Raise the Hammer

The nature of violence that poorly articulated desires to accelerate progress unleash, is best described by: George Johnson, in his "In the Palaces of Memory". The kind of violence that hurts without leaving bruises - or so we in Hamilton presume:

"Freedom of speech is based on the old dualist notion that mind and body are separate things. Hurting someone with a rock is different from hurting someone with an idea. But is it really?
As science continues to make the case that memories cause physical changes, the distinction between mental violence, which is protected by law, and physical violence, which is illegal, is harder to understand."

----------------------------------


"In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping... And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised. ...A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop."
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


"...i love new york, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because i belong to it. "
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

"The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. "
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

"Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense."
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities


"The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner."
— Italo Calvino

"Calvino's final words in this 1962 essay 'Defiance of the Labyrinth' are strikingly similar to those used by Gerald Graff in 'Literature Against Itself': "The critical problem... is to discriminate between anti-realistic works that provide some true understanding of non-reality and those who are merely symptoms of it." -- John Welsh, Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the Violence of Representation.

--------------------------