Rebecca's World
In her wonderfully idiosyncratic books, Rebecca Solnit illuminates the dark side of Western progress.null
iver of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Viking Press
Rebecca Solnit may be the most respected little-known author in Northern California. When I told well-read friends that I would be writing about her, I was surprised at how few were familiar with her name—and yet, just last year, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism (for As Eve Said to the Serpent, essays on "landscape, gender, and art"), which put her in company with Martin Amis and the acclaimed novelist and nature writer Joy Williams.
Solnit is an original: both thinker and activist, impassioned polemicist and prodigious researcher. Now 41, she's been able to earn a living exploring her own idiosyncratic interests, even when she thinks a publisher won't share those interests (as she felt with her latest book, which started with funds from a Guggenheim grant). She can survive with such high standards and modest income in part because she's lived in the same rent-controlled Western Addition flat since the early '80s. If you're going to criticize bourgeois values, which she does, it helps not to hold them too dear.
Most of her work interweaves themes having to do with visual art, the environment, and politics. Sometimes, it's true, she doesn't weave them all that artfully. To me, her work is an admirable bundle of strengths and weaknesses, precisely because of her uncommon blend of political engagement and intellectual scholarship. The passion can lead to self-righteousness and finger wagging; the research, to didactic and abstract point making. She can hit her points way too hard: Her book Hollow City, about the losses to San Francisco caused by the dot-com invasion, was widely considered a screed. I think the criticism came partly because by the time the book was published, early in 2001, the economy had already plummeted, the tech-mad invaders had been repelled. Solnit's fervent comments on the damage to the city's bohemian and working-class life seemed more strident than they really were because the context for her concerns was less current.
But how many well-researched jeremiads by award-caliber authors have you read lately? Even when she irritates me, I admire Solnit because in every line she writes, I feel a human presence. When she overwrites or overstates or makes a point once too often—even when she seems a bit too enamored of her own thoughts, not all of which are brilliant—I don't get impatient with her work; I get impatient with her. It's rare to be engaged by a writer like that.
Her masterwork, and a fine metaphor for the way her mind works, is Wanderlust: A History of Walking, in which she considers this most basic human movement from virtually all angles, anatomical to political, literary to athletic. It's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job with a topic so broad and unique that it can, at least when Solnit approaches it, encompass both John Muir and Werner Herzog, Las Vegas and the Sierra Club, ancient philosophers and modern protest marchers, memoir and storytelling.
Her latest book showcases all her strengths. Most people who know his name would tell you that Eadweard Muybridge took the famous 1870s stop-motion photographs of horses proving that all four feet leave the ground when an animal is running. With that work, he did more than answer a trivia question. In all the photographed landscapes and portraits that preceded it, the subject was as immobile as a mountain; any movement blurred action into invisibility. Muybridge developed a truly revolutionary technology through which a subject's actions not only were captured, step-by-step, but could be set in motion again.
The work was funded (and horse provided) by Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto, his ranch on the Peninsula. Solnit, stretching her mind around the times, the place, the accomplishment, and what came after—movies, television, Stanford University, the silicon chip and high-tech revolution—claims that "the modern world, the world we live in, began then...." Not just because Muybridge was able to freeze time but because Stanford, one of the "big four" behind the building of the transcontinental railroad, had already compressed space, shrinking a cross-country trip from six or seven weeks to less than a week.
When these two men were boys, in the preindustrial 1830s and 1840s, only water and wind, birds and animals could be harnessed for travel, labor, or communication. The transcontinental railroad, the telegraph, photography—all three of these world-changing developments occurred during just a few decades in the mid-1800s. Muybridge, says Solnit, was a doorway between that world and ours. His life and work touched on all the great themes of the late 19th century, from industrialization and the Indian wars to our relationship with nature and the new technologies. Which is why—forget the larger theme, about Palo Alto paving the way for Hollywood and Silicon Valley—her new book is fascinating as biography and history alone.
Eadweard Muybridge started life in England as Edward Muggeridge and be-came E.J. Muygridge soon after he came west in 1855. "San Francisco was the capital of the unknown lands" then, and an excellent place to reinvent oneself. For the next two decades, he specialized in documentary photography, selling his work from his various galleries on Montgomery Street, the city's bayfront commercial thoroughfare. If Muybridge had never made his stop-motion pictures, he might be remembered for his large-format views of Yosemite, which are in a class with Carleton Watkins's mammoth vistas, though Watkins's Yosemite (like Ansel Adams's in the next century) was a pristine, primordial paradise. Muybridge, who preferred more dramatic rubble-strewn scenes and camera angles, also chose to leave the valley's remaining natives in his photographs. These are nothing less than competing visions of the American West: one of Edenic, endless possibility; the other a less heroic view of a setting in which real people lived.
Muybridge's next great project was documenting the U.S. Army's battles against the Modocs, up in the lava beds outside Yreka, in 1873—documenting the replacement of one culture with another, or "the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images." A few years later, he joined Stanford at Palo Alto and took up the motion studies that occupied him, in a real sense, for the rest of his life. (At Stanford University, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts is showing the work of
Muybridge and other motion photographers through May 11.)
Solnit's engrossing new book touches our own lives because we still live in this landscape, altered though it is. We inhabit the center of the world Muybridge and Stanford wrought, a world less now of site and substance and more of "representations and information, a world of vastly greater reach and less solid grounding." In a way, Solnit is a modern Muybridge. She didn't invent what she presents, but, an artist and a scholar, she has found a way for us to see it.
