My name is Jenny. I'm from Brooklyn by way of China, and spend most of my year (temporarily) in Williamstown, MA.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
#finalstime
I’m currently (procrastinating) writing a paper that is supposed to be a self-reflection on why I love the architecture that I do. In short, it’s asking me to search for the biases, conscious or unconscious, that underlie all of the judgements that I make. For research, I returned to one of the papers that I wrote for Art History 101, on Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s The Bouquet:
I’m embarrassed to say that one of my sentences reads: “A tantalizing patch of light that evokes a nascent awareness of her sequestration from the outside world.” This is the kind of ornate, laden language that I know I naturally drift towards when I have simple thoughts, but feel the need to dress them up in fancy words. My professor’s feedback said: As penance you should read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which will ensure that you never write something like “nascent awareness of her sequestration.” And today, three years later, I finally did.
Orwell’s essay is really a diatribe against English that has become decadent and overwrought. He writes, “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” If our thoughts can corrupt our language, language can also corrupt thoughts. There are always those phrases that we naturally reach for, phrases that become a continuous temptation, “like a pack of aspirin at one’s elbow.” The point is that we think that adopting a certain type of language makes our writing better — more academic, more professional, more “polished” — but what it really does is obscure our thoughts.
Language, Orwell says, is not just a natural growth but an instrument that we shape for our own ends. That, I think, is why I am always suspicious of people who can write without agony. The pleasure of reading a beautiful piece of prose is that we can recognize, at once, the simple, seemingly effortless, expression of the author’s thoughts but also the pruning and labor that has shaped it.
For reference, here are Orwell’s six simple rules for writing, although I encourage you to read the entire essay here.
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Repeat, ad infinitum. Until SUMMERTIME.
Currently digging into the archives of Lewis Mumford’s writing for The New Yorker. Has there been a writer since who has been able to write about cities and architecture in such a distinctive way? He had what I seem to always be searching for in my own writing — style and liveliness, tempered with equal parts analysis and haunting beauty. (Read his elegiac and mournful review of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim here — possibly my favorite reading ever done for class.)
Some fragments from two early articles in The New Yorker chronicling his upbringing in New York:
Karl Marx characterized the class into which I was born as the petty bourgeoisie. He didn’t think much of it as a class, and neither do I; but that was the angle from which I saw New York. …
We would walk up Broadway after a vaudeville performance, on a cold December afternoon, humming “There was I, waiting at the church” or jauntily mimicking the debonair carriage of the latest magician, feeling very worldly, very cynical, and very full of quite juvenile anticipation of adventure, in which role one might be anything from a performer on the high trapeze to the Electrical Wizard who would supplant Edison. That feeling is probably the grip and high sign that bind in secret fraternity the West Side boys of my circle and generation. A lot of the things that puzzle our friends or mystify our wives or vex our mistresses could probably be explained in terms of our initiation in the vaudeville thither. …
The New York of my childhood slowly collapsed between 1905 and 1912. … In 1912, the Kaiser turned down Lord Haldane’s offer of peace, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg, and I smoked my first cigarette. That was the end of my New York Childhood.
- From ”A New York Childhood: Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay”, The New Yorker, December 22, 1934
Emerson used to say that the essence of a college education was having a room of one’s own, with a fire, in a strange city. Going to high school on East Fifteenth Street, between Stuyvesant Square and First Avenue, gave me essentially the same sort of shock. …
My new schoolfellows brought the raw facts of life home to me with a rush. My own family knew the pinch of genteel poverty, but here was poverty on a grand scale, massive, extensive, blighting vast neighborhoods, altering the whole character of life, a poverty that, instead of shrinking submissively behind a false front, reached out into the city, creating its own forms, demanding, arguing, asserting, claiming its own, now busy with schemes for making money, now whispering the strange word Socialism as a key that would open the door. …
That was what was important, as one looks back on it, in all the classes. Not the lesson itself, but the overflow — a hint, a pat on the solder, the confession of a secret ambition, a fragment of unposed life as someone had actually lived it. …
Reading “A Pluralistic Universe” at 3:25 in the morning almost wiped away the humiliation of sweeping the floor and setting out the flimsy in the stale air of the city room half an hour later. …
The Trustees of City College had chosen a grand site for their new buildings when the college moved up from Twenty-third Street, and the architecture had a powerful effect when one climbed the hill past the Hebrew Orphan Asylum through the October twilight and saw the college buildings, in their dark stone masses and white terra-cotta quoins and moldings, rising like a collection of crystals our of the formless rocks on the crest. Below, the plain of Harlem spread, a vapor of light beneath the twinkle and flood of a large beer sign.
- From ”A New York Adolescence: Tennis, Quadratic Equations, and Love”, The New Yorker, December 4, 1937
Writing has always been one of my favorite things to do — the act of choosing the right words, out of all the possible ones, that articulates how we think and feel to someone else. It is also an incredibly difficult endeavor. There is nothing so daunting as sitting down in front of a blank screen and facing that blinking mouse cursor.
One of my favorite professors here is also one of the best writers I’ve ever met. Michael J. Lewis teaches architecture at Williams College, although I think he can properly be considered a modern Renaissance man. Here are some of his thoughts, on writing and English, taken from his plenary address to the Society of Architectural Historians (2003):
“In What Style Should We Write?”
We in this room have a peculiar relationship to architecture. We study buildings, we admire them, but — with a few exceptions — we do not make them. We do not calculate their loads, lay their foundations, raise their roofs, plaster their walls, seal their joints, but we do write about them. And how we write about them: in essays and articles, books and dissertations, national register nominations and state inventories — in the amount of millions of words per year. As near as I can estimate, each month we collectively produce the total wordage written by Shakespeare. That is the central fact of our profession: we love architecture but we make literature. … Such is our product; tonight I want to ponder our quality control. …
Our professional position seems to be that writing style is something that takes care of itself, or should best be left alone. It is the world of subjective taste. In this respect we are all children of the 1960s. In that era, so concerned with questions of authenticity, there was no more grievous crime than pious hypocrisy. Polished and elegant rhetoric was seen as false and duplicitous, while fumbling inarticulateness was a badge of earnestness and sincerity; we were urged to “tell it like it is.” And the notion spread that style was merely a rhetorical flourish added after the fact, a dispensable embellishment, a mere hood ornament on the engine of the argument. …
Of all the devices of formal writing, there is surely none more visceral and forceful than rhythm itself. This is the most abstract of literary tools, for it has the capacity to act on us directly and, I suspect, physically. Who has not felt some twinge of instinctive response at hearing a speaker in an inaccessible foreign language, speaking with animation and vigor? After all, rhythm is our primal sensory experience, beginning with the four-four beat of our four-chambered heart. We inevitably experience a quickening beat as conveying excitement and tension—much as a slow steady pulse evokes calm. Either tempo, if sustained at length without various, would be monotonous; but by a skillful modulation of rhythm, and the alternation of shorter and longer sentences, we create that priceless literary commodity: urgency. …
In the moment of bowing to the silent call of anticipated criticism, we have lost the battle to write well, to write very, very well, at the apex of our skill and with our own distinctive personal voice. For no one can write well who is afraid of making a mistake.
Ed Ruscha for the Band of Outsiders lookbook. Perfect match — his paintings evoke the California sunset, the American road, and roadside billboards.
(Source: wordsforyoungmen)
Filed under: bucket list.
Marina Bay Sands Skypark BASE Jump, New Year’s Day, Singapore
Brandenburger Tor at night, Berlin (Taken with instagram)
Nouvelle Vague, Dance With Me.
From the album Bande à part, set to a scene from Godard’s Bande à part.
