Welcome Home
“Then he tried to see the persons already in the room—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one.”
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
Welcome to the inaugural salon at Maison Metropolitanist. Grab yourself a glass of champagne and step back in time to the beginning of The Metropolitanist. Stop to reminisce over familiar photographs (and be sure to leave a comment letting myself and others know around which picture you joined the journey), what photographs most appeal to you, and engaging with the content in any other way you see fit. If you see someone standing by themselves perhaps take a moment to converse with them and respond to their comment, or join a group by participating in a thread of comments.
While a salon is associated with a type of intellectual party that takes place in homes, it can also refer to a gallery opening, so for this first digital salon I have created a mix of both a gallery or exhibition as the reason for gathering and, at the same time, it takes place in the still private space of the salon of Maison Metropolitanist, which I imagine as a cozy room at the front of the Maison, to the left of the entryway, though I invite you to explore other ground floor rooms while you’re here, like the library and study.
This inaugural salon will take place all month, so don’t feel rushed. When it’s time for another salon I’ll move the pictures to the gallery so that this history and your contributions to it will always be here and available. I recommend moving linearly and beginning with the original post that began The Metropolitanist. Make yourself at home and enjoy the party.
The Post That Began It All
“There was already the tall white city of today, already the feverish activity of the boom, but there was a general inarticulateness…there was no forum for metropolitan urbanity.” From “My Lost City” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
How do you define a metropolis and is it different from how you define a city? Let me know in the comments.
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Above is the text from the post that launched @TheMetropolitanist on Instagram. I knew when looking for a photograph that I wanted something immediately striking and urbane. I chose the quote by Fitzgerald because, like my image, there was a simplicity and cleanness about his prose that expressed something so fundamentally urbane even as he claimed that that urbanity was inarticulate. It matched with the buildings in this image, which are also representative of the current New York aesthetic, though here we get a city of glass instead of a white city. Both cities are “tall.” In hindsight it was an appropriate quote considering my Instagram also was inarticulate and without shape. I’m always sad to think about the ephemerality of Instagram, and that as my account grows it becomes harder and harder for people to get back to this post, which set the tone for early followers. I’m happy to be able to give this photograph and post a second life here in the Maison.
The Original Library Post
When I can I like to match my notebooks to my research. This picture is especially meaningful because it features a notebook purchased on a trip to Buenos Aires, one of my research locations and bodies of literature, in which I will be taking historical research notes on Buenos Aires, Argentina and its transnational engagements. The photograph was taken in another one of my research cities, NYC, while doing research in the Schwarzman Building of the NYPL, which itself is at once a research resource and an important part of the landscape of my time period.
Above is a snippet from the original post on instagram, if you want the rest you’ll have to scroll back through my feed. I chose this photograph because it was my first library, stationary, research post. Even as early as my fourth post I established my theme of work practices and stationary love. Today, hundreds of posts later, this is still one of my favorite posts because I like the balance of the composition and the content. It’s rare for me to get images where the book and the notebook match so perfectly.
The Early Days
“Then the gaze is met by the sight of dazzling, magnificent Coney Island. From the very first moment of arrival at this city of fire, the eye is blinded. It is assailed by thousands of cold, white sparks, and for a long time can distinguish nothing in the scintillating dust round about. Everything whirls and dazzles and blends into a tempestuous ferment of fiery foam.” “Boredom” by Maxim Gorky.
While “Boredom” was published in 1907, the parachuting structure in this image was constructed in 1939 for one of the world’s fairs held in New York.
Above is the original post for this image in its entirety. I chose this image to conclude the early days because I was looking for a post to illustrated what I was trying to do back when I first started. In the beginning a lot of my content consisted of literary quotes paired with related but not always identical images. Even then I knew one of the pillars of my content would be blending urban images with what comparative literature calls “imaginative literature” about the city from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Looking back at Gorky’s writing to proofread this quote I realize there is still a lot there, so perhaps I’ll be posting more of his striking descriptions in the future.
#WhatisaCity? #1
“Once the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact, surrounded by a hinterland. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, such a concept of the city—a center and a surround—seemed adequate.” From the Introduction to Urban Imaginaries by Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender.
#what is a city? I love that this book takes its impetus from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in order to consider the role imagination plays in how we understand what a city is. How do you imagine a city?
