Here's my last entry at Moveable Type. I feel ready to move beyond the auspices of the University of Minnesota - after all its been over a year since I graduated. Also I don't like the new format of the updated version at all. Its clunky and hard to work with. So I'm moving on to bigger and better things. Find me at wordpress here.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Well, maybe not the best ever but ... that's only because I've been blessed by the vacation fairy. KJ and I did have a damn near perfect whirlwind early winter vacation in November. We met in La Crosse on a wednesday night, did some pre-cooking and planning and then set out driving northbound on Thursday morning. We hit our destination, a cabin just north of Two Harbors before sunset and got ourselves settled in. We whiled away the evening by exploring our space and reading The Dark is Rising out loud to each other. I tried out my new recipe for White Russians and you be the judge whether KJ violated Minnesota state drinking laws by sharing it with me.
We spent two beautiful days (admittedly overcast and frigid but beautiful never the less) hiking around in a number of lovely Minnesota State Parks. We were confined to the shore side of the highway in each of these due to an extended hunting season taking place. All the really cool (read: rugged, non-paved, lower traffic) trails were over on the far side of the scenic highway but ... we made up for it by walking further on the groomed paths and by appreciating the spectacular views of the lake. Also we got to climb on the rocks more by staying close to the shore line. On saturday we checked out of our apartment and headed south, swinging through Duluth. I don't remember San Fransicso that well - its been four years since I was there. But I think Duluth gives it a run for its money in terms of seriously steep roads. I can't imagine driving anywhere in that city during ice weather.
We stopped at one more park on our way south: Jay Cooke. I was sorry that we didn't have the whole vacation to do over again and do it there. That is a place worth some serious exploring. Also there is a continuous trail that goes up along the shore line - its seems like it might make for an epic hiking adventure some fall. Just a thought.
We spent Saturday night and Sunday in the big city (thanks Malea) and then got home at a decent hour on Sunday night. Monday I got KJ up early and dragged her off to hike Hixon forest with me just once before she escaped back to her sedentary office existence. We'll be making this trek again I suspect. Here are the stunning pics.
These are ... the view out our cabin window over the lake with the pervasive dramatic clouds that marked the whole trip ... KJ striding out across the rocky edge of a tiny island that we rock hopped our way out to it risking frost bite in the frigid water of Lake Superior on our way and ... snow falling around us as we looked out from the top of a rocky promontory mysteriously topped with a stone chimney that may or may not have been the site of Minnesota's most inaccessible home.
I’m treating myself to a little regressive reading this week. I picked up Meet the Austins by Madelein L’Engle and am working my way through to A Ring of Endless Light which I still hold to be on my top five favorite books of all time. Until I read Prodigal Summer in 2002 it was my favorite stand alone novel. But the other Austin books are just good fun, not serious or weighty or plotted around great world events. At the library when I looked L’Engle up I also found a couple of adult non-fiction books under her name with call numbers in the 921 region. To those who haven’t spent any parts of their lives obsessing on the Dewey Decimal System that might not mean anything but I was instantly alerted … biography. So I also picked up A Circle of Quiet which is apparently the first of a four book autobiography that L’Engle published beginning in 1972. Its beautiful prose about her life at Crosswicks, the new England farm house where she raised a family and about nature and the nature of writing. It reminds me of Annie Dillard, another great meditative author I should revisit someday soon. I wanted to include this passage, partly because its where I stopped last night before switching to fiction and partly because it struck me as something I’ve been trying to say myself for a long time in defense of a more convoluted language and … partly because I’m on a campaign to purge improper uses of the work like from my own language.
“Where would we be without the images given in metaphor and simile?
“Metaphor: She speaks poniards, and every word stabs. Simile: My love is like a red, red rose. ‘Like’ is our simile word. Madison Avenue is by mo means the first to misuse ‘like,’ but I was told that the man who wrote the famous “Winston tastes like a good cigarette should� did it with contempt for those at whom the commercial was aimed. Over and over again we hear “like� misused this way: I feel like I’m going to throw up; well, you know Mother, like I really do need it because …; tell it like it is. Every time “like is misused, it is weakened as a simile word.
