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oursinIt does seem to me that she's very much leaning on what's happening in San Francisco as a result of being swallowed up by Silicon Valley, maybe?
Also, I read this
I suspect a lot of people are now if not outright disoriented, not really oriented to where they live. Unlike using a map to find your way, which gradually becomes superfluous as you internalise it, using an app means obeying instructions without grasping the underlying geography, so you never really learn where you are.
and I had a flashback to something I read - and I think it was a memoir, rather than a novel? - by somebody who had been living for a fair amount of time in London and had been using the Tube to get around, and thus had a very weird idea of the actual geography of the city. As I recall the revelation came when she was with someone and they needed to get to somewhere and she said let's take the Tube, and it was all of one stop, and the other person pointed out that it was easier to walk.
(Which leads me to wonder how much people's mental maps of London are at some level based on The Iconic Tube Map.)
(This is one reason why I recommend taking buses, and sitting on the top deck at the front.)
(Also yesterday somebody posted a diagram of a brain scan which was supposed to be promoting AI for teaching, and honestly, surely, more connections are supposed to be a good thing, and doing The Knowledge famously had a discernable effect on taxi-drivers' brains. And oh dear, now I have horrible thoughts of AI trying to do The Knowledge and ending up in Aberdeen or the sea.)
On getting about The Big City, I also remembered this:
If a person has earned their living in London for twenty-one years, they acquire a kind of rat-like neatness of behaviour. They can skip quickly from place to place, pop in and out of tea shops, board buses and make sharp little plans which are carried out rat! tat! as deftly as an automatic ticket machine pops out a ticket at Leicester Square tube station. The more obscure and ordinary the person, the more necessary it is that they should acquire this rat-like deftness.
Stella Gibbons, Bassett (1934)
Which is partly about self-preservation but also about an almost unconscious level of thought for others in that space as well - which may perhaps be somewhat on the decline, though maybe the standing on the wrong side of escalators and stopping dead at the foot of same, and lingering like kine in the gateway at the entrance to the platform may still be the mark of The Provincial.
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Date: 2024-11-16 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-16 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-16 06:39 pm (UTC)The difference between the Tube map (which is not a map at all, but a schematic diagram) and reality became obvious on my first trip to London. My practice in getting around the central area is to check an actual map for 2 or 3 Tube stations in the immediate vicinity of both where I am and where I'm going, and then check them all on the Tube map, because often a few steps further on the street will lead you to a direct connection and save much transfer trouble underground.
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Date: 2024-11-16 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-16 08:21 pm (UTC)Mine absolutely is. It's made up of little zones of mentally-mapped space radiating out around particular Tube stations.
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Date: 2024-11-17 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-17 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-17 01:33 pm (UTC)A friend of mine once recommended her dentist, and I will concede that he was an excellent dentist and fixed a problem that had been baffling dental science for some years, but he was practising in the far reaches of Muswell Hill and it was a massive Expotition to get there, such that I was actually glad when he moved to Finchley.
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Date: 2024-11-18 09:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-17 12:45 pm (UTC)I love Solnit and I think she's got something of a point but it def seems like more of a local issue.
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Date: 2024-11-16 10:21 pm (UTC)New York City doesn't fit her description - are there people who are disconnected, and spend most of their time in their headphones, yes. But there are a lot who aren't as well. I wear headphones and yet am aware of everyone around me. I just have a music soundtrack. It's still a vibrant city. Solhnit does tend towards exaggeration or conflagration at times in her writing. It's what annoys me about it - she aims to inflame as opposed to merely inform?
On the map bit? I am odd. I have no sense of direction - so love maps and use them. As a result, London was no problem for me to get around in the 1980s. My brother, who has a sense of direction, got lost and irritated. The boy who loves to get lost, and can find his way around anywhere - couldn't do it in London. I, on the other hand, could - and adored London. I also adored NYC, I could figure it out - with maps and subways. In NYC. - you take subways to get around. Not buses. In London, you take buses - top of the double decker, not subways. The buses run longer and don't shut down, or at least that was the case in the 1980s when I went to London, I've not been back since then.
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Date: 2024-11-17 12:22 pm (UTC)I feel a bit sorry for younger people who presumably have never used the London A-Z.
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Date: 2024-11-17 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-17 04:43 am (UTC)Living outside of San Francisco and using the subway to get in definitely shaped my mental map around BART, and I learned a lot about when and how I wanted to be Visible. Which is to say, generally not to the guy who has set eyes on me thirty seconds ago and is already propositioning marriage. And when the Twelve Galaxies guy is on the bus with his sign upside-down at his feet, he gets the same general privacy and respect for his space that any other guy with a Wikipedia page can get in the crowds.
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Date: 2024-11-17 10:57 am (UTC)Also, Saint Petersburg is mostly very regular, but there are tricky spots and GPS is good for those. The one way GPS is better than map is that when you figured the spot in which you stand the wrong way, the GPS will show you that you are going in the wrong direction.
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Date: 2024-11-17 11:31 am (UTC)You can see this effect to some extent in fantasy writers. Tolkien, with his strong attachment to the landscape of England, naturally drew up a detailed map with shifting coasts and drowned lands in the past. Le Guin, a Californian living in Oregon, produced a detailed archipelago for Earthsea. But when I see a fantasy map that consists of adjoining blobs, I would certainly guess that the author lives somewhere well inland.
I find it quite amusing that when Lois McMaster Bujold finally put a map into one of her Penric stories, it didn't work as well for me as the mental map I already had of western Europe turned upside-down and relabelled.
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Date: 2024-11-17 12:42 pm (UTC)Oh yeah - I've had multiple conversations with people who've moved to London about how you end up with bubbles of knowledge of what's around particular Tube stations, and then you start to join them up, in the first couple of years.
Which is partly about self-preservation but also about an almost unconscious level of thought for others in that space as well - which may perhaps be somewhat on the decline, though maybe the standing on the wrong side of escalators and stopping dead at the foot of same, and lingering like kine in the gateway at the entrance to the platform may still be the mark of The Provincial.
So, so true. (Though also the climate - I remember when I moved to Saigon from London, my boss thought I was always late for things cos I was 'running' around.) It's definitely worse post-covid but yep the people who get out at Oxford Circus and STOP are still the tourists.
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Date: 2024-11-18 01:30 am (UTC)Not sure about getting an internalised map; especially the tube map, though I do know I never got lost using the tube map (did get it wrong about travel times during certain times of day); even when I was first travelling up to London on my own.
The only time I ever felt intimidated? Taking a wrong road; trying what I thought was a short cut and accidentally finding myself in, what I believe was, the banking district.
That place was scary!
kerk
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Date: 2024-11-18 11:36 am (UTC)I hate satnav because I have a mental map in my head with a fairly good sense of where north is and satnavs, and the new maps on street corners in London*, turn it all round so that whichever direction you are facing is at the top and it disorients me completely. I view myself moving about on a map from above and it doesn't help if people turn my map round!
I do apologise for being provincial now though. I arrive at Paddington and have 5 minutes of "the noise and the people" before I remember how to navigate crowds. I do try to reacclimatise in a deserted bit of the arrival platform rather than while standing stock still at the top of an escalator.
*But I am glad these exist and are encouraging people to walk to places that aren't that far away really.
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Date: 2024-11-18 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-11-19 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-22 06:12 am (UTC)I take greater issue with the assumption that Solnit makes that people have ever actually wanted to talk with strangers outside of spaces where you go to talk to strangers.