She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They have been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon  her mother's dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.
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Page 246, Run River by Joan Didion

the landscape of possibilities

My friends Cass and Mavie just returned from an epic two week adventure in New Zealand.

Last night Cass cooked a delicious dinner and gave us a slideshow of their journey- it was mind blowing! They bought a 1972? cb350 twin (aaaaoooooowwwwww) with a sidecar!!!!!! (aaaaoooooowwwwwww) from a dear old man in the South island and camped all the way up to Auckland in the North island.

Hot springs/mountain passes/magical hikes/epic swim spots- you name it, they lived it! Cass even took a photo of a menu for me which read:

soup of the now


I love it! Cass is an amazing writer, when I was writing here and now/now and then, she gave me some valuable feedback and general encouragement, which I needed at the time. Cass had never read Play it as it lays I leant her my copy of Joan Didion's novel- I was really excited by the prospect of the novel going on a New Zealand adventure- pages well travelled!

The book came back a little weathered, Cass apologised but I was stoked, every mark and line reveals a story. I imagine that the black marks on the cover are tyre marks- maybe the book flew out of Cass's hands as Mavie hit a shrub leaving a riverside camp spot, perhaps the red dots are from the sidecar or the petrol tank (their motorbike was red) and that even the rain wanted a piece of Didion's novel as they hiked up a mountain.

I like the idea that a novel can experience a journey as the journeyer experiences the novel- the landscapes of the novel intertwine with the physical landscapes surrounding the reader and the landscapes within the readers own mind.

Brad Phillips- Collection of the Artist, Type C print, 2010