Man, what a bummer. Looking for a job sucks and when it turns out that one job that you actually want doesn’t work out, well, that’s a pretty big bummer. So we decided to go to the mall yesterday to pick up some craftsy stuff and spend 1 1/2 hours in the bus to get there just to barely avoid getting run over by the CT drivers. In my opinion, the strip mall, and the 24-hour-news cycle, are among the worst things in the USA (there are a ton of other things, of course). The entire design of the mall with it’s lack of sidewalks, lack of crosswalks, is a sad sad excuse for a town center. Who thought this would be an awesome idea, again?
There is a ton of writing on malls, which is actually pretty interesting. The first time I read something about it was in Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, a collection of her non-fiction writing that I can highly recommend! The article is called “On the Mall” and was published in The White Album. And I think The New Yorker carried at least one lengthy article on shopping malls in America.
So when we go the the mall it usually involves having a late lunch (because the bus ride essentially ate up lunch time) in the Food Court, which is apparently a well liked hang-out for every teenager who lives in a 25-mile-radius (this is America, after all). Isn’t that sad? I’m not sure whether the town or city center is something especially European, but come on, even if it was it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have it here too, eh? Not everything the Olde Worlde invented is bad, right?
Filed under: Books, Grumpy German, History , article, Joan Didion, mall, non-fiction, writing
You are so right! I wish we had a good city center here. There are some good stores, but everything is so far apart.