Renamed City

Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I wonder when that might be possible again... I have never been, but I've always assumed I would go one day. I’m not sure I associated Leningrad with anything much when I was a child - it was when I started to read Russian literature that St. Petersburg came into focus, accompanied by a shock of recognition. In Gogol, men ‘scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live.’ When I first read his stories, I too was a lowly, alienated civil servant living in shabby accommodation. And then there was Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, ‘full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city’s cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle that made people sick’ (Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance).

 

 Vasily Sadovnikov, Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, 1830s

 

In his 1979 essay 'A Guide to a Renamed City' Joseph Brodsky talks about how the city has been reflected in Russian literature. The presence of the Neva means that St. Petersburg's 'architectural landscapes' are already reflected in water, 'as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images.' But behind these surfaces, it was the interior of the city that became the subject of Russian poetry and novels. And as this was happening, St. Petersburg itself grew and changed at extraordinary speed, until the Revolution came and it entered a long period of stasis and decline - 'quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of the seasons.' Brodsky concludes his essay with Russia's literary city preserved in the memories of Soviet school children, as they learn verse and re-read nineteenth century prose. He ends with a memorable final paragraph, that describes the cityscape in June...

A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours - a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it is too light and because any dream will be inferior to reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

Hanging Gardens of Rock City

A detail from Hanging Gardens of Rock City (1970) by Liliane Lijn

In the British Museum at the moment you can see Hanging Gardens of Rock City, a collage by Liliane Lijn. It was one of four she made in 1970, imagining aerial walkways and parks among the rooftops of Manhattan. Of course these can now be seen as anticipating The High Line.  The museum caption quotes her as saying 'I have always found the rooftops of the buildings in Manhattan exciting and strange as if their architects had allowed their fantasies free at that distance from the ground.'  In her collages, the public has access to these private buildings and can be seen sunbathing and walking around, far above the streets of the city.

In the sixties Lijn moved from New York to London, where she was married to Takis, who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern earlier this year.  In the course of her long career she has worked in all media, from performance to prose-poems and made plastic sculptures, poem machines, 'vibrographs', cone-shaped koans, kinetic clothing, light columns, biomorphic goddesses and solar installations in the landscape. The last of these is of particular interest here.  They are collaborations with astronomer John Vallerga in which powerful prisms reflect sunlight of different colours, depending on their angle.  Getting permission to install these has not been easy and ensuring they are protected from damage is also a challenge.  The video below shows a couple of these artifical suns on the hills behind the Golden Gate Bridge.  Another, Sunstar, has been shining from the summit of Mount Wilson - the Los Angeles Magazine reported on it last year.  Here is some information from the Mount Wilson Observatory website.

'An array of six prisms, Sunstar takes incoming sunlight and refracts it, bending the light and spreading it into a spectrum–all the colors of the rainbow. It is mounted near the top of the Observatory’s 150-foot Solar Telescope Tower. With motion controls, it can be remotely directed to project the spectrum to a specific point in the Los Angeles basin. An observer below will see an intense point of light in a single wavelength, shining like a brilliant jewel from the ridgeline of Mount Wilson, 5800 feet above in the San Gabriel Mountains. [...] 

The prism will be beaming daily to various sites around the Los Angeles basin — Griffith Observatory, the Rose Bowl, Pasadena City Hall, Memorial Park by the Armory, Elysian Park, the Music Center, wherever there is a view of Mount Wilson.  If you see it, please let us know what you think. Requests to have it beam your way can often be accommodated. Email: concerts@mtwilson.edu. Include the time you’d like to see the beam and your location’s address, or geographic coordinates if you prefer.'

Solar Hills by Liliane Lijn

Undercity

I have started the audiobook of Underland.  I listen to it underground, during my tube journeys to work, where claustrophobia comes from the crush of people rather than the confined space of the tunnels.  It is the first of Robert Macfarlane's books I have listened to and so far the reading is excellent and clear, although there is a point on my daily journey between Highbury and Kings Cross where the scream of the train is so loud that I have to reverse back a little way in order to move forward again.  The fifth chapter, 'Invisible Cities', is particularly resonant to anyone listening on the Underground, as it describes a weekend spent with urban explorers in the world beneath Paris.  At one point Rob is compelled to crawl through a crumbling tunnel which begins to rumble and shake with the passage of a train heading overhead to Montparnasse station.  It wasn't difficult to predict, as I did here a few years ago when Underland was a work in progress, that there would be some 'arduous activity' of this kind in the book.  But there are also rich seams of cultural history, like the pages devoted to Walter Benjamin (including his arduous final walk and memorial.)  And there's Italo Calvino of course: his 'Invisible City' of Eusapia had a copy of itself underground, a dead place that over time became more and more like the 'real city' above.  

Cities are increasingly vertical - it has been estimated that the infrastructure supporting urban life spans from 10,000m below sea level to 35,000 km above it.  But one day they will be gone. Then

'it is the invisible cities - the undercities - that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock.  The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence.  Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids - these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.'

Listening to this, I imagined our tube train preserved intact within the fossil record, along with other machines and artifacts that have been abandoned or buried underground.  In an earlier chapter, Rob is told that potash mining machines are simply left when they come to the end of their lifespan.  In their caves they will gradually be covered in translucent halite, burial shrouds of salt.  Another striking Ballardian image occurs in 'Invisible Cities', when Rob remembers a trip he made to a slate mine with the writer and urban explorer Bradley Garrett.  There, in a great flooded chamber, a shaft of sunlight illuminates an avalanche of abandoned vehicles. The oldest cars were the furthest down - at its base, 'a blue Cortina estate was poised as perfectly as a glacial erratic atop the moraine, with a moss-green Triumph Herald both its pivot and its point of repose.'   

Guardian readers may recall a 2013 article Rob wrote about urban exploration, describing his first excursion with Bradley Garrett.  Some of this material reappears in Underland and encountering it again made me wonder about the tube journey I was taking - who else might have passed through those tunnels during the night?  Towards the end of his 'place-hacking' day in London, Rob was worried he might miss his half-midnight train from King's Cross.

'"We'll get you there," replied Garrett. "In fact, if you want we'll walk you north up the tunnels, and pop you out of a manhole just by the station." I liked the thought of taking the tube rather than the Tube back to King's Cross. But I pitied whoever sat next to me on the way home.

