Yesterday my wife had her 20-week ultrasound scan. Our second child is due in mid-January. Everything seems fine. An estimated weight of 353g. And I know what it's going to be, but I'm not allowed to tell, see.
So, it was great fun to see Kid No. 1 looking at Kid No. 2 on bebevision, as we called it. Look! It's your little _______! There's a handie! There's a nose! Listen...there's a heartbeat!
Now, about names...
Actually, I've been reading a couple of books alongside Timeless: first, a (re-)reading of Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, for historical interest, rather than religious reasons.
Second, I am reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but I am reading it in Portuguese - Uma Vida Interrompida. My wife was reading it in
English at the same time (she started just after I did, but she couldn't put it down, so she passed me on the second day). Anyway, I am about 50 pages into that, about half-way home in Pagels.
And now I am starting Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which is the second volume in the series, but pretty much must be read integrally with The Timeless Way of Building. At slightly more than 1100 pages of practical information, this one could take a while (heck, it could take a lifetime) to choke down.
Last night I put the finishing touches on Christoper Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building. This is a long "sort-of manifesto" (my quotes) of Alexander's philosophy of architecture. Or better, of building. Alexander argues that anyone can build, and that the tools we need to understand the built environment are already there, and always have been. And that if we would look to them - to the "patterns" that define our surroundings, we can learn from them and incorporate them into our own structures, and that this is, in fact, the only way to build buildings, neighbourhoods, towns and regions that "live".
The essence of these patterns is "the quality without a name." The quality without a name is really a lot of qualities, rolled up into one, none of which are dominant. You play the game of looking for the name of the quality without one but it's pointless - Alexander's point here may be that we just do not have the vocabulary we need to talk coherently about what makes the built landscape live because we have not learned how to look at it.
I can't remember exactly what thread I was following that took me to his works. They are, perhaps, a bit dated. The ideas themselves are, indeed, "timeless". And he rejects the charge that he longs for an idyllic past, which might be easy to level if he hadn't gone out of his way to refute it, and then to say that what he does want is an egoless, "innocent" approach to building - maybe he means naive; vernacular. That the hand of the expert builder, improperly introduced, can build no "living" thing.
I felt at times: what is this? The Zen of Building? The Tao of Building? It does seem this way. And from what I've read around, he has many critics, and maybe even himself he rejects the original premise as impossible to quantify.
Alexander seems to have moved even beyond The Timeless Way to a more comprehensive, exhaustive explanation of the "quality" - The Nature of Order. I look forward to the release of these books, pricey though they are. It occurs to me that as a summary of the life work of an observant genius; you look at the price tag and you say, hmmm, pretty reasonable for what you get.
In the mean time, I aim to press on with the Alexander philosophy. I think that for a layman like me, they teach a lot about how to approach the search for a home that echoes and amplifies the life taking place around it - both outside and within.
Following my father's unusual confession that a film had hit him close to home, I felt inspired to watch the Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt, so we rented it and watched it over the weekend. While the Nebraska backdrop was familiar, I do not see a lot of similarities between the life of Schmidt and my father (of course, he may feel differently).
Strange story. I found the narrative device of a confessional correspondence with a small Tanzanian boy to be, well, weird. And maybe we weren't close enough to Schmidt, but he didn't strike me as the kind of guy who really wanted to spend his golden years in a Winnebago (the dialogue between Schmidt and his daughter on this subject is pretty funny). But it does convey the loneliness of a man who is watching the clock on his own life, armed with expert knowledge of just how long statistics give him
I've been reading Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building since it arrived from Amazon on the 1st of August. It was in the same order, and shipped on the same day, as Alexander's A Pattern Language. But while Timeless arrived from the Kentucky warehouse in just 9 days, it took Pattern 28 days, posted from Nevada. That was, unfortunately, just one day longer than my patience about such things lasted and I fired off an e-mail to Amazon from their "Where's My Stuff" section. Oh well. Mystery
solved.
My wife went to our local Blockbuster and found their weekend special - four films, four days. Since her primary purpose was to find something for the little one (Dumbo), we wound up with three more films, all new to me (a benefit of being behind the times).
First up was The Pianist, the Polanski holocaust film, a coincidence since I had just been reading Norman Geras' comments (warning: spoilers) on it earlier in the week, via a link at the relatively new but vale pena weblog, Crooked Timber.
