Why Architects Really End Up Talking Like That

It's November, and it's getting hot. Yesterday I went down to our bodega (storeroom) to put away my winter sweaters and pirate hats and I came across a box of drawings from back in my first year of grad school.
            The drawing on top was a sort of vector diagram - done in footprints. Memories came rolling back. It had been a "assignment now - final product tomorrow!" all-nighter sort of project - in which we neophyte architects had been asked to go someplace where a lot of people came through and map the traffic patterns - putting all the four-dimensional traffic down on two-dimensional paper in an exciting and really neoteric fashion. (Neoteric: architecture-speak for 'an artistic vanguard that you imagined up right now all by yourself."
            And then we had to write about it. Obviously, the drawing would speak for itself, but in practical terms, a short museum-style blurb wouldn't go amiss.  (A good professor is way ahead of student neoterism as a matter of course.)
            The problem with being asked to describe a drawing project in a paragraph or two on short sleep and shorter notice is that you end up turning out some purely awful drivel.
            Because you weren’t thinking clearly. You weren't thinking at all - you were snoring between your words. And you were surrounded by people who'd gotten even less sleep that you had, and while you were confident that your own ideas were pretty darned great, to your sleep-deprived ears theirs approached towers of literary genius.
            There’s no color of jealously like sleepless green.

And I remembered that I'd written about it, afterwards, when I'd woken up. And pasted it to the back of my neoteric masterpiece so I wouldn't forget:

            One fellow held a degree in ancient literature.  He had mapped the smokers on their nicotine breaks in Dundas Square.
            “Since the Dawn of Time” he said solemnly, “Ancestral Man has been Drawn to Flame.”
            “That’s probably true” I agreed, grinding my teeth, and went off to ask editorial opinions on “The pulse, the tide, the ebb and flow of harried, feverish commuters at the Bloor-Yonge Subway station” from two students lying on the floor behind me and looking, respectively, vacuous and pained.
            One of them winced.
            "Isn't that a little…damp?"
            On cue, Mr. Ancient Literature walked past declaiming “And Now, a Tattered Subculture of Social Pariahs Clusters Around the Vestigial Memory of the Ancient Hearth Fire!”
            I, who belong to the extremely tattered Subculture that feels stoned rather than euphoric when we don’t sleep, turned back to my laptop, typed out ‘In my map I marked out a sour by fix goot frid” and ran spell-check twice.

Down in the bodega, I shut the box and sealed it up with tape, but I won't forget. I think I need a little ceremony.
            I'll unfurl the map.  I'll enter the pulsing commuter tide that hustle down my street at rush hour every evening. When the ebb and flow of shoulders and elbows have crumpled it beyond the reach of even the most accommodating professor, I will go home and make it an offering on the fires of my BBQ on my balcony.  Neoterically.

Poetry; the need for, in excess(es).

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

Sometimes it’s all about poetry. At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the to the city of Punta Arenas (lit. Sandy Point) in Patagonia in the south of Chile. Punta Arenas is situated right on the Strait of Magallenes -  a stout little town with neoclassical houses wrapped around a tidy Plaza de Armas, a university, the Chilean Antarctic Institute, and rather a lot of military. 

(I rather like the Antarctic Institute. The sign on their front door is refrigerated, so that the continent in their logo can have a polar icecap.)

The military protects Chile’s southern flank: the strait, the Drake Passage and the southern ocean generally (or at least as far as Argentina lets them.)  We weren’t going that way. We were heading away from the sea into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands.  We were going north to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine, where the spine of the Andes mountains breaks the plains and makes a border with Argentina. We were going tower hunting.

            I have been here once before.  Nine years ago, on Boxing Day (December 26), I flew down here with my parents and my sister for a mid-summer week in Patagonia. These southern pampas are grazing country – on maps the rolling lands is broken into estancias (ranches, or stations) for sheep and cattle.  At that point in the year, the spring weather was tuned to maximum, and we drove out across endless, undulating plains of waving grass. Thunderheads moved across the sky at a rolling gallop, faster than the wind that came in waves and shook the grass from green to russet to gold and back to green again.            
            This time around, at the end of April, the short summer was done, and we were heading at that same rolling gallop headfirst into winter.  The grass was brown and silver, short and broken, and the line between the sky and the horizon was so sharp you could have marked it out with a pencil and carried away with you.

