Drinking coffee and scanning the journal before football (soccer)/cleats/biking. I love the quote from Eudora Welty; it’s a nice complement to the one last weekend from André Aciman.
(1) How to Build a Better City (WSJ – Registration Required)
“The author studies the planners—among them, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the civic planner who radically rebuilt Paris under Napoleon III; Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York; Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon; and Daniel Burnham, the architect and urban designer behind Chicago’s turn-of-the-century transformation. He draws from their successes and failures a universal principle: To gain public acceptance, plans and their accompanying public investment must be part of a compelling vision and an agreed-upon public agenda.”
(2) Hitler’s Words Into Stone: Can architecture itself be fascist? (WSJ – Registration Required)
(2a) The Ideal City by Piero della Francesca
(2b) The Historical Monument of the American Republic by Erastus Salisbury Field
(3) In Praise of Daisy, Fred, Minnie and Red (WSJ – Registration Required)
“But as Eudora Welty once wrote of White, his work was illuminated by ‘the love held by the author for what is transitory in life. The transitory more and more becomes one with the beautiful.'”
(4) The Spikenards of Drafted Anguish: Federico García Lorca spun a brief stay in New York into entrancingly musical Surrealist poetry. (WSJ – Registration Required)
“Lorca came to New York ostensibly to study at Columbia University. He boarded in a dorm room but quickly gave up any pretense of attending classes to roam the streets and write. The urban landscape of skyscrapers and city squares was a setting for deep spiritual loneliness, which he strikingly evoked through his magic lantern of dark and disconcerting images.”
(5) IN MEMORY OF THE SPANISH POET FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA by Thomas Merton
Where the white bridge rears up its stamping arches
Proud as a colt across the clatter of the shallow river,
The sharp guitars
Have never forgotten your name.
Only the swordspeech of the cruel strings
Can pierce the minds of those who remain,
Sitting in the eyeless ruins of the house;
The shelter of the broken wall.
A woman has begun to sing:
O music the color of olives?
Her eyes are darker than the deep cathedrals;
Her words come dressed as mourners,
In the gate of her shadowy voice,
Each with a meaning like a sheaf of seven blades!
The spires and high Giraldas, still as nails
Nailed in the four cross roads,
Watch where the song becomes the color of carnations,
And flowers like wounds in the white dust of Spain.
(Under what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca?
What white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?)
In the four quarters of the world, the wind is still,
And wonders at the swordplay of the fierce guitar;
The voice has turned to iron in the naked air,
More loud and more despairing than a ruined tower.
(Under what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca?
What white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?)