Summer Daze
Yes. It has been a long while. And not a terribly productive one, at least on the prospectus front. I handed my draft to my advisor at the beginning of July, and we just met to talk about it last week. Of course, I used his taking his time to read it as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
But now it's getting time to get back down to it. The meeting with the advisor went very well, and apparently my draft--or at least my ideas--are in better shape than I thought. He had many recommendations, but it was nice to know that with a lot of these, I had already been thinking about them. For instance, he recommended that I should take up the idea/process of place returning to space, or of a human relationship that is maintained in the openness of space, rather than through the often "colonial" process of placing. He recommended, among other things, Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End, which I have read before, but obviously not necessarily in this context.
I, myself, was already thinking along similar lines, but as they relate to ghost towns in the West. What traces are left on the landscape (psychic and literal) of a place created, shaped, defined and then abandoned, played out, dis-placed? There is a huge, hidden history of such places throughout the West, and it would be an interesting avenue of inquiry, for sure.
Such questions make my head hurt right now. I'm out of practice. Slowly and surely. Slowly and surely.
[I had plans to post my prospectus here, and I'm still working on it. I need to find a place to host my PDF, and then I'll link to it. I don't want to cut and paste ten pages of text in here.]
But now it's getting time to get back down to it. The meeting with the advisor went very well, and apparently my draft--or at least my ideas--are in better shape than I thought. He had many recommendations, but it was nice to know that with a lot of these, I had already been thinking about them. For instance, he recommended that I should take up the idea/process of place returning to space, or of a human relationship that is maintained in the openness of space, rather than through the often "colonial" process of placing. He recommended, among other things, Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End, which I have read before, but obviously not necessarily in this context.
I, myself, was already thinking along similar lines, but as they relate to ghost towns in the West. What traces are left on the landscape (psychic and literal) of a place created, shaped, defined and then abandoned, played out, dis-placed? There is a huge, hidden history of such places throughout the West, and it would be an interesting avenue of inquiry, for sure.
Such questions make my head hurt right now. I'm out of practice. Slowly and surely. Slowly and surely.
[I had plans to post my prospectus here, and I'm still working on it. I need to find a place to host my PDF, and then I'll link to it. I don't want to cut and paste ten pages of text in here.]
posted by TRM at 11:00 AM
1 Comments:
Furthermore, what happens when ghost towns--and I'm especially thinking of Bodie--become tourist attractions of their own. They are theme parks of the West (although Bodie is a bit better than that). When I was last there they were doing a photo shoot with scantily clad women in cowboy had in various attitudes of seduction draped across weathered wagon wheels and the like. How's that for "Western landscape"?
Have you been up to Empire Mine in Grass Valley? You should. Huge mining operation (or rather it was) and I have a so-so book about it (a local vanity press kind of thing). There's also the Donner Party site. Not much left but for a soot covered boulder that provided the back wall of one of the cabins. With they would have left some human bones with teeth marks in them but apparently that stuff doesn't stick around.
Did Jack actually read your prospectus, then? Damn! You're lucky!
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