Auditory
This
newly acquired habit, listening to books on tape, happily continues with me. The discovery that I can listen to a reading and, for the most part, not get drowsy while I'm driving is sort of a great surprise gift – and my gratitude's renewed every time I get in the truck, these last few weeks. (I actually look forward now, in fact, to the otherwise
rather unpleasant traffic-dense drives from where I live, in Catonsville, to the house where I've got a good deal of work going this year, just north of Annapolis, for the uninterrupted listening.)
Today I returned
Crime and Punishment, which was something I'd long wanted to read, and picked up
The Tin Drum, which is something I may have known in the back of my mind that I had plenty of reason long to intend to read, but which in fact caught my attention as much as anything because of Herr Grass's recent unhappy appearances in headlines.
This recording of
The Tin Drum is read, not coincidentally, by the same actor,
George Guidall, whose
Crime and Punishment still has a firm grip on my consciousness (or, in a way, conscience) – just finished yesterday. I kind of need to get out of the atmosphere of Dostoevsky (What – to Nazi-era Poland?!), but by the end of
Crime & Punishment, I couldn't help looking for another of Guidall's titles. This stuff really comes to life in his voice.
Push for change
New Pantagruel editor (&
De Regno Christi contributor) Caleb Stegall had a
piece published in the Dallas Morning News last month. Bill Chellis pointed it out on De Regno Christi last week, and I've had a chance to read it through now. It amounts to a compressed argument for Stegall's urgent public cause, a radical (re)turn to locally- and regionally-centered order in American society – culture, economy, government. It's an argument for a conservatism much more thorough-going & coherent, and many times more conscious of history, than anything given clear expression in the 'Christian conservative' suburban world of my upbringing. I feel I've got a lot to learn from this kind of far-seeing, clutter-clearing criticism. That's not to say, though, that I'm ready to buy in to Stegall & Company's social-political vision. Whitebread sub-urbanity may be too ingrained in me – or maybe I'm just turning out, with age, not to be the vision-buying type – I don't know.
I can't look at Stegall's piece at any length here – don't have time, and am too much a novice in many of the questions he's taking on. Anyone who may check in here is hereby encouraged to have a look at it for him- or herself. To whet your appetite, a provocative bit from early paragraphs:
Pollsters wonder why George W. Bush isn't getting more credit for strong economic numbers. Perhaps it is because what are signs of health driven by rampant consumerism are experienced by most Americans as symptoms of economic and spiritual rot – their own and their country's.
Americans, many of them at least, are awakening to the truth articulated more than 50 years ago by writer Whittaker Chambers: that the modern world's 'vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized' does not 'make for happiness from day to day' – and further, that it may mean 'catastrophe in the end.'
My guess is that what all the commentators are sensing is something real. Could it be that unconstrained growth, hypermobility and global markets actually produce social and political instability?
I can't help wondering where the many awakening Americans he refers to might be sequestered. In my part of the country, at least, you don't have to look hard to find Americans prone to fits of anxiety & scorn in the face of whatever may appear to be 'signs of health' around them – but finding Americans sufficiently at liberty in themselves to attend thoughtfully to signs of any kind of deep-rooted 'economic and spiritual rot', that's another project now.
I don't hesitate to say that, from my own limited perspective, I would like to see substantial change in American life at all the levels Stegall touches on. At the same time, I'm as profoundly skeptical of suggestions that change should be pursued via frameworks for recovery of 'oldest sources of order – ... at root religious', which as a society we may to our peril have 'abandoned along with their traditions and taboos', as I am disheartened by the history of positivist Anglo-American industrialism & globalism. Any genuinely society-establishing forms of order must, arguably, be in some sense religious at root. (See interesting discussions at
De Regno Christi, among various useful references.) But we Christians have to be on our guard, here: we can't, religion intact, slip toward understanding ourselves to be religious for the sake of seeing society (re)established. We can be religious for one exclusive cause – for the knowledge of
His sufferings and
His glory, in whom the good of everything in heaven & earth must by nature be and, in fact, with all the finality of His resurrection from death
now is established. To the degree we learn to adapt our idea of religion to the gaining of something less certain, less pervasive, less perfect, than Jesus now come in the history of this His world, to that degree – in my judgment – the religion we actually hold on to fails to be
Christian religion.
'Any building must have a life of its own'
A fairly abstract but nevertheless thought-provoking bit from 2006 AIA Gold Medal winner Antoine Predock's oddly thrown-together-feeling
web site:
I don't do an architectural concept sketch and see if the program has anything to do with it. It is embedded in the work from the very beginning and the discussions with clients with respect to the performance life of the building are very exciting and lead off into many interesting directions in terms of the programmatic intensities in the work. So the program figures continually with the different ingredients of energies that go into the first moves or gestures toward making the piece that becomes a building. The disclaimer with respect to the program would be that we know historically that buildings through the ages change their program and this ephemeral notion of program has to do with political overlays, cultural norms or evolutionary change in what was functional content. The Pantheon changes from a pagan temple to a Christian church overnight, so these kinds of tremendous reversals are also part of the possibility. This means that any building must have a life of its own, in a way independent of program, but of course accommodating the original program. So when architecture becomes solely program-driven and is merely a functional diagram, without other admixtures, it becomes a rather empty determined condition. Like a body without a soul.
The Pantheon example suggests some historical questions to be traced: what in fact was the character of that change from pagan to Christian use? But I have no opportunity to trace them here, now. And Predock's point depends little on the particular example given, anyway.
The quote is the better part of a brief design process discussion on the 'Clay' page at Predock's site. At right, a photo of a Predock design model in clay – this one from the page describing the studio's
El Paso Federal Courthouse, set to open in 2007.
You can listen to a pretty interesting 12-minute interview with Predock by going to the
AIA's podcast page. (Scroll to bottom.)
Time for a spellcheck
The ad in the screen snapshot below is running, at the time of this post, on the home page & article pages of
Prospect, a pretty serious magazine from the UK whose articles I've been enjoying & learning a lot from, lately.
But what's the deal with this ad, now? It's one thing, you know, to misspell the name of a less-well-known country with, say, an awkward arrangement of letters in English context. (Take Liechtenstein, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Djibouti ... & so on. Lovely!) Even that shouldn't make it through the process to the point of publication, of course. But misspelling
Israel?Come on, y'all.
An excerpt
From Susanne Langer's
Philosophy in a New Key, chapter 3:
Charles Peirce, who was probably the first person to concern himself seriously with semantics, began by making an inventory of all "symbol-situations," in the hope that when all possible meanings of "meaning" were herded together, they would show empirical differentia whereby one could divide the sheep from the goats. But the obstreperous flock, instead of falling neatly into a few classes, each according to its kind, divided and subdivided into the most terrifying order of icons, qualisigns, legisigns, semes, phemes, and delomes, and there is but cold comfort in his assurance that his original 59,049 types can really be boiled down to a mere sixty-six.
Geez,
Mr Peirce.