Above are excerpts from the original post. #WhatIsTheCity was my first series on Instagram where I tried to explore a more complex subject in multiple posts. You can still find all of these posts under that hashtag, and today creating content around a “theme” is one of the main ways I create my Instagram content for The Metropolitanist, though now it’s less quotation and more of my writing. I used to do a lot of quoting because I wanted to draw people’s attention to the works that influence me, but now I think one of the best ways to do that is to write in my own voice while providing recommended readings and citing others.
I chose this particular photograph to represent the series in this retrospective because I love its simplicity. Wide swaths of sky paired with striking urban structures is something I always gravitate to when I’m going back through the store of photographs that my husband and I have taken, and now I try to take pictures with that preference in mind. What you may not know is that The Metropolitanist is really a joint visual effort, with many of the early urban photographs coming from Linus, who is an avid hobbyist photographer. I was able to start this project knowing I would have enough visual content because he had created a store of thousands of photographs during our time together.
#WhatisaCity? #2
“#whatisacity? ‘Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold project of an opaque past and an uncertain future onto a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban FACT into the CONCEPT of the city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic RATIO.” From Walking in the City by Michel de Certeau.
I have selected three “what is a city” posts because I think it is one of my longest running series, or at least the one that left the strongest impression on me. Above is only an excerpt, after the quote I added my commentary. One of my goals with this series was to both demonstrate (through quotes) the number and variety of city descriptions to both build our understanding of what a city is and at the same time reveal how there is no single, stable definition just as there is no single, stable image. Even this photograph only shows one eery early-morning facet of the summer fair in Central Park.
#WhatisaCity? #3
“For the #whatisacity series, a hopeful quote about urbanism from David Harvey. ‘An urbanism founded on exploitation is a legacy of history. A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to be brought into being. It remains for a revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation.’
What do you think would improve your community?
For my last selection from the #WhatIsACity series I chose this post for two obvious reasons. The first and easiest to explain is that David Harvey is one of the most well recognized voices in urban geography and the study of urbanism more broadly. He is one of those seminal, unavoidable voices. The image, of course, is striking, but I’m afraid I haven’t enough room here to unpack it, so perhaps I’ll return to this image and quote for a future blog post. In wrapping up #Whatisacity
The final thing I set out to accomplish with this series was to provide many different important texts and authors on urbanism and familiarize everyone with some of the seminal names and some of the authors that I thought were doing an exceptional job.
Monday Match Up
I’ve tried many different genres of Instagram content creation during my first year as @TheMetropolitanist, and one of the earliest genres or “challenges” I participated in was Goulet Pens #MondayMatchUpGiveaway. This photograph was from one of those posts.
In the beginning I was trying to come up with creative ways of presenting literary quotes. As you can see from my very first post on Instagram, one way I did this was by pairing remarkable quotes about urbanism with images of the city, but I wanted to try a way that would make the literary quotes front and center as well (and interacting with other fountain pen enthusiasts was a plus of using this particular approach). My hope was that making the quotes the photographic subject would put me in contact with other people who love reading and writing while also leaving me more space for writing original content in the written portion of the post. While Goulet Pens doesn’t do #MondayMatchUpGiveAway anymore, I still try to incorporate this type of content into my work when appropriate.
Pen and Ink Posts
Even after the challenge ended, I’ve continued to play around with the pen and ink posts, but I’ve also tried to become more flexible. Here I started writing out quotes that I thought encompassed certain bodies of knowledge that I always wanted to get back to and be able to find. In this image I selected a quote from Aníbal Quijano because I frequently cite him, and I wanted to have something that would be a quick memory jogger of why he is such a reference point for me whenever I’m trying to articulate my own thoughts on decolonization and decoloniality. I wrote this one out on the cover page of my bullet journal, thinking that would be an easy place for me to find it, but I thought it would also be nice to share these quotes with Instagram because they are representative of what I spend a lot of my research time thinking about. There have been a surprising number of benefits to Instagramming in this regard.
I like this image as a representation of how a certain type of image that started as just a way to participate in the fountain pen community evolved into a way for me to share thought provoking information. I’m still working on my flat lays but that is also the fun of instagram, because it is ephemeral there is space to play and to mess up and to evolve. Thee best part: I often use my own instagram posts as a way to find references quickly now. So if I’m traveling without my bullet journal and want a refresher on some decolonial ideas, I’ll look at these images.
