I didn’t learn this until I was catching up on the Little Minx, but Herbert Muschamp has left his position as New York Times architecture critic. Put aside all the concerns about Muschamp’s apparent biases toward his architect friends; I wasn’t aware of any of that. All I know is that I could never understand what the hell the guy was writing about. His words were fascinating, but they left me feeling alternately uncultured and exasperated. As Judith Shulevitz wrote:

Muschamp’s most idiosyncratic and notorious bit of metaphor-making came at the end of his rave write-up of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. After leaving the building, he spotted a woman alone on the corner, and asked himself, “Why can’t a building catch a moment like that?” Then, he realized, “the reason I’d had that thought was that I’d just come from such a building. And that the building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” Startled by this leap in logic? Let Muschamp explain: What they share is that their style “is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child. It can’t resist doing a dance with all the voices that say ‘No.’ It wants to take up a lot of space. And when the impulse strikes, it likes to let its dress fly up in the air.”

I love looking at architecture, but — in part because of Muschamp’s columns — I’ve always wondered if perhaps I was too stupid to appreciate it. Maybe now I’ll start to realize that’s not true.

Michael Tomasky writes about Republicans vs. Democrats on political strategy:

It seems that once the Democratic nominee is decided — in the current case, that would have been early March — the top Republican and conservative strategists start having conversations. They probably get together and say something like: “OK, John Kerry’s the nominee. In one sentence or maybe two, what do we want the American voting public to be thinking about John Kerry by November 2? The neighbors discussing their votes on election eve — what do we want them to be saying about Kerry?”

The answer they settled on was clearly something to the effect that “he can’t be trusted to fight the war on terror.” Then, once they’ve agreed on that, they say: “Okay. How do we get there from here? What are the stages of the argument?” And then they lay it out, and the stages are exactly as we’ve seen…

Republicans understand the world, and Democrats do not. Republicans know that voters will respond emotionally to character questions, and they know that the media will lap them up like a thirsty dog…

George W. Bush has a record the Democrats should have made mincemeat of. Right about now, the media should be writing, and American voters should be thinking: Golly, a million jobs lost, millions more in poverty, manufacturing down; no WMD’s, 1,000-plus dead, Iraq on the brink of civil war, al-Qaeda larger than ever and still recruiting, acts of worldwide terrorism on the rise, North Korea and Iran responding to the cowboy routine by going nuclear. This should have been easy.

Now, it’s too late for the Democrats to create these narratives. The counter-narrative is too well established.

I generally agree with this. I’m amazed that a party so incredibly hell-bent on retaking the White House could be so inept at doing so. The Democrats have stumbled along these last few months without any apparent strategy at all.

In the Democrats’ defense, they’ve had two disadvantages (well, three, if you include running a lousy candidate): one, they didn’t know who their nominee was going to be until six or seven months ago, so they didn’t have a solid campaign staff in place; two, once they’d chosen that nominee, he was a blank slate, open to being defined by one side or the other.

On the other hand, they’ve known who their opponent was going to be for the LAST FOUR YEARS. They’ve had four years to prepare for this, and they’re blowing it.

Meanwhile, look at the Republicans. Until January or February, they thought their opponent was going to be Howard Dean; parts of Bush’s January State of the Union Address could have been written with him in mind:

We have faced serious challenges together, and now we face a choice: We can go forward with confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us… It is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting — and false…

Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq.

In fact, after the address, word was that the Republicans had been caught off-guard by Kerry’s surge in the primaries. (And didn’t most Democrats vote for Kerry because he was more “electable” than Dean?) Soon after, they switched their focus to Kerry. One reason they could do this so quickly is that they’d previously assembled opposition research on all the Democratic candidates.

For whatever reason, the Republicans are just better at this stuff than Democrats. I think it’s simplistic for Tomasky to say that “liberals tend to want to believe the best about the world” and that this “makes liberals less likely to play on voters’ fears — makes them want to believe that they actually can win a campaign on the issues.” Anyone is capable of believing the best or the worst about the world. But Tomasky is partly right. For whatever reason, Republicans don’t mind playing dirty politics and Democrats do.

Of course, it would help if the Democrats ran a decent candidate. There are 22 Democratic governors out there — maybe next time some of them will run.

Was I really planning to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a few weeks ago? Who was I kidding? Fortunately, I didn’t even buy it (either the book or the notion, take your pick). After giving up on that idea, I tried to find another book to read. I spent lots of time at the Strand and elsewhere, picking up books that looked fascinating and then putting them back down. I just didn’t feel like investing the time in reading a whole book. I wound up frustrated.

And yet at the same time, I found myself catching up on past issues of the New Yorker (probably my favorite magazine). I realized, hey, the pieces are shorter — but I’m still reading! Since then, I’ve picked up The Best American Magazine Writing 2004, chock-full of magazine-length pieces. I’m currently reading the first piece, about how interrogations work, that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly last fall.

I’m also thinking that if I want to get paid to write, the best place to start is with magazine articles. So I’m looking into taking a course this fall, either through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop (I took a screenwriting class through them a couple of years ago) or through Media Bistro. (Ahhh, the advantages to living in/near Manhattan.)

I think a class would not only teach me some stuff, but would also give me a kick-start into the professional writing process.