There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

December 18, 2011 by Nalina Moses

At the public library, searching for a copy of Sigmund Freud’s case histories, I found many shelves devoted to this writings. There were enough volumes to fill a room. In addition to practicing medicine, proselytizing for psychoanalysis, and caring for a family with six children, Freud wrote. He wrote scientific and scholarly articles about analysis, medicine, art, literature and his own life. It’s hard to imagine a practicing doctor today finding the time to sit and write like that, or even to sit and think like that. It was a different time, and Freud was a different kind of doctor.

Freud corresponded with colleagues, friends and patients too. He wrote letters, by hand, in French and English as well as German, in a florid, looping script that leans dramatically to the right. That slant is an indicator, apparently, of “acute intelligence,” one that’s single-minded and that does not easily admit other points of view. It’s very different, for example, from Karl Jung’s more hesitant, perpendicular handwriting, which indicates a “profound intelligence,” one broader and more open to influence. I much prefer Freud’s writing, an inky, artful mess, to Jung’s childlike horizontal scrawl. I especially like the way Freud’s letters are crammed together on the page. It’s baroque, passionate and personal. It’s as if he’s in a rush to get out the flood of words, that is, of thoughts, and as if he finds physical pleasure in the act of writing. His work relied deeply on language, and this shows in his hand.

December 11, 2011 by Nalina Moses

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.

August 25, 2011 by Nalina Moses

People who hover about the fashion industry – writers, buyers, and hangers-on – tend to be larger-than-life characters, for whom drawing attention to themselves is part of the game. The runway shows and seasonal trends are merely backdrops for their own fluttery, fashionable selves. Andre Leon Talley, Polly Mellon, and Diana Vreeland all fit the bill. For a long time I thought of Suzy Menkes, the longtime fashion editor of the the International Herald Tribune who now contributes to the Times, this same way, as a sort of English Anna Piaggi. She bubbles over when she talks, and sports a little back pompadour like Olive Oyl’s.

But after reading her recent appreciation of Haider Ackermann, whose work she says is “just fine materials slipping over the body,” I was bowled over. All at once she expresses the excitement of discovering an unorthodox new designer, pinpoints his position within the industry, and captures the elemental power of the clothes. Read this passage, which teeters on the brink of parody but stands, somehow, as well-informed criticism: “I thought that there was a mournful note to the work, like the call of the muezzin to prayer. Yet the clothes were not sad, although they were often dark, in the way of anthracite storm clouds, a midnight sky or a puddle on a night road." There’s something that happens when a skillful writer writes about something that she cares about deeply – her language heats up and goes a bit overboard. It’s a kind of love.