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Juliet Earnest depiction of North American grandeur Hudson River School immensity George Caleb Bingham Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran View camera clarity, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams Walt Whitman, John Muir, Faulkner Thomas Wolfe's word rush imagining himself sitting on the Rockies with the Black Hills as his footstool European movie visions like Zabriskie Point Euro objectivity, Michel Butor's Niagara Ole Edvart Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth Paul Muldoon's Madoc Twentieth century landscapes, Abbot Henderson Thayer's Monadnock—Winter Sunrise, 1919 Dramatic best-perspective vanishing point the top, Monadnock's snow-covered granite summit lifting, lighted, above the world like Aconcagua Aconcagua the highest in the Americas, Monadnock only 965 meters, not a seventh as high, but Thayer's Monadnock evokes a like awe of the unobtainable Costruzione legittima Thayer painted it two years before his death, but for much of his career he did nubile angels and skin, heroic Gibson girl-like women with big white wings lifting from loose shifts Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings are another American solution, a restrained one, not straight-out, not surreal Flat and brilliant Ocean Park #21, 1969, with its dramatic teal triangle and blocked segments surrounding Vida: Lived up Appian Way a couple of blocks away when he was painting that Rebecca West in Mexico on the Spanish Inquisition, "...the man is not denouncing some monstrous invader of his people's land, as Poles might denounce the Nazi Germans; he is denouncing some of his ancestors for maltreating other of his ancestors, which, as he is both, must lead to schizophrenia" Mostly we came in off the Atlantic. All Americans with any European ancestry have the specter of a slave ship abeam of the ship that brought them to their safe American lee shore North American slave harbors in the eighteenth century, south to north, Savannah, Charleston, Cambridge, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, New London, Newport, Bristol, Providence, Boston, Salem, Newburyport, Kittery Ships as evil as the Auschwitz gate Africans slaving Africans for the Portuguese, British, Spanish, French, Danes, Dutch, Americans, into the Middle Passage hell into an America where in some respects manumission is yet to come Blatantly sinister, shameless, stinking, black ships that lay in the roads of the Atlantic ports throughout most of our post-Columbian history "The greater part of slaveholders are licentious men, and the most respected and kind masters keep some of these slaves as mistresses. It is for their pecuniary interest to do so, as their progeny..."—Henry Box Brown, escaped (1849) Virginia slave, b. Louisa County, 1815 Slave ships, black ships, death ships like Coleridge's The fog, the albatross, finally after the rotting sea in the burning tropics come the sea snakes in the moonlight "We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes" In the new century the old inconsistent Indian-killing, slave-driving, exploitive America is hip deep in the big-muddy Tigris With a regional client state that builds a wall redolent of the Warsaw Ghetto's, of every sordid rabbit-proof fence in history To the hollow drum roll of coalition Bush's flag pin seems to be getting bigger and bigger Pinocchio's nose The rockets' red glare Under which a black Ford Excursion, still the hogiest of them all, rounds a quiet corner Laboring slightly upgrade with its transmission revving Imagining under the hood, the transmission fins spinning before catching enough torque to move it up the street, the straining engine at that juncture of burning at least a gallon a minute A lone Kate Hudson type at the wheel talking on her phone Cars with dark windows People clutching their cell-phones, their electronic dolls Bone black Furnace black "We don't get a labor or socialist party, but we don't get fascism either." Only cowboy Christianity And Log Cabin Republicans Loyalists in the American Revolution included Anglo Tories of course, but also Indians, escaped slaves, Dutch and German immigrants, Catholics, and Huguenot refugees too All people without much to hope for in a new society Africa in the features and mien of many Americans especially in the South, lips loose in profile, round skulls Maybe we're still fighting that one out, the skinny establishment, gray trimmers that they are, the winners, the top dogs, the descendents of the founding fathers "There is nothing, sad