"From time to time, we passed solitary women trudging through the water near the shoreline, pulling nets behind them as they trawled for prawn seed. This practice, introduced in the past twenty years or so, has disastrously reduced prawn and other fish populations, and the constant pacing along the fragile shore by the women and children who drag the nets has contributed to erosion. In their flowing saris, the women presented picturesque silhouettes that belied the danger of their work, up to ten hours a day waist high in the murky water. As many as ten fatal crocodile attacks are documented each year, and, I was told, too many shark attacks to report. The most common are by dog sharks, which take a bite of soft tissue—a leg or buttock—but do not kill. 'They are considered minor hazards,' Dr. Sanyal said, with a sympathetic grimace. The Sundarbans's occupational hazards—crocodiles, sharks, cobras, kraits, swimming tigers, and cyclones—make it one of the most dangerous places in the world."
Although I don't know Bruce personally, I recognize him as the hardworking, "salt of the earth" type that crowds the interior of Wachapreague's bait and tackle shop. Around and in Bruce, I also recognize my home ground: the salt marsh and bay landscapes, the docks and crabshacks, the marbles-in-your-mouth accent, the unquestioned appreciation of a providing God tethered to an overarching melancholy of things irrevocably changed.
It's easy to romanticize the sun-baked, hard life of a waterman, but I harbor no illusions. Crabbing is exhausting and painful work. The slideshow provides a sweet aural backdrop of lapping water and muted laughing gulls, but, in life, those pleasant sounds are marred by the irritating whine of the motor, just as the rich smell of the marsh is cut with the stench of gasoline. I don't intend, then, to sentimentalize Bruce's position, but having grown up around folks like him, the farmers and fishermen of the mid-Atlantic, it saddens me to recognize that their kind is nearing extinction. The Shore that shaped me goes with them.
Note: The Bruce slideshow is associated with a New York Times travel piece, "The Crab Houses of Maryland's Eastern Shore." This article is fine, but the slideshow, produced by Miki Meek with photographs by Karen Kasmauski, is the real gem. Watch it here.
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is an imaginative and engaging consideration of what a "post-human" Earth might look like. The popular success of Weisman's book suggests that a great many readers are willing to entertain an End Times quite unlike that forecast by eschatological messianism.
Still, in the United States, a significant percentage of the populace (maybe even a slim majority!) insist that dinosaurs coexisted with early man and that Judgment Day will involve supernatural intervention. For the rest of us, however, Weisman's predictions are more tenable than messianic adjudication and, because we're living through what scientists now dub the Sixth Great Extinction, his vision of mass extinction is also more pertinent.
Steinbrener/Dempf "Trouble in Paradise"
I thought of The World Without Us when viewing photographic documentation of Steinbrener/Dempf's intervention at Vienna's Schonbrunn Zoo, an institution celebrated as "the oldest zoo in the world." Not all of the installation images impress me, but a few are coolly beautiful. The best of them serve as both a celebration of life's ambivalent persistence and a critique of our romantic notions of wilderness.
From time to time over what she has called her '40-year conversation' with Ms. Cook, [Ms. Oliver] or the couple together would go off to places like Sweet Briar, Va., and Bennington, Vt., where Ms. Oliver would teach poetry writing. But their home base was always Provincetown.
'People say to me: wouldn’t you like to see Yosemite? The Bay of Fundy? The Brooks Range?' she wrote in Long Life, a book of essays. 'I smile and answer, ‘Oh yes — sometime,’ and go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything.'"
I'd like to accurately claim, as Oliver does, a deep familiarity with one landscape and ecology. Although I'm romantically rooted in the sulfurous soil of Virginia's coastal salt marshes, like many Americans, I've lived a relatively transient life, so far calling three states (and more houses or apartments than I can count on both hands) home. Still, the ascetic aspect of my temperament is moved by the notion of staying put, of refraining from travel in order to better cultivate continuity, peace of mind, and sense of place. The terms "provincial" and "parochial" have pejorative associations, but I believe there is a lot to be said for those individuals who appreciate their home ground as only a true local can.
If Oliver is right, rootedness is especially significant for artists. Reading some of Oliver's poetry last night, I rediscovered this early work, from 1963.
No Voyage
I wake earlier, now that the birds have come And sing in the unfailing trees. On a cot by an open window I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.
Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?-- Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave Wherever they are, when the dying begins.
For myself, I find my wanting life Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance; Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts, Who still am citizen of this fallen city?
On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time. Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can, Inherit from disaster before I move.
O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor, And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back To sort the weeping ruins of my house: Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.
Les Seifer "Shelter" 2009 Acrylic, ink, crayon, pencil, and cut paper on panel 22 x 26 inches
Les Seifer's mixed media paintings evidence a playful disregard for the conventions of painting. The interactions and proclivities of Seifer's varied media inform the pictures' making; as a result, the paintings include unexpected compositional and color choices, even as they manifest the artist's formal command.
