Back to AtD. "Kind of like Omaha", p945

[jochen stremmel]

Neal: author of Snowcrash; the quote is from his last: Reamde.

2012/8/6 Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com>:
> Nice. Stephenson?
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:15 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Speaking of grids, Mark, there is a nice passage in the new Stephenson
>> novel about the impossibility of them laying out the roads in the
>> Midwest:
>>
>> "The first and last thirds of the route were entirely over mountains.
>> The middle third traversed the irrigated basin around Grand Coulee
>> dam. No matter how many times Richard flew it, he was always startled
>> to see the ground suddenly level out and develop a rectilinear grid of
>> section-line roads, just like in the Midwest.  Early on, the pattern
>> was imposed in fragments scattered over creviced and disjoint mesas
>> separating mountain valleys, but presently these flowed together to
>> form a coherent grid that held together until it lapped up against
>> some terrain that was simply too rugged and wild to be subjected to
>> such treatment. The only respect in which these green farm-squares
>> differed from the ones in the Midwest was that here, many of them
>> sported inscribed circles of green, the marks of center-pivot
>> irrigation systems.
>> Richard could never look at them without thinking of Chet. For Chet
>> was a Midwestern boy too, and had grown up in a small town in the
>> eastern, neatly gridded part of South Dakota where he and his boyhood
>> friends had formed a proto-motorcycle gang, riding around on homemade
>> contraptions built from lawnmower engines. Later they had graduated to
>> dirt bikes and then full-fledged motorcycles. The world’s
>> unwillingness to supply Chet with all the resources he needed for
>> upkeep and improvement of his fleet of bikes had led him into the
>> business of small-town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark
>> and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal
>> meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand. Chet had logged
>> a huge number of miles riding around on those section line roads,
>> which he preferred to the state highways and the Interstates since
>> there was less traffic and less of a police presence.
>> One evening in 1977 he had been riding south from a lucrative
>> rendezvous in Pipestone, Minnesota. It was a warm summer night, the
>> moon and the stars were out. He leaned back against his sissy bar and
>> let the wind blow in his long hair and cranked up the throttle. Then
>> he woke up in a long-term care facility in Minneapolis in February. As
>> was slowly explained to him by the occupational therapists, he had
>> been found in the middle of a cornfield by a farmer’s dog. It seemed
>> that his nocturnal ride had been terminated by a sudden westward jog
>> in the section-line road. Failing to jog, he had flown off straight
>> into the cornfield, doing something like ninety miles an hour. The
>> corn, which was eight feet tall at that time of the year, had brought
>> him to a reasonably gentle stop, and so he had sustained surprisingly
>> few injuries. The long, tough fibrous stalks had split and splintered
>> as he tore through them, but his leathers had deflected most of it.
>> Unfortunately he had not been wearing a helmet and so one splinter had
>> gone straight up his left nostril into his brain.
>> The recovery had taken a while. Chet had gotten most of his brain
>> functions back. He had not lost any of his wits, unless discretion and
>> social skills could be so designated, and so he had devoted a lot of
>> attention to the question of why the transit-brandishing pencilnecks
>> who had laid out the section lines a hundred years ago had been so
>> particular about sticking to a grid pattern and yet had perversely
>> inserted these occasional sideways jogs into the grid. Examining maps,
>> he noticed that the jogs only occurred in north-south roads, never
>> east-west.
>> The answer, of course, was that the earth was a sphere and so it was
>> geometrically impossible to cover it with a grid of squares. You could
>> grid a good-sized patch of it, but eventually you would have to insert
>> a little adjustment: move one row of sections east or west relative to
>> the row beneath it.
>> It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a
>> damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge,
>> something cosmic, in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the
>> conclusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit
>> night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during
>> the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been
>> failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters."
>>
>> I hope you enjoy it.
>>
>> J
>>
>> 2012/8/6 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
>> > p. 945 Sofia: Goes back in sources to 59 B.C. always a major crossroads,
>> > transportation route.
>> >
>> > Population remained small until Turks gone in 1879 "a city reimagined in
>> > the thirty-odd years
>> > since the Turks had been driven out, winding alleyways, mosques, and
>> > hovels replaced with
>> > a grid of neat wide streets and Europeanized public works on the grand
>> > scale.
>> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia
>> >
>> > We know how TRP prefers 'winding alleyways' over the rationalization of
>> > grids...with a
>> > slam at the State and its helpful "works'
>> >
>> > I'll also add this as more circumstantial evidence that TRP likes (as
>> > vision) small is beautiful
>> > over larger when rationalization often takes over......I might say TRP
>> > believes in human-sized
>> > cities and comparing Sofia w Omaha--no wikilink, you can find---shows
>> > accuracy (In a
>> > comparison only he--and Calvino?--might make on paper?)---with gridness
>> > as Omaha's
>> > way as well..........Omaha as the heart of America...rationalized, rich,
>> > Puritanical, non-showy
>> > just 'pragmatic' in the narrow meaning of that word in America?
>> >
>> > So what Sofia was turned into after 1879 until this point in the
>> > novel....
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