Old Dog, New Tricks

Timbuktu, Paul Auster


pg37 "We all grew up with that junk, but now it's gone, isn't it, and who the hell cares anyway? Wallpaper, that's what it was. Background music. Zeitgeist dust on the furniture of the mind."

pg 79 "Before you go feeling too sorry for yourself, just remember that you're not the first dog who's ever been lost."

pg 103 "It might not have been perfect this place, but it had a lot to recommend it, and once you got used to the mechanics of the system, it no longer seemed so important that you were tethered to a wire all day. By the time you had been there for two and a half months, you even stopped caring that your name was sparky."



Surprisingly this book shed some light on one of our most frequent rants, who becomes one of "those" architects. Comfort, stuck, greed or perhaps the worst apathy?

“We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures
of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go
lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and
unknown by them”

Somerset Maugham



Image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkcotton/3736850281/sizes/l/

How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes

'For instance, Now I Lay Me Down to Eat is an entertaining tour of historical and cultural alternatives to the design problems of everyday life—dining, sleeping, sitting, cleansing, and bathing—and was "neither meant to spread dangerous heresies nor to undermine our birthright to make the worst of possible choices. Rather, it demonstrates by means of random examples that life can be less dull than we make it." By contrasting current western design solutions with earlier practices, he makes our current "solutions" look open to improvement, if not outright ridiculous and arbitrary. For instance, he asks why the standard American-style toilet is effectively a septic humidifier, and why American-style bathtubs are impossible for adults to lie down in and are as a matter of routine permanently fixed two or three feet away from a septic humidifier.
In 1944 Rudofsky and his wife Berta were invited to Black Mountain College for two weeks. Bernard gave two lectures on the sad state of clothing design, calling contemporary dress "anachronistic, irrational, impractical and harmful" and literally unsuitable. One of his lectures was called "How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes?".'

From Wikipedia's entry on Bernard Rudofsky, the author of 'Architecture without Architects'

hello? this london calling...

image via: postsecret

Night Train to Lisbon

I've been thinking a lot this weekend about Pascal Mercier's novel 'Night Train to Lisbon', and in particular some of the quotes I took down when I read it first last year, which are unfortunately stranded at home in a notebook that won't be making its way over for another month or so, but in the meantime I've dredged some others up from the internet to give you a taste of the lyrical and affecting tone of the whole:

"Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves."

"That words could cause somethinge in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic? But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning."

"What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?"

"The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?"

And the only one that I actually took note of first time around:
"We were prepared for something, but not such a thing. From the first sentence, a breathless silence prevailed. And it became more silent and more breathless, this silence. The sentences from the pen of a seventeen year old iconoclast, who spoke as if he had already lived a whole life, were like whiplashes. I began to ask myself what would happen when the last word died out. I was afraid. Afraid for him who knew what he was doing and yet didn't know. Afraid for this thin-skinned adventurer, whose vulnerability was every bit equal to his verbal force. But also afraid for us who might not be up to it."

Beautiful stuff.

between the strange and the familiar

Moment of the collaboration prefiguring the first few days in London