All posts by Vernon Peterson

General, Music

Nell Warren: late night thoughts

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Nell Warren’s paintings at PDX Contemporary Art have been on my mind all weekend. “Quandaries” they are called. I’ve played with that notion, echoing the word in the “quaint” look the paintings have or the “boundary” Warren blurs between abstraction and representation. My doubt not about if I like them but why. In her artist’s statement, Warren says her work reflects a “delicate balance of serendipity and intent.” That captures perfectly the chance and causal links in my own reaction to the paintings.

I love things that stir the flat-line horizon of deep memory, thoughts triggering long lost impressions, crowding words and images in such a press you’re barely able to see them in the gloaming and wave before they’re gone.

I say they are landscapes but I know that word doesn’t do them justice. On the one hand, they remind me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrated maps of Middle-earth. They have a lazy, rolling, bucolic feel; a cartoonish quality even, at first glance. I thought of Smurfs! On the other hand, I might claim they’re abstracts, except how then explain what can only be a meandering river, pulling the eye switchback-like across the painting. No matter; as ambiguous and as contrived as they seem when you study them closely, they pull you in.
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General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

Forget about it Jake, it’s a Rauschenberg

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My first sense of the modern is in what Roger Shattuck said about Marcel Duchamp: “Can one produce works that are not works of art? He tried; we wouldn’t allow it.”

One might say of Robert Rauschenberg: “Can one throw out something that is pure junk? We tried; he wouldn’t allow it.”

My second sense of the modern is in Rauschenberg’s famous early work, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Which is exactly that: He talked Willem de Kooning into giving him a drawing to erase. He wanted to start with a drawing that was “a hundred percent art,” which he thought his own might not be. De Kooning gave him something hard, a heavy-lined piece drawn with grease pencil, ink and crayon. It took Rauschenberg a month and forty erasers, but he finished his un-drawing. (Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World)
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Books, General

American Earth: environmental writing for the age(s)

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“He had merely waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed there with a good conscience and a great idea.”
–Henry James, “The Next Time”
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau arrived on April 22, Earth Day. Edited by Bill McKibben, with a Foreword by Al Gore, and published by Library of America on acid-free paper, it is a volume designed to last for generations. But will the selection from 102 writers have relevance past our own age? Can environmental writing focus the debate on critical issues in such a way that, as Al Gore suggests, “American environmentalism will shape our standing in the world”? Will folks spend $40 to find out? Lugging around this thousand-plus page book will alter my gait, but will it change my “environmental perception”? The answer to that may be weeks away as I dig in. Here, scatter-shot, are my initial reactions.

Most overrated of the 102 writers. Edward Abbey. I know I cut against the grain here. McKibben describes Abbey as funny, crude and politically incorrect, “a master of anarchy and irreverence.” I don’t buy it. He was a misanthrope with a sense of privilege he expected others to respect. To wit, McKibben’s description of a day spent with Abbey at his “beloved” Arches National Monument: “Because he refused to let me pay tribute in the form of a $5 dollar admission fee to park rangers at the gate, we instead drove for miles, took down a fence, and forced my rental car through a series of improbable rutted washes to reach our goal, cackling the whole way.” Why not an all-terrain vehicle?
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Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Joseph Conrad our contemporary

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“At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I have done with observation, too.”

“Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.”

— Joseph Conrad, Victory

During this past week of “Mission Accomplished” ironies I have thought often of Joseph Conrad and his novel Victory, written before World War I began but not published until 1915. The book has nothing to do with war; if anything, it is one individual’s personal victory over his own skeptical detachment. In an author’s note Conrad said he had considered altering the title so as not to mislead readers, but decided against it because he thought Victory was the appropriate title for his story, based on “obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.”

