COLUMNS
Talk Show 21: with Sven Birkerts, Lisa Gabriele, Yael Goldstein Love & Adrienne Miller
/ Jaime Clarke
01.15.09
––What about the time period attracts you?
Birkerts: What draws me is not the plumbing or the likeliness of fleas, but my fantasy of scale, of a certain immediate social density. Places big enough to support a diverse café culture, a sense of release from what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life,” though on other days said idiocy exerts its own appeals.
Gabriele: I did live in Dawson in the late 1980s, almost a hundred years after gold was first found in its hills. I fell in love with the dusty ghostness of the town, like I seem to do all mining towns, from Bisbee and Jerome, Arizona, all the way up to the North American tundra line. Love them. Not sure why. I’m not a big believer of reincarnation but there’s something about an old, nearly abandoned mining town that has always felt eerily, instantly familiar to me. But the period that most attracts me is the year or two of massive expansion, as Dawson grew from being a handful of filthy canvas tents inhabited by a handful of filthy men, to a teeming, cosmopolitan city of 40,000 people.
Love: The urgency that comes with a life so bound up with death. There was the constant threat of war, the constant threat of disease, and people didn't turn away from this reality. They faced it head-on, made it the center of their art, thought, and even their festivities. As a result there’s something so large and awe-embracing about what they produced – their music, art, architecture, and so on. All succeeding eras seem somehow pinched in comparison.
Miller: I do appreciate that early America was largely a ruffian culture, and that the late-eighteenth-century was a time in which people blew their noses on their sleeves, lived in log cabins, ate with their fingers, and gouged out people’s eyes in tavern brawls, etc. But it was also the Enlightenment, and the central belief of the Enlightenment was that the world could be understood, that everything could be mastered and perfected through reason and rationality. It was a time that produced the most incredible geniuses ever to exist – Jefferson, Franklin, Mozart, Haydn, Rousseau, Edward Gibbon. To have heard the Jupiter Symphony when it was first performed! To have read (or at least cut apart the pages with your penknife, because that’s the way books worked then) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when it was first published! And, oh, to have been in the Assembly Room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the floor debates during that intolerably hot summer of 1776, and to have seen shy, awkward young Jefferson with his flowing red hair sitting silently and lankily, and to have witnessed elderly, avuncular Franklin piping in with another long-winded story that seemed as if it were going nowhere … but that always ended up summing up everything brilliantly and beautifully. I’m also kind of obsessed, to the point of fetishization, with the whole Neoclassical aesthetic: give me a dome, some columns, and a Chippendale chair to sit in, and that’s all it takes to make me happy.
Birkerts: What draws me is not the plumbing or the likeliness of fleas, but my fantasy of scale, of a certain immediate social density. Places big enough to support a diverse café culture, a sense of release from what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life,” though on other days said idiocy exerts its own appeals.
Gabriele: I did live in Dawson in the late 1980s, almost a hundred years after gold was first found in its hills. I fell in love with the dusty ghostness of the town, like I seem to do all mining towns, from Bisbee and Jerome, Arizona, all the way up to the North American tundra line. Love them. Not sure why. I’m not a big believer of reincarnation but there’s something about an old, nearly abandoned mining town that has always felt eerily, instantly familiar to me. But the period that most attracts me is the year or two of massive expansion, as Dawson grew from being a handful of filthy canvas tents inhabited by a handful of filthy men, to a teeming, cosmopolitan city of 40,000 people.
Love: The urgency that comes with a life so bound up with death. There was the constant threat of war, the constant threat of disease, and people didn't turn away from this reality. They faced it head-on, made it the center of their art, thought, and even their festivities. As a result there’s something so large and awe-embracing about what they produced – their music, art, architecture, and so on. All succeeding eras seem somehow pinched in comparison.
Miller: I do appreciate that early America was largely a ruffian culture, and that the late-eighteenth-century was a time in which people blew their noses on their sleeves, lived in log cabins, ate with their fingers, and gouged out people’s eyes in tavern brawls, etc. But it was also the Enlightenment, and the central belief of the Enlightenment was that the world could be understood, that everything could be mastered and perfected through reason and rationality. It was a time that produced the most incredible geniuses ever to exist – Jefferson, Franklin, Mozart, Haydn, Rousseau, Edward Gibbon. To have heard the Jupiter Symphony when it was first performed! To have read (or at least cut apart the pages with your penknife, because that’s the way books worked then) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when it was first published! And, oh, to have been in the Assembly Room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the floor debates during that intolerably hot summer of 1776, and to have seen shy, awkward young Jefferson with his flowing red hair sitting silently and lankily, and to have witnessed elderly, avuncular Franklin piping in with another long-winded story that seemed as if it were going nowhere … but that always ended up summing up everything brilliantly and beautifully. I’m also kind of obsessed, to the point of fetishization, with the whole Neoclassical aesthetic: give me a dome, some columns, and a Chippendale chair to sit in, and that’s all it takes to make me happy.