London Crawling

[rich]

my girlfriend just saw him speak at Cuny--he writes about the people who
work the night shift in London

rich


On 7/12/06, Erik T. Burns <erik.burns at dowjones.com> wrote:
>
> foax:
> excellent story from the Telegraph about London's sewers by Sukhdev
> Sandhu.
> no alligators, nor even rumors thereof (it's hairballs these "flushers"
> are
> worried about) but nevertheless a pynchonesque trip into the bowels.
> etb
>
> snippets:
>
> The sewers are often imagined as an unpatrolled wilderness. They are
> imagined - and correspondingly desired - as the mephitic opposite of tamed
> civil society. They are meant to cancel it out. In truth, they mirror
> rather
> than reverse what goes on above ground.
>
> ...
>
> I never did find the giant hairballs I was looking for. Apparently they
> don't exist. I shouldn't have been surprised: the sewers of London
> accumulate myths as much as they do fat. They are built out of a sediment
> of
> gossip, whisper, untruth, longing. Subterranea is alluring because it is
> thought, by autodidact dreamers and unstable visionaries, to contain the
> solution to the city, to store its hidden wiring.
>
> ...
>
> The sewers are more than negation or black absence. They are rich in
> fragile
> beauty. The brickwork, some of it more than 200 years old, amazes all who
> work below ground.
>
> full article:
>
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/07/08/ftsewers08.x
> ml&page=1
>
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