Casual
_Casual Bright College Days Aboozy housing agent once told me that the golden rule of urban real-estate speculation was "follow the homosexuals." Gays, he said, sought to maximize pretty...
...I have spent as much time as possible in college towns...
...Here you are on the campus of one of the world's best universities, with a multi-million-book library and a dozen Nobel prize winners—what the hell are you doing...
...Gays, he said, sought to maximize pretty architecture and proximity to museums and restaurants, even as they minimized grime and drab vistas...
...A local cop was waiting for us when we got down...
...As for me, I have always followed college students...
...A few years ago, I read an article titled "College Towns: Are They the Best Places to Live...
...of course college towns are the best places to live...
...Last week I spent in Palo Alto, Calif., on a seven-day fellowship at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus...
...I recall a shameful night in 1980 when a handful of us climbed the scaffolding on a church that was being restored near campus...
...They're probably just watching cable...
...Is this what your parents pay five thousand bucks a year for...
...God only knows what went through the cop's head at that moment...
...And all of that suits me down to the ground...
...He was struggling with basic chords and philosophizing with a couple of dirty beggars who'd gathered to watch...
...the kids around Stanford just don't look like they're having much fun...
...For wherever there are institutions of higher learning, there are bookstores, theaters, museums, bars, and a social life revolving around sherry, tea, and literary bloviation...
...Maybe it's because of political correctness...
...A neighborhood in which flower shops and hair salons were opening up would be a neighborhood all city residents could be expected to love in time...
...Ah, the veggie sandwiches at World Wrapps...
...I mean, what a stupid question...
...I get the distinct sense that college life has gone downhill...
...But there was such a thing when I went to college too, and that didn't seem to get in our way (though PC didn't yet have its own readily identifiable initials and we never had to fear getting expelled for calling someone a water buffalo...
...But perhaps I should face the truth that the life of your run-of-the-mill undergrad never was that great...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...The poetry at the Chi-maera bookstore...
...I even spent a couple of months in Burlington, Vt...
...The double espressos at the University Coffee Cafe...
...Let's just say that none of us was tempted to give it the old college try...
...A preppy friend of mine lifted his head and—with the hauteur and mock seriousness we all seemed to receive with our registration packets—replied, "Ten thousand, sir...
...I drank myself pie-eyed while reading the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement in a coffee house called Leunig's and sat around with friends in a tenement on College Street, listening to Frank Sinatra and filling the room with smoke...
...Maybe it's good that undergraduates today don't do as many drugs or have as much sex as we did in the Roarin' 80s, but it doesn't look like or seem like they're investing their freed-up time in academic pursuits...
...There, I earned my living typing papers for undergraduates (and writing them for the son of one prominent member of Congress) and playing video games in the pub where my other sister worked...
...Well, college towns must finally be losing their hold on me...
...At the time, it struck me pretty much as would a piece called "Jobs: Is It Good to Have One...
...Geez," he said, in honest bafflement...
...Yes, Palo Alto is one of the better college towns I've ever been in...
...Because one night last week I walked by an undergraduate hippie, sitting on a park bench with (surprise) an electric guitar...
...She has since moved downtown to the Greenwich Village home of New York University, and I descend on her every chance I get so that I can satisfy my college-town consumer cravings with used compact discs and cannoli and veggie sandwiches...
...You know, if there's any justice in this world, these buddies of yours will steal your wallet before the night is out...
...This scene inspired several thoughts of the these-kids-today-with-their-rock-'n'-roll variety, among them: "Get a job, you stinking bum...
...Living across the hall from this particular apartment was a toothless 300-pound alcoholic gypsy woman who would bang on the door at odd hours of the night begging for sex, but that's another story...
...I strolled, with my wife and infant daughter in tow, from bookstore to coffee shop to bookstore before wandering off to banter with faculty in the senior common room...
...I remained in Cambridge, Mass., a year after I had any academic business there, and frequently stretched a one-night visit to my sister's apartment near Columbia University on New York's Upper West Side into a week's stay...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 21
