The poet and the knife-grinder

Street Songs ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 159-186
Author(s):  
Daniel Karlin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Visual History ◽  
The Way

Walt Whitman’s short poem ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’ describes an encounter on a Manhattan street with a knife-grinder who ‘works at his wheel sharpening a great knife’: the ‘sparkles from the wheel’ form the knife-grinder’s song. The poem, with its narrator observing a group who are watching the knife-grinder’s magical performance, circles back to Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’, with which I began. But the way the narrator places himself in the scene, the description of the old man at work, and the implied politics of the urban landscape are all radically different. In the knife-grinder’s long literary and visual history, there are very few images that ennoble his ‘art’, and some that carry the darkest intimations of violence. Whitman deliberately refrains from investing the knife-grinder with attributes ‘above his station’. What is transcendent is not the knife-grinder himself, but his utterance—matched by that of the poet.

The Sylheti Bari and the Londoni Flat

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Zeitlyn
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Spatial Arrangement ◽  
Attitudes Toward School ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Children’S Play ◽  
Bangladeshi Families ◽  
British Bangladeshi ◽  
The Way

This article examines the ways in which migration from rural homesteads in Sylhet, Bangladesh, to urban flats in London has affected the practices of British Bangladeshi families around gender and childhood. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the “Kabyle house,” I describe relations between the spatial arrangement of homes and practices. Analyzing the “Sylheti bari” (rural homestead) and contrasting it with the “ Londoni (British Bangladeshi) flat,” I describe the significance of the way in which ideas of “inside” and “outside” have translated from one setting to another. I will show how the translation of these ideas to the urban landscape in London affects British Bangladeshi practices surrounding headscarf wearing, children’s play, and socializing, as well as attitudes toward school and language.

scholarly journals A Tale of Two Statues: Memorialising Queen Victoria in London and Calcutta

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Plunkett
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Hero Worship ◽  
The Way

The Victoria Memorial in London and the Victoria MemorialHall, Calcutta, are the two most substantial and enduring commemorative schemesbuilt following the death of Queen Victoria on 23 January 1901. Both memorialsremain heritage icons, immediately recognisable parts of the urban fabric ofLondon and Calcutta. The original schemes are nonetheless notable for the imperialmyth-making and the way they place Victoria as the focal point of British rule.Moreover, both schemes foreground the question of the nature of Victoria’sagency and fashioning in relation to commemoration and hero-worship. Thestatues of Victoria by Thomas Brock at the heart of both memorials are part ofmuch grander and elaborate reshaping of the political and urban landscape, butthe commemoration of Victoria in Britain and India reveals some of thefrictions and instability around her legacy.        

Eating Out

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Eating Out ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
The Way

The restaurant in its modern form was an important addition to the nineteenth-century urban landscape. It epitomized the new forms of metropolitan culture. The restaurant is explored here through the way in which it developed forms of commercial hospitality, which were in turn, integral to the discourses of the West End. Pleasure districts function partly through a discourse of hospitality which makes them inviting. Eating out was never just about the consumption of food; it was about the facilitation of forms of social interaction. The chapter looks at elite restaurants such as Romano’s on the Strand, which were crucial to the nightlife of the rich. It then looks at the way the West End developed food for the masses by delving into two business empires. First, it studies the world of Lyons catering, which established a hugely successful franchise of tea shops, starting in the West End. It then looks at the world of the Gattis, who owned cafeterias, music halls, and theatres. The Gatti’s restaurant on the Strand was a major West End venue which attracted middle-class diners in an opulent setting but with affordable prices.

scholarly journals On the origin of spaces: Morphometric foundations of urban form evolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 707-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Dibble ◽  
Alexios Prelorendjos ◽  
Ombretta Romice ◽  
Mattia Zanella ◽  
Emanuele Strano ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Hierarchical Cluster ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
New Towns ◽  
High Rise ◽  
Key Variables ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Way

The modern discipline of urban morphology gives us a ground for the comparative analysis of cities, which increasingly includes specific quantitative elements. In this paper, we make a further step forward towards the definition of a general method for the classification of urban form. We draw from morphometrics and taxonomy in life sciences to propose such method, which we name ‘urban morphometrics’. We then test it on a unit of the urban landscape named ‘Sanctuary Area’ (SA), explored in 45 cities whose origins span four historic time periods: Historic (medieval), Industrial (19th century), New Towns (post-WWII, high-rise) and Sprawl (post-WWII, low-rise). We describe each SA through 207 physical dimensions and then use these to discover features that discriminate them among the four temporal groups. Nine dimensions emerge as sufficient to correctly classify 90% of the urban settings by their historic origins. These nine attributes largely identify an area's ‘visible identity’ as reflected by three characteristics: (1) block perimeterness, or the way buildings define the street-edge; (2) building coverage, or the way buildings cover the land and (3) regular plot coverage, or the extent to which blocks are made of plots that have main access from a street. Hierarchical cluster analysis utilising only the nine key variables nearly perfectly clusters each SA according to its historic origin; moreover, the resulting dendrogram shows, just after WWII, the first ‘bifurcation’ of urban history, with the emergence of the modern city as a new ‘species’ of urban form. With ‘urban morphometrics’ we hope to extend urban morphological research and contribute to understanding the way cities evolve.