Poetry would come in handy here. Puerto Natales is a small town sitting on the shore of the Ultima Esperanza (lit. Last Hope) Sound, two hundred and fifty kilometers Punta Arenas. Puerto Natales serves as a base camp for the great National Park of Torres del Paine – lying another hundred-odd kilometers to the north.  The views from the town across the fjord are tremendous – the hills on the far side show as thick patches of bruised blue and purple and the air is so thick with oxygen that the sky lays down layers of color, one on top of the other, until the hills and sky all run together like watercolor paints –

And when the sun comes down-  here descriptions fail, and you have to turn to poetry – the wrong sort of poetry, poetry that has nothing to do with it, that shouldn’t ever suit -
            Do you know the poem about the Assyrians?   
            “The Assyrian came all down like the wolf on the fold/ And his cohorts were gleaming, in purple and gold-” 
            and goes on to Angels of Death and wailing widows and forests scattered on autumn winds and sprays of surf on bloody rocks?
            Just like that.  The sunsets were exactly like that.

Mammograms

Several years ago, right here in Santiago de Chile, my mother had her very first mammogram. For those not familiar with the procedure, a mammogram consists of having your breast slammed forcibly between two panes of glass and photographs being taken of the resulting aesthetic abomination. It was my mother's first time, and she was under the impression that she was going in for something innocuous, something like a CAT scan or an ultrasound. Reality left her extremely surprised, highly unimpressed and extremely sore, and she told the doctor so when she saw him afterwards.
            The doctor listened and smirked.  Clearing his throat he explained exactly how mammograms worked. It wasn't quite a medical explanation. It began with the sins of Eve, and got steadily worse. 
            "And it's worth it." He finished up, looking smug. "You'll have to learn to live with the pain. When you're made a woman, you just have to accept that there are things you just have to put up with."
            Generally speaking, my mother is a deeply polite and retiring sort of medical patient, the type of patient who would rather suffer a massive asthma attack on the floor of the ER than interrupt a nurse's conversation and indicate that the nurse might need to turn some attention her way, but this doctor's breathtaking response to her concerns sent her right over her personal line.  Standing up from her chair, she leaned over his desk and spoke directly into his eyes. 
            "I'm going to make a device for men."  She said.   "Just like this one.  How would you like it if I took you in my hand and squeezed-"
            The interview finished quite abruptly. But she was furious for days.

The point of this incident is that in the intervening ten years or so, things haven't changed much. I may have mentioned, at various moments  in this blog, that I've been going through a few gastrointestinal issues.  One of more picturesque symptoms is bloating on an industrial scale, and one day, not so long ago, I was obliged to make an emergency appointment with my GP -
            "Tabubilgirl!" He cried, as I came through his office door. "Congratulations!  I had no idea!  How far along are you?  Four months? Five?"
            "I'm not pregnant, Doctor." I said. "This is one of the symptoms."
            My GP sent me to a gastroenterologist. 
            A "very nice man."  He told me.  "He'll sort this out - run some tests, find out what sorts of food sensitivities you have-"
            It didn't quite happen like that. The gastroenterologist admired my bloat and palpated my belly.  He watched me writhe in pain, made notes about 'unusual abdominal rigidity', listened through a stethoscope to all sorts of irregular noises- and then he steepled his hands, looked me earnestly in the eye and told me that it was quite common "for women- women in particular- to develop a psychosomatic conviction that they are overweight."
            I gaped. I stood up and turned to show him my profile.  I swiped my hand over my swollen stomach and demanded to know if he thought THAT looked psychosomatic. 
            It was his turn to gape. Weakly, he admitted that it didn't, and I sat down again and we got down to business.
            "You're right."  He said.  "You're absolutely right. It's about quality of life, isn't it?  If you go out for lunch and the other women look thinner than you, that is an issue that needs to be fixed. You should be able to hold your head up high. How you feel about yourself matters."
            I reminded him (with remarkable patience, I like to think) that the bloating was one symptom of a larger issue-
            "Absolutely."  He said again.  "When you can't hold your face up among other women when you're out, that's a real issue.  Don't you worry, we'll get to the bottom of this!"
            I think that he found my outrage amusing.  At least, he dimpled and patted my hand and did everything but  call me a fascinating, bewitching, mysterious little creature as he ushered me out the door. As I stomped my way down the hallway, he leaned out his office door for a parting shot. 
            "We'll sort all this out, Tabubilgirl!  The important thing is to think positive about yourself!"

