tomeri – Words

Anne Lamott Essay: Things to Ponder

14 March 2023

I thought this essay by Anne Lamott that appear today was quite nice. It gave me a couple of ‘craft of writing things’ to ponder. One was simply the structure of the essay: After a prelude to set the scene, and introduce the main theme of aging, the essay took place during a walk which repeated the same course: every now and then they would start a new lap. The created a nice rhythm for the essay, and of course the need to do laps (rather than a longer course that involved hill climbing, and her body’s increasing complaints as the walk went on, resonated nicely with the theme of aging. The essay also had some nice phrases for capturing nature:

“the illuminated green scrim of trees ahead and far away”
“The trees just stand around, as is their wont. The drizzle plays them. “

I was out today in the early morning walking with a close friend of 64 years named Shelley Adams. Despite some huge losses over time, she is always overtly positive. I don’t normally like this in a person. I make a rare exception for her. We hike several times a week beside our local creek, now a twisting, flowing stream that rushes over rocks, mint and twigs.

Rainer Maria Rilke was only partially right when he wrote that “life holds you in its hands and will not let you fall,” because both Shelley and I, like all older people, have been dropped. But life also at some point pulls you back to your feet. What do you do in between, during times of loss or general dread? My friend Tom Weston, a Jesuit priest, always reminds me, “We do what’s possible.” I hate that.

Okay, fine: What is possible? The practical, simple and kind. We work, love and help others as best we can, gawk at nature, rest. Is that it? Pretty much.

This is a little disappointing, but age teaches us that kind, simple and practical are enough, even in the face of the worst things we’ve lived through: suicides, mental illness, odious leaders, sudden death. My friend Don was called one day by an aging and suicidal friend. His friend asked, “What is the point of it all?” After a moment, Don replied gently, “Mornings are nice.” And, wildly, it was enough. His friend improved.

I cannot hike the uphill trails here anymore because of my hip, so we do what’s possible: take four 10-minute laps back and forth along the creek. Everything that is true about aging appears to me on these walks.

On our first lap, Shelley and I catch up. We’ve always been talkers, readers, movie lovers. What was true about us at 6 years old is true about us now. We gossip, laugh a lot, quibble. We looked so similar as small kids, with green eyes and white-blonde hair. We still do. We’re built about the same. I’m a bit taller and smaller-boned, but otherwise we could be sisters. And like sisters, we can annoy each other, and weaponize silence. Families, sigh.

I grew up at her house. Her mother was my other mother, who saw how amazing I was on the inside, not just how much better I could be doing. Shelley and I went through childhood and puberty together, played competitive tennis for years as partners and then didn’t see each other much for 40 years. We raised kids, buried parents; sad, scary things have happened to us both, as they have to everyone by a certain age. Now, we’re slower, less busy, a bit goofy.

For instance, this morning, while searching for the word “coaster,” the closest I could come up with was “coffee pad.” She laughs so hard when I say this, she has to cross her legs, and then almost loses her balance.

By the second lap, our bodies have loosened up, and we talk a bit less and look around a lot more, and listen. The creek is the place where the water and the land are in constant conversation. My vision is often blurred by dry eye, but there is a grace to myopia: I’m less fixated.

We walked this morning in raincoats because it was drizzling off and on, even as the sun shone through faintly. In my family, we always announced during a sun shower that it must be a monkey’s birthday somewhere. In Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” a mother tells her child, “The sun is shining through the rain. This is the time when foxes have their weddings.

Like most old friends, we can bobble along without talking for stretches. I listen for the soft orchestral music of the woods on either side of the path. After scanning the illuminated green scrim of trees ahead and far away, I pull closer in on individual trees, all arms and elbows and long legs. The trees just stand around, as is their wont. The drizzle plays them. What instruments are they? Mostly woodwinds, maybe oboes, some flutier, and then dark, dark trees, like kettle drums, like patches of life.

Because we go back so far, Shelley and I know each other’s souls and shadows, and each other’s major screw-ups, and there is comfort in this. Also, we have made mistakes with each other that have felt like betrayals. This happens in families. We have gotten so mad that we have ditched each other on the trail and shouted to each other’s back, “Don’t you dare walk away from me.” Actually, that was only me. We take breaks, make up.