Do we have some bit of that glimmer of “awe and wonder” in our age of “shock and awe”? The one story I read at least once a year is “Heart of Darkness.” “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth,” Marlow begins his tale. And we know what he means. Wherever we are as we read these words we know the green grass or concrete beneath us covers something in the past dark and bloody. A flight of a few hours can take us to one of several of those dark places. Our “here” can become a dark place overnight. No, Marlow says, the conquest of the earth is “not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

What makes a long-dead writer our contemporary? Why do we feel such a direct connection to a nineteenth century Polish exile and sailor who began writing in English, his third language, after he turned forty? Polish drama critic Jan Kott wondered the same about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare Our Contemporary Kott writes that “Shakespeare is like the world, or life itself. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see.” And that is not because Shakespeare foretold things to come, but because, whatever the subject of his story, he filled the stage “with his own contemporaries.” Shakespeare aimed for “a reckoning with the real world.” For Kott, in mid-twentieth century Eastern Europe, it was “the struggle for power and mutual slaughter” in Shakespeare’s history plays that struck a chord. Kott also notes that in Conrad’s Lord Jim, the hero owns one book, a one-volume edition of Shakespeare. “Best thing to cheer up a fellow,” says Jim.

Why do Conrad’s novels and stories resonate with us in our time? Simply because conquest–of those inhabiting the earth, and, the earth itself, in all meridians–IS the story of our times. And, because, damned if they don’t cheer up a fellow like me!
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Books, General

Robert Pogue Harrison: How does your garden grow?

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Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be called: soul.
Dr. Vigil, in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano


Portlanders have a garden state of mind. Perhaps even a garden state of “what used to be call: soul.” Forest Park meanders through the city. There are the Japanese and Chinese Gardens and all the micro gardens within their perimeters. In one the “enclosing landscape,” as Edith Wharton put it, is forest, except for a panoramic vista of the city; in the other it is high-rise buildings. There is the highly-ordered Rose Garden and, within its confines, the test gardens that supplied the metaphor for Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love. There are community and backyard gardens, porch pots all down the block, and desk overhangs in every office. Yes, our garden varietals are many, to include the world’s smallest, Mill Ends Park, all 452 square inches of it, located at SW Naito Parkway and SW Taylor Street.

But with all the gardens and the countless hours gardening per capita, do we live in a “gardenless age” for lack of really “seeing” the gardens in our midst? Robert Pogue Harrison believes so, and I’m always inclined to suspend judgment and follow the course he charts through art, literature, philosophy, psychology and anthropology – you name it – to the clearing he finds in the woods. I’ve kicked around a bit in his new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, but barely have disturbed its topsoil. I’ve spent more time with his earlier books, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992) and The Dominion of the Dead (2003), both remarkable for elegant prose and suggestive argument that draw you back for second and third looks. Harrison takes a ruling image – forests, burials, gardens – and explores how they function in human life and institutions, how they filter through the mind as image and metaphor. What he says about gardens, that they “are never either merely literal or figurative but always both one and the other,” captures his working method in all three books. In Forests, for example, it is the realm of trees that provides the meeting ground of human history and nature, and it too defines “the edge of Western civilization, in the literal as well as imaginative domains.”

But Gardens is not a primer on “literal” gardens or gardening. Harrison is not a gardener, and I’m not reading his book as one. My husbandry extends to mowing lawn, harvesting dog and cat leavings from the yard, and tending – contemplating – a dead bonsai tree that owns a corner of the porch.
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Books, General

Blessed Unrest: Hawken, Lopez & Solnit at the Gerding Theater

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hawken72bw_lg.jpgWe did not find out how or when the State will wither away, but perhaps it was enough that Paul Hawken, Barry Lopez and Rebecca Solnit –- gathered together last Monday, April 14, by Literary Arts to explore the ideas in Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming –- proclaimed the possibility that we’ve reached “peak” Empire. It was a stimulating intellectual adventure, a noisy and crowded philanthropy of good ideas, and my initial misgivings dropped away in the audience’s collective exhalation – of relief, astonishment, long last recognition of all that’s been there right before our eyes if only we could have seen it – which rose past the slanted timbers of the set to Sometimes a Great Notion at the Gerding Theater, which formed the backdrop for the trio’s discussion. But something nagged. I asked myself, “Why does hope, so freely marketed, seem like a sub-prime mortgage?”

But I wander too far ahead, and afield. As Lopez, the moderator, noted, the three were gathered in our “little part of the world” for a conversation about what they know (and what of it they could pass on in memorable form) about the forces they see leading to reconciliation and re-invention of community in the world at large. Hawken sees a common thread in community groups –- non-profits and non-governmental groups (“NGOs”) –- around the world: a restorative impulse in the face of the inability or unwillingness of governments to address the plethora of social and environmental crises. In Blessed Unrest, Hawken describes the emergence of these groups all over the world as a spiritual awakening, or the creation of a new “civil society,” a term that means the “third sector” of voluntary organizations that functions alongside government and the marketplace.