A couple of weeks later, I had to see another doctor for an entirely different issue.  I was feeling a little gun-shy, and asked Mr Tabubil if he'd mind coming with me, just in case.  I'm glad that I did. This time it was Mr Tabubil who emerged pale and shaking.   
            "I know that things can be really tough for women here in Chile, but it's one thing to know it and a completely different thing to see it happening!  That man looked straight over your head and I swear he literally- literally- didn't hear you when you  talked.  Four times in that conversation I had to stand up and put my fists on the table and say 'What this  woman is trying to say to you is this!'  Four times! It was like you weren't even in the room!  But he listened to me!"
            "Sort of."
            "Okay, when he refused to do a proper physical exam, said that the hospital's physical therapy department downstairs were making things up to support your delusion, labeled you as a psychosomatic hysteric and told you that you were incapable of understanding your own body or health and tried to put you on antidepressants after 10 minutes of ignoring every word you said- well, we walked out on him, didn't we?"
            We sure did. Does that count as a win?
            On a positive note, I now have a wonderful female gastroenterologist, who has taken me for a human being and is making great strides in sorting out my insides.  I have also gained access to a circulating underground list of "doctors that women should avoid in this town."  I've made a few contributions of my own.
            I love living in Chile, but there are lines, and at this line I choose to STOP.  I could write pages - volumes -  about what it's like to be a woman in this country. A lot of them are funny, if you like a certain type of alternative black humor. The rest of them are hilarious - in that special way where laughter is the only alternative to weeping or punching walls until your fists are bloody.
            A lot has changed from when I first lived here in the mid-nineties.  Women now control their own assets after they marry, and they are no longer subject- on pain of law- to the rule of their husbands.  Divorce has been legalized, maternity leave is mandatory in public-sector jobs, hospital nurses have hung up their mini-dresses and their high heels, and policewomen no longer chase down bad guys in circle skirts and knee-high leather boots and handbags.  Men like to talk about how good things are for Chilean women these days; eyes have been opened and the world is changing, improving,right left, center and sideways.  Society's eyes might have opened, but when men begin to talk about how good their women have got it, women's eyes begin to drop, and women are silent. 
            Next Wednesday morning I will go to a courthouse and stand next to a friend while she stands across a table from a Chilean man who decided that her words and her understanding of her own body had absolutely no relevance at all, at a time when they should have counted for most. It's the last step in a very long and extremely drawn-out process.  For a very long time there was no-one at all who would listen to her.  What else could a man, faced with a beautiful woman, have been expected to do? When you're made a woman, you have to accept that you have to put up with certain things, and learn to live with pain. 

When I was in my teens, I lived in Antofagasta, a small city in Northern Chile. Life was good for the construction industry up there; an 8.0 earthquake had recently hit and most buildings in the town needed some sort of reconstruction.  Every afternoon after school I would walk down to a sports club for sports lessons.  Every afternoon I would dress twice: once in my sports clothes, and over my sports clothes, I would put on the baggiest clothes I could find in my house, covering my skinny, undeveloped, entirely unsexual body with t-shirts and tracksuit pants three sizes too large.  And then I would walk a gauntlet of construction men on construction sites - my head down, my eyes on the road, my fists clenched as they whistled and shouted and told me what they'd like to do to me - what they'd like their DOG to do to me - in explicit detail.  
            One day, walking with a friend, I turned to her and said desperately - "Why don't you stop them!  Why do you let them do this!  Why don’t people stop them?"
            I still remember her face - this little girl turned toward me, dull-eyed, said, very, very quietly, so quietly I could hardly hear her.  "What can I do?  I'm just a woman."
            We are taught which words matter and which words don't.  And whose. Today, words still happen in the street.  If you react, the men saying them press on harder with words that are worse, ramping up the pressure, grinding it in. If you don't react, you've let them win - you've let them tell you who are you are and what you are, and there is rarely any dignity in their definitions. 
            When your world is bound by words like these, it's hard to see why you should stop at talking.  Looking is part of the talking - and staring comes after that - and if they let you stare, where might the next step take you when you have been taught to not to see and not to hear?            
            Today's post isn't the littlest bit funny. But laugh, please. Think of those sad little doctors in their high offices, and those cruel men on their building sites and laugh loud and laugh hard.  Wednesday is going to be a very difficult day, and we will need the laughter.

Florence has All Sorts of Architecture

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence.

