The April issue of Good Housekeeping (UK), curiously due to appear in early March, has included Little Monsters among its Seven Great Reads. The other six include the latest by La Petite Anglaise, Anne Fine and Hanif Kureishi. It calls the novel ‘haunting’.
Wow.
This lifebelt was spotted in a shop window in Sausalito. It’s hard to imagine a ship called Nellie, though less hard to imagine those who sail on her referring to one another with the term, which I’d previously assumed was only British. It’s heart-warming to find it a spit from San Francisco, less Querelle of Brest than Poofter of Portsmouth, and all the better for it.
Coming into Rome from the south, trains often used to have to wait a little outside the station for an available platform. The view from the windows on the right side of the train (looking towards Termini) was enlivened by the shop front of a place selling toupees. The shop, alas now gone, was called Sexy Wigs. This wig outlet, in Scottsdale, reminded me of it.
I particularly like the imperative: Step up.
There’s an expression for someone who has to travel a long way to discover something he could have found more easily on his doorstep. Whatever that expression is, it could certainly be applied to me as far as the work of the architect Paolo Soleri is concerned. Born and trained in Turin, where I once lived, it took a trip to Phoenix for me to come across the man’s work. The title to this post comes from his book Arcosanti: an urban laboratory? – a collection of thoughts and their applicability to his experimental town in the Arizona desert: Arcosanti. I only got to see the town from a distance, but we visited his workshop, where I photographed this chime.
This post isn’t finished, merely interrupted. By dinner.
Dinner over. In this book Soleri comments:
The value, indeed the imperative of crowding, is documented by 3.5 eons of life. Organisms are by definition crowded, self-contained miniaturized realities. Organisms, societies, and cultures that turn away from such an imperative would be strange, paradoxical and ineffective exceptions. One such exception is the sprawl resulting from the age of the automobile […] Sprawl is a pathological event. It suffers from gigantism with all the derivative handicaps and shortcomings: environmental disruption, waste, pollution, energy and time depletion, expensive logistics, segregation, and urban decay.
What’s interesting is that Soleri should have chosen to build his experimental crowded city within spitting distance of Phoenix, a city that extends in what feels like an almost infinite grid across the skin of the desert. It’s too ordered to be considered sprawl, but the overall effect, amplified by the general absence of high-rise building, is of a vast city clinging by its fingernails to the land beneath it, as though the land were about to tilt and throw it off. It’s a city of space and distance, and is certainly unmanageable without a car. But do people spend more time travelling in Phoenix than they do in other large cities, where the work place and the home are separated for a host of socio-economic reasons? And would the traffic-free crowded urban environment of Arcosanti leave room for those people who don’t – or don’t want to – fit? Sometimes segregation is less imposition than a sort of freedom.
Another review of Little Monsters, this time by literary blogger dovegreyreader. She asks some interesting questions about the construction of novels with more than one time thread in the narrative. If I hadn’t been awake for just under 30 hours (leaving Phoenix yesterday morning at 8.10 local time), I’d be in a better position to answer them. I’ll get back to this before too long.
This wonderfully bold decoration comes from the Mission San Xavier del Bac, just outside Tucson, rising from a patch of desert as though it had once expected a community to form around it, as I imagine it did, although what kind of community it might have wanted is hard to envisage with charity. The interior is probably typical of churches of this type, relying heavily on paint and plaster and memories of the old world to make up for the lack of more precious materials and models closer to hand. It reminds me very much of the chunky flamboyant provincial baroque of a couple of churches I saw some years ago in the small Sardinian town of Tempio Pausania, which also sticks in my memory for having as one of its local delicacies the nearest thing I’ve ever seen outside Britain to a Melton Mowbray pork pie.
The world the missionaries found here doesn’t get much of a look in, which isn’t surprising. Tyla pointed out the sad juxtaposition in the right transept (see below) of an admonishing saint, maybe Xavier himself, and the devout, rather cowed figure of a native American, hands clasped before him in a posture that might be called the missionaried position. The sculpted and painted column that separates them has more life than either figure and I can’t help wondering whether local help might not have been called in to do some of the purely decorative stuff. I’d like to think so.
And talking of cultural contamination, what about this curious
little artefact, spotted in a gift store in the historic section of Tucson, squeezed in between feathered headdresses, tomahawks and gilded shells for holy water. It combines the Renaissance trope of the winged head of a putto with some distinctly native American features. As if that weren’t enough, it also manages to look remarkably like John Travolta in Hairspray, another challenging example of aesthetic syncretism (or maybe not).
I know we’re not supposed to be anthropomorphic (yawn), but I can’t think of any other plant that has so much sheer personality as the saguaro cactus, which populates the hills and desert round here. They do pretty much the whole range of human emotions, from cautious to belligerent, gregarious to cheeky. Take a look at these. (I love the thoughtful, slightly anxious mood of the one at the back of the last picture, just waiting to see what his livelier buddy in front is going to do.)
PS I had a dream in which a vulture plucked a rattlesnake from the ground and carried it off to its nest inside one of these cacti. How’s that for total immersion in the local culture! And, no, don’t tell me what it means. Let me enjoy it as it is.Would that be five feet?
And what if they’re not quite, er, there?
CHARLES LAMBERT 