National Psychogeographic
CaliNews | Published on January 17, 2005
My essay, "Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California," appears in the new Cabinet.
This is the latest in a series of essays I've been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late '60s and '70s.
If you're unfamiliar with the magazine, it's a wonderfully arcane compendium of critical theory and personal essays, combining the braininess of, say, October (but not its effete, '80s theory-jock snobbery) with, say, the omnivorous approach to cultural commentary of, say, The Believer. No, no; that's not right. Oh, hell, just buy the damn thing.
(FYI, Cabinet is available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, as well as other outlets, around the country. Alternatively, it can be bought directly from the publisher.)
Each issue has a theme; this one's is The Sea. Besides my essay, there are articles on "The Sunset Coast: The past within the present at the English seaside"; "The final voyage of Horatio Nelson"; "The Generation of the Jolly Roger"; "The science of rogue waves"; and "Utopia Beneath the Waves: Narcis Monturiol's submarine dream." Plus, there's an awesome postcard of a Kraken, the legendary giant squid of Scandinavian mythology. Too cool.
Here’s what you get, in this one-time, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money back essay:
- Tales of growing up “in the Silurian age,” in San Diego’s South Bay
- an homage to the prehistoric seascapes of the Czech scientific illustrator Zdenek Burian
- an exhaustively close reading of prog-rock artist Roger Dean’s ‘70s album covers that wrings more hermeneutic juice out of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans than Rosalind Krauss could squeeze out of Matthew Barney’s entire goddamn oeuvre (I interviewed Dean at length for this section)
- a meditation on the influence, on Salvador Dali’s soft watches and lobster telephones, of the “grandiose geological delirium” of the micha-schist formations of Cape Creus, near his home
- and some apocalyptic, here-comes-the-flood premonitions of SoCal buried under a biblical deluge, when the polar caps melt.
Here's a teaser, to seduce you into buying the magazine:
According to Dali biographer Ian Gibson, one writer concluded, on visiting Cape Creus, “that Dali could only be fully understood if one took into account this extraordinary landscape that had shaped his thinking.”Posted by Mark Dery at January 17, 2005 04:58 PM | | TrackBackAn instructive phrase: “That had shaped his thinking.” It makes us wonder: Which came first, the neurotic or the rocks? Do landscapes touch off sympathetic vibrations inside us because they resonate with childhood experiences, remembered or not? Dali once observed that his “mental landscape” resembled “the protean and fantastic rocks of Cape Creus.” Did the vaginal clefts, phallic spurs, and fecal blobs of its tortured, metamorphic rocks mirror his sexual psyche, a battleground of (barely) repressed homosexuality, ravenous orality, and shameful anality? Or was Dali, in some weird way, shaped by the landscape he grew up in? The Situationists coined the term “psychogeography” to describe “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Is there a psychogeology---a study of the psychological effects of the rock formations we grew up around? Are there igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic personalities? Is there a stratigraphy of the soul, a petrology of the psyche?
Hey, I'll buy it. Having grown up in Chula Vista myself, I want it just to see the words "Chula Vista" or "South Bay" in a magazine of considerable intellect. But where can I find the damn thing? I'm in suburban Chicago, and I've never seen it in any of the chain or independent bookshops out here.
Posted by: Joyce Garcia at January 21, 2005 03:17 PMI have seen cabinet here in Minneapolis at Shinders, a local book and magazine place. I doubt you would find at a chain. Could be wrong but not the first place I would check out. I might just take another look at Cabinet.
I came here by way of BoingBoing.net and decided to stay because I like Marks' writing. This article made me think about how the lanscape affect me growing up. I grew up in southeastern Minnesota which has a 'karst geography'. That is, as I understand it, a layer of limestone that is gradually being eaten away by groundwater. Karst geology also produces sinkholes that can form overnight just about anywhere. I remember that as a child we knew of a few sinkholes around where we played a kids. I was attracted and yet terrified to know that I was looking at more than just a hole in the ground. That at the bottom it was very likely there was an underground river and if I fell in I would be swept away and they would never ever find the body.
Posted by: brenda vonahsen at January 23, 2005 02:44 AMBrenda: Fascinating. Reminds me of an anecdote I heard once (having a senior moment, so I can't recall where) about a New Jersey town where a mountain of burning tires had been burning for *decades*. Purportedly, the fire went underground---literally---gnawing out big subterranean holes, into which houses would unexpectedly collapse in a shower of sparks and smoke. Urban myth? Maybe. But a great one, even so. Have you written about this? Has anyone?
Also, I retrofitted the above post with a link to the CABINET site, where you can find a list of stores in your area that carry the magazine:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/wheretobuy.php
Have I written about it? No. I had not given it much thought till I read your piece and I simply gave you my memories
I don't believe that these memories influenced my art very much but you never know. But I was thinking, today I live in Minneapolis which is fairly liberal but where I grew-up, SE Minn., is staunchly conservative, when the Bush campain visited Minnesota they usually went there because they were very recptive. Another state that has a simular geology under foot is Florida. Makes me wonder if living in a landscape that occasionally opens up and swallows you leads to a reactionary conservativism. I can see it as..... "there is this terror under my feet, yeah, it is infrequent and the odds are I'll never get 'chosen' but that only makes it worse, so to protect myself I cling to my societies orthodox religion."
I remember the story about the tires. I am pretty sure it was real. I also remember news stories about gigantic sinkholes opening up under a Florida lake. It was like God pulled the plug, the entire lake and a couple of boats went down the drain.
In my childhood I remember hearing about someone waking up to find a sinkhole had swallowed their driveway, or a corner of the basement. Nothing as dramatic as Florida, but to a kid those are very scary things to hear.
I think that living between the suburbs and my aunts' and uncles' farms had a bigger effect on me. I love nature and have a sort of farm-life slash suburban outlook on life. But I do understand what we are talking about here as kind-of the next level down. No, scratch that, maybe this stuff goes way down. The ground of our being, one of the skanzas, whatever you wish to call it.
Posted by: brenda vonahsen at January 25, 2005 10:13 PM"It was like God pulled the plug, the entire lake and a couple of boats went down the drain." Wonderfully evocative line---almost steal-worthy! [g] You really should write about this, if you're the writing type. Your insights into landscape's role in shaping us, as political animals, are fascinating.
Posted by: M. Dery at January 26, 2005 11:01 PMMark -- Harper's wrote about a (Pennsylvania) town that was on fire for decades (coal fire, not tires -- are you sure you're not thinking about the famous Springfield Tire Fire?). Sad, sad article. February, 2004, link here:
http://tinyurl.com/3vq9w
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