Hawken’s recognition of this phenomenon sparked the creation of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, “WiserEarth,” an online directory of international social justice and environmental organizations, more than 100,000 of them cataloged and indexed in user- and contact-friendly fashion. Its breadth and utility as a searchable database is astonishing. One wonders how many contract employees in Homeland Security it must take to re-index this information in terror-threat priority and monitor the activities of the organizations, as well as the interests and contacts, of those who use the site. (The enormity of that task may account for some of the State’s withering.)

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Books, General

TURNING 60: YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

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“Funes remembered not only every leaf
of every tree of every patch of forest,
but every time he had perceived
or imagined that leaf. “
-Jorge Luis Borges “Funes, His Memory”

haystacks1989.jpgI turn sixty today and my memory plays tricks. At any moment I can forget a word, like “deck” or “cup” or “knife.” It’s there in my mind’s eye, a clear picture, but the word refuses to skip past the tip of my tongue to finish my thought.

I struggle with the word “sofa,” in part because growing up in my family in my corner of the Midwest it was called a “davenport.”

In frustration, I ask for a little help. “It’s that thing with numbers, on the car,” meaning license plate. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just say ‘license plate’?” responds my unsympathetic son.

But there are other memory flips that I think of as structural. I catch myself bewildered whether I’ve actually done something I meant to or merely think I have. Did I lock the door? Turn off the downstairs light? Or I turn to do one of those things and realize I did it moments before.

At the health club I hang my towel on a hook and unless I consciously make a mental note, look back and confirm its position and signature fold, I’ll emerge from the shower with no idea which towel is mine. By habit I have a primary hook and a back-up, but in these moments, who knows? At times I just grab and run. Folks can be very unforgiving if you use their towel.

And here’s another odd short-term memory thing. I read a chapter in a book. A half hour later I skim the same passage. Some details are as if new, others spring up vividly in memory, but with the same patina of recognition as memories that are ten or twenty or thirty years old.

And there’s that curious feeling of panic, forgetting the names of folks I know well when it’s time to introduce them. Or forgetting a person’s name fifteen seconds after we’re introduced. That may be as much social anxiety as faulty memory. But even in moments of quiet reflection, I’ll stammer. Who’s the female lead in my favorite movie, “Love at Large”? Elizabeth Something? Ah, yes. Perkins. Who wrote “One Hundred Brothers”? James Wilcox? No, he wrote “Modern Baptists.” The other quirky writer working in utter obscurity is Donald Antrim.

This is disconcerting because my mind for books and authors, even the most marginal ones I’ve never read or never will read, is usually of the same absorbent variety as others’ minds for baseball trivia or wines. Now that faculty skips a beat, too. So folded in my billfold, tattered and worn, I keep a short list of books, writers, movies and CDs, so I can browse in book or music stores without panic.

9780521834247.jpgFinding myself in this predicament more and more often, it’s no wonder Douwe Draaisma’s book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (Cambridge University Press, $18.99) caught my eye in an ad in The London Review of Books. I neglected to note it on my billfold crib sheet, though, so a day or two later in the bookstore I recalled, vaguely, “Why Memory, Something, Something…” and no more (until I looked it up again in the Review).
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Books, General, Theater

Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion Takes Root

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“Remember William Carlos Williams’ description of the pioneer
women who shot their children against the wilderness like cannonballs. Do the same with your novels.”
— Nathanael West

sometimes_notion_150.jpgDismantling Paradise is hard work. Accomplishing it by proxy, such as in writing a novel, also takes its toll. Perhaps that’s why Ken Kesey abandoned the novel form after completing Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964.

He dismantled the myth of Eden at the end of the Oregon Trail.

Americans claimed Oregon, in the words of John Quincy Adams, with the promise “to make the wilderness blossom as a rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply and subdue the earth.” But the idea that the West is a storehouse of riches to be extracted from raw wilderness, is counterpoint to that other potent myth – that the West is a natural, unspoiled Eden. Many folk long to spend their pilgrimage here in refreshing hot springs, even as money folk see the quick buck in resources, renewable or not.

