[gallery] architecturevii:
Church of the Saint Apostles: Peter and Paul in Siedliska, Poland. Pretty big, as for village. © Igor Snopek
Wodwo Vergil: Eclogue 4
This thing of ours.
You ever look at the world, like,
really look at it?
It’s a great dome, some real
supernatural architecture, roof so smooth
and high
you can’t even touch it in a jet, not even
those invisible ones the Air Force fly
made of black ceramic
or some shit like that, going faster than music
faster than light can catch up with
not even then. And the air is thin up there,
so, and, that’s why I keep coughing, capisce?
Cold like frost lining the inside of the lungs.
And from so high, looking down
the sea is texture like an untuned TV channel
bright and gray and white and impossibly far deep.
This bambino, though:
he’ll step over this whole vault, like
stepping over the corpse of a rival,
bleeding on the sidewalk, and you got somewhere you need to be.
This whole dome and everything inside it
will kiss his ass
and sing his fucken praises. Believe me.
—
Ladies and gentlemen, Adam Roberts.
My correspondent felt that my argument betrayed a failure to understand his generation. ‘I’m a regular social media and in-class arguer against people who are being racist, queer-phobic, etc,’ O’Donnell wrote. 'I like explaining why it’s bad and trying to change their minds. But it’s exhausting. Sometimes I want to go home and not have to deal with that. When asking for a home, they’re not asking that their every whim be catered to, but that they have one place they don’t have to constantly be on guard. One where they can take a break from the exhausting work of speaking out for what you believe in. Obviously, Yale students and others have overreached, but you should acknowledge the genuine concerns behind what these students are saying.’
[gallery] biblipeacay:
”The Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero’s 1927 monograph Depero Futurista, also known as The Bolted Book, because it is famously bound by two industrial aluminum bolts, is acknowledged as the first modern-day artist’s book. Filled with typographic experimentation and serving as a showcase for Depero’s art in a variety of media, it is universally recognized as a tour de force of avant-garde book-making.THE BOLTED BOOKDesigners & Books, in collaboration with the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, and the Mart, Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy (which houses Depero’s archives), will launch a Kickstarter on October 18 to publish a new facsimile edition of this rare and groundbreaking book.” [source] [pdf press release]
Convergence
My friend Wesley Hill recently posted a wonderfully concise and elegant outline of what we might call first steps in theological anthropology. I’m wondering if for those of us living in the Anthropocene — so obsessed with everything we humans do and are, for ill and for good — theological anthropology might have to be first theology, the place from which we need to begin, for rhetorical if not principial reasons. Something like that seems to be the driving impulse behind Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self, a first volume of a systematic theology that is an “essay on the Trinity” but that begins by trying to situate and make sense of human sexual desire.
There are dangers in this way of going about things. (Theology is always dangerous, of course.) A theology that begins with us may never really achieve escape velocity, may remain within the gravitational pull of the merely human. Certainly that’s a risk. So then we might turn to the also ongoing systematic theology of Katherine Sonderegger, who begins with the doctrine of God — with particular emphasis on the oneness of God, before getting to Trinitarian considerations.
One way to be theologically coherent and sensible at this moment is to cultivate this binocular vision: for example, to read Coakley, but read her towards Sonderegger; to read Sonderegger, but read her towards Coakley. A doubled reading, starting perhaps necessarily with our human self-understanding, but then moving quickly to occupy the other pole of theological awareness, with the God who is One, not even, yet, the God of Israel, but the God who constitutes and manifests Being, Consciousness, Bliss. And then we read and think and pray our way towards the convergence of the paths, which is Jesus Christ. To read in this doubled way is one aspect of the imitation of Christ. After all, in Augustine’s words, “As God he is our goal; as man he is our way.”
Nostalgia
Whenever you suggest that history is a matter of losses as well as gains, whenever you call attention to what we’ve lost along the way, whether it’s something we deliberately set aside or something we just forgot to pack, a great chorus starts shouting “Nostalgia!” You may not even want to have packed it; you may think that we chose as well as we could have in the circumstances; but you need only hint that something of value, even of some tiny tiny value, that we once held we hold no longer, and it starts: “always the loud angry crowd, / Very angry and very loud,” crying: “Nostalgia!”
It’s a bullying cry, but they’re not bullying you, at least not primarily. They’re bullying that little voice within them that wonders whether there might be more to the future than “everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” Nothing could be more essential than to silence that quiet, that ever-so-gently skeptical voice.
[gallery] arquigraph:
Takefumi Aida
’ It’s impossible to make architecture move, although i’d like to’ T. Aida
Aida started with ‘silence’ in earlier seventies, toying with ‘playfulness’ metaphor for a series of residential projects structured from images of child’s building blocks. But
from mid-eighties onwards, he purposes a system of architectural ordering _ fluctuation_ applying this on its metaphorical usage more than in its physics terms.
Moving from the theory of fluctuation to fluctuating architecture Aida manages the perception of movement created by people’s passage through his work with a carefully controled sequence of unfolding views that the visitors generate as they move.
He has applied this concept of (yuragi) ‘fluctuation’ to civic spaces, mixed-used architectures and to one of Tokyo’s modern sacred sites, theTokyo Memorial Park as you can see on images above.
Leaving the EU is no small affair. It probably will have enormous effects on the UK, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. But just what these effects will be is unclear. To have even a rudimentary sense of the pros and cons of Brexit, a person would need to possess tremendous social scientific knowledge. One would need to know about the economics and sociology of trade and immigration, the politics of centralized regulation, and the history of nationalist movements. But there is no reason to think even a tenth of the UK’s population has a basic grasp of the social science needed to evaluate Brexit.
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How does one become a member of the epistocracy? Can you just vote yourself in?
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How often must you be wrong before you get booted out of the epistocracy?
3) Granted that average people don’t know much, do epistocrats know significantly more? Enough more that they should be trusted with rule? If you think so, what’s your evidence?
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bibliotheca-sanctus: The Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I visited this library a couple of years ago when I was giving a talk at Vassar — it’s really an exceptionally lovely building.
