Month: November 2011

David Foster Wallace would fail you for rolling your eyes

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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE WOULD FAIL YOU FOR ROLLING YOUR EYES.

Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

David Foster Wallace sets his expectations for class discussions in the Syllabus for his “English 102—Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ’94”.. (Comment by Katie Roiphe at Slate). This could be read as swagger, I guess, but I don’t think it is. I think Wallace just wanted to stand up for the ideal represented by a university classroom in the plainest possible terms, uncouched in institutional argot. (via John Gruber).

Joseph Gandy’s Rural Essentialism

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We’re used to seeing crisp white surfaces as a marker of urbane essentialism—c.f. O.M. Ungers’ Haus 3, or Loos’s Müller House—so it’s a little disorienting to remember that what we talk about as ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ has had quite different connotations in the past. For J.M Gandy (see this profile by Christopher Woodward) in 1805, for example, it was a matter of rustic humility. In his book Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London: John Harding) we find these stark white boxes: windows punched, untrimmed and horizontally oriented; surfaces unornamented; and with minimal overhangs. The images are somewhat surprising, given the sensitivity to materials, light, massing, and detail in his more famous images for John Soane.

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Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate V.)

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Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate XVII.)