I Want to Go to the Fair.*

Okay, my nose is stuffy, and I'm disinclined to do too many drafts, so forgive me if this is a bit scattered. Also, some of this perhaps could go in the comments to Katie's post...

The Holmes stuff: His victims seemed to belong to the Victorian era of trust and decency whereas Holmes seems to be a product of the Modern era. Katie asks if serial killers are a newish phenomenon or if we just didn't know about them. While I'm no expert, I would think that they're a product of urbanization on some level, or rather the city allows them the space to act. The horror of this tale is definitely that the modern city allows for isolation, alienation, and duplicity in ways previously unknown. While Holmes's victims did seem a bit too trusting and needy, it was partially that they were ill-equipped to be on their own it seems. Not to seem like a proponent of infantilizing women, but part of the growing pains of women finding an independent place in society may have had to be that they learned to deal with the wolves of the world.

"With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its overstaffed police department, the exposition was Chicago's conscience, the city it wanted to become" (210). I find the title The Devil in the White City so apt because it truly embodies the two halves of the book, we have the darkness and evil of Holmes jarringly juxtaposed with the dream of the fair that was a testament to the good of man, the industrious heights that can be accomplished.

The Burnham/Fair stuff: I loved loved reading about the World's Fair--I've learned a bit about other ones: the Great Exhibition of 1851 in England that gave us the Crystal Palace and the one in Paris in 1889 that produced the Eiffel tower (and Chicago's benchmark), but to have one so close to home made me feel proud of the city even a century later. I was ridiculously excited and oddly choked up reading about the talleys of attendance on Chicago Day in the Fair--"751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable even in history" (319). Maybe I'm naive--but if that's the case I wanna stay that way--but it seems so inspiring that art and everything that it encompasses architecture, landscaping, etc. can be lived and be beautiful and be good.

(Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.)

Sigh, but just as the Fair was burned to the ground (okay, Larson, a bit heavy-handed on the 'foreshadowing'), the book is over--when do we start the next one?

*Apparently, these do still happen, but it doesn't look like I'll be able to catch one anytime soon--unless...Shanghai 2010? Roadtrip, anyone?