Street View vs. Spleen

After an endlessly sunny and warm, altogether spring-like Autumn, suddenly Winter has seized Boston in its unsentimental grip. Which makes Brainiac very sentimental -- mildly depressed, nearly moved to tears by the cliched choreography in "Step Up" -- indeed.

However! In the tradition of Romantic and post-Romantic "spleen" poetry, in which an overcast winter sky becomes a lid lowered upon a cookpot, and slanting rain the bars of a cage, ex-Ideas columnist James Parker has produced a tip-top bit of anti-winter doggerel. It cheered me up to encounter, in last week's edition of the Boston Phoenix, which has just arrived here in West Roxbury, Parker's "To Winter: Lines Upon The Death of The Year":

Disreputable old man of the streets,
whose blackouts have corrupted all the clocks,
now is the heyday of your impropriety.
These hissing slums of ice about our feet
are yours -- where wobblingly, in dampened socks,
we tread like drunks, though harrowed by sobriety.

Imagination shrinks. Who will remember
high autumn, in low-ceilinged mid December?
I curse this early dose of your abuse. It's
winter already? Damn it, Massachusetts!

"To Winter" is even more bracing if you watch Parker read the poem.

Still seasonally affected? Perhaps Brainiac can be of some assistance. This morning, I used Google's Street View to drive around Boston, which was photographed by the Street View team in the late summer and/or early fall of this year. Gaze upon the following images, readers, and let yourself be transported to happier -- or just warmer -- times.

Hope this helped.