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victoriagloverstuff · 6 years

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Edmund White: Reading is a Passport to the World

When I was a little child, my sister, who was nearly four years older, was astonished that I couldn’t read. We were in my mother’s old Ford, driving around the main square of Hyde Park, and my sister pointed to a sign and said, “You honestly can’t read that?”

“No,” I said sullenly. “What does it say?”

“Graeter’s,” she announced triumphantly, the name of Cincinnati’s premier ice cream maker. “Can’t you see that? What does it say to you?” She wasn’t being mean; she was genuinely puzzled. Reading was a magical portal—once you passed through it, you couldn’t even imagine going back.

I must have been four. Two years later I could read, or at least “sound out” syllables (that was the method then). When I realized that I could interpret these hieroglyphics, I felt so free, as if a whole new world had been opened to me. Now I could herar a chorus of voices, even those coming from other centuries and cultures. I was no longer bound to the squalid here and now, to my mother’s web-spinning of agreeable fantasies or my father’s sudden eruptions of rage, to the sweating summers of that age before air conditioning.

I remember toddling into my mother’s room, where she was taking a perfumed bubble bath in the late afternoon. I announced (or maybe thought), “I’m free. I can read.”

Could I really have had such an improbable thought at age six? Or have I just told myself that that thought occurred to me then? And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.

I felt like a blind person who’d just regained his sight. I was no longer a Cincinnatian but rather an earthling. If things were clearly written in English, there was no text that was off-limits. I never read the standard children’s classics. No Wind in the Willows. Only recently did I get around to Treasure Island.

In my twenties and thirties no book was too ambitious for me; I worked my way through Theodor Adorno and Heinrich von Kleist, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, though I was drunk most of the time and often had to hold one eye shut. I suppose I was hanging out with a pretty brainy crowd back then, and I felt I had to keep up. I doubt I retained much, though in my thirties and forties I reviewed several books by Barthes and Foucault.

I was so driven back then, it never would have occurred to me to reread a book! My goal was to have read everything, or at least the major works that appealed to me, that seemed essential. Perhaps because I’d never done any graduate work, I felt inferior. I’d never read The Faerie Queene. Worse, I’d been a writer for eight years for Time-Life Books, the ultimate home of the middle-brow. Although I invariably said defensively, “I’m not an intellectual,” I wanted to be one—or at least to be able to refuse demurely that title. Sometimes I took comfort in the idea I was an artist, not an intellectual. I even resorted to the ridiculously snobbish notion I was a “gentleman amateur” and not an intellectual. But I’ve always wanted to have the choice to join any club, especially one that might reject me. For instance, I made a major effort to join the Century Club, for which one had to be sponsored by 11 or 12 current members. Two years after I was accepted, I resigned. Too many lawyers.

Now I do reread at least two books every year—Anna Karenina and Henry Green’s Nothing. Although these two novels are so different one from the other, they both reward closer scrutiny, so much so they scarcely resemble the same book one remembers having read the year before. People complain about the Kitty and Lvov parts of Anna Karenina, but that’s a frivolous charge. Their love stands in dramatic contrast to Anna’s and Vronsky’s passion and is the necessary counterweight to that tragic tale. In the same way, some readers treat Nothing the way they regard all comedy—as lightweight. Actually it is a profound study of the generations and social classes—and unexpectedly it sides with the older, richer people.

“Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity.”

The other book I’ve reread five times in my life is Proust’s. When I was a teenager I read it as the bible of snobbism; it gave me a whole vocabulary to describe this vice that Proust calls “narrow but deep.” Now I read it as the definitive condemnation of snobbism.

For my memoir, I’ve reread a few favorites by Colette, Nabokov, and Tolstoy and read for the first time novels by Guyotat, Giono, and Malaparte. Do we prefer to revisit books we love or to explore the unknown? Are we happier to find new things in the old or to detect familiar themes and strategies in the utterly new and startling? The brilliant novelist of modern manners Alison Lurie once explained to me why she was more popular in England than in America. “For the English I’m writing about an unfamiliar subject [American academic and artistic life] in a familiar style of social satire, whereas for Americans I’m writing in an unusual style about familiar subjects.” Has she touched on an explanation of why we like certain books and not others?

