Artificial Summers and the Talking Heads: Susan Choi

"Why had it never occurred to me that summer was for the outdoors, for nature, until I was more than 20 years old? Maybe because it wasn't — not in Houston, where I grew up.

Houston is fantastically unnatural, and its summer is the season for embracing all that is contrived, ameliorative and just plain fake about Houstonian life."

Susan Choi (who visits Thursday) talks about the air-conditioned artificial summers of her youth, and her teenage affinity for the music of the Talking Heads, in a 2004 New York Times article preserved on the website of the Talking Heads' David Byrne.