and now for something completely different

I had quite intended to write a rather profound post regarding the curious compositional strategies of James Elkins in What Painting Is (which is actually about painting considered as a species of alchemy, with more commentary on the nuts and bolts...or I suppose crucibles and retorts...of alchemy and its actual transmutations of substance than about the transmutations on canvas that are the stuff of imagination for the inventive art historian: Frank Auerbach, asked for a painter's response to an early draft of Elkins' book, told him that, to quote the woman commenting on a Catholic priest's sermon on "Family Life," "I wish I knew as little about the real thing as he does.") and the previously mentioned Natalie Angier book on the basics of science, The Canon (which begins with a dry chapter about how her early interest in science led her to become a writer about it, then skids into an antic survey that simultaneously instructs and immerses the reader in more clever puns and one-liners than any comic writer ever essayed to include in a single volume).

But I am going to have to forego all that, because juggzy has just posted a friends-only about a public LiveJournal that must be shared with all anglophile Americans and transportation fanatics. By definition, they will not have access to the original post on my friends page.

tubewhore.livejournal.com is the blog of a woman who is documenting every single station on the London Underground. She has taken the photographs of the Tube I have always wished I could take but never have. Those who have suffered through multiple readings of my poem "Letters from the Eros Hotel" will find photographs of Swiss Cottage station and its fake-Swiss pub, and the streets wherein one gets lost trying to find the Freud Museum. (I was delighted that her response to the signage was, "There apparently is a Freud Museum in the vicinity...seems like this calls for a return visit sometime.")

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