Joe Brainard reportedly said on his deathbed, “The best thing about dying is that you never have to go to another poetry reading.” How many times I’ve had to sit through poetry readings in a stuffy room with subaqueous light at the end of a long day and fight against falling asleep! The mind loves a narrative, and in my half sleep my poor brain has spun cartoons made up of chance words, my embarrassment, trace memories (what Freudians call dismissively “the daily residue”), and my shipwrecked will to wake up, or at least not snore.

Everyone says poetry is an oral art, and perhaps some of it is meant to be read out loud. Good actors can make us understand passages in Shakespeare that use obsolete language, though I hate it when pedants hope to indicate the line break or the caesura. I could never make sense of The Tempest until I saw it onstage. On the page I could never keep track of all the characters. Charles Lamb argued in an essay that reading Shakespeare is preferable to seeing him produced, and maybe hammy acting and garish sets and thundering exits and entrances do topple certain of Shakespeare’s cloud castles, but great performances can dial into sharp focus even the vaguest verse.

But does modern poetry gain from being recited out loud? James Merrill was a smooth, trained reader and the smile in his voice could give the reader permission to laugh at his improbable mixture of metaphysics and gossip. His light social tone so often gives way to the sublime that a reader less civilized than he scarcely knows what is funny and what is serious (sometimes both at once, since he thought wisdom was expressed in puns and that the language itself is the collective unconscious).

Percussive poetry like Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer as read by the author himself to the beat of drums can be riveting; a casual scanning of the page would never render the granitic, prehistoric force of this masterpiece. In his recitation (now on YouTube) Pound rolls his r’s, thuds the final d’s, and maintains a shaman’s monotone. Maybe Paul Verlaine’s musical verse (or John Keats’s) is improved by being read out loud, but most 20th- or 21st-century verse is too abstract or too dense to be understood on a single hearing. The mise-en-page, the line breaks, the Latinate or Anglo-Saxon origins of the words, as in tomb and grave (“The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay”)—these are all elements that surrender themselves only to close reading.

With prose the problem is the speed. Everyone reads at a different pace, and some texts are not interesting or intricate enough to be dosed out at conversational speed. We get it; we want to scan it. Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity. It may be valuable for the fiction writer to gauge the response of his audience, to listen for contradictions or unintended echoes, to detect where people’s attention wanders. But do these practical benefits for the writer outweigh the torture undergone by the public?

Silent, solitary reading (if the book is good) is the best conversation, with all the uhs and ahs edited out, the dead metaphors buried, the dialogue sharpened, the descriptions vivid, the suspense rising, the characters hovering between the unique and the representative. In the great Italian and French guides to good conversation during the Renaissance and 17th century, conversation must avoid pedantry and cruelty and seek above all to please and to entertain. Finally it must be natural; affectation is the worst sin, far worse than flattery, which may even be desirable. In her definitive study The Age of Conversation, Benedetta Craveri (granddaughter to the philosopher Benedetto Croce) argues that good conversation should not make anyone feel inferior or ill at ease but rather the object of a total consideration. And Simone Weil, the French religious philosopher, thought paying attention was a form of prayer.

The novelist or essayist should never mystify for no good reason. We should know why the marquise goes out at five o’clock (if it’s relevant). In an essay we should not be thrown off by academese. An idea may be difficult, but not its expression, as I learned from my beloved Marilyn; the words should be as lucid as possible. The assumption should be that the reader is intelligent but not necessarily informed.

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Good read found on the Lithub

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juliandmouton30 · 7 years

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"Architects may, heaven save their mortal souls, have to work on Trump's wall"

For some architects, the decision not to bid for Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall is easy. But Aaron Betsky questions whether working on the project is as unethical as it first seems in this Opinion column.

