Confinement Books, Volume 81: The Portfolios of Ansel Adams
The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Little, Brown and Company, 1977). Finished reading: 21 April, 2021.
In the jacket, we are told that “From 1948 to 1976 Ansel Adams produced seven portfolios, each a limited edition from ten to sixteen original photographic prints…This book contains the full ninety superb images…” So, this book (one of a big pile I picked up from an apartment that was at an estate clearance that a friend heard about) is kind of a ‘best of’ the famous photographer, but arranged in portfolios he designed that each have their own unity about them. There’s also most definitely no comparison between seeing these on a computer screen and the great quality prints in this book.
One interesting thing is that many of the prints for each portfolio come from long before the publication – Adams mentions that to him the negative is like a score and the print is like the live performance, in other words that some of these images have been in his repertoire so to speak for decades before he decided to incorporate them in a particular portfolio.
Back in 2005 the Christchurch Art Gallery put on an exhibit of Ansel Adams which I still recognized several images from in this book. So it was very soothing and lovely to re-visit and discover many new works. One thing which I really understand now that I didn’t then was how incredibly precise Adams’ compositions are. Many of them look to me like they could be modern paintings, either abstract expressionist washes of tone and geometry, or very carefully arranged structures like a Cezanne still life.
Here’s a couple of examples where the pattern of light and dark, and large and small shapes seem almost more important than the actual subject matter.
There are also many wonderful facing pages in the book like this one where the contrasting textures and compositions are just sublime:
Another favourite was this one – a seemingly chaotic and wild scene, but look at how the bright crashing waves on the left so perfectly mirror the dark form of the rocks on the right, not just in the main central group but in the one behind. This sort of unity is not an accident and is behind a lot of what makes these images seem so much better than your average shot.
And then of course there’s the landscapes, of which the Yosemite ones are probably the most famous.
I think it’s interesting to compare an image like the above with a more ‘modern’ photograph more or less randomly chosen from Wikimedia. It’s definitely beautiful, but there’s just not the same level of inspiration and clarity of vision to me. Adams’ photo obscures a lot of detail in the intensely black forest, but also has the intermediate shadows on the rocks to highlight the bright sunlit part of El Capitan. The harsh, irregular dark framing and the asymmetry of the composition adds a wild, unknown, unstable, and mysterious atmosphere, even though the lines and shadows are ultra-sharp.
In contrast the picture below is kind of hazily romantic, the reflection adds symmetry but a simple and sort of unexciting one, and this is more reminiscent of the olden days of fanciful landscape painting a la Claude Lorrain in effect. One photo is very pretty, the other is something else entirely.
Confinement Books, Volume 82: Felon
Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). Finished reading: 22 April, 2021.
As with That Old Country Music, this was a book which I found thanks to a Columbia University online event. Like I assume every big organisation in the US, Columbia reacted to the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer with a whole lot of events, talks, discussions, and the like. One of these was a kind of combination performance, interview, and discussion with Reginald Dwayne Betts (you can in fact watch the recording here: in beautiful English department style, it was entitled “Prison Poetry: A Fugitive Aesthetic?”)
The first maybe 20 minutes were basically a performance piece/poetry reading/story telling, clearly very well rehearsed and put together, which I definitely remember something like this poem being a part of: https://poets.org/poem/blood-history
The blunts we passed around let us forget our
tongues. Not that much though. But what if the old
head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t
hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why
I named my son after my father. You know, that’s a thing
turn your life to a prayer that no dead man gonna answer.
Betts spent time in prison, then made it to big time law school (Yale) and now accomplished as a lawyer, writer, and speaker. What really struck me about his poetry, in the talk and in this book, is how it totally rejects the all-too-common pull the ladder up behind you mindset. Instead of taking his experience as an example that he can beat down less successful rehabilitants with, I got the sense that he regards his life as miraculous, and pays back that miracle by trying to communicate, as clearly as possible, and in ways that people like me can understand, what it’s like to be trapped in the criminal justice system of the US. He puts the boredom and nothingness of prison into words, and makes you see how warped and twisted the system makes everyone who’s involved in it. It’s powerful and compelling, full of compassion and understanding but also not pollyanna-ish: he’s real about how broken people can be, and how hopeless things are. But he cuts through the endless stupid pretend debates about crime and punishment and brings it back to basic humanity: everyone in here is human, deserves and deserved better, and has been failed in so many ways.
