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                                             April 08, 2022        
                                                                   
                                             "Metropolis on the Styx" (2007)
Had enough yet?  I have trouble              by David L. Pike      
stopping myself...  every time I                                   
flip the pages of this book I find                       DEEPSIX
another overblown exposition of a                                  
rather simple point...                                             
                                                                   
From Chapter 1, "The Devil, The Underground, and the Vertical City":   
                                                                       
   "Even more confusingly, the single word *underground* was           
   pressed into duty during the nineteenth century not only            
   to describe clandestine or hidden activity but to                   
   denominate the new railways and the ever-more subterranean      
   quality of the dwellings and workplaces of the urban poor.      
   The language with which the underground is represented in       
   discourse was influenced by and helped to produce the           
   confusion between the moral and the physical, the               
   imaginary and the material; it also indicates the very          
   real but distorted relations between the terms it confuses."    
                                                                   
                                                                   
But then, after a while I start feeling sorry for Pike.            
I can imagine him awake at 3am, pounding away,  cranking out         
the word wooze at a furious pace, desperate to hit his deadlines      
and justify the barrage of grants he's recieved to do this...      
                                                                   
    "Nineteenth-century imagery of the underground can be          
    grouped into two distinct categories: a discourse of           
    segregation and elimination, and a discourse of                
    incorporation and recycling.  The first of these was           
    conventionally identified with London, the second with         
    Paris; as we shall see, neither discourse fully                
    accounts for the space of either city, nor can the two         
    models be fully understood separately one from the             
    other."                                                        
                                                                   
                                                                   
Can you imagine that Pike *really* imagined that anyone would      
care much about this?  Did he envision anyone actually             
reading it?                                                        
                                                                   
    "By the beginning of the twentieth century, the                
    convergence of the metaphorical and literal spaces             
    beneath the earth was no longer so novel;                      
    consequently we find it presented unconsciously,               
    manifesting itself as second nature, expressed more            
    directly as ideology."                                         
                                                                   
                                                                   
But then, my copy of this book has scattered notations in          
pencil (in what seems like a "feminine hand", an odd               
pheonomena in itself) from someone who really seems to have        
*liked* it.  She pencils in comments like "good!" on               
things that I would've said seem mildly clever at best.            
                                                                   
                                                                   
    "The medieval and early modern imagination of the              
    underground had been dominated by the vertical                 
    cosmos of Christianity.  To be sure many                       
    conflicting images made their way into the                     
    capacious receptacle labeled Hell, but, at the same            
    time, the relationship between above and below was             
    rigidly fixed and predominately metaphysical."                 
                                                           
                                                           
                                                           
                                                           
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