Les Seifer "On These Earthly Shores" 2006 Acrylic, ink, and cut paper on canvas 30 x 36 inches
Atmospheric and often gritty, the pictures also reflect the striking (and similarly unconventional) juxtaposition of past and future in urban settings. The layered imagery of Seifer's works is partially rendered or scrubbed out, a lost and found architecture of our evolving cultural landscape.
Les Seifer "Beast" 2008 Acrylic, ink, pencil, and cut paper on canvas 30 x 36 inches
A native New Yorker, Seifer is clearly inspired by the diversity and mutability of the city's outer boroughs, but his saturated, pooling colors and hodgepodge approach evoke a less specific sense of nostalgia, one that is universally understood. Even the darkest or most anxious of Seifer's works celebrates human imagination and potential; his pictures are dreamlike and fundamentally optimistic, poetic records of our increasingly plural mythos.
While visiting central Florida last month, an acquaintance told me that all of her Gainesville co-workers are fans of Rush Limbaugh's radio punditry. On the highways around the small city, I saw countless pro-life billboards and a good number of "NObama" bumper stickers on passing pickup trucks. Although the city's populace supported Obama in the 2008 presidential election (as did the state), it was very clear that the city represents a blue dot in a red region.
"Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends.
[...] 'Rural America is pissed,' a small-town Pennsylvania man told a reporter from Newsweek. Explaining why he and his neighbors voted for George Bush, he said: 'These people are tired of moral decay. They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street.'"
The same Wall Street-Main Street dichotomy was trotted out by campaigning Republicans four years later, in 2008, to cast the GOP as the party of the people. But did the tactic really work? After all, Obama won the 2008 election. Aren't rural and Middle America coming around, realizing that the Republican party doesn't have their best interests in mind, even in those cases where the social issues of the Right more closely align with their values?
I hope so, but I wouldn't bet on it. Middle America will jab an angry finger at someone, and faithful Rush can't be the enemy. Our country is already waging a war against Islam, so we know that the Muslims are "against us," but they're not pulling America's economic strings. And, as a general rule, black folks don't have too much power, Obama not withstanding. But, wait a second...aren't there a lot of socialistJews whispering in Obama's ear? Hell, isn't he related to a rabbi!?
The July 2009 issue of Harper's includes two disturbing poll results.
Chance that an American thinks 'the Jews' were moderately or very much to blame for the financial crisis: 1 in 4
Chance he or she thinks they were 'a little' to blame: 1 in 7
This is a shocking statistic! I wonder what percentage of Americans believe that "the Jews" are no more culpable than any other ethnic or religious group?
Oh, but that's a silly question! After all, "the Jews" are the denizens of Wall Street, and Main Street folk like Dubya and Rush don't like that sinful, unAmerican place. It should be clear to me that the current recession - when should we start calling it a depression? - is not the result of the unsustainable, myopic economic policies of the last sixty years (amped up by Ronald Reagan, but embraced by both Democrat and Republican administrations). It's instead the vast Zionist conspiracy! The socialist Jews have teamed up with the capitalist Jews to forge an unholy alliance, and they're running the global economy into the ground!
"The American economy lost 467,000 jobs in June [2009] and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the most painful downturn since the Great Depression has yet to release its hold."
Things are going to get a lot worse for Middle America. Finger pointing does none of us any good (and certainly not the tiny Jewish minority in the United States).
Still, I remain optimistic. As I wrote in January,
"Call it Obamatism, call it naive idealism, call it what you will...but it's time to participate, to put aside our generation's infantilism and get to Aristotle's happy work. [...] We will pass through our challenging stage of human social development but, fraught as it is, the need for an active and immediate commitment to bettering our world's future is great."
London's Tate Britain recently purchased a curious piece of conceptual art for the Tate's permanent collection. Artist Ceal Floyer's work is, in fact, a grocery receipt, and the museum's acquisition of the piece is generating a wide range of response from the greater art community.
"Pakistani-born Miss Floyer, 41, who graduated from Goldsmith's art college in London in 1994, describes the work as a modern still life where objects are imagined rather than shown.
[...] Exhibition curator Andrew Wilson [...] called the piece 'an imaginative leap of faith from the daily drudge of going to the supermarket to the idea of the domestic still life painting, but also with the supposed purity of Modernist monochrome abstract painting'."
My trip to central Florida was terrific. Two friends and I spent our days exploring some wonderful state parks and preserves around the city of Gainesville, in the Ocala National Forest, and around the town of Lake Placid. Disposed toward more temperate or even cool climates, I'm certain that I sweat off a few pounds in the damp Florida swelter, but the abundant tropical wildlife made up for the mild discomfort.