I also loved his erasure poems. Some of these are copies of pages of legal rulings against clients, with most of the words removed, which spell out the repetition and lack of options that the courts and the people moving through them have. These could be just gimmicks, but I found them to be actually stunningly effective ways to demonstrate that no, it’s not that one racist cop that’s the problem, it’s this case and the ten thousand others that pass by unnoticed, and the ten thousand men who go to prison and end up trapped because of these mundane arrests, proceedings, and sentences.
Here’s some links to some more poems if you’re interested!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/149501/house-of-unending
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55855/a-postmodern-two-step
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/02/05/reentry-a-triptych
Confinement Books, Volumes 74 & 80: Medieval English Edition
Volume 74: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translated by Brian Stone), Penguin Classics (1964 edition). Finished reading: 15 March 2021.
Volume 80: The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (translated by Nevill Coghill). Penguin Classics (1977 edition). Finished reading: 21 April 2021.
I thought it would make sense to review these two together, since they both come down to us from the late 14th century and are both acknowledged as masterpieces of early English literature.
First, the similarities: apart from the era and the middle English, they are written in verse (there’s a very small amount of prose in the Canterbury Tales), and were intended, as far as I can tell, to both entertain and moralize, and perhaps educate a little. And they both entertained me!
Read more…Confinement Books, Volume 79: No Friend but the Mountains
No Friend but the Mountains, Writing from Manus Prison. By Behrouz Boochani, translated by Omid Tofighian (House of Anansi Press, 2019, first published 2018). Finished reading: April 11 2021.
I’ve been meaning to read this for quite a while, and finally put in a library request a couple of months ago. I read it in about three sittings, a week or so after reading the Poetry Magazine on “The Practice of Freedom”, mostly featuring writers with experience of the US prison system. I also managed to listen into most of a webinar/discussion between Reginald Dwayne Betts and Saidiya Hartman, the first 20 minutes or so of which was Betts performing/reading his story of incarceration and what that did to him and how he survived.
Boochani wrote this book from Manus island after being sent there by the Australian government when he was picked up at sea from a sinking boat heading from Indonesia to Australia. Originally from Kurdistan/Iran, he was locked up in the literally illegal refugee detention center on Manus island from 2013, and was stuck on the island until 2019 when he went to Christchurch for a writer’s festival, and then was granted refugee status in New Zealand in July 2020. As far as I can tell, Australia’s government is still unwavering in deciding that nobody who tries to get to Australia by boat will ever be able to live there.
Read more…Confinement Books, Volume 78: Owls of the Eastern Ice
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, by Jonathan C. Slaght (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Finished reading: April 6, 2021.
Reviewing this book conjures fond memories: not only was it a birthday gift from my beloved wife, but I read most of it during our long weekend in New Hope, PA, a gorgeous little town which has stood for centuries on the Delaware river and was full of delicious pastries, cute historic houses, and crisp spring forests. A lot of my reading was done at our accommodation, which was part of a compound designed and used by various prominent artists in the area back in the early 20th century and which had a charming neo-Tudor-ish style to it.
Anyway, all that being said, this was a fun and entertaining book, from which I learned a lot. The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest owl, and lives mostly in extremely remote Eastern Russia, in the area up the coast from Vladivostok. The location leads to some amazing stories of Russian hospitality and the bizarreness that arises from living through crazy intense winters in utter isolation from anything else. Most of the territory is former or present logging country, and part of the point of Mr Slaght’s research on these owls is to understand how to avoid wiping them out through chopping everything down.
The book is sort of a layperson’s writeup of the research project, but it’s far from your average academic treatise, because of these great stories about the people of the area, but also of the owls themselves. The saga of first trying to figure out whether there are any of these owls anywhere across the huge study area, mostly done by sitting in the forest freezing for hours and hours hoping to hear their calls, leads to more sagas: how to capture these things? What can we use as bait, or traps? Will they ever be re-capturable so that the all-important data from the little GPS trackers strapped to their backs can be read out? And how exactly do these creatures spend their days?
I think if you are into owls, or ecology/biology, or stories about drinking too much homebrew vodka, you’ll probably have fun reading this book. It was somehow really reassuring to read this and know that there are people out there in the middle of nowhere going to crazy lengths to understand the beasts of this beautiful Earth. Someday I hope to see one of these chunky monsters!
