Norman Mailer's Lego Utopia

Today I learned that Norman Mailer built a 7-foot tall Lego utopia which he keeps in his apartment in Brooklyn Heights.



"Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. “It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel,” he explains. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There’d be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.” The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. “Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business.”

I wonder where it is now that he has passed away?

Louis Adamic on BMC

All quotes from Harper's Monthly Magazine, "Education on a Mountain"

"They [the students] swim in intellgience and the desire to improve themselves.  Then uncertainty steals upon them, and they sink again into depression.  Not that the process ends here. They are continuous waves" (524)

"Men suffer most from unacknowledged self-contempt... He tries to act in such a way that he will be respected by others, and he becomes confused into thinking finally that this assumed self-respect he has pawned off on others is a reality. But underneath he knows or feels that it is all a lie.  Behind the front he offers to the world he is a disorderly person.  He never knows when he walks into a room but that the enemy is waiting for him, ready to show him up for the liar he is.  And yet, unconsciously, he longs for this very thing to happen to him.  But at the first onslaught of the real enemy he will fight as if he were a real enemy instead of a friend.  He has constructed and elaborately decorated the superficial self that he is to present to society.  It is as if he wore a carefully designed [pasteboard] mask, to the making of which he ha s given the most tender care, and behind this lives the real man, growing increasingly chaotic, miserable, and unhappy, longing for his deliverer but ready to receive him as an enemy.  The task of the college is to be his enemy-friend [frenemy]: the bitter enemy of the superficial self, the friend of the real self.   But the real one is starved, emaciated.  It must be fed back to life, while the superficial one must be attacked without mercy." [524]


"[John Andrew Rice says] A good teacher is always more a learner than teacher, making the demand of everyone to be taught something....A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others....A teacher must have something of humor, a deeply laid irony, and not be a cynic.  In the center of his being should be a calm, quiet, tough. ["But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."] He must have in him the principle of growth; like the student, a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection.
Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem; that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves.  Also, that it's wrong for us to want others to be like ourselves; that we must want to attend to being the sort of people that others ought to be like." (526)

Poems as Constellations

Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A) .We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.

Robert Frost, "The Prerequisites," Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966) , p. 97.




[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. ...The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 23.

Whow‽

I invented a new word today when I had a pen stutter while annotating:

"Whow"

"Whow" expresses both the exclamation of surprise (wow!) and the question implied ("but how was it done?") -- best coupled with the new hybrid punctuation "?!", the so called "interrobang":‽




Another neologism tonight: "connecticanadian" (noun or adjective), must be said aloud for full effect "con-ECT-uh-kuh-NAY-dee-an" -- refers to a Canadian transplant to CT; very friendly, garrulous type, says "sohwry" a lot, usually Caucasian.