Night-walking

There aren't really any good places near my apartment to take a nice night-time walk. I'll probably just go walk around the block, and that's a serviceable route. But I wish there was a street that didn't feel quite so closed-down and lonely.

I'd love to have a late-night coffee-shop kind of place (which is funny to say, given that I don't drink coffee) where I can go out in the evening to sit and read, maybe with some hot cocoa. My neighborhood is gentrifying a bit, but it doesn't seem to have that sort of thing in it, and Westcott, where most of the grad students live and which definitely *does*, is most of two miles away. Close by bike, but not close enough for spur-of-the moment travel.

Reading

I just read a couple short pieces by William Cronon for my research design class. I have to say, whether I'm reading his multi-hundred page history of Chicago, or a few columns in "Perspectives on History," that man can write.

And now it's on to Henre Lefebvre's "The Urban Revolution" for my social justice and the city class. I started reading Lefebvre's "The Production of Space" a couple years ago but got distracted, so here's my opportunity for Lefebvre I suppose.

It's interesting how context can add so much meaning to an image. The cover of the book has an image of the Champs-Élysées. It's a pretty picture of an urban place. But having read so much, in books like Robert Fishman's "Bourgeoise Utopias," about Georges-Eugène Haussman's renovation of Paris and what it meant for both physical and social constructions of the city, it says so much more than that.