Poetry Magazine, February 2021 (Poetry Foundation). Finished reading: 2 April 2021.
This issue contains poems that relate to prison in some way: either written by people currently or formerly in prison, people who work with prisoners, or have some other close connection. More so than other issues, I think it’s hard to just pick a few favourites, so here’s the table of contents so you can choose your own. A few that really stood out to me are below but I think every one of the poems in this issue is worth reading a few times. It’s really amazing how awful the prison system is in the United States (not that it’s better elsewhere, but still), and how dehumanised people become when they are locked up. Even to themselves, the loss of sense of self worth and the sense of purposeless is often strong in these works. For others there is some sense of hope or that things can be endured, but this issue helped me to understand more deeply what it does to people and families to be locked up and forgotten about. When I read these experiences and consider who is locked up for what and who isn’t, it’s very easy to get angry about the lack of justice and about the unthinking ways in which so many people embrace the police and the prison system as good and righteous.
Old School and At Night I Fly, by Spoon Jackson. I get the sense in these poems of someone who’s spent so many years stuck in circles about what does it take to finally be deemed to have ‘repaid your debt to society’.
Donuts in Kid Jail, by Jill McDonough. Almost more of a small story than a poem, the combination of humour and sadness about the situation described is so vivid, I can picture the situation perfectly.
My Brother Is Asking for Stamps, by Michael Torres. The repetitiveness of prison life, the way small things become so important, the absolute dependence on family and yet the drain that it puts on family.
Forgotten Portraits, by Janine Solursh. I can relate to this sensation of being lost to people in a small way since moving away from New Zealand, but this is a far more painful version of that feeling.
The Road to Meet You: Tomoka Correctional Institution and Check-in: Tomoka Correctional Institution, by Tiffany Melanson. Quiet, restrained, and very astutely put together observations of a prison visit. Heartbreaking in what’s not said and in what’s missing, and in the way that all of this is simply ‘how things are’.
Confinement Books, Volume 76: Poetry Magazine, January 2021
Poetry Magazine, January 2021 (Poetry Foundation). Finished reading: 29 March 2021.
I realised that among everything else I’d been reading, I had stacked up four issues of Poetry Magazine, so did a binge around my birthday of a couple of them. This one didn’t have any particular theme, just another selection of poetry from a wide variety of people. As usual for my reviews of these issues, I’ll point out my favourites, but do click randomly on whichever ones from the table of contents sound fun!
For Y, by Seungja Choi: a wildly aggressive break-up/revenge poem. There’s an overwhelming directness and raw rage behind these words that I find amazingly powerful.
Laudation, by Maurice Riordan: repetitive and hypnotic, full of simple references to other stories or authors, but in combination there’s both a unique sense of character and personality that comes out as well as a loving comfort.
Love Poem to the Terrible Doctors, by Jackson Holbert: I read this as a lament for age and losing loved ones, but I’m not sure that’s the only interpretation. This poem creates such a strong impression of a person’s world shrinking and darkening as time does its thing.
The Six Million Dollar Deaf Boy, by Raymond Luczak: All three of Luczak’s poems in this issue relate to deafness, the retelling of Arachne is particularly fabulous, but this one’s shorter and easier to digest. It’s fun, conjuring up a very boy-like vision of super powers and adventures. It’s also a sharp critique of these kind of heroics and pointing out how limited pop culture ideas of fulfilment and happiness and success are.
Barcarolle, by James Longenbach: One of those very complex and referential poems again, but there’s something about it that really got me. Maybe the relative simplicity at a line-by-line level that builds all these references on top of each other to try to capture how complex a single experience (hearing Chopin’s Barcarolle playing from a Venetian boat) can become because of the endless memories and theories it sparks in all directions through our lifetime of reading and thinking. I also thought his essay was a particularly lucid and insightful explanation of some fundamental poetic techniques and directions.An Essay on Loss, by Aria Aber: another lament, filled with nature images in particular of the lost one as a visiting cormorant, contaminating the bed with brine and wetness and slick feathers. “You were alive. We were cormorants moving/on the surface of each other’s eyes.”
Confinement Books, Vols. 72 & 75: Octavia Butler Edition
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler. (Grand Central Publishing Editions, first published 1993 & 1998). Finished reading: 24 March, 2021.
The amount of lash and backlash for and against racism in the United States in the past year of course goes without saying. But if nothing else, some small sidestream of these discussions led me to finally read some Octavia Butler, which I am very grateful for.