By the third lap, my hip has begun coughing quietly to get my attention. It would like to go home now. My vision is even more blurry because of the drizzle and thin light, added to the dry eyes. This is part of what it means for me to be alive still, the blinky vision. Paradoxically, I see more. Now, instead of sharp focus, there’s an appreciation of shifts in light that reveal the mutability of the world. The light sometimes changes minute by minute, and with it we perceive changes in the energy around us, above us, inside us. It moves our attention outside our squinty, judgy little selves.

We point out dark-eyed Oregon juncos to each other and finches, the males with their glorious red headdresses and chests, the females in their faded brown bathrobes. We talk about spiritual things and people we hate — as she puts it, “people we’re allergic to, bless their hearts.’” We talk about our scattered minds: This morning, I was struggling to read some tiny print in a book, and, without thinking, I touched the printed page to pinch it out and make it bigger. Eeesh, I thought: Scary! But I was gentle with myself about it.

My hip has really begun to ache by the final lap. We talk and limp along. Easily half of the people in our conversations have passed on, all four parents, both of her younger siblings, dearest friends. We know that death won’t be so hard. We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed.

Age is giving me the two best gifts: softness and illumination. It would have been nice if whoever is in charge of such things doled them out in our younger years, but that’s not how it works. Age ferries them across the water, and they will bring us through whatever comes.–Anne Lamont, 2024

Making Espresso [stub]

Written as part of a story, originally, I am thinking this could make a nice armature for an essay.

Karda walked across the living room, past the island into the kitchen. She turned on the machine to warm up, and busied herself – yes, here are the beans, I hope they’re not too old, and here are the cups. She poked among them, looking for birds, and pulled two out. She dumped the beans into the grinder that, according to Theodore, cost as much as the espresso machine. She hit the button, and the whir of the grinder took her back in time to so many mornings where it signaled that Theodore was up and about. She slid the tray out of the grinder and tapped the coffee into the portafilter. She gently tamped it down. She could hear Theodore in her memory: “Don’t use too much pressure when you tamp – you need to get the grind right. Soft is the way to go; brute force doesn’t get good results.”

A soft rising whistle – Theodore said it was a leak in the boiler – alerted her that the machine was almost up to temperature. She twisted in the portafilter, watched for the heating light to go out, and flipped the switch. The pump throbbed, groaning as it forced the water through the puck of grounds, pouring out twin brown streams of espresso into two demitasses. She shut off the pump, and was pleased to see the velvety brown foam – Theodore called it crema – floating atop the espresso, a sign that it was well-brewed. With a small feeling of victory, she carried them back to living room and set a cup in front of Dexter. “Thank you, thank you.” He held it up, eyes closed, inhaling. “Yes, perfect.” He held the cup higher, and opened his eyes. “Ah, the thrush cup. Look at him there. Half hidden among the vines, with a berry in his mouth. You can almost see him move. And you’ve got the goldfinch cup. See, it’s hanging upside down, ready to pluck seeds out of the heart of a sunflower. We’d take espresso in the morning together, sometimes, out on the terrace, with birdsong in the background. Sometimes,” he leaned forwards confidentially, “it seemed like the birds on the cups were singing too.”

The Red Thread [stub]

April 2023

Thomas Erickson

The thread is red. It is more yarn-like than thread-like, a loosely twisted braid of fibers. The occasionally broken, almost-invisible fibers, protruding from the braid, are remarkably effective at thwarting my attempts to thread the needle. A tiny red globe of blood wells from my thumb, jewel-like in its intensity, slightly darker than the thread. No doubt this would have been easy for an accomplished seamstress, but I am not that. What I am is a little bit obsessive. I don’t really view it that way, but others might.

Finally I’ve gotten it.

The Topography of Daily Life [stub]

I think of my day to day life as moving across a landscape. Every week has a topography, which, while it may shift slowly – or occasionally abruptly – nevertheless gives me a sense of being somewhere. For many – those in 9-5 weekday jobs or in school – the weekend looms large, either as a place to slow down and take a breath, or as a place speed up and shake off the cobwebs of mundane weekday life. For me, Mondays are a landmark. I am post-school and post-job, and it is my weekly piano lesson that is significant. I work on the pieces I am trying to master, and as the week goes by I assess my progress relative to how much time I’ve left until I perform them. A sense of urgency may develop, if I am not making the kind of progress I feel I ought, and that changes the tenor of the weekend.

====

The topography of my week has become flatter. My planetary science course is over and so Tuesdays and Thursdays have lost their previous distinctiveness. Now the only event of note (so to speak) is my piano lesson every Monday. That leaves me feeling restless. Towards the end of the summer, the piano lessons will cease for the inter-term period, and I have the sense that I will be living in a sort of eternal present where the days blend into one another with little distinction. I do not find this a pleasant thought.

