Item: 1 orange bookmark
I rounded off my vacation by going to Aloud tonight at the Central Library. The library also currently has an exhibit of California vintage fruit crate labels, which was really cool, and at which I acquired a free corresponding bookmark. I have a great collection of bookmarks, which I should write about another time.
Anyway, tonight's featured conversation was between Alain de Botton and Christopher Hawthorne. Alain de Botton is a writer whose books result in bizarre categorizations, such "philosophy/self help." The self-help bit is not to be taken seriously, of course. Or is it? When you apply serious intellectual scrutiny to common everyday experience you end up with something either profound or absurd, or both, which is one of the reasons his books are fun to read. Christopher Hawthorne I wasn't familiar with before, but he is an architecture critic for the LA Times.
The title of Alain de Botton's latest book is The Architecture of Happiness, also the title of tonight's event. Maybe the basic starting point was that places matter a great deal, affect a person's psyche a great deal. This is the reason there are places a person is drawn to again and again. When you start to look closely, you can learn to recognize the messages encoded in a structure's design. One suggestion that I thought was particularly interesting is that a society's taste in buildings expresses what it is that's missing, for which reason so many suburban developments are designed (and named) with a faux-rustic theme. As it happened, the whole conversation was fairly timely to a few things I was thinking about on my vacation, to be unfolded in days to come.
Anyway, tonight's featured conversation was between Alain de Botton and Christopher Hawthorne. Alain de Botton is a writer whose books result in bizarre categorizations, such "philosophy/self help." The self-help bit is not to be taken seriously, of course. Or is it? When you apply serious intellectual scrutiny to common everyday experience you end up with something either profound or absurd, or both, which is one of the reasons his books are fun to read. Christopher Hawthorne I wasn't familiar with before, but he is an architecture critic for the LA Times.
The title of Alain de Botton's latest book is The Architecture of Happiness, also the title of tonight's event. Maybe the basic starting point was that places matter a great deal, affect a person's psyche a great deal. This is the reason there are places a person is drawn to again and again. When you start to look closely, you can learn to recognize the messages encoded in a structure's design. One suggestion that I thought was particularly interesting is that a society's taste in buildings expresses what it is that's missing, for which reason so many suburban developments are designed (and named) with a faux-rustic theme. As it happened, the whole conversation was fairly timely to a few things I was thinking about on my vacation, to be unfolded in days to come.
posted by Karen at 9:28 PM
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