The road plunged at once into a beautiful wood

Because News From Nowhere is a dream vision of the future I have found myself wondering sometimes if certain details I recall are really in it, or whether I dreamed them myself.  After a trip to Hammersmith last weekend, when we walked past William Morris's old house on the Thames, I had an urge to go back to the text, to check whether he really had name-checked Stoke Newington, the part of London where I live.  In Morris's future London, I recollected, it was possible to walk all the way here from Hammersmith along a forest path.  And indeed it was as I remembered it - the description comes in Chapter 5, which begins with the narrator at Hammersmith Broadway (now a shopping centre from which the Thames can be reached only by negotiating a complex system of noisy roads round the Hammersmith Flyover).  'Past the Broadway there were fewer houses on either side.  We presently crossed a pretty little brook that ran across a piece of land dotted over with tree...'  Presently they reach Kensington, where the urban woodland begins.

"People are apt to gather here rather thick, for they like the romance of the wood; and naturalists haunt it, too; for it is a wild spot even here, what there is of it; for it does not go far to the south: it goes from here northward and west right over Paddington and a little way down Notting Hill: thence it runs north-east to Primrose Hill, and so on; rather a narrow strip of it gets through Kingsland to Stoke-Newington and Clapton, where it spreads out along the heights above the Lea marshes; on the other side of which, as you know, is Epping Forest holding out a hand to it..."

They walk on and

'The road plunged at once into a beautiful wood spreading out on either side, but obviously much further on the north side, where even the oaks and sweet chestnuts were of a good growth; while the quicker-growing trees (amongst which I thought the planes and sycamores too numerous) were very big and fine-grown.

'It was exceedingly pleasant in the dappled shadow, for the day was growing as hot as need be, and the coolness and shade soothed my excited mind into a condition of dreamy pleasure, so that I felt as if I should like to go on for ever through that balmy freshness.  My companion seemed to share in my feelings, and let the horse go slower and slower as he sat inhaling the green forest scents, chief amongst which was the smell of the trodden bracken near the wayside...'

A constant delight in the natural world is central to life in this future London.  As Fiona MacCarthy writes in her biography of Morris, there is no real dividing line between country and town life. 'Morris's visionary landscape is both decorous and lavish, mysterious and homely, an extraordinary and deeply imagined image of urban possibility. We can see its effects as the Garden Cities burgeoned early on in the next century...'   The narrator of News From Nowhere eventually leaves London for a journey up the river by boat, arriving at an old house resembling Kelmscott Manor, Morris's home in Oxfordshire.  Here the dream has to end and after a period of darkness he finds himself back in 'dingy Hammersmith.'  We left Hammersmith in bright sunshine and walked along the Thames Path and over the bridge, eventually reaching the Wetland Centre, with its otters and sand martins and dragonflies.  It is almost possible there to imagine a city partially reclaimed for nature.  Meanwhile, News from Nowhere continues to inspire readers across the world - I read just yesterday that Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho will be using the title for a new exhibition, coming to Tate Liverpool later this year.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Water Willow, 1871

Jane Morris with Kelmscott Manor in the background

Taste of a Stone

The Documenta 14 catalogue is organised in a way that appeals to my fondness for chronologies - each of the 163 living artists is allotted a double page corresponding to a day during the duration of the exhibition, and is also allowed to pick one date that is particularly important for them.  The artists are then ordered in accordance with their special dates, so for example Susan Hiller chose 4 November 1899 (the date Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published) which means that she gets August 16th, in between artists who went for events in 1900 and 1897.  I'm not sure if this makes sense without looking through the catalogue.. in any case it's not really relevant to what I thought I would do here: highlight those artists in Documenta who have been addressing the landscape in various ways.  This is not necessarily an exhaustive list but it gives an idea of the range of current practice.  Some of these artists are using various media to consider sites round the world that are threatened, contested or marked with traces of recent political change.  Others are finding new approaches to the profusion of new land and environmental art practices that emerged in the sixties.

The landscape as artist
Probably every artist at Documenta is influenced at some level by landscape, but some allow it to act on their own work, bring a chance element to the final product.  Nevin Aladağ has made a sound piece out of furniture for Documenta but she has previously made city symphonies by filming instruments being played by the environment itself.  In City Language I , 'a flute held out the car window is played by the wind; claves tumble down streets; a tambourine skates across the water behind a boat'.  That was in Istanbul; in the video clip below she describes a more recent piece made in the playgrounds and pedestrian areas of Stuttgart.  Another artist who allows the landscape to complete her artworks is the Guatemala-based painter Vivian Suter.   Leaving her work outdoors, 'she befriends deluge and mud; she invites time to act on her canvases in the manner of acid biting an etched plate. Implicit in the work is a politics of insistent experimentation and an embrace of ruin.'

Landscape documentation
Khvay Samnang's is represented at Documenta by work he made in the Areng Valley, the last great forest in Cambodia, now under threat from a hydroelectric dam project.  A few years ago he highlighted pollution in the lakes of Phnom Phen, wading into them and pouring buckets of sand over his head.  Bonita Ely has had similar environmental concerns and is best known for The Murray River Project.  In the video clip below she describes coming to the river in 1977 when concerns over pollution were first emerging.  She did field research at five locations, objectively photographing the water through cartographic grids (she says she is fascinated by maps and the way they reflect our real interests - "we don't make maps of where daisies grow, we don't make maps of how a butterfly flies across the landscape").   The ecology of the river continues to be disrupted through irrigation and the construction of weirs: "the health of the river depends on flooding but nobody wants it to flood."  Ely has recently returned to the original locations to document how they have changed.  She has also reprised a performance piece called Murray River Punch in which she serves up an unappealing cocktail of all the pollutants that are put into the river. 

Landscape performance
Many of the artists here incorporate performance into their multimedia practice.  It might seem a stretch to think of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens as landscape artists but perhaps we should.  Sprinkle recently took a Guardian journalist on an “ecosexy nature walk” - "a nature walk with a former porn star who keeps encouraging me to find my Eco spot (or E-spot) is much more exciting than anything I’ve seen on Countryfile".  Something perhaps for a future Robert Macfarlane book?  Documenta also contains archival material from the long career of postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin.  In their catalogue essay Pierre Bal-Blanc and Lou Forster highlight the continuing importance of her outdoor dance deck, 'built in collaboration with Lawrence, her husband, the landscape architect, urban designer, and ecologist, between 1953 and 1954, in the redwood area of Kentfield, California.'  Performances that relate in different ways to nature and landscape stretch from The Branch Dance (1957) to Spirit of Place (2009). You can see the dance deck in the video clip below.

