| Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea. Elsewhere I describe my books and my courses. | 
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If you need to know what I am doing, how I am thinking, maybe even a bit about where I am
heading in my research, read any of the books,
perhaps especially the last two Landscape and Images and
Lifeboat. I continue to write essays to
accompany the photographs of world-class artists like Joel Sternfeld
(Walking the High Line) and Barbara Bosworth (Trees: National Champions).
Right now I work on several projects. One involves the growing interfaces among fantasy, advertising, and cyber-space rendering of real and surreal environments: lately I focus on fantasy illustration from the 1885 to 1910 period, the illusions wrought by moonlight on Romantic-era observers north of latitude 45, the fast-changing imaging of powerful, healthy women in challenging environments, and the growing inability of even well-educated people to look acutely at altered images of humans, humanoids, and animals and notice they are altered. Another project examines the changing landscape of rural America after 1915 and projects massive changes immediately ahead. In the next several years almost all of my research will deal with the future of large-scale landscapes away from cities: driven partly by the way marketing experts and retired military analysts use cybernetics to discern, predict, and shape patterns, I focus on seeing around the curve of time, always remembering that history on the ground has vast staying power. The role of the academic discipline of geography in shaping both public and private policy is the armature around which another set of research projects revolve. |
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I remind all my alumni of my lectures on the joys of genuine letters delivered by a Federal Authority that guarantees their privacy, of the pleasures of richly textured paper, fine engrossment, engraved stamps, and envelopes stuffed with illustrations from original photos to magazine advertisements, of my willingness to write back. And I invite all alumni to Brookside Farm, where you may see my latest boat-restoration project, a fifty-year-old lifeboat that sailed again a few months ago, poking out |
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into the Atlantic across which it sailed innumerable times (securely
fixed in davits and gripes), across which it fought in World War II.
It rows well too,
each of its oars being only twelve feet in length, and on windless days I am in need
of a crew. And on a winter Saturday there is much to be said for a warm boat shop,
a cup of Red Rose tea, and the feel and smell of white oak newly sawed and planed
under the yellow boatshop light that warms the spirit.
The next project is around a bend in a salt creek. Anyone seen a grue? | |
website by Deborah Perkins | |