A comment at Crooked Timber that's so long it should be a post. And I don't even try to piss anyone off.
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In the middle of the book. It's strange to have homework for the first time in 20 years. It's supposed to be a simple review -It's for a trade paper not a scholarly publication- but it's a major book, and I'm not going to skim it. I'll make one comment for now, and that is that if we still have the kind of collective socially communicative space that Vesely is describing, he is right to say that it's no longer in architecture. Architecture no longer describes the world as much as it describes our sense of aesthetics. But literature still embodies the richness that design (the word itself connotes an emptiness) has always lacked. And from literature and painting we have the bastard child: film.
Film is our architecture of thought and meaning.
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Sam Rosenfeld was right on Friday. It's the economy and Iraq, Stupid.
The Dems should not back off on anything. If they run away from the war, they'll seem like cowards; and there's no damn need for that to happen. Bush is running on hot air and nothing else.

And no, I won't be sending Clinton any get well cards. There are plenty of assholes I respect, but he's not one of them.
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Laura Rozen
Juan Cole