Post-apocalyptic sci-fi is kind of boring now, right? But in 1993/98, ten years before The Road, Octavia Butler wrote these two books. In summary, it’s ‘the near future’, wildfires and climate change have made large parts of California uninhabitable, rich people have retreated to gated enclaves, everybody else struggles for survival outside the walls despite magical technologies that are available to those who can afford them…and there’s a new voice in politics, promising to Make America Great Again, who gets to power via Evangelical Christianity…
So aside from those historical inaccuracies, how is this series? My overall feelings are a little mixed. If describing and predicting the future of the real world are your goals, this series is almost impossible to criticise – the only flaw I think is that in Butler’s world, the MAGA Christian leader is an actual true believer, whereas in the real world, even the belief could be faked. Other than that, this world is too believable for comfort, and I would not be surprised to find things ending up exactly this way in 10-20 years.
I think this series sits alongside a lot of the old school classic sci fi writers in terms of pure writerly prose and craft: the writing works, and is not bad, but you aren’t reading it for the language or the technique, you are reading it for the world. And in that way, as a forecast for the future, and a description of the types of characters who could rise or fall in the bizarre future we find ourselves in, and the ways that people might organise themselves to cope with overwhelming disasters, this little duo of novels is astonishing. At least to me, 90s sci-fi is stuff like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, or X-Files, where the troubles of the 2030s are not even a tiny footnote. To realise that, actually this stuff is happening now, and is not a distant sci-fi future but our actual future, and to describe it all in such a vivid and compelling way: that’s why everyone should read these books!
As a small bonus, here’s some pictures from March 2021, when I read these books, a time that was hard to have hope in, but also, just look at this (don’t worry, gardens are major theme in this series, so this isn’t even off topic):
Confinement Books, Volume 73: A Sand Book
A Sand Book, by Ariana Reines (Tin House Books, 2019). Finished reading: March 14, 2021.
This is a big book of poetry! What can one say about such a massive slab of poetic might? Some scattered thoughts.
This is a very unusual book in a lot of ways, up to and including the white-on-black printing scheme in the final section. But mostly, in being sort of a ‘collected poems so far’ of a relatively young writer, that still makes sense as a single book, having a true flow and direction throughout the sections. It’s a statement-making 300-page poetry book, rather than a low-key “here’s a best-of that I’ve carefully curated at the age of 70 once I’ve won all the prizes”. This book is fiery and fierce, angry and battling, and reading it feels more like “this is exactly what it felt like right at that moment” than “I reflected long and deeply and created this pristine diamond”. I think this makes the book relatively “easy” reading, in that the poems often read like everyday rants/outbursts/streams of thought rather than hyper-distilled formally flawless masterpieces (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
Without necessarily mentioning our modern day’s worst causes of stress and fear, Reines absolutely does capture the “mood of our times” in a very relevant register. I felt like this poetry was far better than it seems, as very astute and beautifully crafted scenes and emotions roll out in a way that resembles a casual social media feed, but like what social media would be if it was done thoughtfully and with immensely subtle virtuosity. I would definitely recommend this if you want to dip your toes into “contemporary” poetry – it’s not the kind of book that will bore you, and it will provide all kinds of surprises if you let it.
Winter in the Catskills, Part II
After the adventure to the Giant Ledge, the next trip was a more man-made destination: the Ashokan Reservoir. The name is apparently derived from the Iroquois for ‘place of fish’. This actually is a good opportunity to remember to discuss a little bit of the history of the Catskills.
According to what we read in various places, the Catskills were visited by Native Americans who hunted and fished there occasionally, but the very dense hemlock forests and generally hilly, inaccessible, and not agriculturally (or otherwise) useful land meant that the area didn’t have a lot of settlement or permanent residents pre-colonisation. The massive clearance of hemlock from the Catskills for use in the leather tanning process during the 19th century opened up the forests somewhat, and also brought a lot more people to the area for more permanent occupation, since there was something productive for them to do there. Eventually the combination of all the easy trees being chopped down and better chemical processes being invented led to the end of the hemlock/tanning industry, and other industries moved in. But along with all of this there was also the combination of the need for water for New York City, and the desire to conserve the outstanding natural area that still mostly existed in the Catskills. Which brings us back to…the reservoir!
Read more…
Giles Writes 
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