view from baxter

January 30, 2008

The Backs

Allow me to introduce The Backs, a new and ongoing series I've been working on. I don't necessarily like or approve of putting work out before its time, but I've been sitting on these pictures for a while and think this particular edit holds up pretty well. Some of the photos will be familiar to regular viewers of this blog. Most were shot in 2007. Many were shot in New Jersey.

With The Backs I'm trying to pin down the intersections between natural and manufactured worlds. By natural I mean water, dirt, trees, and sky, and the animals that live there. By manufactured I mean anything man-made that attempts to intrude on, or even replace, those environments and creatures. With these photos I’m questioning what it means to decorate a wall with a blue sky, visit an exotic animal in an urban zoo, or leave a dead deer on the side of the road.

thoughts (1)

January 16, 2008

New Books

The vacation was great. Thank you for asking. Costa Rica is a wonderful place. On E's birthday we took a river trip and saw many monkeys and other wildlife. On the morning of my birthday we woke up in a 200-year-old rainforest. It would be hard to beat either day.

I didn't drive once on the trip, which was a great present. It also gave me time to read (which is hard when you drive as much as me; hmmm...maybe that's why Americans don't read anymore). I read four books while we were gone, definitely an above average number for me during a typical two-week period. I enjoyed each book that I read, and thought I'd briefly share my thoughts on them.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clark: Eight short stories that take place in the same world as Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Shorter than that book, and therefore more manageable, but also less fulfilling. The stories are fairly light and usually funny. The best involve one of Clark's best inventions, Fairies, creatures that are absolutely nothing like what you might imagine.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan: Easily the best novel I've read in a while. It's brilliant in several different ways: as a love story, a war epic, and a devastating piece of betrayal. I know it's a movie now, and I know it's won awards and is probably just fine and I'm sure I'll see it eventually. But the book is so much about the inner lives of the characters that i have a hard time imagining the movie reaching the novel's scope. It's also a book about writing, and the costs of creativity. When it first came out, McEwan got in a bit of trouble over accusations that he had plagiarized some descriptions of an army hospital during wwii from Lucilla Andrews' autobiography. A number of prominent writers came to his defense, including, incredibly, the very elusive Thomas Pynchon. I now know why. If I were a writer I'd be in awe (and probably very jealous) of Atonement.

Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth: A short, very funny, very jewish, very dirty novel that my wife should not have been reading when she was 11-years-old.

Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson: A "great book" that I probably should have read when I was an english major, it's been on my list for a while because someone once favorably compared Randy Newman's great album 12 Songs to it. It's better than the album, and as weird, and should be on your list as well. Each chapter tells one of the residents of Winesburg's strange sad stories. Maybe because the chapters are so short and each involves someone new (and also because of who I am), I got the same feeling I might get looking through a book of photographs, maybe Eggleston's pictures of people or Meatyard's "Family Album of Lucybelle Crater." Greil Marcus writes about "the old, weird america," a place Winesburg definitely belongs to.

Just today I bought Martin Amis' new-ish "The House of Meetings." Maybe I'll write about that one day. Anyone else read anything good recently?

thoughts (3)