Reading Response #2

I Chose the article, “On the Aesthetics of Urban Walking and Writing” by Phillip Lopate, because of his references to poets and the interesting views Lopate looks at places. I also enjoy how he incorporates his walking journeys with the other poets and giving his own intake on what urban walking and writing is. My favorite sentence in his story is, “Each New Yorker can seem like a minor character who has honed his or her persona into a sharp, three-second cameo”. This paragraph stuck with me, because I never looked at it that way, but is one hundred percent true. When you’re walking through busy crowds it is just a blur of people you’re trying to avoid hitting. But once you get right next to a person there is one small thing you would notice, giving that person their “three-second cameo”.

Lopate points out how he began his walking from his parents and then how it became a hobby. He also writes of how it would get boring and he had to try to find new ways to see the old buildings of New York. He also points out the poets such as Walt Whitman whom loved the crowded streets and Charles Reznikoff whom felt lonely on his walks. He also points out the connoisseurs of the sidewalk, who like the “ragged” parts of the city.

As a media artist, I experimented my first drifts on the boarder lines of Walkers Point and the Fifth Ward, which lead into a variety of people. Just as the connoisseurs of the sidewalks, they liked the boarders a lot, because it attracted the “…different high-low, joli-laid personalities of both”. Lopate also writes of how he needs to observe with more work now, because he’s done so many walks and knows all the details. That is true for me too in the sense that when I started observing more on my everyday monotonous walks, it did become more difficult to find the beauty in things.