“I’m not against changes in the language. I love new words and not only the ologies. I’ve just discovered “widdershins�: against the direction of the sun. In Crosswicks the bath water runs out clockwise; in Australia, widdershins. I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free – though we buy more of the product.�
(page 17 of the 1972 HarperSanFrancisco paperback)
Four or five nights a week I've been detouring on my way home from work to the county forest just east of town. Located on the bluffs which quite literally overlook the city, Hixon Arboretum is my new favorite place on earth. There is something about the angle of the hills which fits just right with some deep part of my psyche. Its not familiar, exactly - this is not the Wisconsin I was brought up knowing - but it fits. Its also covered in gorgeous fall foliage and has exactly the right size of trails and number of other people on them. I even like the way the packed dirt of the worn trail feels under my feet. A few weeks ago I drove an hour and a half on a saturday to visit a reputedly fabulous nature preserve in Vernon county. It was certainly beautiful terrrain but I just couldn't get over the fact that I didn't like walking on a stubbly path mown six feet wide through the grass. I kept thinking that I could have saved gas and hours by just walking at my own dear park and liked it better. Which I guess, means I'm happier now knowing that I'm in a spot I prefer, just five blocks off of my commute route.
Some of the paths wind in an out along the foot of the bluffs, snaking into and then out of each new valley between the projecting hills topped with rocky outcroppings. These are perfect for medetative rambles and days with knee pain. But the days have been getting shorter and now I find that I like to get more bang for my walking buck by hiking up to the look out points and catching a glimpse of sunset before heading back down. This is my favorite spot, originally named Lookout Point, as seen from the next ridge top over. You can get up to the rocky outcropping one of two ways, by winding up along the northern valley on a moderately sloped path through the trees and then switchbacking out to the point or by heading nearly straight up hill along the front. When pressed for time I do that. you can see the way I go, but not the path itself, in that 45 degree sloped prairie remnant along the front. I climb it almost like a ladder, leaning forward on my hands as I find new footings each step up. It leaves me breathless at several points. I'll go up that way but not down - wouldn't even think of it. But that means that the down side, already in shaddow gets pretty dark after the sunset. On monday, by the time I got back to my car, it was so dark I couldn't see anything but where the trail generally was because of the absense of fallen leaves. I kept tripping on stumps - it got a little exciting.
Since I'm usually racing for the sunset these days this is more often than not my view. Pausing to catch my breath and look back over my shoulder at the sun disappearing behind trees in the foreground and, far across the river valley of the Mississippi, behind the answering bluffs on the Minnesota side. I don't really mind though. Often the time following the sunset is the nicest of all. And there is a remarkably comfortable rock to sit on and think about the day before shaking myself out of the reverie and heading down into the gathering dark.
I found this book by randomly trailing along the shelves at the library and getting caught on the title. Its called A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture by Ann Cline. The preface situates me almost perfectly right now so I’ll include a big quote. Also, this author is a word smith after my own heart.
The fact of the matter is that when I said I created this blog to gather research for my thesis I was full of crap. I the thesis was not the purpose. I am a hunter and a gatherer of ideas by nature and the research doesn’t stop when the research project does. So … here some research … for no purpose in particular.
“Suppose that Architecture draws a circle around itself and proclaims – imperious Architecture! – that everything inside the circle is Architecture and everything outside is not. From a great distance – from, say, a picnic bench set up in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility – this circle appears to be a sharp, unambiguous demarcation; an impenetrable line of continuous length and no width. There is no mistaking what lies inside the circle, be it the Pazzi Chapel or Fallingwater, for what lies outside – the realm of bookkeepers, bumblebees, and subatomic particles.
As we approach more closely the line swells and blurs. What we have taken for a wall, inert and opaque, is now more accurately described as a zone several miles across, possessing a breathable atmosphere, and teeming with life.
In A Hut of One’s Own we will take a stroll through these borderlands that surround Architecture – a region of structures and ideas, a wasteland of heterodoxy defined simultaneously by its proximity to Architecture and its proximity to everything else. On our way we will discover simple structures: shacks, tea houses, follies, casitas. Here and there, we will observe ritual practices dedicated to various “Gods,� “Goods,� or goods, and we will (over)hear the practitioners of construction, art and biology discuss beauty satisfaction, freedom, survival and ethics.
Whenever we wander very near to what Architecture most certainly is, we will catch glimpses of shadowy figures slipping out – as if to a secluded dacha, where they have arranged a clandestine rendezvous with other partisans and malcontents, and then slipping back in again. These figures are the protagonists of our story.
This book, then is about eccentrics and recluses, hut dwellers and ne’er-do-wells, a story about lives scribbled in the margins of architecture and history, of huts and follies that would be forgotten but for the curious way misanthropy occasionally turns beneficent.