With the Pantheon sorted out to American Universalist Satisfaction we took the morning Eurostar train to Florence.
(Buckety buckety pale white horse.  Sway in the saddle, sway on the rail, doze at the stations, but stay the course.)
Slipping between wheat-fields and sere golden hills, we snaked through stands of tall grey Cyprus, rounded grey and red-roofed hill-towns and forded stony olive-bottomed river valleys, and two hours later, we were in Florence –swept off the train and tossed out into the gaping stone halls of the Most Over-praised Train Station in Europe.

When I came to Florence nine years ago and looked at the Art Deco Stazione Santa Maria Novella for the first time, I thought that it was a building so uncomfortable and uncomfortable and that it had almost certainly been awarded a major architectural prize.
I was right.
A year of catching local coffee-pot trains out of it twice a week up to Pisa and Prato didn’t change my opinions. Santa Maria Novella was uncomfortable and uncongenial and definitively, wordlessly ‘-un’  in every possible respect.
Eight years further on and with a masters-load of architectural theory under my belt, I can read the fascist declaration of strength and command (we rise up in a statement of industrial and social might as done up in lines of brand-spanking modern architecture and with self-referential historical overtones to remind people of our long and glorious heritage of architectural successes see if we don’t!) that the designers were attempting to make with the building.  I can appreciate, in a disinterested way, the clean modern bones of the thing.  I can even comprehend – and sympathize a little – with how ivory-tower types could spend the next eighty years going gaga over it.

Nontheless and taking all that into consideration, while the architects of the Tuscan Group who built the Stazione Santa Maria Novella were cheerfully checking off every stylistic ‘x’ in their post-war designer brief,  they were completely and totally failing to build a building that is actually pleasant to inhabit.  From their lofty post-war-modern heights, they made the dark error of thinking about People instead of actual persons while they were designing.  In the station’s dark, drafty, shadowy and echoey, glary and icy, over-heated open-air bowels, there isn’t one iota of indication that this station was ever meant to be anything more than a cardboard model centerpiece in a biennale exhibition somewhere.

And THAT is a rant nine years in the making.  Forgive me.

Stazione Santa Maria Novella stands on one edge of the Florence’s old city.  We are staying on the other edge of it - down by the river in a third-floor hostel on the Via Borgo Dei Greci.

If you hang out the window and look right you can see the pink-and-green-and-white marble chocolate box façade of the church of Santa Croce.  After dark, all flood-lit, it loses its chocolate box aspect and becomes something ALMOST (as much as anything built in the deep Victorian neo-gothic period can be) awesome and broodingly nocturnal, and a fitting burial place for the likes of Niccolo Machiavelli, Lorenzo Ghilberti, Leon Battista Alberti, and Michelangelo Buonnaroti - far more than it could ever be in the shadow-free mid-day light!

And I can speak Italian again.  I couldn’t in Rome.  But the Florentine accent and dialect are completely comprehensible, and roll pleasantly and lilting upon my ear.  I haven’t spoken Italian since I left, and what I do speak now is a patchy Spanish-Italian pidgin, but the words are there when I need ‘em and come without the conscious intervention of my fore-brain: half the time I don’t remember the word I need until I’m saying it, and then it rolls out of my mouth and drops into a sentence before I know I’ve said it.  At the local grocery i can ask for fruit, and make polite commentary on the weather, and agree that yes, it is quite unseasonably hot and that there ARE far too many tourists in town this season - and so my vocabulary  advances!

Spanish Cold Turkey

I was dropped into the whole Spanish thing more or less cold turkey. We arrived around midday, sailed through customs and immigration with perfect fluency, and in the early afternoon, Mis Suegros took us out into the city to find some lunch.  We started off with a hiccup – in the cafe, the lady at the cash register launched a flurry of Chilean accented Spanish in my direction, and was completely unintelligible. I’d been feeling pretty good after my success in the airport, and now my self-esteem was plummeting into my boots. I revealed my secret identity – a bewildered and ignorant gringa, and she vanished into the back. She returned with a roll of paper, and in graphic pantomime explained that the roll of paper that prints out the receipts in the cash register had become jammed – and here she was, fixing it, wasn’t that nice – so she’d had to go into the back storeroom and look for a new one so that she could give me, as was my due as a nice customer, the correct change.

Now HOW was I supposed to have gotten all that?  It's been seven years since I lived here last!

