Previous - 153. Violation
Still Violating
"On Being Text"When you pick up a collection of essays you can't really expect anything in particular, but I have to say that this is not what I was expecting from Tisdale -- not that I'm complaining at all. This essay begins talking about the academic penchant for bundling writer's together into anthologies for educational purposes. Tisdale starts by seeing it as a not unappreciated new source of income, but then goes on (after noticing that one editor has botched her biography) to actually read the collections. She also reprises her ad hoc education -- dropping out of high school and weaving through several universities, where she took no "literature" classes -- before finally getting a degree.
p234 ...the moment the students finish reading, they must start to dissect. I'm afraid that what the students of these books are really learning is what college students learn about so many subjects: how to take things apart, but not how to put them together.
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p236 ...Literary analysis begins by presuming that writing can be understood by understanding its parts. The process is, in fact, called dissection, a term usually applied to dead things.
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...Reading my own critics has taught me a little bit about my work and rather a lot about certain critics.
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p240 How would I change college literature classes?... Read, read, read, and then try to explain how it feels. Read a book because someone you like tells you it's a good book. Listen to other readers when they react. Read some more. I believe that one reason I learned to write is that no one ever really tried to teach me, or... no one ever tried to tell me what a writer was supposed to be like...
p241 [From her note at the end of the essay] ...Anthologies give us a window into everything wrong with how we teach writing -- and reading -- and how one is actually read. It's not pretty.
I did take literature and history and philosophy classes, but I still agree with her. A good university philosophy department is the place to go to have your interest in philosophy deflated. And Thomas Mann, another autodidact, would agree with her as well. Academia (you would think) would be a magical place where people really cared about these topics, that few people in general care about, but instead it is where interest goes to die.
There's a great deal more here that I could have quoted, it's interesting to see an author respond to what is said about her writing by "professional" critics. What does please me is who Tisdale finds herself grouped with in these anthologies, Thurber and White and the other writers she mentions here. That would be nice.
"Twitchy"
What a great essay title. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with Tisdale's categorization as a memorist... even though I think she's the one who suggested it. Her subject is life and she starts with herself, as we all do. Since we keep coming back to subjectivity, how nothing can really be known objectively, what isn't memoir to some extent?
This essay is about, or at least starts with, a trip to the dentist to have her spectacularly bad teeth worked on. This requires a great deal of nitrous oxide which seems to be Tisdale's drug of choice.
My teeth are as good as Tisdale's are bad, and yet a moment of wild abandon with a nutty biscotti at a delightful garden party last Sunday left me without the sole -- massive -- filling in my mouth. In fear the tooth would collapse if I forgot and put pressure on it, I rushed to the dentist the next day and had it refilled. Over $400 for those of you keeping score at home.
So I just this week spent time in a dentist's chair-of-discomfort. I wasn't offered nitrous. My iPod is on it's last legs so that's not an option. So I just had to lie back and be thankful this only happens about once a decade.
I was given nitrous once when three wisdom teeth were to be extracted without any other general anesthesia. I don't recall it doing anything. (And I don't recommend having your wisdom teeth pulled like that.) But what Tisdale's nitrous experience does remind me of is the intravenous anesthesia I got when they extracted the rogue wisdom tooth that somehow traveled sideways into the next tooth, leaving the cavity my massive filling is a reminder of. I was conscious but unconcerned with what was happening in my mouth. My thought processes didn't seem (to me) to be affected -- compared, for example, to drinking a bottle of wine -- and there was no hang-over or aftereffect when the procedure was over. I was told I was going to get a Valium IV, and I think I took a Valium before, but at the last minute there was a change of plan which I never quite understood, so I don't really know what they gave me, except that it wasn't what my friends had gotten that knocked them out, left them groggy, and finally resulted in vomiting later on.
Tisdale goes on to explain her phobia in terms of scary childhood dental work from her (step)grandfather. But what she is averse to is what I dislike as well, the smell and sounds, the surprising pressures, and, for me, the discomfort of simply holding my jaw wide open for so long (that was the worst part of the three wisdom tooth extraction.) If I had access to Valium, and knew I was getting my work done ahead of time, I would have dosed myself up the same way Tisdale uses nitrous. By the time I need to get this filling replaced, I will have forgotten all this again.
She describes an annoying friend who goes to the dentist eager to learn if his flossing has paid off. I'm so much worse than this. Not only do I floss but I use these special little brushes between my teeth. My goal in life is to have the hygienist say, "There's nothing here for me to do" and run off sobbing. And I'm getting closer and closer each year. And yet I react to hearing the words "root canal" about the same way she does.
"The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies"
Finally! This was my introduction to Sallie Tisdale and it is so unlike everything else I've read by her. For one thing it's as much about Buddhism as it is about flies. It's the only place where she really gets philosophical. And it's like a concise version of Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it comes to the amorality of nature.
What I noticed this reading is something that Dostoevsky would have loved. Near the end she writes at length about the role flies and their progeny play in decomposing bodies. Then, talking about the Buddha, she writes this,
p311 ...What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha's death, and came -- flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies? What lucky maggots were born in his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still mourned? The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into the ground.
I'm thinking about the shocking (to the monks) decomposition of Father Zossima shortly after his death. Of course, I'm not sure this works with what Dostoevsky intended this to mean. But it would seem that Zossima would have enjoyed the interpretation.
Ugly
Yesterday I was looking at some photos taken looking down from the top of Salesforce Tower. This got me thinking about when architects decided that the tops and bottoms of skyscrapers didn't matter? (Or, if we think of the architects as thinking like toddlers, that we can't see the tops, at least.)In one shot, there was a great view of the Shell Building and several other handsome structures from the École des Beaux-Arts period of architect education. These structures still appear as perfect sculptural constructions, as neatly designed at the top as where they meet the sidewalk. By contrast, many of the glass, curtain-wall monoliths from the 1960 and 1970s (and beyond) have unsightly mechanical tumors on their flat roofs while their bases seem completely arbitrary. If it weren't for the larger height of the street level floors, you would think that the entire tower was simply extruded out of the ground like a plant shoot with an undifferentiated stem. The few postmodernist structures here do a bit better at the top, but recently they seem to have gone back to pretending no one can see up there. I'll give César Pelli credit for giving Salesforce Tower a better top, but then it's intended to be a focus and focal point for the whole city.
The Shell Building is the petite tower in the left foreground between two flat-topped towers. There are more, old buildings from the early 20th century above and to the left between Shell and the dark mass of the BofA Tower. The other standout tower is the Russ Building. Sadly, the building that houses my gym is just out of the frame to the left of the Russ. The round tower middle right, is Phillip Johnson's 101 California. The dark, part flatiron, part round little tower just this side of 101 California has residential on top, but I don't know it's name. The former First Interstate Bank building is dead center, partly in front of the TransAmerica. The First Interstate building includes a hotel on top and was built in the middle of the block with connection to the streets on three sides, but with the other, older, buildings in that block left in place. It's my favorite large scale development in the city because it integrated itself so subtlety into the neighborhood.
Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building does have a blunt and unsightly top but no tumors sticking up above. The way it meets the ground is a classic example of being too playful with steel and the weightless effect it can give. Like Wright and the Guggenheim, it would appear that van der Rohe also had no sense for urban life.
About the same can be said for SOM's Lever House, especially at the top. The base is better if only because it fills it's site. It's still more a celebration of steel and glass then it is something that belongs in a city.
It would seem that architects started with those examples and then simplified and made the buildings cheaper. Even the BofA tower here, which I think is an unusually handsome tall building, has protruding mechanicals rising from the top and a Seagramesque retreat from the street. I suspect one of the reasons the TransAmerica Pyramid has become so famous is that it is almost Postmodern in the way it avoids both the top and base problems, at least visually. The base is still a sterile zone in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. I give it a pass as an instance of architectural sculpture, rather like the Burj Khalifa.
Painting a wall
I've been thinking about re-painting a wall in my living room for about six months and it's finally warm enough to have my windows open for a couple days. This evening I moved everything out of the way -- not a simple task in such a small apartment. It went about 90% the way I anticipated, which is surprisingly good. I had forgotten that I had velcroed my mirror to the wall, which makes that part of the job much easier than I was anticipating. On the other hand, I underestimated how much space my over-a-hundred-year-old desk and bookcase would take when I pulled it out. So I didn't move it as far as I planned. (I had already moved a chair out of the way to make room for the desk, and moving it back is impossible, so the chair clogs up my kitchen unnecessarily. Still, all in all it went well.
Tomorrow I will prep and prime. Tuesday I will paint and then move everything back. I've already added on a side project of putting something lighter in color at the back of the old shelves which I use as a display space. That should make my featured artifacts more visible. Maybe. We'll see.