Land art structures
Agnes Denes is an artist I discussed here in one of my early blog entries, a short post about Tree Mountain.  Much more recently she has made another land art pyramid, in Long Island City, New York.  Candice Hopkins describes it in the Documenta catalogue: 'constructed of stacked wooden terraces filled with soil and thousands of various living plants, the sculpture arcs nine meters up toward the sky.  It is a social structure. Social because the planted material conveys ideas of evolution and regeneration; the work also cultivates a micro-society of people responsible for its planting and ongoing care.'  You can see images of it in a Brooklyn Rail article which praises her pioneering role, as a land artist more interesting in growing things than excavating new landforms.  However, it also notes that she has been criticised for creating in Tree Mountain a version of mono-agriculture, 'the creatures inhabiting her forests aren’t allowed the kind of complex habitat that would be more to their liking. We now know that trees communicate through their root systems, educating their neighbors. Nature has no voice in Denes’s work.'

Artificial landscapes 
Lois Weinberger works with ruderals (plants growing on waste ground) and for this year's exhibition at Kassel 'he has excavated a “cut” through the park beside the Orangerie and then abandoned it to whatever will emerge.'  You can see a similar work made in Cologne on his website - what makes it interesting is the contrast between the 'wild' weeds and carefully mown park grass.  Twenty years ago for Documenta 10, Weinberger 'planted a garden amongst the railway tracks of Kassel’s central station. The plants were cultivated from seeds of ruderal plants collected throughout Central and Eastern Europe, during and after the collapse of communism. These nomadic survivors, ‘foreign immigrants’ to German soil, flourished amongst the transit lines of ‘Old Europe’, subverting any human projection of territorial sovereignty, or fixed borders, and still do so today' (Tom Trevor, 'Lois Weinberger: The Three Ecologies').

Louis Weinberger, What is Beyond the Plants / Is at One with Them, 1997

Source: Wikimedia Commons (Dietmar Walberg)

Political landscapes
Mexican artist Guillermo Galinda has made instruments from objects found along the U.S. border and for Documenta he is is composing new music scores, 'odes for border crossers'.  The video below shows a more spectacular work about the U.S./Mexican border, Repellent Fence by the Postcommodity collective.  Where borders have come down, there is a fascination in what the landscape retains of societies that have been completely changed.  Ulrich Wüst trained as a town planner and began photographing East Germany in the 1970s.  There were usually no people in his images - 'the sozialistischer Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern is symbolically devoid of its titular workers and farmers.'  Edi Hila lives in Tirana and paints buildings that have been left behind in time.  "In these abandoned houses hope and the desire to inhabit them has departed with the migrant. These houses have been transformed into objects, almost weird and absurd..." 

Disappearing landscapes
Here's a good opening line for one of the catalogue entries.  'In August 1988, four days after appearing in the seminal Freeze exhibition with fellow students at Goldsmiths College of Art, Lala Meredith-Vula left London for the Albanian countryside, where she began to photograph haystacks.'  While the YBAs did their thing, she continued making her photographs in what had been Yugoslavia.  'Their forms are governed by habits of working the land, which are older than nations. The needs of animals and the poetic license of farmers play their parts. Yet, even if haystacks do not belong in the polis, are not political subjects per se, they do bear silent witness to history.'  There is actual hay from another part of Eastern Europe in Documenta, woven into the work of Olaf Holzapfel.  His hay canvases are made with local people in a village on the border between Lower Silesia and Greater Poland (as explained in an article in Frieze).  They are part of a complicated installation, Zawn, with components that 'range the gamut from architectural models of medieval churches and nineteenth-century mine shafts to the writings of Austrian critic Kristian Sotriffer and the graphic work of Hermann Glöckner.'

Landscape as memory
Finally, there is art made from the artist's own memories of places that have undergone profound change.  Abel Rodriguez was born around 1944 in the Colombian Amazon and became an expert in plants.  He was employed by a Dutch NGO, Tropenbos International Colombia, that wanted local experts and later moved to the city, assuming a Western name.  There he began working again with the NGO, creating botanical drawings from memory.  These jungle landscapes 'are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites.'  He doesn't consider his pictures as art, but talks about what they show and how the animals and plants in them behave with the changing seasons.  Fish "start going up the river because they know that the water is going to rise, and they're looking for the overflows to enjoy the abundance of worms and seeds."  Monkeys "stay because they like to look at their reflection, as ugly as it is, in the water."

This city which is no longer anything but an orchestra

When in the past I have added extra features to Some Landscapes, I have tried to include some new material at the same time.  What follows was going to be appended to my last post, introducing a new Chronology, but I decided it would be better kept separate (its relevance was that it concerns how a view, in this case a cityscape, has changed through history).  The quotation below, from Victor Hugo, is a great piece of Romantic prose but particularly interests me as an evocation of landscape through sound.  I checked back to see if it was referred to in R. Murray Schafer's classic book The Tuning of the World; it isn't - probably because Hugo was writing a work of historical recreation rather than direct observation.  Whether Paris ever sounded anything like Hugo's idea of the city in 1482 would be difficult to say.

The novel this description is taken from, Notre-Dame de Paris (in a nineteenth century translation on Project Gutenberg) is, like many nineteenth century historical novels, about history.  It was written partly to draw attention to the way contemporary Parisians were neglecting their architectural heritage.  Hugo suggests in it that before the invention of the printing press, poetry was manifested in architecture: cities were like great texts.  He stops the action of the story in order to devote the whole of Book Three to a description of medieval Paris from its cathedral.  Centring on the small island of the City and 'trapezium' of the university, the view would have encompassed a vast semicircle of the Town and, beyond this, the immense plain, 'patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages', ending at the hills on the horizon.  'Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.' 

'And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

'Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

'Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.'

Brick-dust in sunlight

‘Brick-dust in sunlight. That is what I see now in the city, a dry epic flavour, whose air is human breath. A place of walls made straight with plumb line and trowel, to desiccate and crumble in the sun and smoke. Blistered paint on cisterns and girders, cracking to show the priming. Old men spit on the paving slabs, little boys urinate; and the sun dries it as it dries out patches of damp on plaster facings to leave misshapen stains. I look for things here that make old men and dead men seem young. Things which have escaped, the landscapes of many childhoods.’ – Roy Fisher, City, 1961 

Roy Fisher passed away this week.  I thought I would remember him here with three quotations about landscape and place, taken from Interviews Through Time and Selected Prose, a book published by Shearsman in 2000, when Fisher was seventy.  In the first he is talking about City, the short sequence of poems and prose assembled for Gaell Turnbull's Migrant Press.  This drew on his experiences of Birmingham,   

‘… a particular large nondescript undersigned city, which was a deposit of all sorts of inadvertent by-products of ideas.  In many cases the cultural ideas, the economic ideas, had disappeared into the graveyards of people who had the ideas.  But the by-products in things like street layouts, domestic architecture, where the schools were, how anything happened – all these things were left all over the place as a sort of script, an indecipherable script with no key.   And the interesting thing for me was that the culture, particularly the metropolitan culture, the literary culture, had no alphabet to offer for simply talking about what I saw all the time.’

