Anodyne
Sunday, December 10, 2006
 

I Don't Believe It's Even in Your Mind At All

Sunday night, December on the coast, a light rain falling in the streetlights. "[H]e thought he saw a movement, a shadow on the wall, the suggestion of a movement in the orange streetlight. Rain, sleet and snow all seemed to be falling at once." (M. John Harrison, Light). Inside, stacked on top of the glass display cabinets by the cash register, the 2500-odd mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks that came back from Seattle, whose uneven piles have slipped and slid sideways, creating a buckled, vaguely geological-looking surface of faults and escarpments. "The far-out stuff was in the Far West of the country -- wild, weirdsma, a leather-jacket geology in mirrored shades, with its welded tuffs and Franciscian melange (internally deformed, complex beyond analysis), its slip-strike faults and falling buildings, its boiling springs and fresh volcanics, its extensional disassembling of the earth." (John McPhee, Basin and Range). Is McPhee evoking, here, with his phrase "leather-jacket geology," the photograph on the front cover of Smithson's Collected Writings, the surly, pock-skinned autodidact with his aviator glasses and narrow-legged pants, studying his red reflection in the Great Salt Lake's shallows, contained by an interior spiral of his beautiful and very definitely "internally deformed" earthwork, Spiral Jetty? -- I think so.

Disposable tinkling British pop and its non-Googleable lyrics on the stereo (Thus this entry points back at, but doesn't contain, the moment; something within it flashes up and is gone, like a figure moving through a long exposure).
- posted by cjb @ 10:03 PM


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