Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

to read when there's time

Imagined cities : urban experience and the language of the novel / Robert Alter. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2005.

PN3352.C5 A48 2005 Wilson in process.

The review in the NYTBR last Sunday really intrigued me. There's not much writing about urban geography in literature that I'm aware of. Jed Perl suggests that Alter is saying how artistic experience/interpretation mirrors the city. How individualistically colored is the artist's take on urbanism?

Perl writes, "one can even argue that if it were not for the city, artists woud never have discovered the country, for landscape is a type of painting that was first imagined in the cities, and the pastoral is surely one of the most insistently urban of all literary modes."

The Ethical Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga. This "neuroscientist argues that ethical behavior is a function of society, not one of brain chemistry." I am reading about ethics again to find newer, better readings for my course on ethics and law of construction. Something like this might be an interesting counterpoint to classical theories of moral philosophy.