More than only a story, this book is also an essay that attempts to overturn Architecture’s victory over Individual Experience. Here we will look at dwellings that were not well attuned to the architecture of there era and at their builders, whose lives may instead have been ahead of their time, as if their very inability to march in step raised exactly those cultural issues that later on became helpful.
While this collections limits will appear arbitrary, from my point of view all of the sights are encountered on our stroll – the follies and tea huts, their rituals and antirituals (together with the ideas people have held about them) – have this in common: all acquired their significance during times of cultural transition, when one picture of the world overlapped with its successor. And it is this, in turn, which gives purpose and prejudice to our journey. Right now, comparable transitions are at work; right now, shadowy figures are moving from the circle of Architecture to rendezvous with primitive huts and their avant-gardes, with their makers and denizens.
I know, for I am one of them.�
There. That may as well serve as a manifesto for my next period, be it a week, a month, a year or many. I’m struggling right now to figure out how to fit my three years of intense indoctrination (aka architecture school) in with the values and ideas I held before I found it and with the culture I feel most comfortable with now that I’m again outside of its limits. … Yeah. I don’t have an answer to that yet.
Several factors have contributed to the fact that I have completely neglected my blog for months (nearly six). First there was the pesky little matter of writing my masters thesis and taking care of all the various tasks associated with that, including but not limited to: getting through my childish Urban Theory requirement, teaching a class of delightfully squirrelly honors freshmen, hanging out with my soon to be scattered friends and figuring out what the hell I was going to do with myself once I graduated. All of which is now in the past. Then I passed the barrier of graduation and entered a period of alternating lethargy and panic while I made the fateful decision about my future and then implemented it and also visited home and Roshni in Boston by way of a celebration. And most recently I’ve been diving headfirst into my new job.
If you’d asked me six months ago what I was doing with myself after graduation I would have told you unblinkingly that I was heading back to the Gulf Coast to work in Biloxi for a year or two before writing my Fulbright application to study flood control issues and environmentalist architecture in the Netherlands. If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said that I really hoped to get a job in Biloxi but … who knew. And now … I’m certainly no where near Biloxi. I have, in fact, returned to my native Wisconsin, to finally get some experience of living here, one might say. That’s not to say that the deep south isn’t still in my future but … I’m settled here for the moment. Here in La Crosse. I’m working in Hippy Dippy heaven for Whole Trees Architecture and Construction where the office is a green roofed straw bale shack with two tiny PV panels for power. Of course, there is still wireless internet for my laptop. Even the new back-to-the-land movement can’t survive without their Wi-Fi. But … its great. I’m doing everything from autoCAD (designing, not just redlines) to grant applications to answering emails.
Time’s been flying. I’ve worked three weekends out of six weeks of work now and there’s never a shortage of things to do. At home I’ve been actively nesting – getting things arranged and putting up pictures on the walls. Also I got out my violin again. That was one of the worst things I did in Grad School – stop playing. So I’m re acquainting myself with the Suzuki repertoire again. And, naturally I’m no stranger to the farmers market, grocery coop and library. As far as social life goes … I’m working on that. For the moment, that’s what cell phones are for. Anyway, despite the handicap of not affording internet for my apartment and feeling rather guilty about using work time for play I’m going to try to re-activate the blog. For anyone who was tapping their toes for it to return … hi there. I’m back.
... the minute I did, I was overcome with the compulsion to do it. Also I'm worried I mixed up a couple of names and faces. If I've got you wrong please let me know. See you next week.
Please note: Alyssa and Angie should be switched. Thanks Alyssa.
Robert made the point yesterday at the end of our thesis meeting that architecture students often latch onto the idea of using their buildings to force people into doing thing they otherwise would not. The idea of “and this will make them stop here and look to the window and see the light� This a good warning to me – already a bit inclined to try to solve the worlds problems with my architecture. I have to be wary of using my design to force anyone into living greenly. So then the question is if I want to make a green building which helps people live more greenly I need to be certain that it is allowing or suggesting alternatives to people rather than trying to bludgeon them into some new idea.
Well, it’s clear that production hasn’t been getting my full attention recently but several things have been simmering away in the back ground. I detoured from my central theme with a rereading of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. On reflection, this was a helpful thing to do, because, as Schumacher himself points out, knowledge and research are useless if not dangerous when they fail to reflect their connection to the center of things. To quote him: “It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of over specialization. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis … What is at fault is not specialization, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of metaphysical awareness.�(1) This is, I feel, a useful reminder to bear in mind the reasons WHY I am interested in this issue and not to get wrapped up in inanities. I’m not sure that he’ll find his way into the text of my thesis but I feel strongly that he should be in my thoughts at the moment.
