Something I should own.
I requested this months ago! Currently, I owe about seven or eight books to the library but I’m willing to return them all just to have a look at this book here.
Books organized by color.
My professor was giving books away this morning and here is what I walked away with. Post-grad reading materials are covered.
Ellen Birrell, my mentor, bought this book for me as a graduation gift.
Loving her and crying forever.
Good afternoon.
I ran into Jeffrey Vallance last night and this is what he gave me.
D-503 has his first “dream,” and is soon diagnosed as having contracted the dreaded “soul-disease.” As D-503 describes it in his own richly suggestive language, such a condition marks the development of an interior self, an individual identity now distinct from the social aggregate: “The plane has acquired volume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the mirror - inside you.” (We, 89;16).
— From Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity by Phillip E. Wegner
In We, however, Zamyatin first turns his critical gaze onto the other element of this dialectc - the social spaces of the modern city. The city that the reader finds in We is unlike any yet built: Zamyatin’s “One State” (Yedinoe Gosudarstvo) - an array of perfect geometric forms constructed, like the massive “Green Wall” which separates the city from the outside world, of “impregnable, eternal glass” - is the realization of the modernist dream of the new super-rational “machine for living.” This design at once recalls Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s vision of the crystal palace and prefigures real-world, glass-box urban architectures, such as those of Mies Van der Rohe and the CIAM group.
—
From Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity by Phillip E. Wegner.
(Many more quotes to come in the next few days. I’ll try to space them out.)