Pen and Ink Posts
I haven’t done a pen and ink post in a while, but I selected three photographs to show here because they were a consistent part of @TheMetropolitanist content on IG for a year, and I continue to recycle the pieces now as a background for other posts (as can be seen in another photograph in this gallery of Comparisons, where the book is laid on scattered sheets of paper. These sheets are many of those pen and ink quotes (though not all of them since many were also written in notebooks).
I am continuing to create these pen and ink images, though none have appeared in my feed lately. I plan to integrate pen and ink posts (at least photographically, perhaps not in terms of highlighting the products used in the image) into my series on Comparative Literature and perhaps my series on Dissertating because these series revolve around reading and writing. Another way I plan to use these images in the future (and I have done this in the past as well) is to represent recommended texts that I don’t own physical copies of. I often read ebooks, listen to audiobooks, and read online journals, and these works leave me with very little in terms of objects I can photograph, so writing out a selected quote remains one of the ways I can make the transition from digital content to photograph.
The Haussmannization Series
“Haussmannization: the process by which Paris was transformed into the modern city we recognize today. Taking place in the nineteenth century, Haussmannization is named after Baron Haussmann, the city planner under the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. Haussmann’s transformation of Paris is controversial, and I’ll talk more about that in future posts.”
Above is how I began my Haussmann series (though I have paired this description with the second photograph I used for my Haussmann series for this retrospective). I always meant to do a series on Haussmannization because it is so commonly regarded as the moment when modern urban planning is born (though this is already a deceptive way of thinking about urban planning that can be contested on many fronts, which is a subject I would like to cover in the future and something I wrote about a lot in my dissertation). I held off on doing a Haussmannization series because I had no photographs from Paris in my collection, but when @lmgeeko requested the series, I thought, okay, Haussmannization has effected many cities across the globe, New York included, so I paired these educational posts with images of structures clearly influenced by modern Parisian design which worked well because what makes Haussmannization an important topic is how influential it has been both in built environments and rhetorically (Haussmann dominates histories of urban planning even from the grave).
The Space and Place Series
This image was from my “Space and Place Series.” Series have been a staple of The Metropolitanist. In an attempt to overcome some of the brevity required by instagram posts, and I’ve tried out many series as a way to explore how to at once create an Instagram that is substantive, full of information, and at the same time bite sized and designed for daily learning.
For this series I paired abstract images with quotes and ideas from the discourse on space and place. I drew from literary studies and philosophy for this series. I began this series in part because I wanted a reason to go over the central works on space and place and I thought creating an Instagram series would make me more accountable for this reading list. A lot of academic work consists of creating reading lists and trying to gain a command of different knowledge bases, so this series was directly reflective of that process. I still use this organizing principle when coming up with instagram content. For example, my currently running Comparative Literature series arose from the dual impetuses of my own desire to revisit and refine my knowledge of Comp Lit as a field and to address the growing interest in what Comparative Literature is.
What is a Novel Series
Wrapping up my reflections on the role that weekly series have played from the start of this Instagram I wanted to highlight an early series that just didn’t work for me. Because I had two series dealing with urbanism and space in the more abstract and theoretical sense, I really felt like I needed to find a way to work literature back into my feed, so I decided to do a series on the genre I study, the novel. Having taught the twentieth-century novel twice during my time as a graduate instructor at Stony Brook I thought this would be a fairly easy series to work on and something that I would love since literature is my field, but for some reason, even though I kept this series up for two and a half months, I found every minute of it pretty onerous. In the end I gave it up because The Metropolitanist is a passion project and I want to always be looking for approaches to my content that excite me AND the people who join me on this journey. I just wasn’t excited.
I wanted to include this challenge or failure of a series because I think it’s important to acknowledge the role of experimentation. There’s not a lot of information out there about IG as a process and in my experience sometimes you test ideas and discover they don’t work for you. This definitely happened and continues to happen on my account and I think that’s a sign of progress, even though it can be frustrating and confusing at the time.
Stand Out Posts
“Hello, from the steps of @nyhistory! I wanted to take a post to introduce myself. As you may already know I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at Stony Brook University, otherwise known as SUNY Stony Brook…
My Project focuses on turn of the century literature from New York, Buenos Aires, and Paris to reconsider what exactly is a metropolis? And how can it help us to imagine space in ways that the city may not be able to? But, for this instagram I’m hoping to create a resource for people. Whether you’re a teacher or someone joining in for personal enrichment, I want this instagram to be a resource. The idea is to combine visual stimulus with short form writing to bring you a daily dose of research on my subject.”
