My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #3

Mies van der Rohe relaxes at home in Chicago in furniture decidedly not of his own design. (c. 1956)

Annals of Typography #1, Age of Print #14

Line three enlarged:


John Donne, fragment of “The Flea” (c. 1610)

The long “s” (ſ) gives the line “Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee” two possible readings.

Please notify William Empson.

Page from Poems on Several Occasions: Written by the Reverend John Donne, ... With Elegies on the Author’s Death. To this Edition is Added, Some Account of the Life of the Author
By John Donne
Published by printed for J. Tonson, and sold by W. Taylor. (1719)

Order of the Universe #24

[W]hat are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

Age of Print #13, Architecture #38

Cover of first edition of Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats on Architecture, Education and Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Scarab Fraternity Press, 1934)

Diptych #11, Archaeology of the Music Video #7

Peggy Lee sings "Johnny Guitar". (c. 1954)



The Spotnicks play an instrumental version of "Johnny Guitar". (1962)

Seasons #5

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens, journal entry (March 4, 1906)

Apocalypse #19, Death #5, The Automobile #18

If speed and safety were the only considerations, there is no reason why the auto industry, once it awakened from its self-induced narcosis, should not "go with" this movement and make greater profits than ever. For it is easy to foresee the theoretic ideal limit toward which both the automotive engineer and the highway engineer have begun to move: to make the surface of this planet no better for any form of organic life than the surface of the moon. To minimize road accidents, the highway engineers have already advocated cutting down all trees and telegraph poles within a hundred feet of each side of the road. But that is only a beginning. To provide maximum safety at high speed, the car will either have to be taken out of the motorist's hands and placed under automatic control, as M.I.T. researchers have, on purely mechanical assumptions, worked out; or else turned into an armored vehicle, windowless, completely padded on the inside, with front and rear vision provided on a screen, and a television set installed to amuse the non-drivers, just as if they were in a jetplane. Along those lines, the motor car in a not-too-distant future would become a space capsule, a mobile prison, and the earth itself a featureless asteroid. Meanwhile, a further consolidation of the megamachine, with autos, jet planes, and rockets forming a single industry; the profits of that ultimate combine should exceed the wildest expectations of even General Motors.

Lewis Mumford, "The American Way of Death" (1966)

Annals of Photography #3

Ambulance and photographic wagon, Carson Desert, Nevada. Timothy O'Sullivan, photographer. (1867)

Walker Evans Wayside #4

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

In Memoriam #14, Apocalypse #18

J.G. Ballard

(1930-2009)


From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time, however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction’s obsession with its two principal themes—outer space and the far future. As much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain (manifest, for example, in surrealist painting) where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.

Introduction to Crash (1973)

Order of the Universe #23

An epoch not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.

Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé of 1935"

Age of Print #12, Cinema #41

Cover to Dutton edition of Andrew Sarris's American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1969)

Order of the Universe #22, Love #22

Language has not the power to speak what love indites:
The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

John Clare, fragment

Annals of Outer Space #1

NASA scientists place the golden Sounds of Earth record aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft. (1977)

In Memoriam #13, Annals of Photography #2, Manhattan #40

Helen Levitt

(1913-2009)

Age of Print #11, Food #13, The Animal Kingdom #13

Twenty-First Annual Capital Bicycle Club Banquet dinner menu. (February 3, 1900)

Apocalypse #17, War #12

Robert Mitchum discusses Vietnam. (1966)

Art #19

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked.

T.H. White, The Goshawk (1951)

Alan Lomax's South #1, Music #13

Top: Handwritten on back: "Angola, Louisiana"; "N66-1"; "N67-1."

Bottom: Handwritten on back: "Prison compund No 1. Angola, La. Leadbelly in foreground."