Over the next few days things improved fast.  My Spanish isn't actually terrible - less non-existent than mostly rusty.  My vocabulary needs work, my subjunctive is atrocious and my use of indirect articles isn’t all that it could be, and I tear around the city dropping indefinite articles on the sidewalk and tying taxi drivers up in inappropriate verb tenses, but despite the frustrating refusal of the patriotic Chilean to comprehend ANY Spanish spoken by a gringo (regardless of how pure the accent - and I learned mine in a Chilean high school, valley girl slang and all.  My spanish teacher has an issue with that.  'You've GOT to drop the slangy sing-song intonation!  You're an ADULT now!!!" )  I'm getting along swimmingly, and only stop for cascading confusions of "Que?" "QUE?" "Le prugunte YO!"*  two or three times a week!

("What?"

"WHAT?"

"I asked YOU!")

Tabubilgirl has the flu, so she is fulminating. Because it beats sniffling.

I have, previously, expounded upon on the subject (or piffle) of contemporary archi-speak.
            Having been out of the professional loop for the past year and a half, I've been rather under-exposed to the vernacular. I try to remain au-courant, but up here in Rural South Australia, people only drop their tenses when they talk, instead of their common sense, and I have unfortunately regained a sense of perspective.
            Stuff like THIS is the sort of reason that I get cheesed off.  Bldgblog's content is exciting and moody and thought-provoking and the more-philosophical-than-thou "WE-invented-the-wheel" (or rather "WE generated a primary conceptualization of the multi-modular implementation of a demi-discoid meta-form") presentation gives me the terminal twitches. 
            The author of this blog is clearly a man of passion, with a wholly catholic appreciation of designed space in every medium and manifestation imaginable. (see?!) My current, sniffle-soaked cranky-flu problem is with the way the contributors learned to talk about it. An architect can't even clear a building site without getting so excited they need to go and lie down. Seriously - 

            "For their project Log Chop Bench (2011), the Canadian design firm The Practice of Everyday Design used 'a logger's brute strength and surgical precision to carve out seats on a reclaimed log.''

     

This verbal bloat reminds me of what happened after they put the lid on the new Convention Center in Vancouver.  It has a marvelous green roof - a meadow that spills down the side of the building to be crossed and re-crossed by a series of terraced walking tracks.  It's bright green and gorgeous and ecologically ambitious and there's a plaque riveted to the concrete verge of one of the walking tracks that spells out the biological, climatological, agro-historical, socio-philosophical and epistemological metaphysics behind every board, sheet, nail, rivet and grass stem in the project.
            It reads as if the competition for the prokect had been rather stiff, and as if the competition board was composed of city council members rather more interested in culturally-sensitive point-scoring than the merits of the actual designs, and as if the lead architects for this particular project had gotten rather desperate, and the night before the presentation, over a few stiff drinks, had hammered out the galloping mother of all architectural expositions, and then, rather unexpectedly, found out that they'd won.
            With one small caveat.  The competition board was so absolutely enchanted with everything they'd said that they insisted it be written down and place it somewhere prominent so that posterity would be fully appraised of how deeply sensitive the city had been in its choice of Convention Center.
            I like to imagine that somewhere, there is a small group of architects deeply embarrassed about that.

One can excuse the form when one is playing to a panel. The etiquette is rigid.  But that delightful little log bench on Bldgblog also reminds me of every visit I've ever made to the marvelous circular Guggenheim Museum in New York.  One walks out of the place with a mind packed full of visions of dry white pages of small black-typed philosophy - the curators and artists appear to have spent more time working out their arcane vocabularies than they have on creating the art.
            It's the exquisite Kandisky explosions in the permanent collection - sold as is, sans speech-bubbles, that stick. You have to work them out yourself. 

Show, don't tell.

Just for a week.
I dare you.

Ripper!

My sister is on her last rotation before graduation - “Obs and Gobs” – as Australians – ever so delicately* – refer to Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is in love with her resident: 
            “Tall, no wedding ring, and the most lovely eyelashes.”
            “Lovely eyelashes?”
            “It’s the only part of him I can see over his surgical mask.” She sighed. Beatifically.

*This week I’ve learned that Spaghetti Bolognese is only for stuck up toffee noses from the city – real Australians eat Spag Bog. The sparrows in your backyard are Spoggies – and should be shot, the lot of them, they eat your garden, mark my words, you’ll be down to stubble by midsummer.   Magpies are Moggies – but so are cats, and if you think spag bog sounds dodgy, wait till you're offered a dog's eye with mushy peas, mystery bags and a dead horse.
It's enough to drive you berko.