Above are excerpts from the first time I introduced myself on my Instagram. It was a unique moment for me in the process because up until that point I hadn’t shown myself or tried to articulate my larger project. Therefore, the post still stands out to me today as a benchmark in the evolution of @TheMetropolitanist even though my own camera shyness means I appear infrequently in the feed.
The 500 like post
“It’s August 1st and I met my goal of having a full draft of my dissertation! Yay! Because it’s spread across six documents, one per chapter plus the conclusion, I’m not sure of the exact page count, but somewhere between 200 and 225 I’m guessing.
While I commemorate my largest scholarly project to date, let me know in the comments the accomplishment you are most proud of.”
Above is the original post, and I view this as quite authentic to who I am as a person. I love celebrating every little achievement so of course when I finished up my rough draft I was bursting to say something. The photograph was a throwaway picture I took just so I could shout out into the void that I had completed something, but I had no idea that this would remain my most popular post to date. I remember going to bed just pleased with myself but not thinking anything was out of the ordinary. Then I woke up the next morning, looked at my phone, and was stunned to see I had climbed to 300 likes overnight (like I said, it was kind of a whimsical post). Throughout the day the post just kept climbing till it reached 500 and I saw a lot of follower growth as well. To this day I rarely break 100, so it was kind of an anomalous moment in the feed history, and I still find its success perplexing other than I think people just sensed authentic excitement and hopped on board.
The Leveraged Ph.D. Challenge
“#Hello, soon to be Dr. Sophia Basaldua-Sun checking into #TheLeveragedPhD Instagram Challenge. Today’s topic is #ThisisMe, which is great because I was thinking the other day that I’m overdue for a post about myself on here!”
The original post is quite long so I only have the first paragraph here, but the full post can still be easily found on Instagram. This image marks a shift closer to the present day, and I chose it as one of my three benchmark posts because I do feel like participating in the month long challenge right as I was about to graduate marked a shift in my project on The Metropolitanist. Not only did I meet a lot of amazing academics and professionals, it broke me out of my usual posting schedule, and on top of it I got a new profile picture with this image that it made sense to expand across all of my social media. While it’s hard to commit to more than one 30 day challenge because I do have certain goals with The Metropolitanist that I need to remain true to, I think breaking out and exploring someone else’s prompts as a way to get back to my own themes and message was an incredibly helpful exercise, and I think shaking up a routine is one of the best ways to get back in touch with my creativity. Since the challenge I’ve come back to The Metropolitanist with renewed energy and excitement.
Month Long Themes
“Last week I gave a long quote describing Paris that I stated is a description of Haussmannized Paris. This week I’m explaining how. First, details like ‘green gardens’ invoke Haussmann’s increase of green space in the city by building four new parks and renovating the city’s old parks. the ‘silvery stone’ paired with ‘classically… harmonized’ refers to the new facades of buildings which were inspired by classical architecture and termed ‘neoclassical’ and were indeed harmonized in the sense that they homogenized the landscape. Darrow characterizes this Paris as ‘the example par excellence of city planning…”
In the fall of last year I decided to try out themed months as a way to do some concentrated reading and research on specific topics. In each case I chose authors as the topic. In this post my author was Edith Wharton. I spent the month providing Edith Wharton themed content while reading about Edith Wharton, and since I recently finished drafting an article I suppose that time was well spent. I’ve spent many research hours familiarizing myself with her body of work and this month was a part of that. Though I don't foresee myself doing any more themed months because by day 30 I was sick of all things Whartonian. Committing to a daily content creation subject for the month can be freeing in the sense that it kept Instagram in its place in my daily schedule, but it was also stifling in the sense that there wasn’t a lot of room for spontaneity. I wouldn’t recommend themed months.
Themed Month: The Bonneffs
“My Bonneff month is quickly coming to an end. I’ve mentioned before that the Bonneffs are not well known writers. The way I initially learned about them was through Luc Sante's book The Other Paris, a book predicated on demystifying the singular notion that Paris is solely the city of lights and drawing attention to the darker side of Paris. It’s a captivating read and I highly recommend it. It also happens to be available as an ebook or an audiobook through the NYPL if you’re a New Yorker.”
