[Edit – I’ve actually finished this book now. I found this short post sitting in my drafts folder, so I’m Frankensteining it.]
I’m partway through Roger Deakin’s (not the cinematographer) book Wildwood, and I’m finding it almost exactly what I hoped: meditations on trees that vary from detailed (a whole chapter on ash) to general (living in houses made entirely from wood).
Random thoughts:
- Wood is a bridge between man and metal. Knives have wooden handles. Guns have wooden stocks. The once-living connects the living and the dead.
- David Nash, sculptor: three-dimensional art (sculpture, for instance) is experienced in relation to the human body, two-dimensional art is experienced more in the imagination. Also, objects increase in size when put indoors and decrease in size when put outdoors by a factor of about one-third.
- Lots of interesting thoughts from Barthes and Ruskin on architecture and technology. Barthes: cars are the modern-day Gothic cathedral. They are almost mystical in their summation of our culture.
- A bunch of crazy words: juglone, thwmps, bothy.
Christian Leithart 