The Better to See You With

My sister has moved on from Orthopedics and into Ophthalmology. 
            "And I have to tell you" she told me. "It's SQUEAMISH."
I laughed. "Really? Last week you sat in on a -and I quote - 'rather messy hip replacement' without twitching an eyebrow. Suddenly, eye exams are more disturbing/squeamy than some of the other body parts you've been playing with?"
My sister sighed. "Extend your imagination." She said impatiently. "I'm sit in a sterile room under very bright lights watching a gigantic magnified image of needles being plunged into EYEBALLS."
I extended my imagination and it went places. Terry Gilliam had mostly been there first.
            "Uh." I said eventually, inadequately, from where I lay curled up in a very tight ball in the corner of my chair.
My sister gave a gurgling laugh. "It's ALL relative. There's squeamy, and then there's EYEBALLS."

She graduates in December. She's one-third of the organizing team for the graduation ball, and has me designing the invitations. The work moves slowly.
            "I'm soooooo sorry I didn't call to talk about the drawings. I've been in conference with my fellow directors" she said, rolling her 'r's. "I'm working on my speech."
            "You get to give a speech?"
            "It's my party, isn't it?" She giggled. "You want to hear it?  It goes like this"  She paused portentously and cleared her throat.
            "AHEM.  Distinguished Guests. Families. Friends. Fellow doctors."  She paused again.
            "- and that's ALL I'VE GOT!" she shrieked, screaming with laughter.  "We're DOCTORS!"
The phone line dissolved into static and I didn't get any sense out of her for more than an hour.

How I learned to Talk like an Architect

On my very first day at graduate school, we neophyte architects were herded into a subterranean lecture theater and had the facts of life explained at us by our studio professor. One foot on a chair, his elbow on his knee, his camel-hair jacket unbuttoned and swinging jauntily around his manly frame, he was the very image of a dashing and successful practicing architect as he set down to the business of telling us all about our very first project.
            We would construct two cubes out of bass wood dowels  - he said - and we would wrap these wooden frames in paper. One cube inside the other, we would slash both paper layers full of excitingly shaped and dynamically positioned holes. We would line the inner cube with photo-resistant paper and, placing our boxes on window ledges, track the movement of the sun across these photo-resistant inner surfaces. And then - at last! - sun exposures in our eager little neophyte hands, we would trace the patterns and draw them out in both plan and orthographic perspective.

Or as the professor explained it:
             "The vertical mapping of the temporal exposure of the surfaces is intended to provide the prime conceptual material out of which your subsequent architectural proposal will gradually coalesce and emerge or -if you deem appropriate- remain submerged.  Ahem."

We blanched, but we were young and keen and not particularly blessed with foresight, and we merely squirmed a little in our seats. Visual theory attended to, our professor got down to the nuts and bolts of the class, and we fixed our eyes upon him and pulled out writing pads and pencils and prepared to take notes.
            Which, from the point of view of posterity, turned out to be rather a good thing.
            Making vague noises about the "materials acquisition" the professor handed out lists of required studio equipment -  lists that he assured us earnestly were "entirely non-hierarchical in form."
            "What's that?" He said testily. "Self-evidentially, I mean you to infer that everything on that page holds equal relevance for your practicable activities. Is this clear?"
            Raising his voice, he drew our attention to the large number of pens and pencils on the aforementioned non-hierearchical list, and said that "in this studio, you will find a void of digital content," or, in plain-speak, that we didn't need a computer this semester, because "this school strongly values the acquisition of traditional methodology for learning skill sets as they allow a certain entry to representational media not available through a dramatic jump into digital technology. Ahem."
            I heard a choked-off titter somewhere behind me.
            But he wasn't done yet. Turning to the subject of the actual physical construction of our basswood-and-paper models, he noted, in passing, that "although your drawing mat is resilient and self healing, the purchase of a reserved cutting mat is advisable.  In fact, it is not inadvisable to have a number of reserved substrates available for different materials. Ad exemplo, to understand the functionality of your parallel rule bar, I would here note that parallelity and verticality are only a few of its relevant inherencies."
             Once he'd disposed of the equipment list, the professor settled down for a comfy professorial fireside chat about school theory and student expectations:
            "As you advance within the school, a lack of comfort with representation will become conflated with your burgeoning computer skills"
            (= "don't forget how to draw once we turn you loose on the computer.")
            Because "in general, your work with traditional media has been unparalleled within our faculty - "
            (= we reckon that pencil drawings are much prettier than digital renders anyway)
            " - Although it is certainly true that the use of digitalization has become so primary within our program."
            (= when jargon come in, grammar goes out the window!)

