The Place to Be

Hello Harriet,
I am Ange Mlinko and I will be your co-conspirator for this segment of your flight.
Last year I left Brooklyn for my own private Hartford, but since the Internet has truly turned all geography into a suburb of Itself, I find myself returning, as always, to a neighborhood of writers; a landscape made wholly of symbols. Now I can say, with John Ash:
THE PLACE TO BE
It is essential to really look at the place --
I mean the physical city or landscape
you live in, and consider whether it sometimes
inspires feelings of hope and desire, times
when the Platonic ideal of the right place appears,
splendid and ghostly, behind everything that is wrong,
for it is generally certain that a lot of things
will always be wrong. This clouds our vision,
but if you don't, on most days, love the place you live in,
as if it was the only place on earth, you had better get out,
otherwise you may be dead already without knowing it.
(from To the City, Talisman House, 2004)