My second themed month was based on the third chapter of my dissertation. The Bonneff month was helpful, I gathered a lot of research and gained a lot of confidence in my knowledge of this subject. I took many pictures of this crumbling first edition of Léon Bonneff’s posthumously published only novel. A second reason I wouldn’t do the themed month again is for the sake of my audience. My research is interdisciplinary, which means I think many people follow me for very different reasons, and when I pick a theme like this and beat it into the ground for a month, many people may find that subject for the month is unrelated to why they came onboard. I think it’s better to keep a rotation of topics rather than assuming every wants a 30 day deep dive into an author study, especially since that deep dive even tests my patience (and it’s my research!).
Themed Months: Wharton
“Since Thursdays are usually #Haussmannization days here is Edith Wharton’s description of Haussmannized Paris: ‘the transparency of the green gardens and silvery stone so classically clear yet so softly harmonized, struck him as having a kind of conscious intelligence. Every line of the architecture, every arch of the bridges, the very sweep of the strong bright river…so that for Darrow, a walk through the Paris streets was always like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which countless stored fragrances were shaken out.” From The Reef. It’s a long quote so I’m going to leave it at that and do the analysis next week.”
My Edith Wharton month was a unique month because it was a time when I also tried to integrate a new form of social media into The Metropolitanist. For the month I participated in a Twitter Challenge where I tweeted the name of one article I was reading per day, and every day I read an article or chapter about Edith Wharton. For me, binging Wharton never works, I get tired of her world, so by the end of the month I was tired of Wharton, but now, you can find me in my study wrapping up an article on The Age of Innocence, so the month paid off and hopefully soon it will be undergoing its first peer review. Maybe I speak too soon when I say I’ll never do a themed month again, but next time I think instead of picking an author as the theme I’ll use the article I’m writing as a theme, this way I can vary the content and explore urban history, literature, and the research process. I think that would be a good way of keeping my content consistent and making sure that I stay true to all of The Metropolitanist.
What Is Comparative Literature
We’re now passing into a series of photographs that represent the present day output of The Metropolitanist.
Since beginning I have considerably reduced my content output. When I began The Metropolitanist my goal was to post daily, and this was an achievable goal at the time. Since my audience has grown I’ve discovered that even five posts a week is too much since I prefer to engage in the conversation that takes place on each post. I’m so excited about this development, and that so many thoughtful conversations take place on each post.
I currently have three series going on and this image represents the Comparative Literature series that I have been doing for two months now. This was the earliest post on my field, though not the first official post of the series. This image and its content were a part of #TheLeveragedPhD Instagram challenge, and I was talking about my field. The comments brought home to me something that had already been brewing, which was the realization that people are very curious and also have no idea what Comparative Literature is. Since I wanted to review the field as well it seemed like the perfect subject to focus on for a while. I have no plans to discontinue the series any time soon and you can expect a blog post on the subject as well. Maybe I’ll even devote a salon to it some month.
The Modern Metropolitan
While I was preparing for my dissertation defense I took some time away from The Metropolitanist and when I came back seemed like a good time to re-evaluate my content creation, particularly after the break that The Leveraged Ph.D. Instagram challenge afforded in terms of coming up with my own content. I was bursting with ideas at the time, but I quickly realized that many of my ideas were more about writing and process, and that urbanism and the relationship between urbanization and literature had taken a backseat. Because I think it’s important that The Metropolitanist always have a strong urban component I prioritized making sure that every week contained an urban image and fact. If you head over to the Instagram this series is ongoing for the foreseeable future, so expect a lot more where this image came from.
This picture of the famous chandelier in the Opera Garnier is a more recent addition, and one of my favorites because the post is about how the Opera is an important symbol in modern metropolitan literature. I waited over a decade for my opportunity to finally enter the Palais Garnier which I first became familiar with through literature, something that will get its own post soon enough. To finally have these pictures to share with my audience is fulfilling on so many levels and a great transition point between what The Metropolitanist has been and what I hope it can become moving into the future.
Dissertating
The final series I am currently working on is a series on dissertation writing. Having spent countless hours at my desk scribbling and typing away, and having had all of that work finally recognized through a successful defense, I thought I was done with the subject of dissertating until I was talking to a colleague at a writing group I recently started participating in and realized a common theme in my conversations with academics across all fields is how difficult it is to write, and in particular how difficult it is to write the dissertation when advice on how to write one specifically for our individual field is difficult to find. Thus the dissertation series was born.