This second quotation gives me an excuse to include a Paul Klee painting and is part of a discussion on how his work is positioned in relation to the poems of place written by Ed Dorn and Charles Olson (I have written about the latter here before). 

‘I’ve been told that I’ve been influenced by Americans. An enormous number of people come to mind, some American, some not. You might just as well, for me, talk about Rilke’s Paris or Kafka’s Prague or the imaginary towns that Paul Klee made up or Kokoschka’s paintings of towns he worked in. […] Fascination with a location – I don’t want to duck out too hard from the American tag here, but it could as well be those little bits you get at the back of Italian primitive paintings, the cities on hilltops, as any sort of possibly theoretical concern with place, such as you get in Olson or Ed Dorn.’

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun, 1928

Public Domain

In this third one, Fisher contrasts his approach to that of a landscape painter.

‘I’m capable of being invaded by visual landscape, though I love visible landscape. […] The poem I write is the portrait of a mind, and the sense of the self, a sense of the world, which is responding to a landscape in such a way that the landscape doesn’t quite have a chance to congeal.  I dramatise.   I deprive the landscape of a painter’s vocabulary, where I’ll say ‘Several miles off, there is a little row of red roofs, and in the middle distance is this and that…’  In a fairly gentle way I’m dramatising the landscape to put dynamic lines in, so that there are certain imperatives – in fact, to energise, to potentiate events it.’

A lot more could be said about Roy Fisher and landscape.  As William Wootton wrote in the Guardian back in 2005,

'Much of Fisher's best work has been a poetry of place, and that place has tended to be the city of his birth. As he puts it in "Six Texts for a Film": "Birmingham's what I think with." In City (1961), whose verse and prose moves from dirty realism and detailed urban description to passages of hypnotic reverie, Birmingham has become an unreal, nameless city. In later works, the places of Birmingham are named almost religiously, as are rather different sites, notably the rural Derbyshire in which Fisher now lives. As one description follows another, a pattern of scenes builds up in the reader's mind, until we get what A Furnace (1985) terms a poetry of "landscape superimposed upon landscape". Individual places, too, can now look like palimpsests. Traces of forgotten fields and rivers are found lurking beneath the city. Vanished towns and industries are discovered in the countryside.'

In News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (2000), John Kerrigan asked the poet about his changing attitude to the poetry of place (the interview has been republished in Jacket Magazine).  Fisher had said of City that it was to do with the ‘EFFECTS of topography, the creation of scenic movements, psychological environments, and it’s not meant to be an historical/spatial city entailed to empirical reality.’  Kerrigan put it to him that ‘on the evidence of ‘The Burning Graves at Netherton’ (1981), however, and parts of Birmingham River (1994), you have become more at ease with a ‘poetry of place’ which admits descriptive elements and even paysage moralisé’.  Fisher replied that ‘the landscape has come, with the passage of time and changes in my understanding, to moralise itself under my eye, without any nudging from me. I read it as a record of conduct as well as something subjectively transfigured.’

I will end here with a clip of Roy Fisher, filmed at his Derbyshire home.  He reads 'Birmingham River' (9 minutes in) and then 'For Realism' (1965), with its snapshots of the city: flats on the ridge getting the last light and 'afterimages of brickwork' as windows turning silver in the shadows...

Topographia Germaniae

We had a family DVD viewing this weekend: Karel Zeman's Bláznova kronika (A Jester's Tale), a 1964 Czech film about a peasant caught up in the Thirty Years War.  Philip French described it in The Guardian as an 'exquisite black-and-white anti-war comedy' and particularly admired the way 'live action and animation are integrated with wit and elegance into a magical, fantastical world where the winds of change, represented by an animated old soldier puffing away in the heavens, dictate the arbitrary course of history.'  The story itself has some of the charm of an old German novella, with an irrepressible and innocent hero Petr - seen in the images above near the end of the film with Lenka, the pretty country girl he meets on his travels. 

Matthäus Merian, Frankfurt am Main, 1646

The film's visual style was inspired by the 17th-century Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian.  In many scenes it is as if the characters have been able to step into the slightly surreal landscapes and interiors he illustrated.  These engravings are part way between maps and landscape drawings and their magical quality is a result of the way they strain after a kind of ideal realism, picturing the world laid out neatly from an imaginary bird's eye perspectives.  Merian's engravings eventually covered a large part of central Europe: the first volume of his Topographia Germaniae, on Switzerland, appeared in 1642 and the last, on Burgundy, was published twelve years later.  I have been imagining what it would be like to see all these views combined with black and white photography to create a seventeenth century version of Google Earth, in the style of Karel Zeman. And wondering too whether our own topographic art forms will be found as charming in four hundred years time.

Straight Outta Compton

Here's an extract from Evelyn McDonnell's interview in the LA Review of Books with Paul Beatty, about the novel that has just won the Booker Prize. 

'The Sellout is set in an inner-city rural neighborhood called Dickens. Yes, that’s right, an inner-city rural hood. There are rodeos, ranches, and orchards amongst the donut shops, and shootouts. The narrator is a farmer who nurtures exotic fruits, along with killer weed. Call The Sellout a ghetto pastoral.
Or don’t.
“I try not to use that word at all,” Beatty says when asked if he cast The Sellout in the great literary tradition of the pastoral. “That was one of the hardest things about the book, trying to make that neighborhood feel real and a little bit fantastical at the same time; that was so hard to do.”
Beatty mixes the factual and the fanciful. The town name is made up (sly nods to the actual founder of Compton, Griffith Dickenson Compton, and to the father of social realist novels, Charles Dickens), and the setting may sound surreal, but in fact, Dickens is based on an actual Los Angeles area: Richland Farms, straight inside Compton. Yes, in the area made famous by Niggaz With Attitude and Kendrick Lamar — the town known worldwide as the home of gangs and gangsta rap — there are horses, goats, corn, and chickens. There really is a rodeo in Compton. Paul didn’t make that up.'