Solnit gives an illustrated lecture March 16 at San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut St., S.F., (415) 771-7020.
iver of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Viking Press
Rebecca Solnit may be the most respected little-known author in Northern California. When I told well-read friends that I would be writing about her, I was surprised at how few were familiar with her name—and yet, just last year, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism (for As Eve Said to the Serpent, essays on "landscape, gender, and art"), which put her in company with Martin Amis and the acclaimed novelist and nature writer Joy Williams.
Solnit is an original: both thinker and activist, impassioned polemicist and prodigious researcher. Now 41, she's been able to earn a living exploring her own idiosyncratic interests, even when she thinks a publisher won't share those interests (as she felt with her latest book, which started with funds from a Guggenheim grant). She can survive with such high standards and modest income in part because she's lived in the same rent-controlled Western Addition flat since the early '80s. If you're going to criticize bourgeois values, which she does, it helps not to hold them too dear.
Most of her work interweaves themes having to do with visual art, the environment, and politics. Sometimes, it's true, she doesn't weave them all that artfully. To me, her work is an admirable bundle of strengths and weaknesses, precisely because of her uncommon blend of political engagement and intellectual scholarship. The passion can lead to self-righteousness and finger wagging; the research, to didactic and abstract point making. She can hit her points way too hard: Her book Hollow City, about the losses to San Francisco caused by the dot-com invasion, was widely considered a screed. I think the criticism came partly because by the time the book was published, early in 2001, the economy had already plummeted, the tech-mad invaders had been repelled. Solnit's fervent comments on the damage to the city's bohemian and working-class life seemed more strident than they really were because the context for her concerns was less current.
But how many well-researched jeremiads by award-caliber authors have you read lately? Even when she irritates me, I admire Solnit because in every line she writes, I feel a human presence. When she overwrites or overstates or makes a point once too often—even when she seems a bit too enamored of her own thoughts, not all of which are brilliant—I don't get impatient with her work; I get impatient with her. It's rare to be engaged by a writer like that.
Her masterwork, and a fine metaphor for the way her mind works, is Wanderlust: A History of Walking, in which she considers this most basic human movement from virtually all angles, anatomical to political, literary to athletic. It's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job with a topic so broad and unique that it can, at least when Solnit approaches it, encompass both John Muir and Werner Herzog, Las Vegas and the Sierra Club, ancient philosophers and modern protest marchers, memoir and storytelling.
Her latest book showcases all her strengths. Most people who know his name would tell you that Eadweard Muybridge took the famous 1870s stop-motion photographs of horses proving that all four feet leave the ground when an animal is running. With that work, he did more than answer a trivia question. In all the photographed landscapes and portraits that preceded it, the subject was as immobile as a mountain; any movement blurred action into invisibility. Muybridge developed a truly revolutionary technology through which a subject's actions not only were captured, step-by-step, but could be set in motion again.
The work was funded (and horse provided) by Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto, his ranch on the Peninsula. Solnit, stretching her mind around the times, the place, the accomplishment, and what came after—movies, television, Stanford University, the silicon chip and high-tech revolution—claims that "the modern world, the world we live in, began then...." Not just because Muybridge was able to freeze time but because Stanford, one of the "big four" behind the building of the transcontinental railroad, had already compressed space, shrinking a cross-country trip from six or seven weeks to less than a week.
When these two men were boys, in the preindustrial 1830s and 1840s, only water and wind, birds and animals could be harnessed for travel, labor, or communication. The transcontinental railroad, the telegraph, photography—all three of these world-changing developments occurred during just a few decades in the mid-1800s. Muybridge, says Solnit, was a doorway between that world and ours. His life and work touched on all the great themes of the late 19th century, from industrialization and the Indian wars to our relationship with nature and the new technologies. Which is why—forget the larger theme, about Palo Alto paving the way for Hollywood and Silicon Valley—her new book is fascinating as biography and history alone.
Eadweard Muybridge started life in England as Edward Muggeridge and be-came E.J. Muygridge soon after he came west in 1855. "San Francisco was the capital of the unknown lands" then, and an excellent place to reinvent oneself. For the next two decades, he specialized in documentary photography, selling his work from his various galleries on Montgomery Street, the city's bayfront commercial thoroughfare. If Muybridge had never made his stop-motion pictures, he might be remembered for his large-format views of Yosemite, which are in a class with Carleton Watkins's mammoth vistas, though Watkins's Yosemite (like Ansel Adams's in the next century) was a pristine, primordial paradise. Muybridge, who preferred more dramatic rubble-strewn scenes and camera angles, also chose to leave the valley's remaining natives in his photographs. These are nothing less than competing visions of the American West: one of Edenic, endless possibility; the other a less heroic view of a setting in which real people lived.
Muybridge's next great project was documenting the U.S. Army's battles against the Modocs, up in the lava beds outside Yreka, in 1873—documenting the replacement of one culture with another, or "the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images." A few years later, he joined Stanford at Palo Alto and took up the motion studies that occupied him, in a real sense, for the rest of his life. (At Stanford University, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts is showing the work of
Muybridge and other motion photographers through May 11.)
Solnit's engrossing new book touches our own lives because we still live in this landscape, altered though it is. We inhabit the center of the world Muybridge and Stanford wrought, a world less now of site and substance and more of "representations and information, a world of vastly greater reach and less solid grounding." In a way, Solnit is a modern Muybridge. She didn't invent what she presents, but, an artist and a scholar, she has found a way for us to see it.
Solnit gives an illustrated lecture March 16 at San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut St., S.F., (415) 771-7020.
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