This series seeks to speak specifically to humanities Ph.D.s since norms of dissertating are quite different in the sciences and social sciences, but I also view it as a great opportunity for anyone who is curious about what we do to learn about the kind of work that takes place in the Ivory Tower. Because I spent most of my adolescence wanting to be a novelist,, part of the reason a 200 page dissertation was less intimidating for me was because I had written a lot. I had read countless blogs, books, and articles during that time about how to write. I say this because sometimes writing advice doesn’t have to be exactly on what you’re writing in order to be helpful, so I hope the series contains a little bit of something for everyone, just as those blogs on how to write a novel laid the ground work for the dissertation I would write over a decade later.
I selected this image because it was the image I used to introduce the series.
Let's Look Into The Future
These three photos represent material that is yet to come moving forward with The Metropolitanist, particularly now that this space has expanded to include Maison Metropolitanist.
I chose this image because I begin with a door on this website, the entryway into the Maison, and this image is an outtake of a door I gave serious consideration as a potential door (though, when I went on the hunt for my door I was always imagining a colorfully painted door like the one currently up). Still, the composition of this photograph was compelling and it was hard to make the choice. I took so many pictures of so many beautiful doors. In fact, as I left for Paris I knew one of the tasks I would try to accomplish would be to snap the perfect door picture for this site. I knew Paris would have many more classic doors than NYC that are also accessible from street level.
But at the same time, I choose this picture now because this is only the beginning. Projecting into the future you may see more of my outtakes on The Metropolitanist, but this is a digital platform and changing my door here would be relatively simple, so keep an eye on the website as I play with the possibilities of shifting the design and giving the Maison the occasional alter ego. After all, who says the space has to be stable? Right now the aesthetic is identifiably Parisian, but I plan to play with this in the future as my content plays with notions of space, place, and decolonization.
For me this image is also representative of the travel I plan to do in the future, and an expansion of my project to include this travel and urban exploration.
Bibliophilia
I began this project in part as an exploration of my field of literature and its relationship to urbanity, and these are connections I plan to continue and strengthen in the future. Books, writing, writing instruments, bookstores, all of this will continue to feature prominently across my platforms and I cannot wait to continue to work on this material not only through the traditional mediums of scholarly research and writing, but also through blogging, instagram, and this salon.
I want to work on photographing more libraries, bookstores, book storefronts, and literary culture on the ground and in the streets. At the same time, I also want to keep working on book flatlay and the written word. As a part of this I have begun my practice of photographing book culture during my travels through Europe, and hopefully I can continue that here, even though, unfortunately, New York has many fewer independent bookstores than many of the other cities that I have visited over the years. It’s a shame, for example, that Shakespeare and Company in Paris is practically a shrine to some of the most iconic 20th century American novelists, but we have no such institution in New York, the center of U.S. publishing and arguably the center of world publishing!
The Metropolitanist and Maison Metropolitanist aim to be a space where we deepen our appreciation of book culture and literacy.
A Space for Reflection
While in Barcelona I went to see as much Gaudí architecture as time would allow for, and one of the places I saw was the famous Sagrada Familia. Entering the chapel something that was repeatedly emphasized was that much of the traditional Biblical imagery is on the outside, while the interior is a space meant for internal reflection, which is why I’m closing with this image, because projecting into the future very much entails reflecting on the past of this project in order to imagine the possible avenues of expansion for this project moving forward.
In many ways The Metropolitanist has been a rehabilitating space for me. After the closure of the department I received my Ph.D. from, finishing the PhD was a trying and difficult process. I lost my community and I lost any possibility of continuing to work within the institution where I was pursuing my degree. Creating The Metropolitanist gave me a space to continue to teach, to continue to think and communicate, and most importantly expanding now to the Maison Metropolitanist has allowed me to dream and create in ways I never could have imagined I would be doing. In fact, I think if there wasn’t an ongoing fiscal crisis in the humanities I might never have begun this journey, and now I hope it will continue to be a space where I imagine the world otherwise, and dream up possible ways to put us back in touch with the importance of literature as a part of our cultural legacy.
I hope on this final picture you will also take some time to reflect on your hopes for this project, as well as reflect on the world you hope to see and cultivate through your own life’s work. What kind of legacy do you hope to leave? Lose yourself in this image for a bit, let your mind wander, and then tell me some of your conclusions in the comments.