Philly's Elite Main Drags

Philly and its environs are laid out and built with a sense of graciousness and sumptuousness that is difficult not to notice over a long period of time. It's been my pleasure to admire the sense of absolute architectural elitism which makes so many vistas here Heaven-on-Earth ones. These vistas are most apparent on a seemingly endless string of exquisite main drags, which take the region and sprinkle it with star-dust. Some of the main drags I'm about to mention are more about earthiness and serviceability, others are more about the aforementioned architectural razzle-dazzle effect. All take this area and, for me, radically transcendentalize it. The list I've assembled cannot be, nor is meant to be comprehensive; but these are the main drags I know best, and which I've spent a big chunk of my life imbibing:

Conshohocken- Fayette Street

Plymouth Meeting- Germantown Pike

Chestnut Hill (Philly)- Germantown Avenue

Glenside- Easton Road

Bryn Mawr- Lancaster Avenue

Ardmore- Lancaster Avenue

King of Prussia- Dekalb Pike

Center City (Philly)- Walnut Street

West Philadelphia- Baltimore Avenue

North Philadelphia- Broad Street

South Philadelphia- South Street

Manayunk (Philly)- Main Street

Old City (Philly)- 2nd/3rd Streets

Ambler- Butler Pike

Jenkintown- Old York Road

Abington- Limekiln Pike

North-East Philadelphia- Five Corners

Penn's Landing (Philly)- Delaware Avenue

If you can make it to these, you will not be disappointed. Peace!

Preface

With the new Monday Journal out with a vengeance (online & print), worth noting that Vlad has something else coming out of note: a second print edition of his late Nineties chapbook Derelict. When Derelict was released, Vlad still lived in Philly, and much of the action in the chap takes place in Philly. Vlad asked me to write a preface for this second edition, and I did.

Bio Time

My bio in the new Monday Journal is about the quandary which arises for publishing authors over long periods of time. To make a long story short, the quandary is what to leave in and what to leave out. You can emphasize or deemphasize academic or publishing creds, prizes, grants, fellowships, or what have you. Sometimes I get bored these days & just say I'm from Philadelphia.

Personal Mythologies II: September 20, 2003: KWH

 

 This mp3 offers the second installment of the Personal Mythologies series at KWH in 2003.

This Charming Lab: March 27, 2004: KWH

 This mp3 offers the entire This Charming Lab reading, held at Kelly Writers House in 2004. 

English 271: How Does This Sound?

I've put in a good amount of work, consolidating the events that transpired at Loyola U. in Chicago in 2008. All the particulars of the course (English 271, How Does This Sound, Ultramodern Metaphor, 25 East Pearson Street, room 306, Prof. Laura Goldstein) and my involvement in it (Opera Bufa 2.5 days, my lecture on the third day) are now well documented. There are some details as to how the lecture day (June 19) went that are worth relating. The funniest is a quirk of Loyola classrooms, as a ricochet against Opera Bufa. Loyola, of course, is a religious institution. It follows from this that all the classrooms come equipped with a rather large, plasticine Christ-figure, hanging in a lofty position at the back of the room. Room 306 happened to be a downwards-slope model academic room, so that when I lectured, I was gazing upwards at the class of about twenty students. The plasticine Christ appeared to be gazing down at me from a great height. I remember feeling a wry sense of amusement at this circumstance; Opera Bufa is an intermittently racy book, and some of the passages the students wanted me to explicate were racy ones. If Jesus were there, would he have approved?

Adam Fieled: Treated Image Self-Portrait: 2020