 It's nice to see all your faces here. Welcome to the Kellogg Hummer Library. Welcome to the first one of the statements. Oh, it's really great. We extend our thanks to our partners at Vermont Humanities, as well as to the generous underwriters who make it possible for us to offer such rich and robust programs. The sponsor for our entire first Wednesday season is the Vermont Department of Libraries and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And today's event is underwritten by Leaning Public Affairs. There's a restroom in the back of the room. And you can check in with this QR code at the table at the back to let Vermont Humanities know that you're here to give your feedback, which they very much value. It is my pleasure to introduce to you our speaker tonight. New York Times bestselling author, M.T. Anderson, writes books for children, teens, and adults. His satirical novel, Feed, was winner of the LA Times Book Prize. His hysterical, I don't think all of it's hysterical. It's hysterical. It's hysterical. Won the National Book Award for which his nonfiction book, Symphony for the City of Dead, was also long-listed. His novel, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is being made into a movie by MGM. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and Salon. He lives in a rotting 18th century house in Central where we're very, very happy to have you here tonight. Thank you. Thank you so much, Randolph, for coming. It's great to be here, and especially because here is so close to home. So the composer, Walter Episton, who used to spend summers up here in Vermont, one time was trying to get from Vermont to Maine, and as you know, in New England, you can't really go east to west because we have all those north-south mountain ranges going through. So he's driving along. He's totally lost, and he came to a fork in the road that was not on the map. And there was a farmer by the side of the road, a Vermont farmer, so Episton pulls over, rolls down his window, and yells to the guy, hey, I'm turning it to Maine. Is it matter which one of these roads I go on? And the farmer goes, not to me, it don't. So as homeowners, we are naturally obsessed with landscape as an obstacle as well as something beautiful. It determines the routines of our daily lives, which routes we drive, and which towns we never visit. Today I'm gonna talk about why landscape matters. Now, the excuse for talking about landscape is that I have this novel, Landscape with a Visible Hand. Sorry, this is the promotional thing I made for Bear upon Books. It's actually a TJ Wood painting of Montpelier that I had doctored there. You can see the State House. Yeah, so David Sheets, watch out, it's gonna knock that statue off the top. Anyway, so that book is my excuse to talk about landscape, but actually I don't wanna talk about that book or writing it any more than you want to hear about it. I wanna talk about the interest in the American landscape that drove me to write the book. So to exhaust the topic of the novel in, I think two sentences. It's a satirical novel about a young landscape artist who is painting American landscapes, but in the wake of an alien colonization of the earth. At this point, the whole of this planet has become an obscure third world backwater in someone else's galactic economic empire. The story is told entirely through descriptions of his paintings. So that's all I have to say about that book and we will now move on to the actual talk. I have always been moved by the... Oh yeah, actually that's a great point. Yeah, Susan Dasman for the lights to be turned down because she knows that some of her paintings appear later. She's like, oh my God, the color values will be wrong. Okay. I have always been moved by the New England landscape. For me, as for many people in this state, climbing a mountain is a deeply spiritual experience. You reach the top of a mountain and you see distance in space, but you also survey time. You see the village where you lived 15 years ago and then the steeple of a town where you lived before that when you were young. You see hills where you hiked with people you love. You see houses you used to frequent that are now lived in by strangers. You struggle to recognize pastures where you sat around on fires. Often the distance, you see other states, shining cities, commerce reduced to a fractional gleam. 100,000 lives are reduced to nothing but a shimmer. When I was young and lonely, I worked at an office in Boston. I was an editorial assistant. I spent the days photocopying and humming Elizabethan lute songs about suicide. I did not know how to meet people though I was kept awake at night in my little studio apartment, by people spilling out of the bar right across from the street. Right across the street. I had nothing to do on weekends, so I drove out of the city, away from Boston. I drove out of Massachusetts Route 119 and watched the history of white American settlement unraveling the glass city, the wealthy suburb of invisible fences and sterilized lawns. The sixties suburb with squat houses lost in the yellow needles of white pine. And finally in the New Hampshire hills, the ramshackle village greens with their pure new churches painted white. The houses lost in the forest, reclaimed from an agricultural economy, long stagnant, the orchards were overgrown. I would drive into loneliness. Loneliness would settle around me like a welcome fog. And I would climb up mountains in New Hampshire. Great Monadnock, Pac-Monadnock, or Kiersarch, where a friend of mine had died as a teen driving home high one night. I would think about stories I wanted to tell or stories people had told me. I would get to the top and feel that thing that Edmund Burke described as the sublime. The awe at our littleness and the exhilarating vastness of creation around us. Distant hills reduced to undulations of red. Other states, other cities, other lives we will never lead. Burke and his ilk laid out various guidelines for the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque, each of which has a slightly different, it was a slightly different category for them. And yet in those mountaintop vistas, they all were combined, the sinuosity of line, the terror of being a small life clinging to a world whirling quickly through time. So I'd go up to these mountains and then drive back to the city late at night, listening to Copeland or listening to the Sulfanese Buldesupia de la Roa, symphonies for the feasts of the sun king Louis XIV, while waiting for my 12-piece nuggets and large fries at the end of the street. Each year on my birthday, as I got older, I climbed little Monadnock, which looks out on Mount Monadnock. And there, witnessing distance and space, I would perceive myself at a distance in time, too. I'd think five years ago, standing here, I was an editorial assistant, a particularly shitty editorial assistant. Now I'm an author published by the same publisher. Three years ago, I was alone. Now there is someone standing beside me. Or now I am alone, whereas before, someone was here to hold my hand. I would look back toward the haze of Boston, that glitch on the horizon that contained all my life. You can never see your home until you leave it. Home must be seen not simply from within its rooms and its door yards, but from a distant hill, if you were to ever understand it. I knew that North felt good, and so when I could, I moved to Vermont. Here were the old crumbling houses of my youth, but with a more dramatic geology, a more operatic ontogeny. I had grown up in Stowe, Massachusetts, a town where 18th century houses were lived in by 19th century people. Literally, at that point, they were in their 80s, but that's what they were. So this was my assumption about successful adulthood. It feels good and right to be an adult who lives in a house with 12 over 12 windows in the woods. If you have lived right, an adult's doors should be well out of true, and the kitchen should smell like mouse piss. So, yes, Jack and Jack. Yeah, there I am. But what is the draw of the landscape? I know that it feels profoundly right for me to stare out at it, that there is an expansion of spirit. A Vermont landscape viewed with a rational alien eye is a chaos of entangled growth punctuated by eruptions of agricultural production. Signs of agricultural production are particularly esteemed, especially when they involve financial ruin and disastrous mismanagement of husbandry. Why? Why is that beautiful? Our reactions to landscape feel visceral, even holy. They feel primal, primal, visceral, holy, and yet there's something more to it than that. This is what I started to ask myself about. Thus began my researches as a young man into the history of landscape and how it had been understood. Now, there are some bold general theories about why landscape moves us so much. In the experience of landscape, Jay Appleton connects landscape formulas to animal behavior and habitat theory, specifically to the eye of a predator who scans the landscape as a strategic field, a network of prospects, refuges, and hazards. So if you look at the typical Clodian landscape, that is to say a landscape by Claude Lorrain, who is sort of the painter whose landscape has been taken as the model for hundreds of years after him. So he's a 17th century painter. And this is his deal. You have these sort of like, some things there to indicate a foreground, then you have like theatrical flats going back and back and back, leading the eye back. You have a scoop of water, as they usually call it. And then in the background, you have the far distance, right? That's the Clodian landscape. It's a standard, a form as like Sonata form or in a novel like The Marriage Plot. It's been repeated all over and over again, right? So Jay Appleton suggested this in essence is the desired spot for a predator to hang out. A refuge, this suggests a kind of mastery, but also a safety of approach or even a bounty of resources and targets. And plenty to explore and ways to plan exploration from above before we get admired in the corpses and marshes below. So there's one, of course it's you, Erica. I'm sorry. So there's one theory. We literally like landscape because in the primal sense of evolutionary behaviorism, it offers us what mammals like us need. Shutter, control of territory, mediated risk and the offer of plenty. But this is obviously incredibly reductive. That's not all that's going on by any means. The importance of Vista also connects with the sense of distance and time I mentioned above. We walk through the forest of our days and during those days, we cannot scan too far to see where we are going or where we've come from. Then we reach a peak and we can strategize our past and future are laid out for us and we can see time itself laid out in space. As Gertrude Stein said in her inimitable way, mountains are not merely outcroppings. They are usefully employed in reasonable association. We reasonably associate with one another and are elaborately aware of waiting, wait again for me. So distance and vantage point are some of the elements that produce the sublime and expansive New England landscape. Now art is a thing which leads you away from the known so that you can learn about it again. Art works by making the familiar unfamiliar. The landscape Vista naturally occurring offers that. Here's your town or the town where your friend lives or the town where you go to for tooth cleaning, all laid out together like you have never seen them. Here they are next to one another, no longer seen from within their bellies. Winding through their intestines, now seen whole staring back up. And this is true especially in the fall. The trees are luridly strange. They are phovest. In this sense our actual landscape here in Vermont performs some of the functions we expect of human art. Those functions of defamiliarizing you from what you know through shocking change or an abrupt change in direction or attitude. Vermont landscape artist Wolf Kahn loved to get colors wrong and to shock us into seeing color anew. But frankly the sugars and obssession layers and leaves also do his work for him every year and the shock is thrilling. Old places seem new again by which I mean they seem ancient. Through shifting color values the New England landscape renews itself and demands attention. So it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. But also the opposite of that, the distance seems near. A place an hour away through dirt roads and over bridges and through hamlets, the eye flits there in a moment and you see the main street. In the 19th century buyers of huge operatic landscape paintings like Albert Bierstadt's wanted distant prospects like the glories of Yosemite brought into their dining room. In this way the unfamiliar was made familiar to them. At the same time familiarity is often important also important to many of those who enjoy landscape paintings at places they know well. How fantastic when strolling around the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia to come across the familiar silhouette of Campbell's home. Amidst the unfamiliar there is a sudden glimpse of home. This is another purpose of landscape painting simply to pleasingly record the place we already live. Here's the painting by local artist Susan Bull Riley which hangs in my friend Lita's house. And Dick you can blame Lita for the crappy photograph. One reason I love it is precisely that it shows me a place I know a stretch of East Hill Road in Plainfield. Or the central Vermont scenes of Susan Abbott which really captured the stark beauty of this region. And in the case of this painting it is not just a pleasing study of confluence surfaces and distances. It shows the familiar traffic entanglements of Plainfield Center. A place we've all been in where some of us shall die. So broadly speaking there are many purely aesthetic formal reasons why this disenchanted us. Reasons why rocks, some tangled growth and vignettes of agricultural production can be deeply emotional to us. There are other reasons. Reasons that go beyond the a priori aesthetics of distance and familiarity. They are particular to the stories we tell ourselves about landscape in this country. These reasons are deeply embedded in our myths of place and nation. They go back to the beginning of landscape understood as a genre. And they continue to affect our politics deeply sometimes destructively. So landscape has not always been a genre. It has not always made sense to us as something artists want to capture. Landscape is natural but it has to be invented. The common wisdom is that landscape as a genre came out of the Netherlands in the mid 16th century. The word landscape in fact is taken from the Dutch. Landscape. We should point out however that in fact the Chinese were dealing with landscape as they recognized genre A millennium before that. And what followed in China was a thousand years of debate about landscape before we in the West got involved. Some schools argued that nature should absolutely guide the artist. Others argued that the artist should reformulate everything to create a new and perfected kind of nature. The Northern Song Dynasty favored monumental mountains. After the Mongols invaded and the capital moved south the Southern Song Dynasty promoted flat marshy scenes