Maiakovskii and the Mobile Monument: Alternatives to Iconoclasm in Russian Culture

Slavic Review ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rann
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article examines Vladimir Maiakovskii's frequent references to statues and monuments in his poetry in relation to traditions of iconoclasm in Russian culture in order not only to shed light on the poet's attitude toward the role of the past in the creation of a new culture but also to investigate the way in which the destruction, relocation, and transformation of monuments, both in the urban landscape and in art, reflects political change in Russia. James Rann demonstrates that, while Maiakovskii often invoked a binary iconoclastic discourse in which creation necessitates destruction, his poetry also articulated a more nuanced vision of cultural change through the symbol of the moving monument: the statue is preserved but also transformed and liberated. Finally, an analysis of “Vo ves' golos” shows how Maiakovskii's myth of the statue helped him articulate his relationship to Soviet power and to his own poetic legacy.

scholarly journals Indeks, ikona i symbol. O stosunku fotografii, historii (czasu) i pamięci

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Christoph Hamann
Keyword(s):  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Digital Photographs ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Analysis ◽  
The Future ◽  
Collective Resource ◽  
Visual History ◽  
The Way

The Author starts with a thesis that photography and modern historiography developed at the same time, and then tries to look for relationships between the two. He starts from analyzing a specificity of a photograph which — as a medium — not only represents the past, but can be an energizing impulse both in the presence and the future. By referring to the semiotic classification of Charles Sanders Peirce, the Author describes the importance of a photograph to historical research as an index, an icon and a symbol. This helps understand the way of using a collective resource of photographs and to define a status of digital photographs as a source. Finally, the Author tries to show the perspectives of visual history analysis and the role which might be played by images when forming and changing memory communities in the era of globalization and diversification.

Not in Between Lyric Painting, Visual History, and the Postcolonial Future

2003 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Moten
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Theoretical Possibility ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Visual History ◽  
The Way

The lyrical radio speeches of Patrice Lumumba are recaptured in the art of Tshibumba Kanda. But in order to understand this spirit of the postcolonial future as a revolutionary, intellectual force, we must make a detour through the work of C.L.R. James and Cedric Robinson. The theory and practice of revolution is bound to the way the individual emerges as a theoretical possibility and phenomenological actuality in and out of the revolutionary ensemble.

scholarly journals From teaching experience. VIII. Grid ornaments

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Yu. L. Voytekhovsky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Teaching Experience ◽  
Symmetry Groups ◽  
Simple Derivation ◽  
Actual Problem ◽  
Space Symmetry ◽  
University Course ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

After 7 symmetry groups of borders, 17 symmetry groups of grid ornaments are the next step on the way to 230 space symmetry groups in the university course of crystallography. A simple derivation of grid ornaments is proposed, combining the search for 10 flat clusters and their translations in 5 parallelogram grids. Analysis of grid ornaments in the urban landscape (artistic mosaics, wall claddings, floorings, etc.) draws students to the actual problem of the prevalence of 230 space symmetry groups in minerals.

Memory, Heritage and the Demolition of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche, 1968*

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310
Author(s):  
Marcus Colla
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Many ◽  
Number Of Individuals ◽  
The Church ◽  
Socialist Unity ◽  
The Way

Abstract In 1968, the ruling Socialist Unity Party demolished Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche (Garrison Church). This article analyses the way in which the demolition of the Garnisonkirche opened up a spectrum of reflections on the meaning of the Prussian and Nazi pasts in the GDR and the ways it ought to be mediated through the urban landscape. Using petitions sent by everyday citizens to the local political authorities as well as debates within the SED itself, this article demonstrates how the public discussion about the demolition of the church navigated the many problems posed by Potsdam’s ‘burdened’ past in its urban spaces. While a number of individuals believed that this history could be transcended through the construction of a ‘new’ Potsdam, others believed that effectively handling the recent past required a direct confrontation with its architectural symbols.

The Beginnings of Urbanization in Rome

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Smith
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urbanization Process ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the urbanization process in Rome based on archaeological evidence. Archaeological attention has been refocused on Rome because the question of the reliability of our sources for early Rome has been reopened and because recent and ancient sources have been found to cohere to a surprising degree. The chapter suggests that the curiae are interestingly urban in their interests and functions, and in the way they participate in conscious and unconscious dialectics across the whole urban landscape. It also discusses the distinction between proto-urban and urban.

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