About to head out the second food pantry shift of the week (got called in to sub on Monday). So let’s do some quick random, which pains me a bit because I actually have so much I would rather be blogging on, but which would take so much longer.
First, this interview at “Material Mysticism” with architect Amanda Iglesias is just marvelous.
AI: That’s the hope! In curating the exhibition, it was critical to showcase the best of church architecture across a wide variety of cultures, denominations, and especially budgets. This work collectively points to the possibility that out of the various cultural and stylistic wars of the twentieth century, there has emerged into the twenty-first century a quiet flowering of a globally ecumenical architecture.
Church projects uniquely invite a design process that extends beyond purely pragmatic considerations (such as programming or mechanical updates) and therefore are highly desirable for an architect. Consider how the Christian faith contains a rich repository of symbols and images, poetry and parables. A single psalm alone can generate an entire architectural study, giving physical form to verse, such as Bosjes Chapel in South Africa, designed by Steyn Studio. The architects transformed the soaring language of Psalm 36:7—“How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings”—into a sinuous, winged chapel. Early concept sketches reveal an exquisite attention paid to the geometry of birds in flight: an architectural exegesis of the scripture…
….In response to devastation or tragedy, I am moved when a community of faith responds by constructing not a monument or a museum but a place of prayer. Not only is a church a significant way for a people to make their presence known and felt in the world, but it centralizes prayer as perhaps the most generative activity of hope. On a personal note, I’ve experienced a diversity of church environments that have facilitated prayers ranging from silence to supplication, lament to rejoicing. In the words of Winston Churchill, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The posture with which a church is designed and constructed will reciprocally shape our posturing in the world, one that must aim to be more like Jesus.
Dave Richardson, of the Oxford branch of real ale group CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), said in February the challenge would be to recreate the pub’s original features, including the alcoves at the front and the Rabbit Room where writer’s group the Inklings used to meet, while making the narrow building more welcoming.
Anthony Burgess and music. My goodness.
Anthony Burgess wrote 2,000 words a day. Finished copy, mind you, not drafts. This would have put him in the middleweight division of the 19th century, when heavy hitters like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac set the pace. Burgess was in many ways a 19th century writer, but he lived in the 20th century. The longer it went on, the less writers wrote, probably because there was something more interesting at the movies or on TV.
Graham Greene, Burgess’s frenemy and fellow exile in the south of France, stopped his working day at 500 words, even in mid-sentence, and poured out a gin and tonic. Burgess, having streamlined his practice by starting on the iced gin after breakfast, kept going. He wrote journalism in the mornings, and then, when mind and liver were nicely lubricated, fiction in the afternoons. He is not known to have taken any exercise beyond walking to the pub.
Burgess devoted his evenings to music. He was the son of a pub pianist, and his wartime service included some nocturnal action as pianist with the entertainment section of the British Army’s 54th Division. Instead of unwinding by bashing out a few standards at the old Joanna, he sat in an easy chair, drank more gin, and composed some 250 pieces of music, some quite substantial: chamber music, solo works for piano, a ballet suite, some film music, a James Joyce musical (Blooms of Dublin). He did this without an instrument, out of his head in the fullest sense.
“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of as a novelist who writes music on the side,” he said. The University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra commissioned and performed Burgess’s “Symphony in C” in 1975, and several more recent recordings are in print.His music is strongly influenced by Claude Debussy, and the modern English school, notably Frederick Delius (who was influenced by Edvard Grieg and Richard Wagner), Sir Edward Elgar (who was a kind of English analogue to Gustav Mahler), and the folky locals William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In music as in print, Burgess was 19th-century England under Continental influence.
Maybe I’ve erred in not paying much attention to Burgess. Finished The Wanting Seed last night and as much as I find the voice of the 20th c self-elaborator difficult to read it is certainly a clever, thoughtful novel– which I borrowed, I believe, because you noticed it here. The Dominic Green review (“(t)his sets us up for the central section, ‘Burgess and His Music’, in which Burgess reviews himself, generally awarding an A-plus”) convinced me to place a request at the library. Thanks!
When you realize that the Wanting Seed was one of five novels he wrote in year b/c he thought he was dying and needed to provide for his wife…it makes the rather…antic quality more understandable. (He wrote a Clockwork Orange in 3 weeks during that year)
‘Rather antic quality’– right on the mark, I think. Have figured out that I’ve confused AB and J.G. Ballard in my memory. :-)