{"id":90,"date":"2009-01-05T17:42:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T17:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=90"},"modified":"2009-01-05T17:42:10","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T17:42:10","slug":"city_mouse_country_mouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2009\/01\/city_mouse_country_mouse\/","title":{"rendered":"City Mouse, Country Mouse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"house.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/house.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;\" height=\"197\" width=\"300\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>When I first moved to New York, I often wondered why so many writers dream of typing their way to success in Gotham. Sure, there are plenty of coffee shops and it&#8217;s probably easier to network your way into penning an article for Harper&#8217;s at cocktail parties in Manhattan than it would be in Missoula, but with so much activity 24\/7 and a cost of living that just never seems to give a sucker a break, isn&#8217;t the place also just a tease? You can chat up an editor from Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, but you&#8217;re so busy copyediting for one place and freelancing for three more and meeting friends for drinks and plays and shows that you realize with horror that you don&#8217;t have a single new idea to pitch.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe it was just a personal thing, arriving in New York as I did from the hills of Appalachia. Perhaps I just romanticize the drama of the extremes because the suburbs, where I came of angst-y age, were what really filled me with existential dread?<\/p>\n<p>But then today I saw some deep-seated suspicions writ large: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/bostonglobe\/ideas\/articles\/2009\/01\/04\/how_the_city_hurts_your_brain\/\" target=\"_blank\">How the city hurts your brain<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Truth is, artists need nature! Well, maybe not <a href=\"http:\/\/alexandragardner.net\/blog\/2008\/12\/28\/big-ice\/\" target=\"_blank\">this much nature<\/a>, but all the same. And here I thought I needed to escape the urban landscape just because of an ever-increasing desire to smack rude strangers in the subway. But this week&#8217;s science tells us that there&#8217;s more to those artist colonies in the woods than just the quaint fireplaces and the really good food. We need to see open space in order fill it with our creativity. Or is that just one way to spin this study? Assuming most artist types don&#8217;t have the luxury of a country home and a pied-\u00c3\u00a0-terre in the city, where should the aspiring put down roots? <\/p>\n<p>(Personally, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tumbleweedhouses.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">I vote for the space<\/a> that requires the absolutely smallest time investment in cleaning it.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I first moved to New York, I often wondered why so many writers dream of typing their way to success in Gotham. Sure, there are plenty of coffee shops and it&#8217;s probably easier to network your way into penning an article for Harper&#8217;s at cocktail parties in Manhattan than it would be in Missoula, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-90","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}