Do you hear the words in your head as you read?

 July 18, 2022

“Teachin’ bitches how to swim.” (Death Grips, “Hacker”, from “The Money Store”, 2012, Epic Records.)

It's not the things I have done that are funny but it's the things I have nearly done. I once told a girl that I was going to be an architect, and she was very nearly impressed. Of course, being an architect is the most intellectual thing you can be outside of being an intellectual. I had a couple roadblocks on the way to becoming an intellectual as well. I could never get much into reading until I could hear the words inside my head, for example. I hated being forced to write in cursive as well, but that's a story for another day. I still hear the words I read and write "silently" to this day. No one questions whether an architect can hold the image of a design in his head as he works. And I wonder if it's not assumed that someone could also hold the sounds of words in their head as they read or write… 

Do we need all this concrete? Back to architecture for a minute… This caught my eye on the 'nets the other day. Basically we're using too much concrete. Most buildings are over designed. Concrete slabs only experience breakage stress along certain stress lines. They did the geometry on this, as far back as the 1940s. It was an Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, who ribbed floor slabs along their principal stress lines. A group in Zürich just recently took this to its logical conclusion by removing all the concrete from a concrete slab except along those principal stress lines, and replacing the cores with some new foam material.

Concrete is a very carbon intensive product to make. It releases a lot of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to make it. But basically 3-D printing this foam framework, to pour the concrete around, makes it possible to use much less concrete without sacrificing strength. The concrete is not cut away to make this framework-geometries-type slab, but poured into a mold you can make very quickly. 

The concrete companies might not like this because they want to sell the same amount of concrete. But it turns out we can use concrete much more efficiently, and we can use whatever new material we replace traditional concrete with, much more efficiently as well.

And I can't help but draw the analogy between this, and reading and writing without "spacing out", but rather by hearing the sound of words in your head.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sure; a lot of well-known writers write maximally, not one word at a time, but wandering all over the space until they hit on a topic.

Sure; there is often raised a question of trust, as if an "untrustworthy" author's words could "do something" to you if you pay attention. What could it do to you if you don't pay attention? Truth is, there is the habit of the author, but there is also the choice of the reader, to develop a skill or not. And it’s not fair to portray the lack of a skill as a choice not to do it.

I won't be the one to push you in the water to learn to swim, but you are right at the edge of the pool…

That's how I see it. If concrete is also essential why was it so performative to Trump? If it is so unassailable, why was President Trump so defensive of it? Is the weight of quantity a replacement for well structured concrete slabs? I'm still not an architect; I've never worked construction trades. But I know for a fact that throwing words on paper like throwing spaghetti at the wall doesn't work. The intimidation of a large quantity of words doesn't substitute for the persuasion of a well crafted structure of words. 

There's a good reason to support less waste in concrete construction. It's a huge contributor to climate change, and the end of a livable planet. But there are solutions that embrace beauty, and to be honest, restore a modicum of dignity to the building trades. They're absurdly being told by bad actors like the former President Trump to embrace being part of the problem, when they could be the largest part of the solution. Our relationship with the built environment needs to be reinvigorated with all the passion for technology, science, and systems thinking that the populace has come to appreciate in other areas of life. The building trades can do it – they've always relished doing good work. It all comes down to turning aside "more, more", for "better, better", instead.

But I'll focus on my responsibility to my trade. And I note that F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, that as he got on in life, he started to care less and less about writing a good passage, and more and more about "writing one good sentence." He was cheekily exaggerating, of course. But pedagogically emphasizing the need for writers to try to write "one good sentence" one day means that they should not only write a lot and work hard at it, they should also write as if every minuscule part of their product matters. Perhaps if we keep at it, someone in the future will in fact write "one good sentence."

ツ