It is hard to read The Sellout without getting interested in where truth ends and fiction begins.  I found myself trying to get a clearer picture of Richland Farms via Google Earth - it's hard to detect any actual agriculture going on although maybe I just haven't looked down the right streets.  You don't need much space for the kind of city farms we have near where I'm writing this in London, at the equally bucolic sounding Holloway and Bethnal Green.  But it has to be said that even in the fictional version of Compton, it is only the novel's central character who maintains an actual working farm.  Whilst his neighbours have largely given up, he still rides a horse and has vegetable plots, fields that rotate from wheat to rice paddy, vines, cotton (symbolic, unpicked), unusually-shaped melons and satsumas so succulent 'they damn near peel themselves'.  At one point he recalls teenage years reading aloud from Kafka's Amerika with his girlfriend and there is something of that novel's surreal not-fully-urban version of an American city in the idea of Dickens.

A Google Earth view in the Richland Farms district of Compton

The Sellout may not be a pastoral but it is a book about place and the way districts change: the decline of Dickens from a prosperous independent city to a rundown district of LA is an echo of Compton, a once-desirable location where George and Barbara Bush lived in the late 1940s.  Critics have said that the novel resembles a set of comic routines and one of the best involves the idea of a kind of dating bureau for matching up 'sister cities' (the joke works less well with the British version 'twin towns').  Dickens is offered three possibilities: Juárez, the most violent city in the world, Kinshasa and Chernobyl.  But it is the disappearance of Dickens as a separate entity that hurts the novel's hero most, and his first protest against this is to paint and erect his own road sign.  Pleased with his handiwork, he feels 'like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.'  His increasingly outrageous local interventions as the novel progresses end with a trial on charges of reintroducing slavery and segregation.  Back at home, waiting for the verdict, he is watching the local weather on TV when he notices that it includes the word 'Dickens'.  He has literally managed to put his city back on the map.

Quick Light

 Alex Katz, West 1, 1998

The Serpentine Gallery currently has two excellent exhibitions, not to mention the striking new Bjarke Ingels pavilion.  I'll write about Etel Adnan separately; here I offer a few words about Alex Katz, and some images too because, unusually, you are allowed to take photographs.  The show is called 'Quick Light', suggesting moments of illumination, sun glancing off objects or perhaps, in the large painting above, windows glimpsed at night from a passing car.  Get up close to this painting and there are no further clues to the forms of the buildings or the identity of the city, all is black.  Such scenes are non-specific but were painted in New York, where Katz was born back in 1927 and where he started painting among the Abstract Expressionists and hanging out with the New York School poets. In another nocturnal image, Untitled Cityscape 4 (below), we see only a fragment of a dark building, a two-dimensional shadow against a cold grey sky streaked with ghostly cloud forms.  It is like a cropped detail from an Edward Hopper painting.  The fork of an aerial and corner of a dimly lit window have an air of menace.  What we are shown of the roof resembles a fortification. 

 Alex Katz, Untitled Cityscape 4, 2014

Some of the daylit scenes in this exhibition have an unsettling quality too - an air of mystery that you find in younger artists Katz has influenced like Peter Doig.  4pm 2014 is painted in sickly shades of green and the view of what looks like a distant boathouse is obscured by a tree whose leaves are blowing into the cold sky.  As with Doig's landscapes, you often find yourself picturing a scene from a film, just before or after some darkly significant event.  That cloud of leaves in motion reminded me of the park in Antonioni's Blow Up where you hear nothing but the wind in the trees.  The painting below could be the illustration of a fable or fairy story, or some dream-like narrative by a Robert Walser or Franz Kafka.  It is painted in flat planes of colour, like a Matisse, except for the feathery strands of grass which seem to be animated by a breeze.  I thought again of cinema - the wind in the buckwheat in Tarkovsky's Mirror, the wheat swaying in Herzog's Kaspar Hauser.  Katz has said that he wanted his large-scale paintings to have the quality of the blown-up faces and landscapes you see on a movie screen. 

Alex Katz, Red House 3, 2013

 
Leaving the Serpentine Gallery and walking back out into the bright sunshine of Hyde Park I found myself seeing the lake and trees and various tableaux of figures in terms of Katz's vision of landscape.  A recent article in the Telegraph described the way Katz experienced something similar himself in the art of Cézanne.  'About a decade ago, Katz visited an exhibition of work by the French post-impressionist. “I was looking at his stuff and saying: ‘See, the guy couldn’t paint, it’s terrible, this is overworked’ – stuff like that,” he recalls. “Then, when I got on a train, all I could see were Cézanne landscapes. His vision is so strong that it dominates your mind. And that, for me, is the highest thing an artist can do.”'

A Way of Being in the World

Last Sunday I managed to get to the last day of the Balham Literary Festival, A Way of Being in the World, which was entirely devoted to questions of landscape and place, nature and the city. The first session, 'Running Riot In The Urban Landscape', focused on the disappearance of public space and ways to reclaim the streets.  It featured academic/urban explorer Bradley Garrett, guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds and poet Inua Ellams who leads nocturnal cultural walks through cities.  Their contributions raised fascinating questions about the effectiveness of such practices in exposing and challenging the power structures of the city.  Guerilla gardening, for example, may have roots in the history of land struggles but today in Western cities it can, in a small way, help along gentrification and the withdrawal of local government from their responsibility to maintain the built environment.  It was heartening though to hear that one London traffic roundabout persists as an island of lavender a decade after Richard first gave it a makeover.

In the Q&A afterwards Richard's mother, sitting in a kind of throne by the stage, recounted an anecdote about his rebellious streak at boarding school.  It made me think of those precursors of the urban explorers that Brad had referred to earlier, the Night Climbers of Cambridge, students who scaled the city's buildings with a joie de vivre and confidence that seems connected to their position of social privilege.  As Sam Jordison wrote in a Guardian article when the original 1937 book documenting their activities was reissued, 'just as it's possible to suggest that those currently seeking highs on city rooftops are reacting against their cotton-wool upbringings, so Whipplesnaith's stories of death-defying derring-do in Cambridge say a lot about those whose parents had lost so much in the first world war but who themselves were (for now) bereft of action and significance.'

There followed two sessions featuring Cambridge academic and climber Robert Macfarlane.  In the first he was joined by China Miéville who had delivered a new lecture on the eerie and the picturesque the day before (it has just been reprinted in The Guardian). They were discussing one of many recent landscape-related books I've not yet read (for reasons partly explained in my previous post): Nina Lyon's Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man.  The origins and meanings of the Green Man are impossible to trace - what is of interest is how this symbol has repeatedly surfaced in the culture.  Is its current popularity an extension of the urge to identify with animals, China Miéville asked, and would we soon be seeing hipsters in vegetable masks?  Is it a symptom of the urge to aggrandise and domesticate nature by those unable to afford to live in cities but unwilling to live too far away from them?  Is there a connection, Robert Macfarlane wondered, with new ideas about the ecology of forests (the wood wide web) and speculations on the non-human by contemporary philosophers like Jane Bennett?  Ideas in his session sprouted like foliage from the mouth of the Green Man, including China Miéville's notion that the leaves are actually disappearing into his mouth: nature inexorably being swallowed up. 
 

