Colloquium, Revisited.

New York, New York on the Vegas Strip: It doesn't even LOOK real (photo by JpL)

Well I suppose this blog post is a fitting forum to discuss some quotations and ideas that I had prepared for my Colloquium – Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not need my notes as often as I had anticipated. If I had been asked exactly where I wanted to start, I was planning to offer the following quotation from the epilogue of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:

Feelings and intimate experiences are inchoate and unmanageable to most people, but writers and artists have found ways of giving them form. Literature, for example, is full of precise descriptions of how people live. The academic disciplines themselves yield abundant experiential data that deserve our closer attention (202).

Tuan has a habit of bringing to our attention that which would have been obvious if we has only stopped to think about it. In the case of the above quotation, I found my Rationale, Colloquium, and I suppose my Concentration and general course of study validated when reading Tuan’s words. During my Colloquium, we discussed many aspects of portrayal and redefinition of both New York City and Paris, drawing on both literature and film. I believe that the creation of these two cities as mythic concepts derives first and foremost in experiential knowledge of these two vibrant cities. Both Paris and New York have innumerable layers of history (granted, Paris has been around a lot longer…) that make these constantly moving metropolises what they are today. But when I say history, I mean everything you find in a standard textbook along with all aspects of culture as well as individual perception and a side of topography. But when considering these cities as singular entities, if that is even feasible, New York and Paris are certainly greater than the sums of their parts. This synergy comes from their auras. As wholes, they can be more or less deconstructed, but there is that certain je ne sais quoi that can only truly be exposed through art. I have noticed countless times that those who best capture the essence of either city are talented (is that word too cliché?) artists—writers, filmmakers, what have you.

As per our class discussion yesterday at the Christopher Street Pier, New York is perhaps a city of individuals who share common thoughts and experiences. We laughed at the time, it even became a running joke for the rest of the afternoon for those of us who stayed in the sun a while after class was over. But I think there is a great deal of truth in this collective identity that seems to harshly oppose what we consider our idiosyncratic individualities. In just about any book, film or even song that comes readily to mind about New York, I am struck by common themes that come up to some degree almost every time. For example, I find in so many portrayals of New York City a similar touching and beautiful loneliness. If we are all lonely, and it shines through so frequently, how does that fit in with defining New York as its own humanized place in the world?

And on a totally tangential note, here’s a question that came out of my Colloquium: What is it about Paris and New York that make them worthy of being the only two currently major cities to be represented in Las Vegas? How are there senses of place duplicated and/or lost in their reproduction?