I understand that my friends find it to be strange that I cannot make it to the end of most movies without having to take a break but I can stay up all night to finish reading a book. What can I say? I have always loved books. I enjoy letting my imagination run wild and most (perhaps all) movie adaptations fall far short of what I conjured in my imagination for the book.
One of my favorite components to my graduate degree in architecture was the analysis portion. I devoured the articles in our overwhelming reader that was put together by a wonderful instructor with too much theory on the brain and time on the hands. Every time I came across a name or theory that I was unfamiliar with, I had to mark it down in my notebook and go look for it later. I went on a James Burke style journey of loose relationships that moved from Bob Somol to the diagram to string theory to rhizomes to Koolhaas to the New York grid. For those who don't speak architalk, basically I was reading an article by UCLA's Bob Somol about the ease and recognition in logos being applied to architecture versus the intricate and more meaningful process in architecture. With such a fast and surface oriented society, why bother with all the critical work when the public is looking for a brand? From this, I needed to read more about digrams to understand the concept of an easy but loaded message. This led me to studying the idea behind the formation of a rhizome, and the theory in acrhitecture to do with rhizomes. Then I looked up Koolhaas' work and compared the finished building to the diagram of it. On a completely different tangent I found myself reading Koolhaas' Delirious New York, which became one of my favorite books and explained a lot about his way to thinking to me. On an even bigger tangent, it all came back to me at grad school at Cornell because the designer of the New York Grid was Simeon De Witt, who moved to Ithaca, New York (location of Cornell University) in his later years and thought of it as an ideal town. Koolhaas came to Ithaca in the early 1970's and hated it. He has written some terrible things about it although his idol loved it there. Koolhaas loved the grid. And I loved Koolhaas until I met him but that is another story.
But anyway, back to books. Can you now understand how I cannot sit still through a movie?
I once had a boyfriend who said that he would never read another book once he had finished his required readings for his undergraduate degree. I thought that maybe he had been burned out.
I understood being burned out because I did it to myself once. In the first week of high school I was given the College Bound Reading List by my English teacher. Lists were my kryptonite, probably still are. There I was, a 14 year old girl who was just starting to wonder about her future, given a list of books that supposedly were most cited as having been read by college students. Well, I wanted to go to college so I felt pressure to read those books. For the next year I read EVERY book on that damn list. For the record, this wholesale attack of reading did almost nothing for me. I can only briefly recall what went on in a couple of the books and all the rest are hazy memories of pages and book covers. Nobody in university admissions ever asked me about reading any of the books on the list. And I wasted a lot of time that could have been used for enjoyment of reading. I guess the positive part is that without the College Bound Reading List I would never have read the Bible from front to back. Do you have any idea of how many times someone is begotten in the Bible? I do! Sadly, even though I learned the error of my ways back then, I have recently gotten a hold of a list of Classics that Harvard feels compelled to put into a collection and I will probably be furrowing my brow over some dead French guys in the near future. Kryptonite.
The boyfriend never did pick up another book after university. After too many dull conversations I took my books and shoes, and left. My SB- he is many things but never dull. He reads.
One of my favorite components to my graduate degree in architecture was the analysis portion. I devoured the articles in our overwhelming reader that was put together by a wonderful instructor with too much theory on the brain and time on the hands. Every time I came across a name or theory that I was unfamiliar with, I had to mark it down in my notebook and go look for it later. I went on a James Burke style journey of loose relationships that moved from Bob Somol to the diagram to string theory to rhizomes to Koolhaas to the New York grid. For those who don't speak architalk, basically I was reading an article by UCLA's Bob Somol about the ease and recognition in logos being applied to architecture versus the intricate and more meaningful process in architecture. With such a fast and surface oriented society, why bother with all the critical work when the public is looking for a brand? From this, I needed to read more about digrams to understand the concept of an easy but loaded message. This led me to studying the idea behind the formation of a rhizome, and the theory in acrhitecture to do with rhizomes. Then I looked up Koolhaas' work and compared the finished building to the diagram of it. On a completely different tangent I found myself reading Koolhaas' Delirious New York, which became one of my favorite books and explained a lot about his way to thinking to me. On an even bigger tangent, it all came back to me at grad school at Cornell because the designer of the New York Grid was Simeon De Witt, who moved to Ithaca, New York (location of Cornell University) in his later years and thought of it as an ideal town. Koolhaas came to Ithaca in the early 1970's and hated it. He has written some terrible things about it although his idol loved it there. Koolhaas loved the grid. And I loved Koolhaas until I met him but that is another story.
But anyway, back to books. Can you now understand how I cannot sit still through a movie?
I once had a boyfriend who said that he would never read another book once he had finished his required readings for his undergraduate degree. I thought that maybe he had been burned out.
I understood being burned out because I did it to myself once. In the first week of high school I was given the College Bound Reading List by my English teacher. Lists were my kryptonite, probably still are. There I was, a 14 year old girl who was just starting to wonder about her future, given a list of books that supposedly were most cited as having been read by college students. Well, I wanted to go to college so I felt pressure to read those books. For the next year I read EVERY book on that damn list. For the record, this wholesale attack of reading did almost nothing for me. I can only briefly recall what went on in a couple of the books and all the rest are hazy memories of pages and book covers. Nobody in university admissions ever asked me about reading any of the books on the list. And I wasted a lot of time that could have been used for enjoyment of reading. I guess the positive part is that without the College Bound Reading List I would never have read the Bible from front to back. Do you have any idea of how many times someone is begotten in the Bible? I do! Sadly, even though I learned the error of my ways back then, I have recently gotten a hold of a list of Classics that Harvard feels compelled to put into a collection and I will probably be furrowing my brow over some dead French guys in the near future. Kryptonite.
The boyfriend never did pick up another book after university. After too many dull conversations I took my books and shoes, and left. My SB- he is many things but never dull. He reads.
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