As Aaron Posner’s stage adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion premieres at Portland Center Stage, and related lectures and discussions explore Kesey’s importance and place in Oregon culture, let’s recall how Kesey exposed that myth as baldly as a clearcut and covered a theme as old as Europe’s invention of America. The empire with no clothes. An empire as precarious as the Stamper house cabled and sandbagged on the brink, the river’s edge.

Here’s D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature:

“Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the underconsciousness so devilish. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the underconsciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! Cackles the underconsciousness.”

And Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael:

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.”

Olson is writing about Melville and Moby Dick, but he’s thinking of the continent and “the restless thing” that is the American in action, out to conquer that stretch of earth between oceans. “It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.” Americans fancy themselves as democrats, “but their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.” For Olson’s Melville “it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people.”
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Books, General

Hemingway: Last Night in Havana

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U.S. policy toward Cuba is depressing.

Fifty years ago there were high hopes in Cuba when Fidel Castro toppled the dictator Batista and ran out the American Mafia. But since then there has been a slow, steady descent into poverty and repression, the combined effect of the U.S. embargo and Castro’s ruthless system of concentration camps, forced-labor and re-education, supported by a network of secret police and informers. Recently, Castro was replaced by his brother Raul, and there was much speculation about “transition scenarios” and the usual saber-rattling from the administration about regime change, keeping hopes alive for the politically-active Cuban-American community that someday they’ll be able to reclaim the property Castro confiscated fifty years ago.

ernesthemingway.jpgBut there’s likely no going back in any sense. Consider the curious fate of Ernest Hemingway, always a revered local god in Cuba. His novels To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream reflect the sun-soaked, elemental, sometimes violent sense of adventure he found in pre-Castro Cuba. His estate on the edge of Havana, Finca Vigia, or “Look-out Farm,” where he lived for more than two decades, is now a state-run museum, housing thousands of books and dozens of paintings he collected, as well as many heads of animals he killed on safari.

Finca Vigia is the setting for Leonardo Padua Fuentes’ entertaining novel Adios Hemingway (Cannongate, 2005). As the story opens in the year 2000, ex-cop Mario Conde returns to duty to investigate the discovery of a skeleton and FBI badge that have washed up in the garden during a violent storm. It’s quickly established that the man was murdered some forty years before, during Hemingway’s last months in Cuba. Suspicion falls on the famous author because it was then that he abruptly left Cuba to resettle in Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself in 1961.
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Books, General

Surveillance: From Barbed Wire to the Invisible Prison

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Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets
To conceal.

Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

1.jpg
Ubiquitous means being or existing everywhere at once. A novel word for a commonplace idea. We now accept the idea that surveillance is ubiquitous, even though we commonly, and romantically, associate it with the world of stealth and spying, as in popular novels and movies of the James Bond or Jason Bourne variety.

Its reach is much broader than that.

I posted on CIA, surveillance and paranoia the day before the revelation that “contract” employees at the State Department accessed the passport files of Barack Obama and other presidential candidates. “Contracting” of course means “outsourcing,” which means the likes of Blackwater and Halliburton and its subsidiaries, the client states of administration officials and lobbyists. The State Department claims it was simply innocent curiosity – before they’ve even investigated. And little chance we’ll see the results of the investigation soon. It is essentially the same claim made on behalf of the Patriot Act. Communication surveillance is directed at terrorists; honest Americans have nothing to fear. I don’t “fear” anything, but I have no illusions. If information is there to mine, the roving political operatives in either party will mine and exploit it for political purposes.

Surveillance is pervasive. I recently ran the 2008 Portland Shamrock Run and a few days later received an email with a photo of me captured mid-race (and laboring mightily) that I can purchase for a fee. I can’t reproduce the photo here without violating intellectual property laws (as if I’d want that hunkered huffer-puffer figured-forth in this space). I assume the photographer was able to identify me by the timing chip I wore on my ankle. I don’t recall that I gave race officials permission to use me commercially in this way, but I imagine it is there somewhere in the entry form fine print. This is likely as “innocent” as surveillance gets. Cameras are everywhere and we now have the capability if not the political will or federal funding to create virtual borders. It is not, finally, that we are being tracked. It is that we are now effectively captive to technology and the paranoid will to use it in order to maintain political order.
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