A delightful tribute to a uniquely American landscape and the writers who've grappled with it. ! A modern addition to the canon of the (south)west I'd propose is a scifi book called The Water Knife. A near-future thriller with a little bit of Cadillac Desert and a lot of thirstiness.
I was around 36 when I consecutively read Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I was transported. I have yet to meet a woman who has read the series and I’m curious if there is something gendered about the way men and women experience the writing. There is a kind of intimacy embedded in the silent solidarity of the protagonists with the backdrop of a vast desert expanses … I wonder if it tends to be more appealing to men for whatever reason.
I assume that the more we experience abundance, the more we’ll yearn for scarcity. We may choose to live in places like Singapore, San Francisco, and Mexico City, but we’ll daydream about (and pay good money to visit) the rugged wilderness of simplicity and inconvenience. As the world’s wealth expands and the population declines, I assume that more billionaires will support nature conservancy.
And I imagine that *some* desert landscapes like Las Vegas and the UAE will take advantage of solar + desalination to astroturf big sections of desert with lots of golf courses and manicured gardens. Those aren’t places for me, but I’m happy they’ll exist for whoever enjoys them.
I've read the first two books of the series and have Cities of the Plain sitting on my desk. The inversion of John's successes in Billy's failures from Book 1 to Book 2 is fantastic. The fact that these books have almost entirely male characters engaged in traditional male pursuits makes your gendered observation perhaps unsurprising but still interesting. I'll report back once I finish the last one.
An athlete in Boulder recently wrote a post about a big linkup he did around the southwest, writing in it:
"The reality is that constraints—some kind of chosen ground rules—are exactly what imbue meaning. Having zero restrictions—what is often mistakenly characterized as true freedom—is the same as having no choices. We need rules in order to define our experience, to give it context and shape. If anything and everything is permitted, then a meaningful course of action becomes impossible."
A delightful tribute to a uniquely American landscape and the writers who've grappled with it. ! A modern addition to the canon of the (south)west I'd propose is a scifi book called The Water Knife. A near-future thriller with a little bit of Cadillac Desert and a lot of thirstiness.
I will add this to my reading pile, thanks!
I was around 36 when I consecutively read Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I was transported. I have yet to meet a woman who has read the series and I’m curious if there is something gendered about the way men and women experience the writing. There is a kind of intimacy embedded in the silent solidarity of the protagonists with the backdrop of a vast desert expanses … I wonder if it tends to be more appealing to men for whatever reason.
I assume that the more we experience abundance, the more we’ll yearn for scarcity. We may choose to live in places like Singapore, San Francisco, and Mexico City, but we’ll daydream about (and pay good money to visit) the rugged wilderness of simplicity and inconvenience. As the world’s wealth expands and the population declines, I assume that more billionaires will support nature conservancy.
And I imagine that *some* desert landscapes like Las Vegas and the UAE will take advantage of solar + desalination to astroturf big sections of desert with lots of golf courses and manicured gardens. Those aren’t places for me, but I’m happy they’ll exist for whoever enjoys them.
I've read the first two books of the series and have Cities of the Plain sitting on my desk. The inversion of John's successes in Billy's failures from Book 1 to Book 2 is fantastic. The fact that these books have almost entirely male characters engaged in traditional male pursuits makes your gendered observation perhaps unsurprising but still interesting. I'll report back once I finish the last one.
An athlete in Boulder recently wrote a post about a big linkup he did around the southwest, writing in it:
"The reality is that constraints—some kind of chosen ground rules—are exactly what imbue meaning. Having zero restrictions—what is often mistakenly characterized as true freedom—is the same as having no choices. We need rules in order to define our experience, to give it context and shape. If anything and everything is permitted, then a meaningful course of action becomes impossible."
Nothing but abundance does lead to a dearth of meaning. https://antonkrupicka.substack.com/p/southwest-summits-tour