Tag
Landscape
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Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the roundtable featured presentations by Wai Chee Dimock, Heather Love, William Mills Todd III, J. Keith Vincent, and Cynthia Wall. To solicit brief position papers…
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Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping, fishing, swimming, texting, Pokémon catching, furtive sex, sunbathing, people watching). We imagine public parks as democratic spaces par excellence, offering “relief…
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Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper, and Tom Wolfe’s journalistic account of the Merry Pranksters (diehard trippers in both senses of the word). While American literary road…
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John Williams’s Perfect Anti-Western
Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones behind. This is the part of the world where Edward Abbey (in his 1968 Desert Solitaire) said he came “to look at and…
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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The Bonds of the Sea
What do war journalism and surfing have in common? On the face of it, not much: surfing is a frivolous pastime and war reporting a humanitarian endeavor to shine a light on violent conflict in ways that put the observer’s life on the line. However, the parallels between the two haunt journalist William Finnegan’s Barbarian…
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What to Do If Yer Bit By a Snake
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. In the middle of mind-numbingly boring days at work as an online content manager, Ronald Stanage challenges…
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A Bus Ride in Old Mexico
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. The bus from Hermosillo had rimmed out and leveled off on top of the Sierra Madre to…
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The Price of Great Art
When someone who made good art is accused of being a Bad Mother, can she ever be remembered as anything but a Bad Mother? In 1992, Mann’s book Immediate Family tapped into collective anxiety …
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Unstill Life
English nature writing has never been all that natural. While their American counterparts tend to imagine natural landscapes as “the last remaining place where civilization … has not fully infected the earth,” English nature writers have more often embraced a pastoral sense of human continuity with a landscape that has been modified and cultivated for…
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Yorkshire Calling: An Interview with Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips is a British writer, born in St. Kitts. He has authored and edited a wide range of works, including plays, screenplays, documentaries, and non-fiction. His novels, with geographies that traverse the Caribbean, America, Europe, and Africa, are particularly celebrated—they have won numerous prizes, been widely translated, and together constitute a significant contemporary literature…
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Saguaro Sketchbook
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. Tucson, Arizona-based artist Danny Martin is known regionally for large-format Dia de los Muertos inspired murals and mixed media projects, as well…
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Street Corner Society
The world thinks it knows Manhattan. A thousand movie portrayals, among them Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan, and TV shows like Sex and the City have imprinted its iconic skyscrapers on our imaginations. Looking at Richard Howe’s extraordinary photographic portrait of the island, New York in Plain Sight, reveals that this assumed familiarity is a sign…
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The Market and the Fest
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the rural villages of southern Germany, the rain rolls in breakers down the hills, curving along the little streets, stretching its path in tiny rivulets, dampening window box gardens. The villagers are so efficient: on the highways…
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In the Yellowstone Valley, a Beet Farmer with an Artist’s Soul
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of rural southern Montana. It has microbreweries, artists, a cowboy hat–fixing genius, solar-powered lofts, and huge summer street events, along with homeless people, addicts,…
