25 February 2022

North Dakota redux

Today, still in North Dakota:

Oxford House, Fargo, N.D., built 1902 for Webster Merrifield, the third president of the University of North Dakota. Served as the president's house until the 1950s and then became a dormitory, the art department building, and the alumni center, before sitting mostly unused after 2012. Now rehabilitated as the Dr. Kathleen and Hal Gershman Graduate Center. Rehabilitation architects: JLG Architects (who also are working on the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library). Photo by Chad Ziemendorf for Preservation, the National Trust magazine. Oh, by the way, yes, this did come to my attention as I indexed.

24 February 2022

North Dakota

What are the chances that North Dakota will come at you two days in a row? Perhaps not high, but also not impossible, as I discovered earlier today.

Yesterday, a friend from New York City sent us a link from a Hyperallergic article about a protest over the plan to send the controversial statue of Teddy Roosevelt from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC to the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The site for the library is on seized Indigenous land in North Dakota.

After reading the Hyperallergic article, I crawled into a prairie dog hole on the TRPL website. The building site is near Medora, N.D., and TR's ranch and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Much of that land was seized in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Rather like all of the other Indigenous land in North America that was bought, stolen, or seized from the Native Americans.

The book I am currently reading is Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo (2007). It was recommended by Dorothy when I mentioned that I had really enjoyed his The delight of being ordinary, about a road trip by Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Breakfast with Buddha is also about a road trip, about Otto Ringling who drives to North Dakota to empty his childhood home after his parents are killed in a traffic accident. He was supposed to take his wacky sister but she substitutes a somewhat inscrutable Rinpoche. An "inscrutable Rinpoche" may be inherently redundant.

While the Rinpoche is meditating before they set off for a day's journey, Otto sinks into a couple hours of morning television at their hotel. As he's speculating about the sordid and exposed lives of the guests on the talk show, he remembers what his father said about North Dakota as the family returned from a sun festival at one of the Indian reservations in North Dakota.

"After we'd watched the dancing and singing and were on our way home in our car, my dad remarked upon how far we'd advanced since the days when the land was ruled by Indian tribes. There were farms now, he said, where once there'd been only buffalo. Farms with telephones and TVs, tractors, airplanes, medicines ... whereas, in those old days there had been nothing. You worked from morning till night, you hunted and fished and sewed and cooked, sang and danced a few times a year, made war, made peace. 'Look at us now,' he said, sweeping his hand out near the windshield at a stretch of heartland. 'Look at all this.'" (page 137, ellipsis in the book) The protagonist compares this "nothing" or "all this" to the wasteland of the TV talk shows that he had just wallowed in for a couple hours.

By the way, North Dakota is one of the three U.S. states that I have never set foot in. And reading Buildings of North Dakota was the impetus for one of my first edits of a Wikipedia page when I noted a church by an architect who also did a church in Napoleon, Ohio.

Also, by the way, just a few pages beyond the protagonist's family trip memory in Breakfast with Buddha is a chapter that circles around coincidence.

14 February 2022

separated at birth: index / indexing

I was looking at the Times book announcements and reviews yesterday. One of the reviews was of Index, A history of the: a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton). Just my kind of book. I love my indexing gig and the book is about books (&c) and the title is inverted like a subject heading string might be. It's got a pretty zippy cover.

When I think of indexes aesthetically, I generally wander over to the work of Alejandro Cesarco who was often on exhibit at Murray Guy, a favorite gallery on West 17th Street. He has done these wonderful pages of index entries where the indicated mentions may be interlocked though many stand alone. He has also done other book-related art and was matched with John Baldessari in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. 
You can see more of Cesarco's work on his web page, linked under his name.