Second was The Shipping News. I didn't really enjoy the film, but I think for the same reasons that I didn't really enjoy the book. I guess I found the Quoyle character too hard to empathise with after the pathetic start. The film did have the advantage of its beautiful setting in Newfoundland.
And third, City of God, or Cidade de Deus, here in Brazil. We had rented this once before, but I had to pass - it's a long film. We were a bit nervous in watching this film, having committed to a year in Rio just as the latest wave of gang violence had kicked off in earnest.
And it is a no-holds-barred, mercilessly violent film, taken from the early days of the City of God neighbourhood, built, as the film implies, to get the poor out of sight and mind. As the favela grows up and up, the street thugs become more and more powerful (and nihilistic) as they move into cocaine trafficking.
To me, the take-away message is how hard it can be for one man, motivated, to get the simple leg up he needs to make an honest start in life; how easy it seems to be weighed down by the incomprehensible misery of his environment.
I took the family up to Minas Gerais state this weekend, principally to visit the historic city of Ouro Preto, which has been on my agenda since before we came out to Brazil. We contemplated driving up - it's only about 400km from Rio - but a friend had driven it the weekend before and said it took about 7 hours, so we decided to fly.
First, kudos to Gol airlines. Low cost, close in airports, and better service than Europe's Easyjet", although clearly modeled on them.
Ouro Preto is the former capital of Minas state, and it is famous for its colonial architecture, particularly its churches. It's a mining town, and in its day was famous for the richness of its gold ore [Ouro Preto means 'black gold', which to me naturally brings back to a story 'bout a man named Jed, but evidently reflects the fact that the gold is mixed with palladium]. Our driver told us that, even today, when they are doing street works, they sometimes post guards to make sure that no one takes away the dirt from under the town, which cannot be mined any longer. This may just be an urban myth.
Old Ouro Preto is under a preservation order that makes the centre of town a very pleasant place to walk around (although its hills and cobbles make it something of a challenge for those of us pushing kidlets in a pushchair).
If I have one regret (and word of warning for future visitors), it's that nearly the whole place closes on Monday. We allowed ourselves two days - Sunday and Monday - to see it, and so had to be content with visiting only two of the famous churches (Sao Francisco de Assis and Nossa Sra de Pilar) and two museums - one of oratorios, and one of mining and industry. But it must be said that the Sunday lunch was a factor in our sightseeing - afterward, you
just don't want to move! We were happy enough to spend a rainy Monday browsing through the shops and taking a coffee and conhaque at the exceptionally cozy Cafe Geraes.
We also spent an enjoyable day in Belo Horizonte. Founded in the late 1890s, it is about as opposite to Ouro Preto as you can get, and still, in a way, there is a continuity, since it was founded as the successor capital to Ouro Preto. It's a comfortable, planned city with lots of parkland - we spent hours roaming the streets. We also made room for another gut-busting mineira lunch, this time at the Dona Lucinha restaurant in Belo.
We closed out the day with a pizza and a drink with one of my favourite bloggers, Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons, and his wife Mercia. Randy is the first blogger I've met IRL, and it was a particular pleasure to get some of his back-story and impressions on Brazil. I was very happy we could time our visit to coincide with their trip to Belo.
A final remark about our stop (on the way to the airport) at the sadly decaying church of Sao Francisco de Assis at Pampulha in Belo. The church, only about 55 years old, is considered a masterwork of Modernism, with architecture by Oscar Niemeyer, landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx and paintings by Candido Portinari, possibly the three most influential Brazilian artists of the 20th century. The inside of the church is pristine, but the outside is suffering from exposure, as this large photo shows quite well.
Via Kottke's Remaindered Links, a reference to a feature in the New York Times Travel section about how the film Amelie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain) has brought tourist interest to the Montmartre section of Paris. Longer-term readers will remember that this is one of my favourite films.
There's also a cute slideshow of Amelie's Montmartre (warning: I have picked away the Java pop-up, but this can still deliver a shocking soundtrack, so you might want to mute your speakers).
