Dispatch #2 – On Cities

Glasgow, Tokyo, Munich, Berlin

In his most famous, much alluded to but little read, work Postmodernism (1991), Fredric Jameson wrote about a nostalgia for the present, which he traces to certain works of American literature of the 1950s:

the misery here is the misery of happiness, or at least contentment (which is in reality complacency) […] the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite program on the sofa-which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn't know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.

This summer has unfortunately been spent visiting people in cities (Glasgow, Munich, Berlin), seeing family, friends, acquaintances, etc. Almost everything felt like an obligation, and I seemed to have begrudged every minute of it, which in retrospect makes me a little ashamed.

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Glasgow

When I lived in Glasgow, I lived in the West End of the City. When I came back from living in France after two years in 2014, I noticed that a lot of people started moving to the Southside as the West began to become more and more prohibitively expensive. The South was always a mostly residential area when I lived in the city, and it mostly still is. It was very rare for me to go there, and I knew so little about its geography or outlines. By the time I moved away permanently in 2016, everyone I knew had moved South. Henceforth, every time I returned to the city, I would end up spending a long time in an area of the city that was quite new and a somewhat alien place, and on the whole, the experience was always quite irritating. Not because the South is not itself quite pleasant, but because my own powerful sense of nostalgia was never fully satiated. When I lived in Glasgow, I walked everywhere and rarely took public transport. I remembered with a characteristic sense of poignant melancholy, many moments of deep contemplation, false or near epiphany, standing at traffic lights waiting for the signal to cross. When I was back this time with a rowdy toddler in tow, I realised that this previous, decidedly romantic memory was probably because the traffic lights take so bloody long to turn green – and once green, only give you around 10 seconds to get across.