Geography's Creative Juices

Apparently September is "musicians and sense of place" month here at The Topophilian.

Today's quip comes from The Man, Mr. Heart of Gold himself, Neil Young.

In an interview by David Carr of the New York Times, this excerpt caught my eye:

“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.”

Best to always either be coming from or going to that 'good place,' it seems.

It's good to have goals.

Erica Wheeler's Search for Sense of Place

Performing songwriter Erica Wheeler has spent 20 years as a touring folky and, as it turns out, has a great interest in "sense of place."

She recently wrote about being a "Sense of Place Sleuth" on her blog. In fact her whole website (and career, in many ways) revolves around what she labels "inspiring connections between people and place."


Erica Wheeler, 2012, as pictured on www.ericawheeler.com

"Wherever you live, there is a history, both natural and cultural," writes Wheeler. "And you can discover it through your computer or newspaper, and then just beyond your front door."


If you're in Wisconsin, you can step 'just beyond your front door' to catch a Wheeler live show, in Marshfield on the 20th and in La Crosse the 21st.

Keeping a fresh set of eyes is vital, suggests Wheeler. "You'll find places you never knew about or see familiar places through new eyes." I couldn't agree more.

Jason Isbell and Americana

Isbell in Madison, WI, 2007.   

I've often been aware of how "place" fits in to so many good songs, not to mention the presumptive worldview of so many good musicians, writers, and other artists. 

This recent CBS News post about northern Alabama native Jason Isbell's "great year" at the Americana Music Association (AMA) awards caught my eye. The AMAs are a sort of Grammy's for the American "roots music" crowd. Other favorite artists of mine in this vein include Justin Townes Earl, Gillian Welch, The Avett Brothers, The Secret Sisters (also mentioned in the CBS article), and many others. 

Tonight they'll all gather in Nashville and, as Isbell recently tweeted "get to dress like @JustinTEarle for a while!" Funny guy.

I wrote about Isbell and his band the 400 Unit back in 2007 for Madison's alt-weekly newspaper Isthmus. I've been a fan since DBT days of "Outfit" and "Danko/Manuel." His latest album Here We Rest is nominated for album of the year.

"Isbell's upbringing left him with a strong sense of place," writes Chris Talbott of CBS, "...he's used it to turn heads in the Southern songwriting community, first as a member of the Drive-By Truckers and later as a solo artist."

The piece also quotes John Paul White of The Civil Wars, noting the strength of place-based lyrical attributes. While this approach is nothing new, it seems that generation after generation of songwriters (and others) rediscover such basic knowledge again and again.

I've blogged about this connection before, here. Now go out and find yourself some good "local" music!

Vernacular Buildings - Appreciating the Ordinary

A short post on Farming Life focuses on vernacular buildings in rural Ireland and a project to map and preserve these wee bits of workaday history in and around Londonderry.

Vernacular buildings are of the land, often built of local materials such as stone and wood. Over time they. too, become the land. These ordinary and often overlooked bits of architectural history are symbolic and "represent the ingenuity and resourcefulness of our ancestors." They exhibit "the human ability to work with the local natural environment and to be an integral part of it."

This sort of "vernacular built heritage" weaves itself so intimately with the local natural environment over time that it becomes simply part of it, part of the sense of place for that particular community. I can think of several examples of old stone housing foundations, old barns, or pump houses that I used to play in and around as kid. They were indeed distinct parts of the landscape, part of what connected me to those places.

Yi-Fu Tuan's Humanist Geography

The wait is over!  A career-spanning look-back by a pillar of "place" philosophy, Prof. Yi-Fu Tuan, is now available. I saw a copy of this at the American Society for Environmental History conference last spring but it hasn't been publicly available until now. Yes. I know. Exciting!

It seems to be distributed by both University of Wisconsin Press and GFT Publishing. They introduce the book as such:

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography—what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy―to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search for Meaning, his latest and last book, is a final testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer.

I love this stuff. I'm not even sure why exactly. But I do. And that's okay.

As a student at UW with an interest in the "place literature" I have read a lot about it. Many, many scholarly articles mention Tuan when crediting the origins of this approach to humanity's interaction with the physical world. I've even seen him walking around campus once or twice. Sort of like nerd celebrity sighting. Next to Prof. Wm. Cronon, Tuan is about as close as one gets to such a sighting around here. Though I once saw Wisconsin alum, Jane Kaczmarek (a.k.a. the mom from Malcolm In The Middle) walking through the Memorial Union with some people who were probably family. And there are plenty of other well-known scholars who've come and gone through UW, I suppose. Still, seeing someone who you've "gotten to know" through books and essays is always a treat (at least for a sort-of lit nerd like me).

Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (University of Minnesota Press, 1977) is a bookshelf favorite. Again, I'm not even sure why. Which is odd. But there is just something endearing about it. It's certainly not for everyone. It's not light fiction. It's no Jodi Picoult. Thank goodness.  The world's got enough of that crap. (Sorry, Mom).

GTF says that Tuan's intent with this book is "to show how wonderful life on our small planet can be, even as we must deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws." His take on the future is hopeful, which will be a welcome reprieve from my own pesky pessimism, to be sure.

If you pick up a copy, let's talk. I'll be cashing in my coin jar to scrape together the $26 purchase price post haste.

LAND and how it gets that way. A review.

    

It may sound like the start of a bad joke, but it’s not: A sheep farmer, a car dealer, a horse trader, and a real estate developer all walk into an open field. What do they see? From the same vantage point, they see a sheep farm, a car lot, a horse pasture, and rows of rooftops. These various perspectives are the central dilemma around which filmmaker Walter Brock creates a compelling and well-rounded snapshot into the disputes that these senses of place create. These are the varied views of land, and how it gets that way.

            It is a story of place, Woodford County, Kentucky, during a ten year period starting in the early 1990s. It is a story of disputes over land, community, economics, and aesthetics. And it is as timeless as it is ubiquitous. Brock uses these archetypes - the agriculturalist, the business man, the horse trader, the developer - to exemplify the heated battles that have been happening not only in central Kentucky but throughout the United States since before the many battles for independence in the 1770s. What Brock finds is just what one might expect: political positioning, rhetoric, name-calling, a dose of good intention, and a wagon-load of pride.

            To be sure, these are not simple decisions. Any community that has wanted to expand its economic base while striving to preserve its unique geographic and cultural heritage has come up against difficult and divisive decisions needing resolution. Do land owners have the right to sell property on the edge of the city if it is properly planned according to a comprehensive zoning plan? Certainly. Do preservationists speak for the voice of many when they claim that development should be approached cautiously so as not to convert valuable agricultural land (be it pasture or tilled acreage)? Of course. The problem, as Brock shows, is that people typically want to do what they please on their own land, yet they also want to tell others (often direct neighbors) what they should or should not do on on that adjacent land.

            This hypocritical bit of human nature (or at least the nature of the landed gentry) is exemplified by the car dealer who doesn’t want the land around his residential estate developed but wants to build new car dealerships on pieces of “ugly land” here and there throughout the county. And the preservationist whose family sold off land for a tidy sum to developers but yet eloquently relays a convincing line of argument about why others should be restricted in their desire to profit from parcelization.

            Brock narrates the film, which was shown on Kentucky Public Television (some time ago) and offers a balanced view of the opposing sides. Most importantly, he spent the time to give viewers a longitudinal perspective by investing a decade in filming the central characters while they struggled to continually convey their side of this evolving story. It would be very interesting to see how such issues were affected by the ongoing recession but, to be fair, when making a film one must create parameters and at some point shout “cut!” for the last time.

            In the end, Brock asks “where exactly in this world is the line that divides us from the land?” In trying to answer this question, Brock utilizes these archetypal perspectives to exemplify the deep rifts playing out in one small Kentucky community. The subtle point running throughout the film, however, is that we are all intimately connected to land. To quote the great environmentalist and philosopher John Muir, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” Where we live and work and the roads we travel by all have different meanings from different perspectives. And it is this basic pluralistic conflict that will keep filmmakers like Brock, for better or for worse, indefinitely supplied with ample stories to share.

More Books With A Strong Sense of Place

A list of "top ten books with a strong sense of place" was recently posted over at Down The Writer's Path, a writerly blog by Vikk Simmons. This particular list sets up a challenge for me since I've only read two of the listed ten. Time to add a few more titles to the ever-expanding List of Books I Need To Read Next. I posted a different link to books with a strong sense of place here.

Any "top" list, sense of place or otherwise, will be lacking the favorites of others, of course, (no House Made of Dawn?!?! no Desert Solitare?!?! no Death Comes for the Archbishop?!?!) but it is a good conversation starter.

Personally, I've just finished The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen and I'm damn close to (finally!) finishing Coming Into The Country by John McPhee. I've never been to Nepal or Alaska but both these books evoke an incredibly strong sense of place and definitely "put me there" in terms of imagining the icy isolation and the vastness of those mountains. I've also been reading Rock Springs, by Richard Ford. It also evokes a certain Western States desolation. In places such as Idaho, Montana, North Dakota. And it's a great short story collection of the so-called 'dirty realism' variety.

Read on readers. Don't forget to write.