New Bookshelves: Horizontal and Vertical

With no remaining space for new books, I bought and assembled a vertical stand, into which I have placed many of the books I'm using for the study of the standing metaphor. A book stand for standing books, in other words.

And the horizontal shelves I built out of 2 x 12 douglas fir. 

Barbed-wire books on the top shelf, along with books by Zarko Radakovic and myself. On the second shelf and part of the third shelf, books by Peter Handke. The rest of the third shelf: books by Charles Bowden, Brian Evenson, and notebooks. The fourth and bottom shelf: books by Richard Ford, Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Ondaadje, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Cormac McCarthy, and John Berger.

[Bust by Nathan Abbott]

Good light

Wildflowers: Addendum

Okay, I said I had made the last wildflowers post. But it wouldn't be right not to include these very latest blooms, now would it? This is an aster, I think, but I'm not sure what species.

An old but still functioning barbed-wire fence.

It's mine! Don't even think about it.

Photos of Barbed Wire

The Flowerville blogger (http://fortlaufen.blogspot.com), as fine a photographer as she is a reader, sent these photos of English barbed wire:

Barbed wire: Utah or Japan?

My friend Jan Wellington sent this photo yesterday, asking if it were Utah or Japan.

Why the question?

Because of the spare form, perhaps. Because of the real fence that is tending here, somewhere between the fence and its reflection, toward abstraction.

Fences have that general tendency, a characteristic Christo exploited for his "Running Fence," and barbed-wire fences almost disappear in most light (try taking a photo of barbed wire and you'll see that immediately).

photo by jan wellington

christo's running fence

A New (and not metaphorical) Fence

While Lyn and I were writing today about literary barbed wire (Barbed-Wire Flagellants, Worshippers, Prisoners, and Celebrants), neighbors were stretching a real fence.

corner posts (the artist Bruce Nauman, by the way, made
a film of himself setting a good corner)

Boundaries, Fences, Barbed Wire

Still working on Steinbeck's use of barbed wire in The Grapes of Wrath, re-reading it, awestruck by the easy humor and good-heartedness and bitter anger of the novel.


Besides the passage that initially attracted our interest (the ecstatic whipping with barbed wire under the influence of the Holy Spirit), the wire is also used in more mundane situations, as in this early scene:

They plodded up the little rise on the other side of the water-cut. Now that the sun was on the wane some of its impact was gone, and while the air was hot, the hammering rays were weaker. The strung wire on crooked poles still edged the road. On the right-hand side a line of wire fence strung out across the cotton field, and the dusty green cotton was the same on both sides, dusty and dry and dark green.

            Joad pointed to the boundary fence. “That there’s our line. We didn’t really need no fence there, but we had the wire, an’ Pa kinda liked her there. Said it give him a feelin’ that forty was forty. Wouldn’t of had the fence if Uncle John didn’ come drivin’ in one night with six spools of wire in his wagon. He give ‘em to Pa for a shoat. We never did know where he got that wire.”

Near the end of the novel, Tom has to crawl under a barbed-wire fence to get out of the camp where he and other workers are virtual prisoners. But in the early scene it is just a marker of property farmed by the hard-working Joad family—a marker, by the way, swept away by tractors sent by the bankers who foreclose on the property:

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. . . . Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

The tractors destroy the work of generations and the Joad family and many others move on to California. Descriptions of abandoned houses and their contents reminded me of the book of photos by Eugene Richards, all shot at and in abandoned houses. 

Photo by Eugene Richards, from The Blue Room

Barbed Wire

Starting part two of our literary barbed wire today. Part one (Stretching and Cutting Fence from The Connecticut Yankee to "'Brokeback Mountain'" has been sent off for consideration by Western American Literature. We'll call part two "Barbed-Wire Flagellants, Worshippers, Prisoners, and Celebrants."


Steinbeck is our taking off point for flagellants (it's the former preacher Jim Casy speaking with Tom Joad):


“I says to myself, ‘What’s gnawin’ you? Is it the screwin’?’ And’ I says, ‘No, it’s the sin.’ An’ I says, ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ all full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fingerin’ his pants buttons?’” He laid two fingers down in his palm in rhythm, as though he gently placed each word there side by side. “I says, ‘Maybe it ain’t a sin. Maybe it’s just the way folks is. Maybe we been whippin’ the hell out of ourselves for nothin’.’ An’ I thought how some sisters took to beatin’ theirselves with a three-foot shag of bobwire. An’ I thought how maybe they liked to hurt themselves, an’ maybe I liked to hurt myself.”

Fifth printing of the first edition (1939) -- the battle hymn on both front and end papers:

We'll move on by the middle of the essay to Amy Irvine's Trespass, a memoir about living at the edge of the promised land. At one point in her attempt to live as a wilderness advocate among the ranchers of southern Utah, she discovers a coyote, newly shot and hung on a barbed wire fence. She identifies with the coyote.