"For us it is very simple. We are a small firm and we all agree. We are not going to build Trump's freaking wall. But other firms around town have more trouble with this situation. Maybe the principals want it, because they need work, maybe their bosses in other cities do, maybe even some of the employees want to go for it, but others would just walk out the door. It's a dilemma."

That was how one architect in my native Phoenix answered when I asked him last month whether his firm was going to submit a proposals for the design of the wall President Trump has promised to build "from sea to shining sea" between the United States and Mexico.

For most of the chattering class in architecture the choice is pretty simple. I did not recognise a single firm of design repute among those that in the end submitted their proposals to design the wall – other than those, like MADE Collective, who put their name in to showcase radical anti-proposals; in this case a free zone, Otra Nation, that would merge, rather than separate, the two nations.

I do not know of any instances of theoreticians – not even the rabid neo-classicists who love defending order – suggesting that designing the wall is a good thing.

For most of the chattering class in architecture the choice is pretty simple

So the case is a seemingly simple one. Just as doctors should first do no harm, so architects should not participate in this particular political gambit whose motives most of us find repulsive, to say the least.

Perhaps the sentiments that this very clear case have loosed might even convince the American Institute of Architects to adapt the long-mooted proposal to prohibit its members from building inhumane federal prisons that contain solitary confinement cells and other means of punishment most governments have also condemned.

But where do we draw the line? For years, very good architects have designed new border stations for the same agency that would oversee the wall and as part of the same attitude that we need to be watchful about who we allow in this country.

Designs by Smith-Miller Hawkinson, Julie Snow, and Jones Studio, to name just three examples, are excellent. They even make you proud of being an American.

Just as doctors should first do no harm, so architects should not participate in this particular political gambit

They create humane environments for workers and visitors alike, they respect the landscapes in which they appear, and they put a good face on the United States government's desire to protect its borders. Should architects participate in this programme now that the government looks to enforce its nativist, racist, and Christian-first policies by using such structures?

Some have gone even further. The artist Christo abandoned his long-standing plan to create one of his landscape curtains in Colorado because his client would, in effect, be the US government (most of the site is public land).

Though this seems like a stretch to me (and I suspect there are other mechanisms and motives involved), you could make an argument that collaboration in any form with a government that is actively seeking ways to discriminate against many of its own citizens, remove safeguards on our natural resources, and otherwise do evil, would be unethical.

This then takes us into even more uncharted territory. If it is not right to work for this government, then what about that of countries that are even more evil? Should architects accept commissions from governments or companies that are at least in part owned by much more repressive regimes, such as China or Russia? What about Turkey, now that it has taken yet one more step towards one-person rule after jailing tens of thousands of teachers (including architecture teachers) last year?

But where do we draw the line?

Activists have made a point out of saying that architects should not work for the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, but that is mainly because of the working conditions on the sites there.

I have not heard a great deal of protest of the many massive designs now going on in Saudi Arabia, a country that denies one half of its population, namely women, basic human rights, while supporting terrorist organisations around the world.

So let's say that you decide that you are not going to work for any government or government-allied company in a state that denies human rights, commits crimes against its population, or irreparably harms its natural environment. You are also not going to work in countries where construction techniques or working conditions do the same.

Instead, you are going to design away in your own country or Western Europe, perhaps in most of Latin and South America, and for a few other Asian countries. You will, of course, have to vet the situation every time, which is difficult, so perhaps you decide to just stick to private clients in the United States. Life is simple now, and you can continue your quest to be the next Palladio.

You can question just about every commission you could possibly conceive

But what do you know about your clients? I recently visited the office of an architect who was doing a humongous house for what has to be a billionaire. "Oh, we vetted him, his money is clean," he told me.

Really? Are you sure? What does "clean" mean? Is it not okay to work for a mining company but okay to work for a hedge-fund billionaire whose strategic investments have either propped up that strip-miner or put thousands of people out work?

Would you work for Walmart? No? What about some of the Walton family members who have taken the money they made by destroying small retailers and paying scandalously low wages to very good work in social causes and culture?