[update: self-link at "remember" broken, so removed]
This post at Daniel Davies' D-squared Digest started a wonderfully eclectic discussion in the comments section on communitarianism, masturbation and Scrabble scoring. I've edited out most of it to focus on the exchange that really tickled me:
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
One such is Amitai Etzioni who (as well as having a name which looks like the Scrabble hand from hell) is a political philosopher who achieved some minor fame a couple of years ago when he got a namecheck from Tony Blair on Desert Island Discs.
sym @ 11:43AM
Hey, my brother is named Amitai. And 'Daniel Davies' is a pretty mediocre Scrabble hand too.
Jeremy Leader @ 8:20PM
I don't know about Scrabble, but if you'd just have the decency to provide us a middle initial of "S", we could spell "I saved N ladies".
dsquared @ 7:32AM
Nah, both "Daniel" and "Davies" have a decent mix of vowels and consonants and you can make a fair few words with them. "Amitai Etzioni" is practically all vowels, with only two useful consonants, a fairly useless M and that bloody great unusable Z hanging around in the middle.
BTW, if anyone's playing a version of Scrabble that involves proper names, I pass on the information that the new CEO of Bank Hapaolim in Israel has the glorious name of Zvi Ziv.
Jeremy Osner @ 4:05PM
But alas, only one "Z" in the Scrabble deck.
dsquared @ 7:13AM
That's the English scrabble deck. The Polish scrabble deck has 12 z's and Z scores 1 point (true). Before the Scrabble company made a special Polish set, Scrabble used to be known in Poland as "The game of thinking up words without a Z in them".
No wonder Davies loves his comments section:
I started reading my own archives, and was impressed by two things. First, how good my comments section is (no really, I love you guys, sob) [...]
Something I came across via Robot Wisdom today bore a striking resonance with something I was reading in The Timeless Way of Building only this morning.
Christopher Alexander writes of the function of windows. How the shape, structure or "patterns" of a living window differ from those of one that is not alive. He writes:
For instance, a WINDOW PLACE is stable, and alive, only if many other patterns which go with it, and are needed to support it, are alive themselves: for instance, LOW WINDOWSILL, to solve the problem of the view and the relation to the ground; CASEMENT WINDOW to solve the problem of the way the air comes in, to allow people to lean out and breathe the outside air; SMALL PANES to let the window generate a strong connection between the inside and the outside.
If these smaller patterns, which resolve smaller systems of forces in the window place, are missing from the window place itself, then the pattern doesn't work. Imagine for instance a so-called window place, with high windowsills, fixed windows, and huge sheets of plate glass. There are so many subsidiary forces, still in conflict, that the window place still cannot work, because it fails to resolve the special system of forces it is supposed to solve. [...]
Jorn posted a link a propos the recent heat wave in the UK. A scientist at Imperial College London comments:
"Many of us have forgotten how to correctly use the sash windows so carefully installed by the Edwardians and Victorians to maximise airflow."
Read the rest of the article for a reminder. It's telling how we can lose hold of good technology in our pursuit of "better" technology.
I finished reading the Paul Elie book last night. Overall, an enjoyable read, although I got the sense that the end was a bit rushed. I guess with many of his main characters dead the technique of interchange between them disappeared and he was more intent on completing the game of musical chairs - one after the other being removed from the circle. He did a fine job at the end of summarising, and interpreting, what the life of each - Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy - had meant as a pilgrimage, and how they had interacted with the others (directly or not) to compose a moment that neither could be repeated nor would have been so meaningful if not for the others. Worth the effort.
And now I have a problem. What to read next. I took four books to bed last night: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sigrid Undset's The Garland (Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1), Nicholas Howe's Across an Inland Sea and the letters of Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller (1935-1980). Guess which I chose: none of them.
Yesterday Amazon brought me some more new books - this time (finally) some titles from Christopher Alexander. I received A Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment yesterday. I am still waiting for A Pattern Language, but since Timeless is first in the "series", I have chosen to read it first. I made it through the first 40 pages at lunch today.
I do not know much about Alexander - not more, anyway, than what is found on the web. He is well-regarded not only in architectural circles, but also in the field of computer programming, where A Pattern Language is regarded to have been a big influence on OOP (object-oriented programming). Since that subject interests me, and I am interested in some of his ideas about building, I have decided to invest (and invest it is) in his books. I have bought these three now, and if they make sense to me, I will step up to buy his next round of books, The Nature of Order, which look to be the life's work of a regarded multidisciplinary genius, currently struggling their way through the publishing process.