What’s the world coming to?

School bags will soon be in abundance, but, it being a highly respectable girls’ school, I’d best pass on things anatomical…

Teju – Fair enough. If you ever come visit, I’ll have to show you around Penn State. The University Park campus is certainly impressive, especially for the huge old elms that they labor so hard to save from Dutch Elm Disease. But whatever they’re spraying on the lawns these days, the worms sure don’t like it!

It’s fine to prefer open, ordered landscapes — to each his/her own — as long as you understand that parks and wildlands in Eastern North America shouldn’t look that way, and if they do, it’s a sign of severe ecosystem imbalance (a hugely over-abundant deer population, for example).

On the other hand, I have a very strong longing for visual order, and as a result, a well-kept college campus is one of my favorite things. The lawns, the libraries, the sense that the non-commercial enterprise here is a worthy one. There really is so much decay, in everything, that covering up some of it doesn’t always scandalize me. It’s a needed relief.

I think this strong longing has to do with the relative absence of such spaces where, uh, I come from. Lagos is so disorderly that order refreshes me.

I do react badly to lawns when they are suburban and obsessively manicured by insecure rich people and, depending on my mood, certain college campuses can give me historical flashbacks about the sorrow that went into enriching them.

Forty thousand sets of genitals arriving! That does give one pause. So long as they’re not wearing makeup, though, they’re welcome, so far as I’m concerned :-)