(Photographed c. 1934)

Age of Print #10

Advertisement for the book Many a Monster in the New York Times (March 25, 1948)

Entrails of Finance #2, Manhattan #39, Architecture #37

The present-day money pit rises from an actual pit in the ground: work on 70 Pine Street, the future headquarters (from 1976 onward) of American International Group, a.k.a. AIG.
(Pictured 1930 and 1931)

Order of the Universe #21

The heavens are wrath—the thunders rattling peal
Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky
Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel
Nor chills with fear eternal destiny

My soul is apathy—a ruin vast
Time cannot clear the ruined mass away
My life is hell—the hopeless die is cast
& manhoods prime is premature decay

Roll on ye wrath of thunders—peal on peal
Till worlds are ruins & myself alone
Melt heart & soul cased in obdurate steel
Till I can feel that nature is my throne

I live in love sun of undying light
& fathom my own heart for ways of good
In its pure atmosphere day without night
Smiles on the plains the forest & the flood

Smile on ye elements of earth & sky
Or frown in thunders as ye frown on me
Bid earth & its delusions pass away
But leave the mind as its creator free


John Clare, excerpts from “Written in a Thunderstorm July 15 1841”

Order of the Universe #20, Apocalypse #16

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay that leads to death has already begun.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1938)

Scenes from a Life #23, Aviation #13

Buddy Holly's body lies in front of the wreckage of the Beechcraft Bonanza B35 aircraft that also carried Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. (February 3, 1959)

Entrails of Finance #1,Manhattan #38, Architecture #36

Future zombie tower: preliminary sketches for Citicorp Center. Hugh Stubbins, architect. (1970)

My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #2

Edward Durell Stone bestride his grilles. (1958)

America #50, Founders' Promissory Notes #1

Mixed-race petit jury impaneled to try Jefferson Davis, the first mixed-race petit jury in the United States. (1867)

Anniverseries #14, Dead Presidents #45

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809

Cast of Lincoln's face, hands, and Lincoln's suit and hat.

History #13

Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Lytton Strachey, preface, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Atomic Age #1

A Nevada sheriff standing against the light from an atomic blast forty miles away.
George Silk, photographer (1955)

Scenes from a Life #22

Orson Welles and Cole Porter confer. (1946)

Apocalypse #15, America #49, Books on Books #5

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

 The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood- self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and  Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business- like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est! But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.


D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Annals of Photography #1

George R. Lawrence stands astride the lens of his 8 x 4½ ft glass-plate camera, which will be used to photograph Chicago & Alton Railway's Alton Limited. (1900)

Scenes from a Life #21, America #48

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dead Presidents #43

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln hold hands.
"Led By Lincoln's Principles" New York Mail and Express (August 3, 1904)

Walker Evans Wayside #3

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

History #12, Dead Presidents #43

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress (December 1, 1862)

Alcohol #10, Age of Print #9

Dust jacket to later edition of The Savoy Cocktail Book, by Harry Craddock. The full title of the original was The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of the Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Slings, Shrubs, Smashes, Fizzes, Juleps, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks, known and greatly appreciated in the year of grace 1930, with sundry notes of amusement and interest concerning them, together with subtle Observations upon Wines and their special occasions.

America #47

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Anniverseries #13

Ships burn in Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)

Scenes from a Life #20

Kennedy administration Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara play squash. (July 1962)

Opening Lines #6

Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi.

Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jeté, c'est ce dont on ne peut juger qu'après m'avoir lu.

Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra, je viendrai, ce livre à la main, me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement: Voilà ce que j'ai fait, ce que j'ai pensé, ce que je fus. J'ai dit le bien et le mal avec la même franchise. Je n'ai rien tu de mauvais, rien ajouté de bon; et s'il m'est arrivé d'employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n'a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire. J'ai pu supposer vrai ce que je savais avoir pu l'être, jamais ce que je savais être faux. Je me suis montré tel que je fus: méprisable et vil quand je l'ai été; bon, généreux, sublime, quand je l'ai été: j'ai dévoilé mon intérieur tel que tu l'as vu toi-même. Être éternel, rassemble autour de moi l'innombrable foule de mes semblables; qu'ils écoutent mes confessions, qu'ils gémissent de mes indignités, qu'ils rougissent de mes misères. Que chacun d'eux découvre à son tour son coeur au pied de ton trône avec la même sincérité, et puis qu'un seul te dise, s'il l'ose: je fus meilleur que cet homme-là.