When I began to think about retiring, I realized I would lose a lot of structure as well as sources of stimulation that work and related professional activities provided. So I did things like start piano lessons, sign up for courses at the U, become involved in the geological society of Minnesota), and develop plans for an ongoing series of hiking trips. The pandemic has disrupted most of this, eliminating much and altering the rest in ways that dilute their value for me.

I’ve been pondering what it is that makes daily/weekly/monthly life satisfying. For me, I think I need a mixture of structure and stimulation, and the question is how to arrange life so that it has that. That is, if there is a continuum between the doldrums where the days blend seamlessly into one another and boredom is the dominant experience, and chaotic rapids where one is constantly dealing with the unexpected and barely managing to stay afloat, much less navigate, how does one adjust one’s location on the continuum. I certainly don’t want to permanently dwell on either end, but I do recognize that brief periods of doldrums can be nice if one is tired and needs to recharge, as can the exhilaration of rapids when one needs a change.

So how does one manage to create a life with the right blend of comfort and stimulation? This is something that, for me, work and/or school has always done a lot to contribute to. However, in their absence, I need to figure out how to construct this for myself. I think this is a challenge that more people are facing due to the pandemic.

I’ve developed a theory – perhaps one that applies only to myself – about how to arrange life so that it is satisfying. My theory is that three things are needed to have a satisfying life: a routine that provides a recurring daily structure, landmarks that help you keep track of where you are in the routine and perhaps provide a sense of progression, and unusual occasional or sporadic events – which for lack of a better word I will call ‘zings’ – that provide variety or surprise or distinctiveness, and that disrupt routines and alter one’s relationship to landmarks.

I find routine pleasant in that provides a sort of scaffolding for one’s day. And I personally like repeating things, at least if I enjoy them. I have favorite books, for example, that I read again and again, because I know I like them, and also that I will see new things in them, or experience them differently. Same thing for running and hiking – I like going back to places I know (not exclusively, but often), and of course the nice thing about the world is that it changes, so you’re always going to see new things as the season progresses. However, if there is nothing but routine, or repetition of familiar things, the days and experiences blur into one another.

Landmarks help me keep track of where I am in the week or the season. Right now I am living in a pretty ‘flat’ topography, except for the ‘peak’ of piano lesson. My piano lesson is significant in that I prepare for it, trying to polish (or sometimes just be able to stumble through) the pieces I am working on. If I do well enough, I graduate from old pieces and move on to new ones, and so that progression is nice. But the point is that I usually know where I am in the week, because I’m peripherally aware of how well various pieces are coming along and how far off the time is when I will play them for my teacher. Courses – at least if they include homework and tests – perform the same sort of role. As do hiking trips – in the sense that I both look forward to them with anticipation, and also (because of my age) need to work to make sure I am in shape for what I plan to do… of course the hiking trips are currently in abeyance.

Slow Email [Stub]

One of things I’ve been pondering for some time is how to conduct correspondence via email. By “correspondence” I mean not just a note and a reply, but a recurring exchange of multiple messages that span months or even years. It seems to me — although I am thinking far back into my personal history — that correspondence by hand-written letters was much easier to maintain over the long term than correspondence by email.

There is something about email that is unsuited to an extended, punctuated, reflective exchange. Perhaps it is that, when one receives an email, the tool one needs to respond is at hand, as is the motivation to reply (if, at least, the message was a welcome and interesting one), and so it is easy to respond immediately. In addition to the superposition of tool and motivation, the reply, once composed and sent, will take effectively no time to reach the recipient.

In the days of written missives things seemed easier. Someone would write a letter to me, mail it, and then days later it would arrive. I would read it, start thinking about how to reply, and in the meantime the letter would sit somewhere semi-obvious where it served as a low-key prompt to reply. Since editing was difficult, I imagine (but do not claim to remember) that the process of composition was more deliberate, and perhaps spaced out over time. There was not any impulse to wrap it up and get on to the next item, as I sometimes feel with email. And of course, over the entire span between X authoring a letter to me, and my authoring a reply, time has passed and milled more grist to be folded into the reply. Perhaps there is an impendence mismatch between the rapidity of email, and the more measured pace of life.

