Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Big Shoulders
They have told me it is wicked hot, and I believe them. The Tribune reports that three air conditioners were stolen from windows on the south side, and the police have no leads, because everyone in the city has a motive. I can walk about three blocks before ducking into some air-conditioned building or another.I make a couple more stops in Hyde Park. One is to see the Henry Moore sculpture. Chicago was, and probably remains a strange and impressive and disturbing place. They pull together the smartest thinkers in their fields and let them do whatever they want. There were, and doubtless are, scarily brilliant people here, and I always had the sense that very few of them gave a damn what anybody else thought about what they were researching and what its moral or practical implications were. It made the place, in my mind, powerful and dangerous, with all of the thrill and horror that that combination implies. It's exactly the sort of place you would turn to if you wanted to invent an atomic bomb.
Which, of course, they did - with help from lots of other places, but it was underneath the football stadium at Chicago that the first controlled, sustained, nuclear reaction took place. The Henry Moore commemorates that moment. (It was possibly the only noteworthy thing ever to happen in Chicago's stadium. The university had been a member of the Big Ten and the original Monsters of the Midway, but then it got a president whose attitude toward physical education was summed up in his observation that "whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.")
My next stop is the old, crummy, broken down gym where I used to lift weights. It's been turned into a dining hall, but I'm glad to see it still bears the dedication "To the advancement of Physical Education and the Glory of Manly Sports."My last stop is at the coffee joint on 53rd Street, on the first floor of the building where I used to live and formerly where I spent way too much of my student loans on bagels and coffee, when it was a Jacobs Brothers bagel shop. It's trendified now, but at least it has working internet access, which makes in the only place I can find in this the most hyperintellectual corner of the world where one can connect to the rest of the world. Maybe they have some newer, super-spiffy way of connecting via satellites or osmosis or something. Maybe they figure the rest of the world has nothing of importance to tell them. Maybe Chicago students still never venture beyond the dorm, lab, or library.
Dinner at another Hyde Park institution, Salonica, which is a classic cheap greasy spoon, and then back to I-House, which is a sweatbox. Maybe $65 wasn't an excessive amount to pay for air conditioning.
