April 26, 2006
Jenny Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"
A photograph taken last week in Los Angeles
I began reading the first article in The Believer's April issue, titled "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA," as my plane took off from LAX. The article, to be published in two parts, is taken from Land of Sunshine, an essay collection edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise, and postulates that Los Angeles "is the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature." That's a counterintuitive proposition, to say the least. Despite some rhetorical excesses—such as listing eighteen topics the Los Angeles Times has reported on before identifying them all as "nature topics"—her broadening of the definition of "nature writing," in part through tracing "stories that follow nature through our material lives" and understanding the ways in which class affects one's perception of (and access to) nature, is pretty convincing. A quote, from right after the eighteen-strong list of Times topics:
These are nature topics all, about how we live in and fight about nature, and about how we use it more and less fairly and sustainably, and about the enormous consequences for our lives in L.A., as well as for places and people and wildlife everywhere. And such topics beg for a literature—for a poetry, for an aesthetics—because to clearly ponder our lives in and out of cities, we have to be able to imagine and reimagine these connections to nature.
(A side note: Price ends by discussing the Los Angeles River, which I pass over on foot on nearly every trip to LA, since at one point it cuts between several art galleries on La Cienega Blvd. I'm fascinated by it, and by how the creation of its concrete straitjacket remains the largest public-works project ever undertaken west of the Mississippi. Doug Aitken once tried to take a boat up the river, as discussed with Ed Ruscha in this Frieze interview, a quixotic project if ever there was one . . . )