In an article posted on L magazines website Henry Stewart quotes Colum McCann as saying "It was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN' CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.
New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder...He had said to his wife many times that the past disappeared in the city. It was why there weren't many monuments around."
To Mr Stewart I say "Thank you!" You have said what we have been trying to tell people for years!