Now, in theory, it should be easy to adapt: don’t reply to the email right away. But then one has the danger of forgetting, which, for me, is exacerbated by the intangibility of email. Paper, letters if my recollection is right, would sit on my desk, or perhaps in a holder or box, where I would occasionally come across them (if only when a letter from another correspondent arrived and needed a place to sit). Their physicality acted as prompt, and just as important, reminded me a bit of who they were from. Letters from my parents did not look like letters from my girlfriend; nor did letters from overseas (now there’s an old-fashioned word!) did not look like those from closer to home.

But all email looks alike – and there is so much more of it. The physicality and distinctiveness of envelopes has dissolved into a gigantic table of single-fonted text. Your email – because I decided that I wanted to respond to it later – was left in my in-box, and although I am not one of those who has thousands of emails, I do have dozens that are either (1) unread, (2) skimmed but I believe I’d like to read more deeply, (3) have information I need to refer back to, (4) finished with but need to filed, and (5) etc. Since I am pretty diligent about keeping my queue manageable, I do in fact stumble across to-be-replied-to emails, but still it feels too haphazard to be a satisfactory solution.

I hope that one day someone will design a ‘slow email’ system. Its characteristics might include: The email takes time to get where it’s going, with a bit of randomness thrown in (thus eliminating the expectation of an instant reply). If the email is not deleted or archived, it should occasionally bubble up to the top of one’s queue, or find other ways to be stumbled across. One other idea – to address the problem of quantity of email – is that there should be the equivalent of “first class,” where there is a small charge, perhaps a nickel (what can you buy for a nickel anymore?) – to send it. I believe this would do much to eliminate spam, or at least to separate the possible gold from the likely dross. Once it would have seemed utterly ridiculous to pay extra for slowness, but these days it seems less so.

My tangent has been far lengthier than intended… if this were a letter, at least a bulging envelope would have forewarned you.

Oliver Sacks [stub]

I am traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico, with Oliver Sacks.

I’ve been looking forward to it with considerable anticipation, something that would not, normally, be my reaction. I am quite shy and I can think of few things more to be dreaded that that time spent in the close company of strangers. I like my privacy. I am happy by myself. I find books fine companions at dinner. Strangers can be intrusive. They look at one. They may wish to converse. They may very well have irksome habits. But I am untroubled by my journey with Sacks: he’s been dead for eight years.

Our interaction has been, and will continue to be, only through the medium of his writing and my imagination.

I’ve known of Oliver Sacks for years, but it is only in the past two years that I feel I’ve gotten to know him as a person. I first came to know him – as many others have – through his accessible and provocative case histories of patients encountered in the course of his neurology practice. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and Musicophilia are just a few of the publications which made him famous, even as they revived a 19^th Century tradition of publishing medical case histories. However, in the last two years, I’ve discovered that he had a broader repertoire than I knew. He’s written essays on a variety of topics including, as his life entered its twilight period, essays about his life, and ultimately a memoir, On the Move. It was through thislatter tranche of writings that I learned of his crippling shyness, not something I would expected of such a sprightly writer, his largely closeted life as a gay man, his time as a meth addict, as well as a variety of odd and, to me, endearing characteristics, such as his obsession with the periodic table of the elements, or his fascination with the botany of club mosses and other primitive plants.

It was his last book – Gratitude – that spoke to me, and made me want to know him better. Gratitude is a short book of four essays, three written during the period when he knew that his remaining life was measured in months and weeks; the fourth written a year or so prior to that. I read the book during the time of Covid, when my retirement activities had been muted by the pandemic, and various events such as the passing of parents, the deaths of friends, and shifts in my own health had shifted my awareness of mortality from the purely intellectual to the deeply emotional. Gratitude is an apt title for the book, as that theme wends it way through the essays, regardless of topic. But what attracted me even more were other emotions entwined with gratitude: curiosity, engagement and a quiet sort of joy.

Algorithmic Untruths [stub]

“Tom, you’re on a roll with your career!” Thus reads the subject line of the latest email of the day.

This is fantastic news. Not “fantastic” in its common sense, but rather in its alternative sense of “fanciful; remote from reality.” After all, I am well into my fifth year of retirement, and it is at least three years since my last paper was published, my last patents granted, and my last appearance at a professional conference. While it would be nice to believe that the cumulative mass of my accomplishments has somehow reached a critical point, tipped, and is now barreling along on its own like an ever-growing cartoon snowball, it is not so.

