Jim just loves to garden, yes he does. He likes nothing better than to put on his little overalls and his straw hat. He says, “Let’s go get those tools, Jim.” But then doubt begins to set in. He says, “What is a garden, anyway?” And thoughts about a “modernistic” garden begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve. He stands in the driveway a long time. “Horticulture is a groping in the dark into the obscure and unfamiliar, kneeling before a disinterested secret, slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle, birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and destroy, pull out and apply salt, hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots, where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous, the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love, into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating, through the nose, the earsplitting necrology of it, the withering, shriveling, the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris, wireworms are worse than their parents, there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently at me, the me who so loves to garden because it prevents the heaving of the ground and the untimely death of porch furniture, and dark, murky days in a large city and the dream home under a permanent storm is also a factor to keep in mind.”
Ernst Haas-Western Skies Motel, Colorado, 1977. It’s a wonderful use of color, along with those clouds and that light. A mood is created, and not much extra visual information is provided.
Ernst Haas-There’s so much visual information, but is there? What is communicated through your eye and to your brain? Route 66 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969
—
As posted:
Via Mick Hartley, British photographer Mark Power’s Good Morning, America, vols. 1 (mostly Arkansas) & 2 (mostly across the South).
Power:
‘I keep a physical and metaphorical distance between myself and the subject. It’s a way of delineating my ‘foreignness’ and is a similar stance to the one I took while working in Poland making The Sound of Two Songs (2004-09). It’s comes very naturally to me; I’ve always felt I’m better at observing than participating, so to stand back and watch from afar suits me very well.’
I often find myself drawn to photos with some distance.
As posted:
Via Mick Hartley, Steve Fitch Photography has neon motel signs glowing into the Western night.
What’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?
“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’
—
Well, there’s Donald Judd and Marfa, Texas, which looks interesting:
As previously posted, The Critic Laughs, by Hamilton:
Do you long for the days of unabashed American consumerism? Are you nostalgic for nights lit only by a soft, neon glow on the underbellies of clouds? Return to a time when America broadcast its brash, unironic call to the heavens.
But it can be empty, and lonely, and full of hard work and suffering:
Montana Pastoral
I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises. I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,
Thirst where the grasses burn in early May And thistle, mustard and the wild oat stay.
There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.
So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove,
And found no images of pastoral will, But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.
Immediately, I think of Edward Hopper: The lonely cityscape at night or the familiar glow of gas station lights cast into the American wilderness. The eye might want to linger among the colors, shapes and clouds even though the mind knows this is pretty much an empty street in a ‘post-industrial’ zone.
Perhaps it has do with another strand of expression: The break into free verse from past forms. The move from American Romanticism to Modernism which occurred this early past century. William Carlos Williams produced many good poems from a process of earnest, scrapbook-style intensity in trying to discover, redefine, and order a new poetic form within a modern ‘urban landscape.’
The individual artist is quite alone in the task he’s set before himself, and like much of modernism, it’s a rather big task.
Pastoral
When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors.
No one will believe this of vast import to the nation