The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley's debut novel, was discussed with Robert Macfarlane in connection with the recent upsurge of interest in folk horror, uncanny sites and haunted landscapes. In the course of the talk we learnt that the book is potentially the first of several novels to be set on the Lancashire coast, a place that has not featured much previously in literature.  A film is now being put together by Andrew Macdonald, producer of Danny Boyle's films and the recent version of Far from the Madding Crowd.  Again I've not read this book myself; The Guardian's review pointed out some flaws but said that 'Hurley’s lyrical grip on his landscape is flawlessly bleak'.  The Telegraph review was extremely positive and again cited the treatment of landscape in descriptions like this: 

'Day after day, the rain swept in off the sea in huge, vaporous curtains that licked Coldbarrow from view and then moved inland to drench the cattle fields. The beach turned to brown sludge and the dunes ruptured and sometimes crumbled altogether, so that the sea and the marsh water united in vast lakes, undulating with the carcasses of uprooted trees and bright red carrageen ripped from the sea bed.'

Fortified with an excellent pint, courtesy of Richly Evocative's Matt, I was ready for the Festival's final session 'And where next?', which sought to cover globalism, the growth of cities and the anthropocene.  Science journalists Gaia Vince and Fred Pearce were joined by Owen Hatherley, who I always find interesting - I had seen him only a week before at our local Stoke Newington Literary Festival, talking about London with Rowan Moore (they gave it to Heatherwick and the London Garden Bridge with both barrels).  This session also had thematic links to another fascinating talk I had gone to in Stokey - Becky Hogge and Ken Worpole discussing utopias - and to a Radio 4 programme Ken alerted me to afterwards, highlighting the Silicon Valley dream of establishing communities floating entirely free of  the state.

In the Balham discussion Owen Hatherley criticised the rise of favela chic: the way architects undervalue the boring virtues of planning and celebrate the vibrancy of ungoverned urbanisation in the global south.  It took me back to a talk I attended at the ICA about fifteen years ago by Rem Koolhaas, enthusing about his recent work in Lagos.  In an interview last year Koolhaas recalled the way Lagos, a city from which the state had withdrawn, 'mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency'.  Owen would rather have well-designed urban environments with relatively affordable housing like Vienna.  He lamented the decline of Stockholm where the benefits of social democracy appear to have been jettisoned out of an almost Ballardian sense of boredom.  I will get to see Stockholm myself shortly as we've booked a week there this summer, followed by a week on an island in the Baltic where I may actually have time to catch up on some of the books I've been hearing about recently...

Bruges-la-Morte

Henri Le Sidaner, The Quay: View of the Quai Long in Bruges, 1898

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When landscape reflects the emotions of a fictional character it is usually through some mood of the weather, but sometimes there is a more profound connection, when a location is sought out because it resonates deeply with a particular state of mind.  This is the case in Bruges-la-Morte (1892), the short Symbolist novel by Georges Rodenbach, whose bereaved hero finds solace in the melancholy streets of the old medieval city.  Bruges, Rodenbach says in his preface, 'establishes a powerful influence over all who stay there.  It moulds them through its monuments and its bells.'  In an essay he published three years earlier, The Death Throes of Towns, (included in the Dedalus edition I am quoting here), Rodenbach decribed the city as stricken by a kind of consumption.  The cause of this was the silting up of the waterway linking Bruges to the sea, isolating it economically and leading to its slow decline.  The essay ends with a memorable passage in which the city's mute pain mirrors that of a troubled soul.  In Bruges,

'one gradually submits to the creeping counsel of the stones, and I imagine that a soul, bleeding from some recent, cruel sorrow, that had walked amidst this silence, would leave that place accepting the order of things - not to live any longer - and, beside the neighbouring lake, sense what those gravediggers of Shakespeare said of Ophelia: it is not she who goes to the waters, but the water which comes to meet her grief.'  (Translated by Will Stone.)

Fernand Khnopff, Book Cover Design for 'Bruges-la-Morte', unknown date

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A 2005 article in Frieze describes Rodenbach's use of photographs in Bruges-la-Morte, which could be seen as prefiguring Andre Breton's Nadja and the writings of W. G. Sebald.  

'The images were taken from the picturesque local stock of prints and postcards sold to tourists; they picture a city almost wholly uninhabited. Occasionally, minute figures in the distance have even been excised, so that these photographs, in 1892, are already outdated, resembling daguerreotype city views of half a century earlier, with their vanished or blurred citizens.

'For the most part these photographs of deserted squares, looming bell-towers and impassive façades have been left out of subsequent editions of Rodenbach’s novel, as though they added a touch of distracting realism to his dreamlike narrative. The opposite, in fact, is the case: where the story merely reflects the lurid expectations of the writer’s Parisian audience, the photographs reveal an act of grand deception — the Bruges they depict is in many places an architectural concoction of the 19th century, a renovation further finessed by the photographers’ choosing to leave out the incidental evidence of modern life. In an inexplicable twist to this tale of trompe-l’oeil medievalism the latest edition of the book, from Dedalus Press, has replaced the original images with 23 new photographs taken by the translator: once again the ‘real’ town has been carefully cropped out.'

Photograph in the 1892 edition of Bruges-la-Morte

This and others can be seen at Wikimedia Commons

I have been looking back at some old photographs I took in Bruges almost exactly a century after the book's publication, but even with some careful cropping I don't think they would convey a sense of melancholy (I should have risen earlier perhaps, before the tourists, when the streets were empty and autumn mist still hung over the motionless canals).  A modified version of Bruges is the basis for one of the most remarkable images drawn under the influence of Rodenbach, Fernand Khnopff's The Abandoned Town (1904).  Here too there is an absence of people and even the statue is missing, leaving just an empty plinth.  An incoming tide is starting to cover the stones of the Woensdagmarkt.  Instead of having been separated from the sea, the city here looks as if it is being flooded and abandoned to the waters.

Fernand Khnopff, The abandoned city, 1904

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Frances Fowle's essay 'Silent Cities', in Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910, describes Rodenbach's influence on artists like Khnopff and Henri Le Sidaner (called the Rodenbach of painting by one critic).  Knopff, she says, 'spent part of his childhood in Bruges, which he described as 'truly a dead city, unfrequented by visitors'.  As an adult he allegedly wore opaque dark glasses while travelling through the city, so as not to confuse his memory with modern reality.'  She notes however, that visitors had been drawn to Bruges before Rodenbach, including Holman Hunt and Rossetti, whose poem 'On Leaving Bruges' describes its grey towers under a sunless sky.  Baudelaire too had been there and called it a 'ghost town, a mummified place that smelled of death and the Middle Ages.'

