Carrion Luggage

Pei Attention

Time for another inspiration from "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

I.M. Pei

As much as some pedants who are slightly more pedantic than I am would like to believe otherwise, there is no One Correct Way to handle initials.

In part, this is a matter of style. Some sources require the formality of breaking the letters up with a space: I. M. Pei. Others, notably the influential AP style, dictate initials with periods and no space when the individual goes by initials: I.M. Pei. (Other notable examples include H.G. Wells and, amusingly, E.B. White. I say "amusingly" because E.B. White was the White of Strunk and White, the authors of the American English standard style manual Elements of Style.)

I'd like to emphasize, however, that this is a blog, not a scholarly report. While I try to adhere to conventions of spelling, word usage, and sentence structure, mostly for practice, I know I'm all over the place where it comes to style. Even sometimes typing incomplete sentences. Additionally, I do these things pretty quickly; like everyone, I make mistakes; and, of course, I don't know everything, having not memorized Chicago, AP, or Strunk and White style guidelines.

Let's also point out that it's AP for Associated Press, not A.P. or A. P.

But there's another wrinkle when it comes to names: in English-speaking areas, at least, it's generally accepted that we can style our own names. If I wanted to go by RoBert Waltz, then no one gets to tell me I'm doing it wrong. They can say it's dumb, silly, precious, or a marketing gimmick, sure, but not wrong. Incidentally, it wasn't E. E. Cummings who decided to style himself e e cummings, but one of his publishers; it amuses me to no end that that asshole's gravestone bears his fully-spelled legal name... in all capitals.

All of which is to say that both I.M. Pei and I. M. Pei are acceptable renderings of the famous architect's name.

And yet, both are, in a sense, wrong. I had to look this up, okay, because I'd never learned his full name: Ieoh Ming Pei. But, although he became a U.S. (or U. S. or US) citizen, he was born in Guangzhou  , and his birth name followed the traditional Chinese convention: Pei Ieoh Ming, or Bèi Yùmíng (not going to attempt to transcribe the Chinese pictograms), which puts the family name in the premier position. That Wiki page I just linked has all the information you might expect on Pei, except for when or why he began to style his name in the Western way. Or, if it does, I missed it; I tend to skim things.

On a personal note, I didn't first encounter his work in Paris or Hong Kong or Cleveland (the latter two of which I've never even been to), but close to home in Washington, D.C. (or DC or D. C.) The art museum he designed featured, I was told, the most acute angle in all of architecture. I don't know if that's still true or not. The museum was fairly new at the time, but the stone (I think it was granite) of that particular feature was already worn down at roughly human torso height, from all the tourists who just had to touch the angle. If my memory serves (which it might not), it's right there at the main entrance. This is why we don't touch art, folks.

I did get an opportunity recently, as regular readers already know, to see his perhaps most famous work, the glass pyramid at the Louvre. I didn't touch it, though.

And yet, the work of his that brings me the greatest joy is the one in Cleveland: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While, as I said, I haven't been there (I do intend to visit one day, even though it's in Ohio in general and Cleveland in particular), I have of course seen pictures. And that wonderful bastard made it feature a glass pyramid, echoing the one he designed for the Louvre, which I can only hope pissed off Parisians by diluting its uniqueness. Yes, I love France, but I can never pass up an opportunity to poke the French. It's also worth noting that even the Louvre pyramid pissed off a lot of French people, but since it's stuck there in plain sight and not on a different continent or mentioned in some obscure blog, I don't find that nearly as amusing.

But that's the thing about art, in which I include architecture and music: it's meant to elicit emotions. Sometimes, those emotions are negative. That's the risk you take. And just like with names, you can flaunt the "rules" and make stylistic choices, and everyone else has to live with them.