After admiring so many of John Updike’s short stories and essays I’m reading his famous novel Rabbit, Run.  It’s something entirely different.  In shorter form Updike is masterfully concise, using language in quick, knife-like strokes to make a point or set a mood.  He simply never misses – each meticulously crafted phrase lands exactly where it needs to.  The novel, in contrast, is stupendously overwritten.  Updike has widened his scope and also inflated his language.  At first I was disappointed, since I wanted to wade through two hundred pages of the lean, practically skeletal prose of his short stories.  But I’ve been won over by the dense, twisting paragraphs in Rabbit, Run, which are fattened with layers of details and descriptions.  There’s in them a deep desire, I think, to capture everything – literally, each single thing – that is seen, experienced and observed, and to put it into language.

I’ve always been smitten by Updike’s unapologetically bourgeois persona.  In photos as a young man he’s lean and awkward-looking, the striving scholarship boy who went to Harvard.  And in photos as an older man (he died in 2009) he’s white-haired and professorial, a literary icon.  But he doesn’t seem to change.  Throughout his life he seems to have maintained the same good spirits, the same build, and the same preppy (without a twist) way of dressing.  There’s none of the bluster of Mailer, torment of Cheever, or emotionalism of Roth.  Updike wrote with avant-garde brio under the guise of absolute normalcy.  I like this notion of the writer as a person who simply gets up every morning and writes.  And I like this photo of Updike, from 1960, the same year Rabbit, Run was published, very much.  He’s got the suit, tie and brush cut of an insurance salesman (or should I say, a vegetable-peeler salesman), but poses with a cockily tilted cigarette and a deep, true smile.  You get a sense that he’s an ordinary man and also a sensualist, reaching for everything possible both in experience and in language.

What does it mean when a girl goes to see a George Clooney movie and ends up more interested in the scenery?  The Descendants was shot on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kaui, where the story unfolds.  Everyone you see on screen roams around in flip-flops, shorts, and bikini tops or flowered shirts, surrounded by hibiscus bushes and palm trees.  But I never got a deep sense of the landscape, of what it’s like to live in the tropics, surrounded by crazily blue waters, nestled within valleys that are older than time.  In Hawaiian cities life unfurls below the volcanic hills, that lie all around like sleeping giants.  I worked on two shops in Honolulu International Airport years ago and to distinguish them everyone (executives, construction workers, shopgirls) called them Diamond Head and Ewa, because they faced the sides of the island where those volcanoes are.  People used the formations to orient themselves, the same way New Yorkers once used the Twin Towers.

To signal when the action in The Descendants shifts from one island to the next, there’s an old-fashioned movie map of the archipelago, with a curved dotted line that stretches from one island to the next.  As we walked out of the movie I complained to my friend that Kaui had a different landscape than Oahu, with different volcanoes, but that the movie hadn’t shown them to us.  “How are we supposed to know when we’re on one island or the other?"  I asked.  "When we see it on the map,” he deadpanned.  The characters in the movie run around, haplessly and attractively, on brochure-pretty beaches and in sprawling houses with overstuffed furniture.  Where are mountains and skies that preside over the beaches and cities, and over their lives? 

There’s no time when music meant as much to me as it did when I was in architecture school in Cambridge.  The endless stream of pop music pumped through my Walkman was as essential as oxygen.  Boston was a good music town.  There were small clubs, student radio stations, and stores selling secondhand records and tapes.  The Pixies and Tracy Chapman had made it big.  The day I packed up and left Cambridge, that is, the day my adulthood began, was the day Kurt Cobain died.  The boy behind the counter at the copy shop who was helping me with my resume that afternoon looked a lot like him, with the same stringy blond hair, clear blue eyes, and ghostly pallor.  Each time I spoke to him he fixed me with his stare and nodded slowly, as if to say “Yes, of course, but what’s it all for?”

Sometimes on weekends I walked all the way down Massachusetts Avenue to the Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston to hunt for music.  The store filled the first two floors of an old warehouse building that had been converted to luxury condos by Frank Gehry, who added penthouses and canopies with signature flaring outriggers.  The building always seemed a bit overdressed for the surroundings, as if it had been flown in from SoHo.  As a high-minded student of architecture, I dismissed its deliriously over-scaled decorations – its hat and skirt – as empty gestures.  But seeing the building again last week, on a grey afternoon, it struck me as a perfect urban folly.  It still feels a bit too flashy for the surroundings, and the record store has been replaced by a discount appliance store.  But its kooky, soaring profile brightens the city, and brightens the day.

The Carpenter Center is Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the few modern buildings in Harvard Square.  It’s both conspicuous and invisible.  Set on a narrow, seventeenth-century block between two staid brick university buildings, it’s freakish and liberating.  It doesn’t feel like an institutional building and it doesn’t even feel like a building, really.  It feels more like a device for moving students in and out of its studios and galleries, a machine for coming and going.

The building is spectacularly porous.  It has no center; in plan it’s two lung-shaped volumes connected with ramps that pass all the way through and spin off centripetally to the sidewalks at each side.  Strangely, for a great modern building, there are no canonical photographs of it, and no single point of view from which you can see it as one whole thing.  Approaching it on the sidewalk, you see the ramp and one half of the building, or the building cleft into two dissimilar parts.  When I visited the Mill Owner’s Association Building in Ahmedabad I realized that Le Corbusier’s buildings, no matter how good they look from the outside, don’t lend themselves to one image.  Instead they generate images for the moving visitor cinematically, and, in the case of that building, spectacularly.  I could not leave the Mill Owner’s Building – I walked through it again and again.  At the Carpenter Center, where I spent time roaming the galleries, I felt as if I were leaving it and then entering it again and again.