After Rodenbach, more writers of 'dead-city-prose' emerged (a type of writing it would be interesting to trace forwards and backwards from this Symbolist moment).  Will Stone mentions Camille Lemonnier and Franz Hellens, whose En Ville Morte (1906), written about Ghent, 'gives the impression that the town is literally decomposing'  Other more recent writings can be linked to Bruges-la-Morte: there is a website, Villes Mortes, which provides a list works that provide context for Rodenbach's novel.  The book has also featured on two excellent blogs which have stimulated my reading over the years: Writers No One Reads and Vertigo.  And, finally, while I'm on further reading, see also the Preface to the 2005 Dedalus edition, written by Alan Hollinghurst, which The Guardian reprinted. As Nicholas Lezard pointed out in his review of the book, Hollinghurst's own '1994 novel The Folding Star is itself a homage to Bruges-la-Morte.'

Topological loss

The building work I mentioned a fortnight ago is well underway, covering everything in layers of dirt from crumbling Victorian bricks so that any neglected surfaces begin to look like Man Ray's Dust Breeding (1920).  Meanwhile I have been reading this week about the first study of London's air quality which puts a figure on the number who die prematurely from the long run effects of nitrogen dioxide and dangerous fine particulates.  Such airborne pollutants have been used by the Italian artist Luca Vitone for a new kind of plein air landscape art, canvases that capture the grey substance of the city that we all have to breathe.  He has also made similar works from the kind of dust I am surrounded by now: Rooms (1914) comprised four watercolours made from dust collected in the German Federal Court, Bundesbank, Bundestag and Berlin's Pergamonmuseum.  You can see an example of a dust piece accompanying an article on Vitone in Frieze from a couple of years ago.  In this overview of Vitone's art Barbara Casavecchia discusses other works that deal with a sense of placelessness:

'In 1988, at the age of 24, Luca Vitone began working on ‘Carte Atopiche’ (Atopic Maps), a series of 1:25,000 scaled maps from which he removed all topographic indications. [...] ‘All my works reference a condition to which we are subject, which I call “topological loss”,’ Vitone explained in an interview with the critic Emanuela De Cecco in 1992.² So deep-rooted were his feelings that he had the geographical coordinates of his place of birth, the Galliera hospital in Genoa (Lat. N. 44°24’07’’ Long. E. 8°56’31’’), tattooed on his arm, while his website constantly updates his position with a tracking system. Travelling widely and regularly exhibiting internationally, Vitone (who is now based in Berlin) compensates for his placelessness through constant scrutiny of his relationship to the contemporary Italian landscape, which he transforms into minimalist installations, soundscapes and, more recently, monochromes and videos.'  

The article concludes with a description of Vitone's recent work in which visitors to the Venice Biennale were confronted with a scent that the artist had developed 'in collaboration with the master perfumer Maria Candida Gentile by mixing three rhubarb essences.'  This was no perfume though, it was designed to evoke the smell of asbestos. For Vitone there was a particular association with asbestos-related deaths in Piedmont.  (When we first moved in here we were told by the man who dismantled an old structure in the garden that he thought it contained a small amount of asbestos. In mentioning this I should point out that our garden is pretty small and a significant portion of it constitutes an inconvenient ivy-clad mound that we understand to be a concreted-in World War Two air raid shelter nobody has had the energy or money to have removed.  Still, I suspect this visible remnant of the past is something of an antidote to feelings of placelessness and topological loss). 

After Venice, Vitone and Gentile created a new olfactory sculpture for an exhibition in Berlin, Imperium (2014), 'composed of different fragrances, which together evoke the “smell of power”' (something I think I may have sniffed before). Olfactory landscape art may well be a growing trend.  One of the best known artists working with smell, Sissel Tolaas (who recently featured in The Guardian) is also based in Berlin and made an installation charting the smells of its districts back in 2004.  The city is also home to a Smell Lab dedicated to olfactory experiments.  The results from one of its field trips are not hugely impressive ('Piece of Textile Left for an Hour Underneath a Rug at a Späti on Kottbusser Damm' - 'Smells like Nothing'), but I guess this kind of smellscape research is still in its infancy.  It is not yet possible to embed smell clips into these blog posts so I have added a short video about Luca Vitone above.  Now, on a fine evening here in Stoke Newington, I think I can smell the spring at last, overlaid with a whiff of brick dust and a hint of ancient soot from the old kitchen fireplace we have just uncovered.

Fragment of old wallpaper, Stoke Newington, date unknown

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain

 James Norrie and Jan Griffier II, Panorama of Taymouth Castle and Loch Tay, c. 1733-9

I recently wrote here about Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, focusing on his remarks about Derbyshire.  I mentioned the wealth of illustrations in the Yale Press edition and some of the colour reproductions are spectacular, a full page for example given over to one detail in the painting above, showing soft light on the distant Loch Tay.  It's a shame there aren't more because some of the book's small black and white images are equally remarkable, like Balthasar Nebot's painting of extreme topiary that looks like it has come from the imagination of Giorgio De Chirico.  As these two examples indicate, many of the artists represented in the book came from abroad, particularly the Low Countries: Johannes Kip, Herman Moll, Jan Siberechts, Peter Tillemans.  Other groupings of topographical artists might be made: antiquarians, professional painters and engravers, or artists associated with the military: Paul Sandby, Greenville Collins, John Slezer.  Slezer came over to Scotland from Holland in 1669 but was a supporter of James VII rather than William of Orange and went to prison for it.  Defoe, a great supporter of King William, was writing just after the Act of Union and subsequent uprising by James's son, the Old Pretender.  His observations on Scotland have a particular resonance today.
 

Balthasar Nebot, Garden View of Hatwell House, 1738

Defoe is not generally very expansive on matters of landscape, but here are ten miscellaneous quotes that I thought worth noting.  The final illustration below also appears in the Yale edition and shows the kinds of trading and commercial activities Defoe was really most interested in recording.

1. Essex: the effect of the marshes on the people - 'all along this county it was very frequent to meet with men that had had from five or six, to fourteen or fifteen wives; nay, and some more ... The reason, as a merry fellow told me, who said he had had about a dozen and half of wives, (tho' I found afterwards he fibb'd a little) was this; That they being bred in the marshes themselves, and season'd to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went up into the hilly country, or to speak their own language into the uplands for a wife: That when they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently chang'd their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most; and then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another...'