I HAVE begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, "Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his
heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Book I (1782)
English translation, W. Conyngham Mallory

Aviation #12

LZ 129 Hindenburg burns over Lakehurst Naval Air Station, Manchester, New Jersey (May 6, 1937)

My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #1

Wallace K. Harrison mows his lawn (1947)

Walker Evans Wayside #2

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Anniverseries #12, Dead Presidents #42

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy arrive at Love Field, Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963)

Walker Evans Wayside #1

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Auden #20, Art #18

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

Concluding stanza to "Moon Landing" (1968)

Architecture #35

In the end, pure white light was to survive only as the weapon of the Secret Police interrogator, the brain-washer and the terrorist. But before that relegation to the underworld of Western culture, it had almost a two-decade career in the visible and progressive overworld, as architects of the International Style—with the noblest aspirations, and clear consciences which the clarity of the light was supposed to symbolise, no doubt—subjected doctors, art-collectors, publishers, teachers and the other law-abiding bourgeois who were the clients, to Gestapo-style luminous environments, with light streaming from bare, or occasionally opalescent, bulbs and tubes and glaring back from white walls. Even when allowance is made for the fact that many of the interiors they designed were for the specialised purposes of exhibitions, and may have needed unusual intensities of lighting, the published record of the work done by the Bauhaus and like-thinkers down to 1934, combined with the memories of survivors, leaves an impression of a luminous environment close to the threshold of pain, probably mad e tolerable only by the notorious willingness of intellectuals to suffer in the cause of art.

Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969)

Order of the Universe #19

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"], Discussion [Discusión] (1932)

Books on Books #4, Order of the Universe #18

The directions in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and the combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. And of this let every one be assured—that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood.

Thomas de Quincey, "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power" (1848)

Anniverseries #11, War #11

American soldiers cheering news of the Armistice (November 11, 1918)

Word of the Day #27

Fontanel

America #46

And these are the things we must be concerned about—we must be concerned about because we love America and we are out to free not only the Negro. This is not our struggle today to free 17,000,000 Negroes. It’s bigger than that. We are seeking to free the soul of America. Segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are to free all men, all races, and all groups. This is our responsibility and this is our challenge and we look to this great new state in our Union as an example and as the inspiration. As we move on in this realm, let us move on with the faith that this problem can be solved and that it will be solved, believing firmly that all reality hinges on moral foundations and we are struggling for what is right and we are destined to win.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to the House of Representatives of the First Legislature, State of Hawaii (September 23, 1959)

America #45

America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, introduction (1832)

Order of the Universe #17, Cinema #40

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

Sans Soleil d: Chris Marker (1982)

Architecture #34, America #44

Frank Lloyd Wright was, very probably, the last of the true Americans. This is not intended to suggest that he was of Red Indian origin (which he wasn’t) or that his ancestors came over on the Mayflower (which they didn’t). It is intended to mean that Wright was the last great representative of all the things this country once stood for in the world when “America” was still a radical concept, rather than a settled continent: a symbol of absolute, untrammeled freedom for every individual, of as little government as possible, the end of classes and castes, of unlimited and equal physical opportunities for the adventurous, of the absence of all prejudice—excepting prejudices in favor of anything new and bold; of the absence of form and of formality, and finally, a symbol of a society of many individuals living as individuals in individual settlements—not a society of masses living in giant cities.

Peter Blake, The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright (1970)

Word of the Day #26

Cavaedium

Scopitone #33, Love #21

Nancy Sinatra sings "Bang Bang" (1967)

Architecture #33

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie used as a barn.
G.E. Kidder Smith, photographer (c. 1959)

Seasons #4, Order of the Universe #16

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923)

Opening Lines #5, America #43, Order of the Universe #15

Once, from eastern ocean to western ocean, the land stretched away without names. Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected nameless mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays.

George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945)