http://www.davidbyrne.com/news/misc/susan_choi_nytimes.php
韓国系米国人の作家Susan Choi*1のエッセイ。デヴィッド・バーンのサイトにある。
夏向きの読み物（或いは、読んだら却って蒸し暑くなる？）。
彼女の故郷であるヒューストンについての描写を抜き書きしてみる；
また、”Our sky was always a strange shade of salmon, light pollution bouncing off air pollution.” さらに”we, the children of a city begotten by unscrupulous real-estate speculators on an infernal swamp, the children of a city in which the buildings downtown are connected by air-conditioned tunnels so that no one need venture outdoors”という記述も。
In Houston, we air-condition all 12 months of the year, but it's in summer that our air-conditioning achieves the stature of art, that it can feel like a gleaming Brancusi or a well-mixed martini. It seems incongruous, but Houston does actually have vast public parks full of plush grass and trees. Why?, I wondered when young. What did one do in such places? Sitting outdoors on a blanket, or risking heatstroke by trying to jog, struck me as a sign of insecurity, the same strivings that led Houstonians to tell visitors how "culturally vibrant" and "global" the city was. These were people who didn't want to admit that Houston is an unreasonable city, a "port" city without a harbor, a "space" city 900 miles from Cape Canaveral's launching pad. These were people who didn't relish the fact that Houston doesn't make sense.
1984年の夏、ヒューストンでトーキング・ヘッズの映画Stop Making Sense（ジョナサン・デミ監督）が上映された。彼女は毎晩この映画を観にいっていたのだが、ある晩不図独りになりたくなって、銀幕の裏側にまわってみる。これは彼女にとって、故郷ヒューストンでの最後の夏の終わりだった。そして、紐育に出てきて９年経って、妊娠９か月目の彼女はブルックリンでデヴィッド・バーンのコンサートを観ながら、あの1984年の夏を涙ながらに想い出す。
ところで、
というのは、私にとっては「大人」になることと故郷を出ることが同時ではなかったので、新鮮な感覚を喚起した。
For me coming into adulthood was a process of realizing that there is a unviverse that the world of my childhood in Houston had erased. You could call it the stars beyond the smog, or, less romantically, the heat beyond the air-conditioner.