to say, surprising in Updike's ignorance of history and politics and of people unlike himself; in this, he is a standard American and so a typical citizen of what Vice-President Agnew once called the greatest nation in the country" All over the country, up and down and all the way across, in their burgundy, dusty rose and pea-soup green stretch jersey elastic-waist pants Americans wallow toward the big box store in the sky from their huge hogwagon SUVs Virtuous flat abs versus inferior, lazy, ignorant, self-indulgent slobs The mocking realism of Law and Order exploits the stereotypes to ridicule black gullibility and ignorance, women's primal drives, gay goofiness, while Hispanics stereotype themselves into ridiculousness But then telebishion, no matter how well-intended it is, always panders Oliver Law, a black officer in the Lincoln Brigade promoted politically, because of his incompetence as a line officer most probably was fragged "A gull screams Spanish whore words" Rwanda: A woman with a baby strapped to her back and a raised panga in one hand was chasing and attempting to cut down another woman with a baby on her back "Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood..." Ivory black Raven black Quaker blue Black locust twigs at first coated in silvery woolly hairs that drop and leave the new growth pale green, in late summer leaves become reddish brown and flecked with small, scattered, pale lenticels Corbeau And then again horned lizards aren't easy to find. But they eat huge quantities of ants, so go to an ant nest and walk outward in a spiral As you pick one up it may expand by gulping air, and famously they shoot blood defensively from a pore in their eyelid for almost a meter Few better sights on he planet than Volcán Popocatépetl's cone rising from the campo off the back road from Oaxaca to Puebla The steep, green and gray Mayon Volcano from the railroad line into Legaspi in far southern Luzon comes close Even though the Mayon Volcano is only barely half as high as Popocatépetl you view it from near sea level while you see the great one in Puebla State from about two thousand meters on the Mexican plateau Shakira's "Eyes Like Yours," her Arabic nasal flare, Columbiana mother, father Lebanese, blonde belly-dancing rocker, bring Arabic and Spanish back together with, "There is nothing that I won't do..." Black plum "Andalus and Morocco were united by the Mediterranean, not divided, when the Sephardim cantors sang there" A successful manipulatrice, courtesan-style but with modern accomplishments and a graduate degree, she led him out to the end of a limb, either give her up and turn back to cling to the trunk of his mother or twist around and saw it off, him and everything he had always been with it And then after he'd complied, very soon she turned into another former child bride advancing to an adult career as a grande horizontale And as for him, he began to look more and more like Théodore Géricault's The Madman Maybe the best of Géricault's 1820s series of ten portraits of inmates of the Paris asylum of the Salpêtrière, the one that's in Ghent Lamp black Sooty black Carbon black Nicolas de Staël's Sicilian landscapes, like Agrigente, 1954, stagger in the way their colors shine out of the central vanishing points Again, la costruzione legittima Staël, dead at 41 in 1955, thought Braque the painter of the half century In the manner of Dürer's study of the hare, the parrot in his Adam and Eve, the hound in Knight, Death, and the Devil Better to slip in closer to animals and the specifics in nature, to let the grandeur that so easily turns delusional, stay in the background Concentrate on the children of Iraq instead of the abstractions of Islam and free-market economy, "good and evil," Shite and Sunni, and grand regional plans Draw like Dürer, paint like Staël Paint a bluegills' iridescent cream, honey and electric blue, black speckles, a navy gill spot on each side, spiny dorsal, heavily scaled The red of a wild turkey gobbler's wattles, the yellow of a yellowthroat's or a Kentucky warbler's breast Come in close, step back from strip-mall, carpet-bombing, arms-for-peace grandeur of America Open to the Palouse grasslands in southeastern Washington and northwestern Idaho, to Seattle to Kaua'i to Hoboken to Miami and Biloxi and Gila Bend Roll your hogwagon's dark windows down +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Richard Dawkins, David Brock, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Ruth Moon Kempher, Michael L. Perna. |
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