Kaja Katamay

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:02:00 +0000

Female hands are all over America's landscape; you just need to know where to look for them. In Unbounded Practice, author Thaisa Way can direct your eye.

Look to the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, the grounds of Princeton, or a number of botanical gardens and astronomical observatories to see the legacy of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959). Recall a youthful American pilgrimage to Disneyland—if you are among the number who has made one—to know the work of Ruth Shellhorn (1909-2005). Stroll past any working or middle-class apartment complex designed with a central, neatly-gardened courtyard to see the lasting influence of Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954), who designed such courtyards with the needs of family members—particularly mothers—in mind; not only can natural beauty be observed from every dwelling, but so can children at play.

Way's concern in Unbounded Practice is not just that significant contributions to landscape architecture have been made by women, but that these contributions have been largely forgotten by current practitioners and require a restorative historical account. An irony that emerges in Way's recounting of women's contribution to the formation of the discipline—critical in its early stages—is that the public conceptions of womanhood were both an inlet for women to practice the discipline and an impetus for them to be disassociated from it. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, pursuits associated with horticulture, such as gardening and botany, were considered appropriate for the sex viewed as intrinsically closer to the earth than its masculine counterpart. This allowed women to enter the discipline with minimal, or no public rebuke, pursuing architectural approaches to design as well as employing acquired botanical knowledge often superior to that of their male peers. As landscape architecture moved towards an alignment with architecture at the expense of being associated with the "craft" of gardening, women were marginalized in the discipline.

Way's history is both a history of women and a history of the formation of a discipline—the key of the book's strength—and her passion as a scholar is evident in the pains she takes in detailing both. A lay reader, or perhaps even a beginning student, may benefit from reading Way's conclusion before embarking on the book proper. There, Way's passion is evident in tone as well as content, and the relatively brief reflection on a hefty scholarly endeavor reads as an accessible orientation to the modern challenges the discipline has faced.

Ten color plates are featured in the book, as well as a wealth of illuminating photographs of work by women pioneering practitioners, slides from lectures delivered by women, period advertisements, and—thrillingly—meticulous plans and client sketches drafted by the women Way profiles. While Unbounded Practice could easily be sourced for perspective on American history, women's history, class structure, ecology, urban studies, fine arts, architecture, and education, one can't help but imagine Way writing this book thinking of the reader who would crack the spine at one such architectural-botanical plan, magnifying glass in hand, connecting back to one of the women who would draft herself a practice.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, July 9th 2010

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Edited by Sandra Spanier

Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.)

In addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, April 3rd 2010

Trouble the Water

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:17:00 +0000

Directed by Tia Lessin, Carl Deal

Zeitgeist Films

If you missed the exhaustively, deservedly lauded Trouble the Water in theaters last year, now you can catch it on the small screen. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (it lost to Man on Wire), Trouble the Water follows New Orleans residents Kimberly "Kim" Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts from the day Katrina makes landfall to a year and a half afterward, when Kim and Scott have moved back to the city.

Kim’s video footage of her neighborhood just before and during the storm, shot on a Hi-8 camcorder, provides the anchor for the beginning of the film. The dramatic arc of the storm’s landfall is witnessed by the viewer through the eyes of a resident in its path: talking with the neighbors under a blue sky; sheltering from sheets of rain on the porch; watching the water come up to the back door; watching from the attic as the water comes in through the windows; sharing fruit juice and food with neighbors in the attic; and shouting out an attic window to a neighbor swimming through stop-sign-high water, who’s using a punching bag as a flotation device to help ferry neighbors to higher ground. A clip of footage shot from a helicopter at the time of the storm is spliced in, showing the overwhelmed levees of the Ninth Ward, three blocks away from Kim and Scott’s house.

The vintage news coverage interwoven throughout the film provides a contextualizing counterpoint to Kim and Scott’s story as they assume places in front of the camera; simultaneously, their story works as a powerful antidote to the coverage of the hurricane as seen from above, lorded over by pundits. The viewer hears the story of the storm, and the story of a city chronically afflicted by poverty cheek by jowl with its chipper tourist industry, from those who have lived it.

The viewer follows Kim partway into an uninspected house in which there lies the body of one of her neighbors, two weeks after the storm, while outside National Guardsmen appear to loll in the street. The viewer hears Scott tell the story of being directed to a nearby Naval base by the Coast Guard to seek shelter for displaced neighborhood residents; once there, guards cocked their guns at the crowd. (The viewer then witnesses guards at the Naval base, being interviewed, deny this.)

Throughout the film, Kim comes across as a confident woman and leader, and Scott as a loving and supportive husband unthreatened by her strength. This would be a refreshing depiction in any film, but is especially remarkable given the extreme circumstances under which Kim and Scott share their story with the filmmakers. In an interview with Richard Roeper included in the DVD, director Tia Lessin says, “You’re looking up at [Kim and Scott] most of the film, which I think is beautiful, because that’s not how the media portrays people… metaphorically, we really tried to make a film that looked up to Kimberly and Scott.” Certainly, they’ve succeeded.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, November 20th 2009

The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:46:00 +0000

By Fanny Howe

Graywolf Press

Fanny Howe’s ostensible concern in The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation is the origin and nature of her writing life. Poet, novelist, and essayist of distinction, Howe also engages her familiar themes of mysticism, art making, and social justice, as well as her familiar backdrops of Boston and Ireland, with her signature catholicity.

In the two anchoring essays of the collection, which is Howe’s second work of lyrical nonfiction, she explores the origins of her work through bits of straight autobiography (childhood and adolescence in “Branches,” adolescence and adulthood in “Person, Place, Time”) interwoven with meditations on the works and (often famous) friendships that have influenced her. These two lengthy essays are refreshingly offset by several brief pieces, including the terse, brilliant “America,” a meditation on social injustice and spirituality (two pages); the glitteringly weird “The Land of Dreams,” a meditation on Jesus (one-and-a-half pages); and the gorgeous “Evocation,” a tiny slice of memoir made more sensuous by its subtle, tannic bite (four pages).

A mid-length essay, "Waters Wide," brings us from narrative of Howe's history into her present tense and recent past, moving with an easy clarity through meditations on the natures of time and language, writing as work as prayer, and qualities of transreligeous experience. There is an intimacy in this piece that is often lacking in "Branches" and "Person, Place, Time" which have their strengths in reading as cultural and political histories as well as personal ones.

Throughout The Winter Sun, Howe employs a prose form that has drawn accurate comparisons to collage. While these essays are rich in content, readers new to Howe may find her idiom taxing in the collection’s two longest pieces, where her narrative can become so broadly associative as to suggest evasion. Fortunately, neophytes to Howe have her extensive canon from which to draw if __The Winter Sun_ proves a mixed first meeting, while veteran converts will likely find it a fluid addition to her body of work.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, May 20th 2009