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

[Keith Davis]

Thought so. Read Snowcrash. Pretty good. Haven't read any others.


On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:47 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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....
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > www.innergroovemusic.com
>



-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
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