people trying to write their names in marble or maybe a concrete cornerstone.
We all have ambitions.
The recently deceased Clive James (England via Australia) visited New York in the 1980’s for his Postcards series. He seems very worried about getting mugged a second time.
Everybody knows you take a classy, beautiful lady on a classy movie date, down in Times Square:
I don’t know about all these Brits roaming around.
Here’s Sting singing his classic ‘British Guy In The Five Boroughs’
In fact, what people with a longer history can teach us about history is that people might forgive, but they rarely forget:
Ambitious Southern Gentleman makes his way to New York and gets hip to The Arts & Journalism, fact and fiction:
