There is a particular kind of August laziness that likes to dress itself up as a fashionable pose: you can’t undertake significant projects in August, you’re not supposed to, apparently, you aren’t even supposed to read anything that’s too complicated (though I wonder, if you don’t read complicated stuff while your brain isn’t engaged with work, when do you do it?).
It’s bad manners.
But I’m not known for my good manners, so this summertime I’m doing a sequel of my Poetry Reading List for Architects.
I’d like to say this was the plan all along, that I always intended to spend an entire month doing this properly, one theme a week, an article every Wednesday, daily reading picks in between, the whole apparatus, but the truth is it worked once, you liked it, August is long, this August I’m working on a complex project (see the thing above about manners), and I would like to spend my free time rereading poets.
There is a name for this in publishing, I’m told. It’s called “a series.” I usually do it for Pride Month (though I couldn’t get around to it this year), for Spooktober leading up to Halloween and throughout December as an Advent Calendar. This year, you’ll get a Summertime series as well.
What actually earns this a second round, beyond the seasonal excuse, is that the first post left a great
deal unsaid. Five poets was just a sample size. The room Dickinson gave us was just one room and there are others, and not all of them are comfortable. The path Bashō walked was one path, and paths, as
any architect who has ever fought with a masterplan knows, are far more argumentative than they look on a drawing. So, this month, I’m reopening four of the doors that first post only pushed ajar: the room, the path, the material, the ruin. Four weeks, four articles, and — in between — one book a day, none of them about architecture, all of them, I’d argue, secretly about nothing else.
See you tomorrow.
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