{"id":930,"date":"2007-09-18T21:27:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-18T21:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=930"},"modified":"2007-09-18T21:27:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-18T21:27:00","slug":"the-right-architecture-for-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=930","title":{"rendered":"The Right Architecture for Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

M. and I played hooky and went to Taos<\/a> last weekend. I spent part of two mornings reading In Search of Zarathrustra<\/em><\/a> (interview with author Paul Kriwaczek here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The book is both an exploration of how Zorastrian ideas influenced Western monotheisms and an travel book about Iran, Afghanistan, and other regions of Central Asia.<\/p>\n

It seemed right to read it on the patio of El Pueblo Lodge<\/a>, surrounded by adobe walls, because as Kriwaczek reminds his readers, the word paradise<\/em> comes from the Persian for walled garden<\/a>, and many of those walls must have been mud brick.<\/p>\n

The old parts of Taos follow the Middle Eastern\/Mediterranean model: walled off from the street and easily fortified. I am acutely aware of the difference when I come home to my own house, built in the Celto-Germanic model: rectangular and decorated with antlers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. and I played hooky and went to Taos last weekend. I spent part of two mornings reading In Search of Zarathrustra (interview with author Paul Kriwaczek here). The book is both an exploration of how Zorastrian ideas influenced Western monotheisms and an travel book about Iran, Afghanistan, and other regions of Central Asia. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[32,4],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-new-mexico","tag-scholarship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-f0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":999,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=999","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":0},"title":"Time Warped in Taos","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A slow day today: a couple of hours at the Wired coffeehouse in Taos, N.M., a visit to the art gallery where a friend was \"working\" on a slow Easter Sunday (in other words, M. and I were the only people to drop by) and continued reading of Stephen Oppenheimer's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1139,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1139","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":1},"title":"The Difference between Santa Fe and Taos","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Looking back to the artists and writers of 1930s-40s Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico writer Paul Horgan observed,Between Santa Fe and Taos there was a sense of rival constituencies, and sensitive persons tended to be loyal to the powers, virtues, and dangers of one place or the other. Santa\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1423601823","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12428,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12428","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":2},"title":"Back in Taos, Layers of Memories","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 9, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Back in Taos, New Mexico, to visit old friends, I keep walking past my favorite hangout of years past, Caff\u00e9 Tazza on Kit Carson Road. It closed in 2018, I think and it had been going downhill from its slightly entheogenic-esoteric height. The food offerings diminished, the interior became grubbier,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/back-patio-at-caffe-tazza.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/back-patio-at-caffe-tazza.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/back-patio-at-caffe-tazza.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":442,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=442","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":3},"title":"Taos Notes","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 23, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I got in the new Jeep, headed up the \"secret cutoff\" and came over the mountains and down to Taos for a couple of days.There is always a nostalgia component for me here, dating back to the summers in college when I worked on what you might call\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8270,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8270","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":4},"title":"Got Ghosts with Your Historic House?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was handling the sale of my mother's Arizona home after her death, the real estate agent and I were perched on the kitchen counters doing the paperwork, because the furniture had already been moved out. Working through a long sale-listing questionnaire, I came to a question asking if\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ghosts\"","block_context":{"text":"ghosts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ghosts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10898,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10898","url_meta":{"origin":930,"position":5},"title":"The Robot God and the Underworld Gate","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Earlier this month, M. and I were in Taos, New Mexico, for what I think was the fifth annual PASEO outdoor art festival. The interesting thing about PASEO is that it happens mostly at night, in a town with a late-medieval street plan that was built for ox carts and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"art\"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=art"},"img":{"alt_text":"Robot God","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/idol-daytime.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}