Tunnel of dust

  • On the Calculation of Volume [SPOILER ALERT]

    On the Calculation of Volume is a popular book series by Solvej Balle, a Danish fiction writer. Six of the seven titles in the series have been published in the original language; four have appeared in English, a fifth soon to arrive this November.

    For those who do not plan to read the books, please see below for a full synopsis. This information is unavailable anywhere else.

    Book I: Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, gets mysteriously trapped inside the eighteenth of November (it’s always spelled out like that) for an entire year. She relives this day 366 times and remains, inexplicably, entirely sane.

    Book II: Tara escapes the time warp of the eighteenth of November by swallowing a sestersius right before she falls asleep on day 366. Success! However, now she has had a weird experience that no one else can identify with. Luckily, just as in Book I, this doesn’t bother her very much. She continues to live an upper-middle-class life unencumbered by computers, cell phones, politics, war, finances, or other people.

    Book III: Same as Book II but all the mentions of tea and various European linens have been expunged. This a new time warp, one that only the reader is meant to experience.

    Book IV: Remembering the most interesting thing that she did in Book I (purchase a telescope), Tara decides to become an astronomer. This is simply too much for her husband, Thomas, who so far has been extremely understanding, having accepted her explanations of a rift in time without question on at least sixty-one eighteenths of November. But going back to school, at Tara’s age? It’s embarrassing. Divorce court gives Thomas the house, which is only fair; it’s been in his family for generations. Tara moves to Leuven. As she packs up her childhood belongings, we finally learn where she was born: Hampton Springs, Florida.

    Book V: At astronomy school, Tara meets a much older man, Gustav, who has ALSO experienced the same day for a whole year (for him it was the twelfth of February). They begin a torrid affair. Tara dip-dyes her hair green.

    Book VI: One evening, Tara and Gustav are passionately kissing under the old clock tower on campus. The clock strikes twelve; its hands begin to spin out of sync, faster and faster, until the whole world whirls underneath Tara’s and Gustav’s feet. They melt into the surface of the earth. The rest of the book is their lucid observations on being liquid versions of themselves, slowly percolating through the crust and mantle of the planet.

    Book VII: Once they reach the earth’s molten core, Tara and Gustav’s liquid selves are shot out into space. As they hurtle back into the atmosphere, they reconstitute, but in each other’s bodies. Finally they land, gently, on a beach. It is January 1, 0 C.E., Kingston, Jamaica. They live that same day for the rest of their lives. Since they’re doing it together, it’s great; no further conflict arises. On their 5,786th first of January they are killed by a small meteor. The book ends after a brief soliloquy by the meteor on the incomprehensibility of time and the power of love.

  • Clothes

    Here in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side and certain blocks of the West Village, it is in vogue to wear clothing of random sizes and mismatched affect. The idea is that you are funky, although it is actually about nudity—advertising the raw body’s supreme unneed for the compensations of fashion.

    At first I called this style “I just found these clothes on the side of the road.” But as I walked down Seventh Avenue late last night, alone, the city thronging and singing, I thought about how there are, indeed, always clothes on the side of the road, and their destiny is not the figure of a rich twenty-five-year-old. In Manhattan, in Brooklyn, on I-95, on highway feeders and scenic routes, on small-town streets and in business parks and cul-de-sac turnarounds: frequent encounters, in public space, with discarded objects made for the human form is an experience unique to our time alive in the universe.

    Some will be picked up and used again. Most will go straight to a landfill. Pants and socks, underwear and blouses. Basketball shorts. Crumpled blazers. A child’s T-shirt, slaked with soil.

  • The price of a curve

    In my first semester of architecture school I drew a curve. Long and wiggling, ducking in and out of itself. It was a wall. I was happy. 

    When I showed it to my teacher she laughed. How did you construct that, she asked. I just drew it, I said. She laughed again. You can’t do that—you can’t just draw a curve. You have to build it from other stuff, circles and arcs and describable geometry. She showed me a project all architecture teachers love, a cheeky primer on how to draw a croissant using tangents, radii, etc. Ignoring the primer, which made my mind and eyes bleed, I tried to explain that I fundamentally didn’t understand why someone, including me, could not simply draw a curve.

    She was gracious, a patient and usually careful educator. But decades of swimming in the sweet chlorine of architecture had rotted part of her brain, and she could not respond with precision. It’s not done, she said. Now take your curve and r-r-r-r-rationalize it. No, you may not “just draw” a curve. You just CAN’T!

    Five years later, there are curves in a project I am trying to get built, a little park in New York City. I didn’t make the curves, someone else did, and they are rational. And now I know why: it’s cheaper and faster. She could have just said that, but it would have been crass.

    Fear of money really slows things down. I would have liked to learn how to draw a cheap curve that could be created with off-the-shelf products or a simple fabrication process. Instead, proudly thinking that I was rejecting an exercise in fetishistic formalism and the tawdry imprint of Europe (see: croissant), I spent the rest of that semester drawing curves that only Lauren Sánchez could afford. Lauren, if you are reading this, my curves are still for sale.