DISCOVERIES

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Matthew Frederick

MIT Press: 102 pp.,$12.95

SMALL things understood by architects prove useful to us all. Why? In item 101 of this charming little book, Matthew Frederick provides an answer: “There is perhaps no other profession that requires one to integrate such a broad range of knowledge into something so specific and concrete. An architect must be knowledgeable in history, art, sociology, physics, psychology, materiality, symbology, political process, and innumerable other fields, and must create a building that meets regulatory codes, keeps out the weather, withstands earthquakes, has functioning elevators and mechanical systems, and meets the complex functional and emotional needs of its users.” How to draw a line, the meaning of figure-ground theory, hand-lettering and the fact that windows look dark in the daytime -- each item has resonance beyond architecture. Books like this are brief tutorials in the art of seeing, a skill useful in every aspect of life on the planet.

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An Elemental Thing

Eliot Weinberger

New Directions: 194 pp., $16.95 paper

WINDS in ancient China, wrens, the Kaluli people of Papau New Guinea, Portuguese swashbucklers, Indian tigers -- the Earth is an open book, and there’s no stopping a curious mind from traveling to its far corners for bits of treasure, stories, characters, metaphors, ideas. Eliot Weinberger never leaves his desk but is nonetheless a roving, intrepid author of literary essays and political articles. Reading the 34 essays collected here is something like visiting Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology: Sparks fly in his pieces on Aztec and Chinese conceptions of time, SS. Catherine of Siena and Perpetua of Carthage, the Arctic hysteria that Inuits call pibloktoq. Here is a sea of images far denser than any film. He quotes Ezra Pound: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”

Think of the vortex as a unit in literature, like the measure in music or the iamb in poetry. Picture Weinberger’s essays as whirling vortexes, the author leading the charge against old-fashioned narrative in which someone else orders the images into story. In this brave new literature, a chaos of images, characters and stories swirls like electrons around a nucleus. They bond with other images and fall apart again, down through the ages.

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Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog

The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

Kitty Burns Florey

Harcourt: 150 pp., $14.95 paper

SENTENCE diagramming was introduced in U.S. public schools in 1877; it is how many of us learned grammar, including Kitty Burns Florey, who began diagramming sentences in sixth grade under the tutelage of Sister Bernadette, a no-nonsense nun with a passion for parsing. “It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics,” a “bridge between a dog and the description of a dog,” Florey writes. “[I]t was a picture of language.” There is indeed something thrilling about seeing a lyrical sentence spread out on a page: “Death is the black camel which stands at every man’s gate” (an Arab-Berber-Moroccan-Sanskrit proverb). Some of Florey’s examples take up two pages (breathtaking scientific equations). Some are elegantly lean: “Boys eat snails.” There’s an appealing lightness in Florey’s resurrection of this dying art: “I do believe that clarity in speech and precision and consistency in writing will never cease to be important. . . . I suppose if I have any rules of writing, they would go something like this: 1. Communicate. 2. Communicate elegantly. 3. When elegance is beside the point, fuhgeddaboutit.”