2.  Harwich: a town paved with petrified clay - 'there is a sort of clay in the cliff, between the town and the beacon-hill adjoining, which when it falls down into the sea, where it is beaten with the waves and the weather, turns gradually into stone: but the chief reason assign'd, is from the water of a certain spring or well, which rising in the said cliff, runs down into the sea among those pieces of clay, and petrifies them as it runs ... The same spring is said to turn wood into iron: But ... I presume, that those who call the harden' d pieces of wood, which they take out of this well by the name of iron, never try'd the quality of it with the fire or hammer; if they had, perhaps they would have given some other account of it.'


3. Bagshot-Heath: a desert in Surrey -  'Those that despise Scotland, and the north part of England, for being full of wast and barren land, may take a view of this part of Surrey, and look upon it as a foil to the beauty of the rest of England ... here is a vast tract of land, some of it within seventeen or eighteen miles of the capital city; which is not only poor, but even quite steril, given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on, not only good for little, but good for nothing; much of it is a sandy desert, and one may frequently be put in mind here of Arabia Deserta, where the winds raise the sands, so as to overwhelm whole caravans of travellers, cattle and people together; for in passing this heath, in a windy day, I was so far in danger of smothering with the clouds of sand, which were raised by the storm, that I cou'd neither keep it out of my mouth, nose or eyes; and when the wind was over, the sand appeared spread over the adjacent fields of the forest some miles distant, so as that it ruins the very soil.'


4. Surrey: the effect of chalk on a traveller - 'From this town of Guilford, the road to Farnham is very remarkable, for it runs along west from Guilford, upon the ridge of a high chalky hill, so narrow that the breadth of the road takes up the breadth of the hill, and the declivity begins on either hand, at the very hedge that bounds the highway, and is very steep, as well as very high; from this hill is a prospect either way, so far that 'tis surprising; and one sees to the north, or N.W. over the great black desart, call'd Bagshot-Heath, mentioned above, one way, and the other way south east into Sussex, almost to the South Downs, and west to an unbounded length, the horizon only restraining the eyes: This hill being all chalk, a traveller feels the effect of it in a hot summer's day, being scorch'd by the reflection of the sun from the chalk, so as to make the heat almost insupportable; and this I speak by my own experience.'


5. London: swallowing up the surrounding villages - 'It is the disaster of London, as to the beauty of its figure, that it is thus stretched out in buildings, just at the pleasure of every builder, or undertaker of buildings, and as the convenience of the people directs, whether for trade, or otherwise; and this has spread the face of it in a most straggling, confus'd manner, out of all shape, uncompact, and unequal ... We see several villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the country, and at a great distance, now joyn'd to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner ... That Westminster is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles's is with Marybone; and Great Russel Street by Montague House, with Tottenham-Court: all this is very evident, and yet all these put together, are still to be called London: Whither will this monstrous city then extend? and where must a circumvallation or communication line of it be placed?'


6. The Fens: the ominous sound of bitterns - 'This part is indeed very properly call'd Holland, for 'tis a flat, level, and often drowned country, like Holland itself; here the very ditches are navigable, and the people pass from town to town in boats, as in Holland: Here we had the uncouth musick of the bittern, a bird formerly counted ominous and presaging, and who, as fame tells us, (but as I believe no body knows) thrusts its bill into a reed, and then gives the dull, heavy groan or sound, like a sigh, which it does so loud, that with a deep base, like the sound of a gun at a great distance, 'tis heard two or three miles, (say the people) but perhaps not quite so far.'


7. Nottingham: its vaults and cellars - 'The town of Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars, and yet so firm as to support the roofs of those cellars two or three under one another; the stairs into which, are all cut out of the solid, tho' crumbling rock; and we must not fail to have it be remember'd that the bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stock'd with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends. as some in our company experienc'd to a degree not fit to be made matter of history.'


8. Yorkshire: magical springs - 'The country people told us a long story here of gipsies which visit them often in a surprising manner. We were strangely amused with their discourses at first, forming our ideas from the word, which, in ordinary import with us, signifies a sort of strolling, fortune-telling, hen-roost-robbing, pocket-picking vagabonds, called by that name. But we were soon made to understand the people, as they understood themselves here, namely, that at some certain seasons, for none knows when it will happen, several streams of water gush out of the earth with great violence, spouting up a huge heighth, being really natural jette d'eaus or fountains; that they make a great noise, and, joining together, form little rivers, and so hasten to the sea. I had not time to examine into the particulars; and as the irruption was not just then to be seen, we could say little to it: That which was most observable to us, was, that the country people have a notion that whenever those gipsies, or, as some call 'em, vipseys, break out, there will certainly ensue either famine or plague.'


9. Dumfries: a fine palace in a hideous landscape - 'We could not pass Dumfries without going out of the way upwards of a day, to see the castle of Drumlanrig, the fine palace of the Duke of Queensberry ... Drumlanrig, like Chatsworth in Darbyshire, is like a fine picture in a dirty grotto, or like an equestrian statue set up in a barn; 'tis environ'd with mountains, and that of the wildest and most hideous aspect in all the south of Scotland; as particularly that of Enterkin, the frightfullest pass, and most dangerous that I met with, between that and Penmenmuir in North Wales; but of that in its place...' 


10. Stirling: the meanders of the River Forth - 'The Governor's lady (who was the Countess Dowager of Marr, when we were there, and mother of the late exil'd Earl of Marr), had a very pretty little flower-garden, upon the body of one of the bastions, or towers of the castle, the ambrusiers, serving for a dwarf-wall round the most part of it; and they walk'd to it from her Ladyship's apartment upon a level, along the castle-wall.  As this little, but very pleasant spot, was on the north side of the castle, we had from thence a most agreeable prospect indeed over the valley and the river; as it is truly beautiful, so it is what the people of Sterling justly boast of, and, indeed seldom forget it, I mean the meanders, or reaches of the River Forth. They are so spacious, and return so near themselves, with so regular and exactly a sweep, that, I think, the like is not to be seen in Britain, if it is in Europe, especially where the river is so large also. The River Sein, indeed, between Paris and Roan, fetches a sweep something like these some miles longer, but then it is but one; whereas here are three double reaches, which make six returns together, and each of them three long Scots miles, or more in length; and as the bows are almost equal for breadth, as the reaches are for length, it makes the figure compleat. It is an admirable sight indeed.' 

Unknown painter, Broad Quay Bristol, early 18th century