(1) Schumacher 1973, 86
A note on the text:
These little essays are something like a snapshot of notes growing into a very rough first draft. It will, naturally, be edited, culled and rewritten before I move on. I don’t however expect the tone to change much. This is a journey for me as much as it is a repository of knowledge for anyone else and I intend to affect the same style of breezy chat in my finished thesis which has always been found in my correspondence (both with myself and with others). This might be viewed as too casual – not academic enough. I shall refer any such criticism to Thoreau who prefaced Walden thusly:
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.�
I've been resisting, and yet strangely attracted to, the idea of a blog for some time now. Each time my attention turned to the matter I questioned my motives. Why would an extreme introvert want to shout their ideas from the internet hilltops, visible to all and sundry? Its highly illogical. And yet I find I do have things I want to say. Perhaps blogging is an introvert's tool after all. It's a venue for the sharing of ideas with a theoretical outside world, without the actual bother of seeking out specific people and really communicating with them or the associated nerves of face to face interactions.
However, being the child of a professional wordsmith, and an amateur in my own right, I really couldn't begin one without a good title. I was thinking 'trashed' which has the value of irony and would pertain to my thesis (about which more hereafter). But it didn't have the right ring to it.
I found it serendipitously at the library on Tuesday after work. I had just dropped by to do some reading and had detoured past the entrance in order to run my old books through the automated check out machine and had paused outside the door to rearrange my bags. As I looked up I happened to see Joan Soranno and John Cook walk in before me, looking a little lost. They took the elevator and disappeared from view. Then my eye caught on a poster for an event sponsored by HGA taking place in the Athenaeum on the fourth floor. So I followed my curiosity one floor up from my usual spot (derived through a complicated calculation involving nearness to the NA section, distance from other readers, protection from too-prominent sightlines down aisles and, of course, shade). When I got off the elevator something in my manner of looking around drew the attention of the white coated bouncer/HGA-head-honcho at the door of the exhibit. He asked if I was here for the show and I answered honestly that I had not been invited but was a curious architecture student and ... would that get me in? He gave me a name tag and I slipped in while he chatted up the next arriving architectural bright lights.
It turned out to be the last day of a traveling exhibition of Iraqi book art - really beautiful stuff, mostly watercolor and what is commonly referred to as "mixed media" on handmade looking paper bound in interesting ways. Of course the text was all in Arabic but it was beautiful none the less. The room was swirling with dramatic people in eccentric glasses and black clothing, some conversing about the architecture scene but some listening to the white gloved docents talk about the display. I tagged along to one of the groups and heard the librarian describing the sense of one of the books as she talked. She said the author was writing about letters as being the foundation of all communication. The formed bonds into words and the words bonded into thoughts - she used a couple of flowery and poetical similes that didn't appeal to me and which I have since forgotten. They may have worked better in the original Arabic than in a brief and paraphrased translation but I was totally distracted from my literary criticism by the last words. The book concluded sadly, with something about the pain of being and exile and ended "I am lost between the letters." I was entranced.
I had to get out a pen and write down his name - Dia al-Azzawi. It was actually only after I had jotted it down that I remembered that on all previous experiences inside the closed archive of a library there had been strict pencils only rules and there I was with a pad of paper and navy blue inked fountain pen at chest height. Oops. I quickly stashed it in my purse but the spell was broken. I remembered my obligations to my seat downstairs and also felt a bit out of place among so many of my architectural betters. Also I was the youngest in the room by about 15 years. Bear in mind the way the NYT is always waxing poetic about "brilliant young architect, 46." But I got what I came for, obviously. There are times when I feel lost between the letters in the sense he intended - cut off from communication when the bonds turning the alphabet into words and words into meaning and meaning into some connection with my fellow humans fall apart and leave me breathless and stranded. But I prefer my own interpretation - the sense of losing oneself in the noise of the universe - and in the mystic symbols with which we describe it. I'm reminded of a quotation by Annie Dillard in her wonderful autobiography An American Childhood. "Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through world."
Well I feel that this is plenty and to spare for an introduction.
This strange process of publishing random thoughts to the universe seems like a poem by one of my new favorites, Kay Ryan. And anyone who knows me would expect this to conclude with a poem so ... in honor of three much-missed stalls in the women's bathroom of a church gym in Biloxi Mississippi: