Night Walks

Since I was a teenager I've enjoyed walking around at night. Most nights while vacationing on the Gulf of Thailand, I'd walk up and down the beach and, while visiting other cities, I loved walking around the night bazaars and streets to see what was happening. I kept this up when I moved to the States for college, but I was disappointed to find that not much happens in Seattle outside, after dark.

Charles Dickens was a big walker, and a big night walker, and started out a piece on the subject this way:

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed, but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

I think he was on to something. All of last year, when I was working on my project on Dickens, Darwin, and Nietzsche, I suspected that I would have breezed through it if I'd written all through the night, rather than trying to write during the day. I never had the guts to do it.

architecture

…but another aspect (or spectre) of architecture is how sedimentary it is, either the different buildings in a neighborhood or city, or the difference in the building (renovations, I guess). And what is sedimentary? Differences of materials used for construction, the money and means available to whoever was bankrolling the project, restrictions that speak to different building codes at different times, the technologies first included or added on afterwards (some more successfully than others). And then there’s the history that gets wrapped up in a building through fire, earthquakes, vehicular accidents, etc.

Returning to Thailand after the economic crash in 1997, one of the first things I noticed was how many buildings were left half-built after the funding disappeared. Most of them are still unfinished.

And, of course, while we often know who rents or even owns a building, the designers and, especially, the builders disappear.

Many other professions depend on form, materials, and aesthetics working together, but a lot more depends on the structural integrity of, say, a 6-story apartment complex, or a half-mile suspension bridge than on the structural integrity of a 12-string guitar.

a little vision of hell

The man's girlfriend pretends to be pregnant so that he'll marry her. They come to hate each other. They raise a pig and when the butcher is late, slaughter it themselves. After that she starts throwing his books around the house

'Leave my books alone!' he said. 'You might have thrown them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!' In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave off.

Jude the Obscure is off to a great start.

a partial list of books I own but haven't read

Pickwick Papers - Dickens
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
The Persian Expedition - Xenophon
The Ticklish Subject - Zizek
The Plague of Fantasies - Zizek
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Hardy
The Long Valley - Steinbeck
The Storm - Daniel Defoe
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Lost Illusions - Balzac
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
Mardi - Herman Melville
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
The Three Musketeers - Dumas
The Bostonians - Henry James
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Spring Currents - Turgenev
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Secret Agent - Conrad
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Annals of Imperial Rome - Tacitus
Barchester Towers - Trollope
Moll Flanders - Defoe
A Pair of Blue Eyes - Hardy
The Nature of the Universe - Lucretius
Felix Holt - George Eliot
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
Vanity Fair - Thackeray

And the list goes on.

One of my teachers in high school told me that he really didn't start reading until after college. While I'm still reading a lot, I don't think many of my friends do. Some of them have embraced the book totally as an aesthetic object, used mostly for design purposes in a room. A full shelf looks good. A full shelf of good books in good condition, even if you've never read the books to know they're good, looks great.

The real question is how the hell I got so many Thomas Hardy books when I didn't even really like the one book of his I did read, the Mayor of Casterbridge. Jude the Obscure I picked up in Vancouver, CA while on a trip with friends. Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess I bought because I thought I'd have to read them in Oxford. a Pair of Blue Eyes I grabbed off a free table in a hospital...

dusty

Many things can, and often do, disturb my reading: bad lighting, an uncomfortable seat, too much talking or not enough, the wrong type of music. Then there are problems having to do with the book itself. The story's boring or the style is bloated, the book's spine doesn't bend right, the font is hard to read or the pages are too thin and I can pick up the writing on the other side of the page (Norton anthologies.) I become confused and agitated, have trouble concentrating. But the most crippling obstruction for me is dust.

At first everything seems normal and then my nose begins to run. I wipe my nose on my hand (which is now dusty from holding the book), my nose runs even more, and my face starts to itch. Most of the time the books I read are clean enough that this is not much of a problem--I'm careful now about smelling the used books that I buy to check how dusty they are even if they otherwise are undamaged.

I can remember a few books that were dusty enough to make me miserable while reading, most recently Stendhal's Scarlet and Black, which always left me itchy and snotty. It happened most distinctly while reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. Even now, when I ask myself whether I liked the novel or not, I think, "Well, it was so dusty." I have almost no recollection of what happened in Portrait of a Lady, and had almost no recollection immediately after finishing it, and I blame this in large part on the dust.

Several years ago I lived for a summer behind a used bookstore and, several times, went through their dumpsters at night. After sitting in the sun for a summer day, the dumpsters were quite warm, and warmer still since I would close the lid back down once I was inside. One of the books I found in the dumpster was Saturday by Ian McEwan and, sure enough, when I read it my nose always ran.

France

I would never have made it in a 19th century French novel. From Stendhal's Scarlet and Black.

He flew up the ladder, he tapped at the shutter; a second or two later Mathilde heard him; she tried to open the shutter, but the ladder was in the way. Julien clung to the iron hook placed there to keep the window open, and, at the risk of coming hurtling down time and time again, gave the ladder a violent shake and shifted it a little. Mathilde was able to open the shutter.

He flung himself into the room more dead than alive.

'So its you, my dear!' she said, rushing into his arms.

Painting, I was never comfortable enough on the ladders to perform this maneuver. I would have either had to climb down and reposition the ladder from the ground (not romantic), or I would have tried to move the ladder while on it and fallen to my death (also not romantic). Luckily, my friend who is moving to France has more talent up on the ladder.

sinners

Slavoj Zizek writes this in the Sublime Object of Ideology"Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it 'projects' this internal negativity into the figure of the 'Jew.'" He was writing about anti-Semitism, but the same logic applies to the figure of the radical Muslim, the illegal immigrant, etc...

And in the church? Perhaps what happens there isn't so much a negative type in response to an internal problem or blockage, but the creation of a positive type whose non-existence or absence can always be posited as an explanation for why things are falling apart. Zizek talks about how, in anti-Semitism, perceived counter-evidence is absorbed as evidence for anti-Semitism: "The fact that this Jew doesn't seem xyz just demonstrates how dangerous they actually are." And sin works similarly in the church: "...this shows just how deceptive sin is..."