Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
Knowing the tone of these, I didn’t experience the same cringe/dread that the first one engendered, and just enjoyed the trainwreck. One of those books that has me cracking up quietly to myself, while my wife comments ‘I don’t need to know what you think is funny in this book but I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.’
a note about The Honeywood Settlement
Finally picked up the sequel to The Honeywood Files, which was absolutely one of my favorite books I’ve read over the last few years. It picks up right after the client Sir Leslie Brash has moved into the new house, and continues with architect James Spinlove and the builder Grigblay as they all try to settle accounts… and figure out if they all got what they wanted out of this exercise. The editor, who comments on each piece of correspondence, is as wry and funny as ever.
a note about The Honeywood Settlement
Interestingly the author decides to go chill out for a while in Yunnan province, which is apparently known for having a laid back culture. This was also written about in Dan Wang's book Breakneck, which I just finished. A place I had never heard of!
a note about I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
This was interesting but not revelatory: stories from working in the last-mile logistics world in China, where you can get a LOT more stuff delivered to you quickly. The best parts were there, which I assume were the original blog posts that went viral in China. And then, because he got a book deal, there is a significant amount of padding to turn it into a whole book - notes on every job the author has ever had.
a note about I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
However! This did leave me with a specific idea that has been referenced over and over again between Erika and I. The titular Burntcoat in the book is a cheap, large warehouse that the artist acquires - it becomes a big studio space for her artwork, and the manager's upper offices in the warehouse become a bohemian apartment for her - barely heated, sparsely furnished, but obviously becomes home over time. This is honestly a kind of dream of ours now: a warehouse to make big ambitious art in, and a spot to crash in for extended periods. We looked very closely at buying a building a couple of years ago for this exact purpose, and it's still on the vision board.
So, in the way that William Gibson can capture a whole idea in a tight phrase (eg CPUs), we now talk about this future space as our Burntcoat.
a note about Burntcoat
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
This letter must have been sent to Spinlove pinned to the other papers, by an oversight. It shows Grigblay's business to be conducted in the old-fashioned style that still lingers, with the best traditions of the building crafts, in the provinces, where son follows father to the bench or the scaffold, and the master calls his men by their Christian names, knows the domestic circumstances of each, and distributes joints and poultry among them at Christmas. There may be somewhere in this world happier men than these, associated in more delightful work, but it is a hard thing to imagine.
an excerpt from The Honeywood Settlement
Between them sits a jellied gammon and a tureen of anaemic disintegrating potatoes. A mysterious sauce, wobbling under a brown meniscus, is deposited on the table by Midge. Their wine glasses stand empty. The decanter is also empty.
an excerpt from Helm
I also liked to stroll around the Lianhua Supermarket there, and I would while away my days off in IKEA, because it was nearby and had AC. I'd find a couch and curl up for a nap, which nobody seemed to mind at first, but eventually the capitalists removed their mask of kindness and sent security to move along anyone who was sleeping—because you can't wake up someone only pretending to be asleep, the only ones disturbed were those of us genuinely there to get some rest.
I didn't buy furniture in the store, but I often took advantage of the Absolut Vodka promotion in the first-floor food shop. A bottle of vodka cost around one hundred yuan on discount and came with a free bottle of juice. I'd then spend the evening sitting by my window drinking and looking out at the bustling streets. I felt especially serene in those moments. Though this might have just been the alcohol.an excerpt from I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
[raiding the pantry for a midnight adventure] Finally they seized an enormous box of chocolate biscuits. "They must be Miss Gozzling's," said Emma, giggling. "She never gives any to us. We'd better call her Miss Guzzling!" and these they removed without conscience or care, though before they had tried not to make their taking too obvious. But Charlotte had a faint twinge of shame about Miss Gozzling, thinking how kind she could be and how terrible to have so many chins.
an excerpt from The Summer Birds
The popular conception of the ancient architects as intellectual supermen has to be considerably modified when an unprejudiced study is made of their works. Amazing as it may seem, no advance was made in their mechanical methods from the IVth dynasty onwards, and it is difficult to determine what was the factor which enabled them to make their early pro-gress. The Egyptian mind was not, in matters unconnected with religion, speculative. His mathematics were so cumbersome as to be inadequate for any really refined calculation, and were rigidly practical. He could use primitive appliances with an almost incredible refinement and was a superb organizer of labour-therein lay his genius. The more, however, his constructional methods are studied, the more one is convinced that if any detail in a piece of work has to be explained by an apparatus of any com-plication, then that explanation is certainly wrong.
an excerpt from Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture