“There is some risk in focusing too intently on the characteristics of individual bridges and in doing so overlooking the larger context. Vermont's extraordinary villages and countryside create that context, a colorful blending of natural and cultural resources. A great many of Vermont's bridges, even those that can be called ordinary by engineering standards, are distinctive pieces of this varied but fragile landscape. Many contribute to vistas along important river corridors; others frame entrances to village centers or physically and visually join urban neighborhoods; still others define form and space in unusual ways; some simply mark places for travelers to pause on winding roads that disappear among the hills.”

It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along....So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium and bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble" (pp. 345-346)

The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—an harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes... and then set out upon the stories' various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.

A light which lives on what the flames devour,a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,a crucifixion by a single wound,a sky and earth that darken by each hour,a sob of blood whose red ribbon adornsa lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--this is the wreath of love, this bed of thornsis where I dream of you stealing my rest,haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.I sought the peak of prudence, but I foundthe hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,and my own thirst for bitter truth an

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

It's funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated worldwide as perhaps man's greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon's desolate landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure.

Introducing a great artist, Alexander Wainwright in THe Fate of Pryde.In his landscapes, Alex expresses the totality of everything in the universe. At the same time, within each leaf, each drop of water or human hair, he conveys a light or glow, which seems to come—how shall I put this—from another dimension. And each brushstroke contains every ounce of his own life and vitality.From The Fate of Pryde, the second in The Trilogy of Remembrance. Enter the giveaway to win one of ten personalized, autographed copies of this novel starting July 31st to August 31st. You can sample the first fifty pages of it at my page.

In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera compos

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have to evaluate it, maybe our time has come. In the context of the real world, not just the American world but all around, we haven't done too well. We are not a very good advertisement for the idea we represented. If you lose one wheel of the car, you might be able to get to the side of the road, and some freaks can make it on two, but if you lose three, man, you're in serious trouble. I think we've lost three.