My ‘fantastic’ career aside, I am curious about the truth value of the statement. Clearly it is not true – I am not ‘on a roll’ but in what way is it not true? One could simply say that it is a lie, but as the statement is no doubt generated by an algorithm, that seems both dubious and overwrought. A lie, I think, requires a degree of intention behind it, something I am loath to attribute to an algorithm. Of course, at some point a programmer constructed the phrase, and decided upon the conditions which would lead to its triggering. But I find it a little difficult to say that the programmer was lying.

Looking into it more deeply, the body of the email told me that I recently been appeared in 12 different searches. This might be nice if I were just starting out, and particularly if I was searching for a job, but as a person with over a 1,000 connections on Linked-In it is not especially notable – it is just an increase from the more usual 2 or 3 ‘notices’

Reflecting on the matter, there are a large class of algorithmically generated messages that seem similar. My favorite, a message which dates back to the ancient days of the digital age, is “Sorry. I don’t understand the word ‘Sorry.’ ” This seems to me to embody a deep truth.

Another example, which amuses me, is “Congratulations on your 462nd fastest run.” It is hard to imagine a world in which such an achievement would merit congratulations. I suppose if it were expressed as “Congratulations, your physical condition is not deteriorating as quickly as we would expect given the increase in your age,’ congratulations might not be completely unmerited. But, to be honest, I don’t think that’s it: I think the programmer never thought about the case where someone would be using their application for a half decade.

It seems to me that there is a sort of algorithmically generated fantasy world.

I don’t believe that that deserves congratulations; nor do I believe that such congratulations are sincere. When I was a child, in what they used to call grammar school, people believed I was a bit slow. What that means, at least in the context of a supportive environment, is that I received a lot of positive feedback for achievements that did not merit it. Although the subsequent discovery that I was myopic and simply needed glasses to address my academic malaise addressed this issue, it left behind an abiding distaste for compliments of any sort. Yet, curiously, the computer-generated flattery does not bother me.

Ten favorites from the OBE*, + comments

*Ten Favorites from The Oxford Book of Essays

27 February 2022

The Haunted Mind, 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

On the experience of waking in the night, the accompanying thoughts, and going back to sleep. A very nice evocation of the varying dimensions of the hypnagogic state.

“In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Haunted Mind, 1835,

The Acorn-Gatherer, 1884, Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

More of a short story than an essay; striking in both its use of imagery and movement, and in the malign and macabre nature of its storyline. I particularly liked the opening figure of the rooks in the oak, and their acorn gathering and interaction.

“The happiest creatures in the world are the rooks at the acorns. It is not only the eating of them, but the finding: the fluttering up there and hopping from branch to branch, the sidling out to the extreme end of the bough, and the inward chuckling when a friend lets his acorn drop tip-tap from bough to bough. ”
—Richard Jefferies, The Acorn-Gatherer, 1884, Richard Jefferies

Cordova, 1898, Arthur Symons (1865-1945)

A beautiful short evocation of Cordova. I found it notable for its artfully constructed long sentences, which often, implicitly or explicitly, trace paths or lines of connection through the city that weave together people and places and streets and buildings. Also notable was the occasional sentence that provided a burst of color – amongst all the other sensory qualities.

“Seen from the further end of the Moorish bridge by the Calahorra, where the road starts to Seville, Cordova is a long brown line between the red river and the purple hills, an irregular, ruinous line, following the windings of the river, and rising up to the yellow battlements and great middle bulk of the Cathedral.”
– Arthur Symons, Cordova, 1898

A Clergyman, 1918, Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)

A beautifully constructed essay which envisions the mortifying experience of a young clergyman who, in his attempt to contribute to a conversation with Samuel Johnson, and was devastated by a crushing retort. The essay is notable for the author’s facility in creating, entirely from his imagination, a compelling account of the situation and its precursors and aftermath, and of doing so in a way that showed compassion for both the clergyman and Johnson.

“I see the curate’s frame quiver with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and — no, I can’t bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill, followed by something thunderous.  Presently I re-open my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from the young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.”
– Sir Max Beerbohm, A Clergyman, 1918

The Death of the Moth,” 1925, Virginia Woolf (1882 -1941)

A transcendent essay that moves easily between a view of a numinous arcadian landscape and a moth fluttering against the window pane, the moth being an exemplar the life-energy that flows through the world.

