November 07, 2003
River of Shadows
Finished River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit. I checked it out from the Library the day Margaret, Alan and I took a tour. He had found it in the browsing area and dared my to read the first chapter and not want to read the whole thing. I, of course, loved it and read the whole thing.
Its a history of Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his motion-study photographs that helped lead to cinema, and really a wonderful portrait of California and the West (including Leland Stanford and Silicon Valley). Towards the end she writes:
"Muybridge pursued the transformation of bodies and places into representations, representations that in some ways fed that unslaked desire for landscape, geography, beauty, embodiment, and the life of the senses, but Stanford, who hammered the Golden Spike, pursued the annihilation of time and space without mercy, without misgivings, without deference to what might be lost, and this might be the difference between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Hollywood would become the center of the world of movies, while Silicon Valley is the center of the world of information technology, and in the way these two institutions dominate the world one can say California is the center of the contemporrary world, but of a world in which time and space have been annihilated, a world that is in some obscure way so dismbodied, dislocated, and dematerialized that the very idea of a center is perplexing." (258-9)