"...Plainly,
 ours is a sitting culture
 in a generation which prefers comfort
 (or is forced to prefer it)
 to command, would rather incline its buttocks
 on a well-upholstered chair
 than the burly back of a slave..."

W.H. Auden, "XII The Common Life" in About the House, New York: Random House, 1959

It's been too hot lately to do anything but sit.  I was sitting with N. last night, who told me about going to the Topanga Community Center to hear Tom Hayden talk about the war in Afghanistan.  "We sat in the front row," she said.

"How did he look?" I asked, meaning Tom.  I haven't seen him in years.

"Old," she replied, not surprisingly.  Also, not surprisingly, he is against the war.  I had just read Rory Stewart's essay, "The Irresistible Illusion" in the July 9th issue of London Review of Books, so I could appreciate why Tom might be against the war, but I am getting off track.  I am sitting here hoping it won't be as hot as it has been lately.

I woke up remembering wanting to be an architect, once upon a time.  I believe I told you.  My dad liked the idea.  I think the idea I might want to be a decorator instead unnerved him.  In the end I became neither but for a while I was obsessed with Frank Lloyd Wright, who managed to design what surely must be some of the most uncomfortable chairs in the history of sitting.  

Frank Lloyd Wright's father, William Casey Wright, died in 1904.  Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo was designed in 1904 and demolished in 1950.  The Robie House in Chicago (1908) was acquired by its neighbor the Chicago Theological Seminary which tried to demolish it around the same time.  Wright showed up, a very old man by this point, and was photographed beating the bulldozer with his cane, saying, "This is what happens to great art when it winds up in the hands of the Church."  So the University of Chicago quietly stepped in and saved the house.  

I love when people call and ask if I am sitting down.  I know I will hear something sensational.