State of Place

Something new: I’ve just started a weekly gig over at Vagablogging. Here’s a link to my post from last week about the magic of fort cities. This week it’s about the intersection of art and place.

Tonight during a World Series commercial break, I ran into the following passage which gives an interesting take on the whole art/place thing. It’s from the article At Sea by Jonathan Raban, published in Outside back in 1996.

The real heart of my boat is its library. There are few sea books in it–the inevitable coastal pilots, tidal atlases, and one or two grim volumes with titles like The 12-Volt Bible. But when I’m galebound on the dank and gloomy Northwest Coast, I’m in no mood to read Conrad or Melville. At anchor in a lightless British Columbian inlet, where matte black cedars crowd ’round the ruins of a bankrupt salmon cannery and the rain falls like ink, I shall pine for brilliance and laughter, for rooms full of voices. So, on the long shelf in the saloon, overhung by the gimballed oil lamp, are Lolita and Madame Bovary, the novels of Evelyn Waugh (all of them), Dickens’s Great Expectations, Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Byron’s Don Juan. There are books by friends and acquaintances, like Paul Theroux, Richard Ford, Cees Nooteboom, Ian McEwan, David Shields, Martin Amis. I rejoice in the thought that my eye might lift from a page of Waugh (let it be Julia Stitch, in bed, at the beginning of Scoop) to the sight of a black bear snuffling in the driftwood at the water’s edge: nature outside the boat, society within, and just an inch of planking between the world of one and the world of the other.

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