Do you think that the Ford Foundation has redeemed itself enough through all of its good work to design a project they help to fund, even though the ultimate source of the money was a racist, ruthless oppressor who paved the way to paving our planet?

Using your skills and knowledge in any situation to do good means working for evil people

Down and down the rabbit hole we go, until you can question just about every commission you could possibly conceive. At some point you either realise that architecture is indeed the world's second oldest profession, and you have to take the clients you can get, or you have to try to erect a more complex set of standards and trade-offs.

This is certainly what lawyers and doctors have done, but I do not know many people who admire the general state of their standards. At least they have tried – the AIA's standards have everything to do with the financial and managerial well being of a project, and nothing with larger questions of morality or ethics.

As an organisation, they promote a drive towards net-zero and racial inclusion, but not in the mechanics of the profession. Not that I blame them – where would you stop or start?

If you come out the other end of the rabbit hole, the answer might be: you start by using your skills and knowledge in any situation to do good. That means working for evil people, just as a doctor might save a dictator's life because it is the right thing to do. That, in turn, would mean that perhaps architects should work on the wall.

You either work for those who have the money and power to hire you, or you don't work

The difference between architects and doctors, however, is that each individual choice is not one of life and death. An architect can simply prefer not to, and save her or his soul. The problem then is that this choice may lead to a wall that would be worse, a prison that is more inhumane, or a building in China that is more wasteful of resources and enforcing of state power and than it needs to be.

You either work for those who have the money and power to hire you, or you don't work. If your clients have money and power they are, at least on some level, probably not "clean". Architecture is, always has been, and always will be, the built affirmation of the social, political, and economic status quo.

Architects will have to make hard choices within that situation if they want to do the right thing. They may even, heaven save their mortal souls, have to work on the wall.

Aaron Betsky is dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

Architects and contractors defend "ethical" decision to bid for Trump wall

The post "Architects may, heaven save their mortal souls, have to work on Trump's wall" appeared first on Dezeen.

from ifttt-furniture https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/18/opinion-aaron-betsky-ethical-architecture-donald-trump-us-mexico-border-wall/

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jeniferdlanceau · 7 years

Text

"Perhaps architects should work on Trump's wall"

For some architects, the decision not to bid for Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall is easy. But Aaron Betsky questions whether working the project is as unethical as it first seems in this Opinion column.

I do not know of any instances of theoreticians – not even the rabid neo-classicists who love defending order – suggesting that designing the wall is a good thing.

For most of the chattering class in architecture the choice is pretty simple

Designs by Smith-Miller Hawkinson, Julie Snow, and Jones Studio, to name just three examples, are excellent. They even make you proud of being an American.

Just as doctors should first do no harm, so architects should not participate in this particular political gambit

This then takes us into even more uncharted territory. If it is not right to work for this government, then what about that of countries that are even more evil? Should architects accept commissions governments or companies that are at least in part owned by much more repressive regimes, such as China or Russia? What about Turkey, now that it has taken yet one more step towards one-person rule after jailing tens of thousands of teachers (including architecture teachers) last year?

But where do we draw the line?

Activists have made a point out of saying that architects should not work for the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, but that is mainly because of the working conditions on the sites there.

You can question just about every commission you could possibly conceive

Using your skills and knowledge in any situation to do good means working for evil people

This is certainly what lawyers and doctors have done, but I do not know many people admire the general state of their standards. At least they have tried – the AIA's standards have everything to do with the financial and managerial well being of a project, and nothing with larger questions of morality or ethics.

As an organisation, they promote a drive towards net-zero and racial inclusion, but not in the mechanics of the profession. Not that I blame them – where would you stop or start?

You either work for those who have the money and power to hire you, or you don't work

Architects will have to make hard choices within that situation if they want to do the right thing. They may even, heaven save their mortal souls, have to work on the wall.

Architects and contractors defend "ethical" decision to bid for Trump wall

The post "Perhaps architects should work on Trump's wall" appeared first on Dezeen.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217598 https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/18/opinion-aaron-betsky-ethical-architecture-donald-trump-us-mexico-border-wall/

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