The assistant professors were beginning to make coughing noises at his more florid excesses, and the class was developing an interesting variety of nervous tics. Someone finally slipped a word in sideways and asked a question about the actual project:
            "If the basswood frame is covered with paper, are we allowed to have the frame be visible?"
            The resulting drivel was so spectacular that it is worth quoting in full:
            "This problem is necessitated by initial moves on your part conflated with critical moves on the part of others. This exercise does not privilege the model as an artifact. The basswood frame will necessarily become visible through the projection of shadow and, via the compromise of envelopes, the dialogue between structure and substance, structure and perception, visual and invisible...... er.....  Ah ha....ha... did you mean literally visible?  Like, with your eyes?"
            "May the heavens preserve me" I thought, "from catching his attention this year.  I just might start spouting jargon back."


Despite the liquid velocity
The loquacious sibilance with which he articulates his erudition
            and, incidentally, demonstrates a not insignificant portion of inflated pomposity
Elaborating upon a contemporary conflation of contradictions that show how exemplary 
            hierarchies deviate from accepted norms and, thereby, perspective, from his 
            viewpoint, the primary functionalities of certainty and coherence -
- That's viscosity.

Ahem.

Metonymy

My new favorite trope

Metonymy (pronounced /me'tɒnɪmi/) is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "Washington," as the capital of the United States, could be used as a metonym for its government.

The words "metonymy" and "metonym" come from the Greek: μετωνυμία, metōnymía, "a change of name", from μετά, metá, "after, beyond" and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix used to name figures of speech, from ὄνῠμα,
 
(via)

The Small Motorized Chamber of Horrors

Yesterday, I dropped my CV off at the Town Planning Department down by the water, and caught the municipal bus home.  I do wish this town ran proper school buses - two stops from "downtown" we stopped outside the High School and half of the eighth grade poured on and I discovered why the other grown up passengers on the bus had competed to squeeze into the front two seats.
Perhaps it's a generational thing - but I don't remember anyone swearing nearly as much when I was in junior high.  Where we used adjectives, these kids toss around expletives like popcorn.  The bus echoed with "F*** this" and "S**t HER" and - "Oi James - you're a Sheepf****r!" 
I pricked up my ears - I'd never heard THAT one before.

Sitting in front of me was a baby faced thirteen year old boy with buck teeth and rosy cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles, whose highest aim in life was to spend it hanging over the top of my head shoving his middle finger into the face of the girl behind me.
            "STOP that, James" she tittered, fluttering her mascara.  "I can't believe you.  You're SO mean!"
Being forced to bend my head sideways, I was inclined to agree.  I shot him a look.  He graciously moved twelve inches sideways and stuck his tongue out at me.
My cell phone rang - it was my sister, I think, but the ringing profanity and steam whistle titters drowned her out. 
            "Can I call you back later?"  I said.  "I can't hear you in here."
            "She says she can't hear!"  James yelled.
            "What did she say?"  The girls screamed back.
            "She says she can't HEAR!"  He bawled and bounced up and down in my face, waving his middle finger furiously three inches from my nose.

I was Absolutely. Fed. UP. 
So I laughed at him - looked him in the eye and roared with laughter, and when I was done laughing, I shook my head - very very sorrowfully.
            "It's not working."  I said to him kindly, and I shook my head again. And sighed.

            "What did she say?" the kids on the bus roared, hoping for more games.
"She said it's not working."  James said in a small voice, and turned away to concentrate on hitting the daylights out of the boy across the aisle. 
            "You're SOOOO mean, James" the girl behind me piped hopefully, but she'd lost him - he wasn't going to risk turning around and catch me looking back at him.  Little snot.

At the next stop, the kids from the private school got on, and they were either Best Friends or Worst Enemies of the kids from the public high school so the noise level doubled, but they yelled at each other, not across me.
Worryingly, James and his pack of ratbags all got off at the stop next to our house, but I'm acting on the assumption that they live in the other direction and that I have nothing to worry about vis. eggs on the windows or T.P. in the shrubbery.