“The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. ”
— Virginia Woolf , The Death of the Moth,” 1925

“It was if someone had taken tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it.”
— Virginia Woolf , The Death of the Moth,” 1925

Insouciance, 1928, D H Lawrence (1885-1930)

This explores the discordance between direct appreciation of sensuous reality and intellectual immersion in abstract problems. Moreover, it does this in an amusing manner, through the figure of a little old lady, determined to engage the author in a discussion of international relations.

“A hot, still afternoon! the lake shining rather glassy away below, the mountains rather sulky, the greeness very green, all a little silent and lurid, and two mowers mowing with scythes, downhill just near: slush! slush! sound the scythe-strokes. ”

[…]

“Before I know where I am, the little white haired lady has swept me off my balcony, away from the glassy lake, the veiled mountains, the two men mowing, and the cherry trees, away into the troubled ether of international politics.”
— D H Lawrence, Insouciance, 1928

The Toy Farm, 1927, J. B. Priestly (1894-1984)

A vivid and whimsical description of a child’s toy farm, segueing into a consideration of the attraction of toys and play and imagination.

“Here is the bright epitome, not of the country we can find where the tram lines come to an end and the street lights fade out, but of the country that has always existed in our imagination, so clean, trim, lavishly colored.”
—J. B. Priestly, The Toy Farm, 1927

The Snout, 1957, Loren Eiseley (1907 – 1977)

A fanciful account of the conditions and manner in which life moved from water to land, that also makes the point that evolution continues all around us. It is marked by a synecdochic use of humble terms – “ooze,” “snout” – for abstract evolutionary processes and results, and by its vivid portrayal of how unpleasant evolution — the “stealthy advance made in suffocation and terror” — was for the ‘snouts’ involved. The marshaling of words with unpleasant connotations – reek, corruption , strangled gasping, fetid, oily, foul, hobbled, stumps, heavy, swamps, monstrous, forbidden, fermenting, ooze, desperation, noisome, uncomfortable, oxygen-starved, rotting, dripping – makes the description impressive and powerful.

“There are two ways to seek the doorway: in the swamps of the inland waterways and along the tide flats of the estuaries where rivers come to the sea. By those two pathways life came ashore. It was not the magnificent march through the breakers and up the cliffs that we fondly imagine. It was a stealthy advance made in suffocation and terror, amidst the leaching bite of chemical discomfort. It was made by the failures of the sea.”
—Loren Eiseley, The Snout, 1957

The Crisp at the Crossroads, 1970, Reyner Banham (1922 – 1998)

Reyner Banham, a noted Architectural critic, demonstrates that one can apply one’s skill at analyzing the aesthetics of form and the systems and context in which it is situated to seemingly disparate constructions: in this case, the humble crisp. From the sensory qualities of crisps, to their packaging, to their social uses, Banham provides a brilliant examination of how the crisp is changing in response to evolving technologies and social needs.

“The sense that there is no diet-busting substance in crisps is reinforced by their performance in the mouth. Apply tooth-pressure and you and you get deafening action; bite again and there is nothing left. It’s a food that vanishes in the mouth so, I mean, it can’t be fattening, can it? It certainly isn’t satisfying in any normal food sense; the satisfactions of crisps, over and above the sting of flavor, are audio-masticatory — lots of response for little substance.
— Reyner Banham, The Crisp at the Crossroads, 1970

“The pack is analogous in its performance. […] What with the crisps rattling about inside, and the pack crackling and rustling outside, you got an audio signal distinctive enough to be picked up by childish ears at 200 or 300 yards.”
— Reyner Banham, The Crisp at the Crossroads, 1970

La Paz, 1963. Jan Morris (1926 – 2020)

A wonderful description of La Paz; rich and beautiful phrasing that captures the energy of the place. And an interesting ending that ought to, but does not, subvert what came before.

“For sixty miles the road plods on through this monotony and then it falls over a precipice. Suddenly it crosses the lip of the high plateau and tumbles helter-skelter, lickety-split into a chasm: and as you slither down the horse-shoe bends you see in the ravine below you, secreted in a fold of the massif, the city of La Paz.” — Jan Morris, 1963
— Jan Morris, La Paz, 1963

“But here’s an odd thing. When you come to La Paz from the north over the escarpment, it seems a very prodigy among cities; but if you drive away from it towards Lilmani and the south, looking back over your shoulder as you cross the last ridge, why, all the magic has drained from it, all the color has faded, all that taut neurosis seems an illusion, and it looks like some drab old mining camp, sluttish among the tailings.”
— Jan Morris, La Paz, 1963

# # #