explore | Grilled Cheese

'It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.'

This quote from a LIFE Magazine interview in May of 1956 is commonly misattributed to Agatha Christie, but she did not quip this herself – in fact, she thinks quite the opposite:

"The mill stood in a narrow side-street in the heart of a district characterised by squalor & the numerous streets of a similar sort, as well as by the number of houses crammed in those streets & the multitude of human beings herded in those drab dwellings." ~ Odd Man Out, F.L.Green.
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Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
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"our sky, cement;
our trees, steel;
...
Coming up the subway stairs, I thought the moon
only another street-light--
a little crooked."
#20 Jerusalem the Golden
Charles Reznikoff
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"For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal"

James Joyce speaking to his friend the writer and painter Arthur Power in the 1920s
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'Desire is a city of yellow houses
As it surrenders its drunks to the night.
It is the drunks on ancient bicycles
Warbling into motionless air,
And the pigeons, asleep in branches,
That will repeat the same songs tomorrow
Believing them new.'

Tracy K. Smith

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🎨 Randal Ford

"Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night."

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🖊️ Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood
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🎨Paul Klee

In London
every now and then
I get this craving
for my mother's food
I leave art galleries
in search of plantains
saltfish/sweet potatoes

I need this link

I need this touch
of home
swinging my bag
like a beacon
against the cold.

Like a Beacon
Grace Nichols
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🖼️ Tschabalala Self

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

The Waste Land
T S Eliot
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🖼️ Monet

A rare, and strange, occurrence of me actually prepared for a #BookwormSat event.

‘Of the West the factory chimneys on sullen sentry will all night wait
To call, in the harsh morning, sleep-stupid faces through the daily gate.’ ~ Louis MacNeice
To mark the birthdate of MacNeice, #BookWormSat will explore the urban landscape in literature tomorrow. Do join us. 🏙️

Goodnight.
‘Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.’ ~ Richard Adams, Watership Down. #BookWormSat
🖼️ ‘Julieta, In a Field of Starry Skies’, Gina Matarazzo.

"However many years she lived, Mary always felt that she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow."

—The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

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