1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

een. How so? We wanted to know. His an-
swer arrived a few days later in a campus
mail envelope:
here exists in North America—and nowhere
else, to my knowledge—what I call
the Genteel Archipelago. This wide-scattered
and variable formation consists of
tiny, small and less small communities
(some call themselves cities but often as not that's a bit
of a brag) in which a college or university, or both, exist.
In some of these places, town and gown are in uneasy
balance; in the more fortunate, the two aid and abet
each other. In the most fortunate, they foster and improve
each other—indeed, require each other—in a sort
of cultural symbiosis. The one would find itself soon
enough turned brackish were it not for the other's
sweetwater: the town would become another hidebound,
unimaginative, unremarkable and less viable
burg, while the academy, without influx from the outside
world, would swirl ever more swiftly in its predilective
eddies of smugness, detachment and things
ethereal.
Ithaca, it seems to me—and I speak with the authority
of someone who lived there all of four months—
sits most decidedly in the Blessed Isle category. You
have to love a place where you can spend a morning at
something called the Synchrotron Facility and lunch
dissecting the Buffalo Bills over a pesto omelet at Andy's
Third Street Cafe; where you can catch Lethal Weapon
2 at the Pyramid Mall multiplex matinee and Godard's
Histoires Du Cinema at Willard Straight the same
evening, or, vice versa, catch Orlando downtown at the
Cinemapolis and Cliffhanger at the Uris midnight show
on campus.
You can get your car's muffler replaced, then hop
over to see your polarity therapist; you can weep with
frustration caught in traffic at The Octopus or along
Meadow Street and dry your tears with a stroll through
the Cornell Plantations' herb garden. You can catch John
Hsu on the viola da gamba and Catherine Liddell on the
theorbo at the A.D. White House, then head across town
for the first set of Steve Southworth and the Rockabilly
Rays at Kuma's.
Or, you can experience a bit of bad luck, as I did
shortly after arriving, and have your car break down
one sweltering, hectic September mid-day. I climbed
into the tow truck cab and, between sobs at the ensuing
financial debacle, asked to look at the driver's Ithaca
Journal to see how the Braves fared. I don't remember
if they won or lost. Trying to lift myself from de-
spair, I mumbled something innocuous about the vagaries
of baseball. The driver launched in on a lengthy
monologue concerning not only the strengths of various
teams, but the essentially binary nature of sport:
you win or you lose. Period. His life had hit a rough
patch, he said, and he had concluded that sport's hold
on him had to do with its "delicious" lack of ambiguity:
"It's not real life, and that's why we need it. Sport,
unlike life, contains a satisfying sense of closure," he
concluded.
"Sense of closure, huh?" I asked.
"Yeah, a guy from Cornell—he cracked a block on
West State—used the phrase."
What I'm getting at, folks, is that this sort of encounter
just does not occur in Anytown, USA.
Before you begin to think me incapable of criticism,
think this some naive booster's paean, think I believe
Ithaca without flaw, that instead of existing on the earth
it hovers somewhere above it...
With the possible exceptions of Boston and
Bangkok, I have never lived in a town with more vexed
traffic or less capable and less civil drivers. The streets
are divided into narrow, narrower and Oh My God!;
they are bumpier than the skin of a hives victim, twistier
than a large intestine. At some intersections, streets
meet at angles not found in nature. I'm reminded of the
poet Richard Hugo, who described a town (not Ithaca)
in which the "streets are laid out by the insane." People
here love their car horns; they save their turn signals
for emergencies; if they followed other cars more
closely, they'd be ahead of them; pedestrians are beneath
contempt; stop signs are treated as advisory
bulletins. Watch yer back!
Further, it remains a job of work to find a decent
cup of coffee in town or on campus. Γm talking continental
here—espresso, latte, cappucino—which, you
may as well know, is readily available these days at even
the most nominal convenience store in one-horse towns
throughout much of the country.
The water tastes chalky; the sidewalks are too narrow
by half; you can't get The New York Times delivered
to your door. Trash collection is out of control—
severe penalties are likely if you dare mix your
Smucker's jam jar with a dead soldier of gin. (I speak
from experience. I have tried my best. But my best is
never good enough. I have been deemed unworthy and
been made bleak.)
Two more beefs: it is difficult to respect fully any
university with such a fine agricultural school that requires
its football team to play on artificial turf, and it
is just as difficult to respect any town which includes in
its everyday vocabulary such an infelicitous phrase as
"dish to pass."
Okay.
Residents of Ithaca—both temporary and perma-
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