Future daze

Read my rambling baggy column on Brussels, that sloppy European city here. Not sure if I believe it anymore. Quatably:

As I walked through the boulevards and narrow lanes, stopping for a building façade here, a crepe there, and even for a dramatic-hysterical suicide attempt at the Hotel Métropole (she was finally cornered and rescued), and with the words "scrappy, baggy" running a loop in my head, I got to thinking about the grand, bookish idea of the capital city expressed in Dickens' living, breathing London and Joyce's Dublin; an idea of the city as a kind of contextual model for character and narrative depth.