We just got a copy of Dave Foreman's book Ecodefense, a handbook for the monkeywrencher. It pictures a similar scene and describes possible ways to cut such fences:

The Virginian and Barbed Wire

Lyn and I have been working on our barbed-wire book. We wanted to cite Owen Wister's novel The Virginian from the original 1902 edition, so I bought a cheap copy. It's not a first edition—the book was reprinted repeatedly during that first year—but it does give a good sense for book-selling and buying sensibilities of the time.


I noticed, for instance, how important the cover is for a book published without a dust jacket. And then thought how dust jackets with their photographically reproduced designs subtract from the design of the actual book. The Andres Neuman Traveller of the Century I wrote about in the previous post, for instance, has a cover so bland as to make the word "bland" an overstatement.


By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers and they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men. 

Spaziergang Along the Spanish Fork River on the Solstice

not a good place for an owl to perch

wheat's ripe, pole's hand cut, barbed wire is tight

woodchuck

found this beauty on the trail

Richard Skelton, Landings

AUTUMN



A century's passing and the listening


rattle. Crows bicker in the trees


overhead. Rhymed leaves. Dew Grass.


Wing skirr. Engine. Siren. Machinic


murmur. Threads across the river.


Collective memory. Left to nettles


and to barbed wire.

When the flowerville blogger sent me this poem by Richard Skelton, knowing I am thinking about how barbed wire has been construed in literature, I went looking for the book Landings.

I found it in/on/at a spare and beautiful blog. When I decided to order the book and the accompanying music, the link took me to another striking site. My order elicited a personal email:


Dear Scott

Just a quick note to say your Landings is in the post. Here's the tracking number: RJ962567042GB, which you can track at www.royalmail.com.

With many thanks and warmest wishes

Rich

The book arrived, royal mail indeed, with handwritten address.

Inside, the book was carefully wrapped in tissue. I washed my hands before I opened it.

 There was a note enclosed. The book was signed.

Landings breathes silence with its generously white pages, marked by type only where necessary.

The landscape, including the ruins of human habitation, of the West Pennine Moors is a subject of the book and of the music recorded on the moors. A related subject is loss. Another is language, names.

The book's notes are as interesting as the poems and quotations and thoughts that make up the main text.

For instance:

25 {many of these places have names} The question of names, name-giving and remembrance is, for me, a recurring one. Names become physical. . . . Place-names are embodied, and are subject to the same bodily process of change and decay. The question then becomes one of tenure, of endurance. How long can they last? . . . Maps are vital repositories of our knowledge of place. They enshrine the collective memory— recording not only what is current, but what is deemed worth holding onto from the past. But in so doing, they enforce a mononymous relationship between name and place—rarely does any location receive more than a single epithet. Yet this fact belies the complex relationship we have with our surroundings, and the many different ways in which we express our sense of place. Shouldn't there be room on maps for local names, folk-names and familial names; for narrative, personality and myth? What happened to the polyonymy of place?

Among the names Skelton reclaims from the place fallen into disuse is our family name: Abbott.


In 1696 a John Abbott of Anglezarke was church-warden at Rivington.


John Abbott is my brother. Was my brother. His birthday is four days from now. He died in 1991 at the age of 40.


In a very ruinous state. 


Ravaged by AIDS.


John Herbert Abbott. Also known as Jay.


Below the name of the book on the title page, Richard Skelton prints the name of his lost wife: Louise Skelton.


Landings worked a profound quiet into my being. A melancholy and meaningful stillness for which I am grateful.

"The barbed wire stretched across the landscape was like the strings on an instrument."

Wildflowers #16 + Barbed Wire + Blue

An early-morning look to the east and then a Memorial-Day walk along the Spanish Fork River revealed these scenes:

morning light catches the new aspens

wild rose, Rosa woodsii

thistle, not sure which

Wildflowers #13 + Barbed Wire

A couple of new blooms in the yard.


and . . .


Walking along the Spanish Fork River last night, cotton floating down from the cottonwood trees, we came across a barbed-wire fence with red barbs (for visibility?).

red penstemon / Penstemon eatonii ??

Palmer's penstemon / Penstemon palmeri

flax in native bunch grasses

cotton / Populus fremonti

looking around this evening

aspens greening, bottom left

lichen on scrub oak

spider web and wire

looking toward nevada

REGULATIONS

Painting the Japanese-American "relocation camps," artists inevitably featured the barbed wire enclosure.

Chiura Obata's juxtaposition of the wire and the written regulations highlights the fact that the barbed wire is stretched only to punctuate the written racist laws that removed these Americans from the West Coast to interior deserts.

Chiura Obata, from Topaz Moon

Estelle Ishigo, from Lone Heart Mountain

Estelle Ishigo's loosely strung barbed wire with wide gaps between the strands also suggests that the incarceration was only symbolically enforced by barbed wire.


Brian Evenson's story "Contagion" similarly relates barbed wire to regulation. As a tool in the real world, barbed wire controls, separates, and imposes order. In response to an incomprehensible and frightening contagion, a town’s panicked populace transforms the wire’s function until the fact of the wire becomes the truth of the new religion—“You shall know the fence and the fence shall make you free.”