more characteristic of their landscape. Some landscape artists believed in presenting a strong central design understood at a glance. Others demanded a detailed adventure. In some Chinese landscape paintings the viewer can accompany the artist on a journey wandering along a mountain path seeing what a hermit might encounter. So what I mean is that some of these larger landscape scrolls, they are actually scrolls meant to be unfurled slowly. And so you are literally reading the image right to left as here or you're seeing it all at once but you would crawl through that by unrolling it and traveling through it or from the bottom to the top is the other direction they can go. So it dramatizes the eyes of voyage through the space the space literally unrolls around you as you travel through it. In this way scrolls of this type of motion not only through space, but through time. Their totality cannot be understood in one instant or in one glance. The Chinese called their landscape genre Shang Shui, I mean literally mountain water. Shang is mountain and Shui is water. So Shang Shui literally just means mountain water and interestingly enough it's the same as the picturesque formula of Claude Lorraine that I talked about earlier where you have the scoop of water so to speak in the mountains in the distance. So keep in mind that while all these artistic arguments and revolutions are going on here is where we are with landscape in the west. It's sort of just, oh yeah, landscape. Let's just stick some like some broccolini back there and we're done. Oh, it's a story about hedgehogs. I can tell you later. They had some strange beliefs about hedgehogs. All right, thinking about the origins of landscape movements in China and in 17th century Holland and in 18th century Britain and in our own country in the 19th century, W.J.T. Mitchell, a critic, proclaimed boldly, landscape might be seen profitably as something like the dream work of imperialism. What he means by this is that landscape painting as a genre is a way for nations to explore their own dreams of what they are and what they want to be and it tends to become important when that nation is in a position of power. So in Europe, up until the 17th century, landscape was simply a fantastical background to narrative events. I mean, here's an Albrechtur and it's Samson fighting the lion. Samson and the lion are the actual news of the picture and all these beautifully rendered craggy hills and castles and everything in the background. That's just a narrative filler. It's not the focus of the painting. It was in fact the Dutch who first pioneered the idea of painting landscape as its own subject. If we are looking to understand why landscape fascinates us, its Dutch origins forced us to ask the challenging question. How is it that the landscape genre was pioneered by a country with the world's most fucking boring landscapes? And Jensen Adams has written a really interesting essay about this. She points out that Holland at that precise historical moment was engaged in what has turned out to be the most extensive land reclamation project ever attempted in the history of the world. At the beginning of the 17th century, over the course of a single generation, the Dutch reclaimed hundreds of square miles of land from marshes, bogs, the sea, and inland lakes through their use of their famous dike canal and drainage system. So suddenly, at that time, you get this genre springing up where people with money are proud of dikes and waterways. As the Dutch became one of the great international empires, their middle and upper class focused on images of their homeland, which newly terraformed was itself a statement of their power to transform the world. And they often make that, though, very bucolic, which I'd let, for example, this kind of rather slow, simple look at a canal, which is ironic, since the artist's name is actually Froome. So what about the dreamwork of empire in our own country, in New England itself? Well, for the first few centuries, after the European invasion, white New Englanders didn't really write about or paint the landscape because we basically hated it. As the Dutch were reclaiming their own inland empire, as well as building their overseas empire in the 17th century, the British were engaged in their invasion of North America. Writing about the New England landscape during the period of white invasion and settlement divides pretty starkly into two camps, descriptions written for people back home in England, describe a paradise where fish leap into your nets, crops grow without plowing, and the deer offer up their haunches to the bow like a burlesque show of chanteuse shaking your jelly. Descriptions by English men and women who've actually lived here describe the place as an absolute hell. Literally, once again, the dreamwork of empire, but in this case, an embattled imperial backwater of invaders who suddenly find that their agricultural folkways no longer work. Starvation is always near, and the actual settled population of the country is resistant to being displaced, assaulted, and betrayed. For the Puritans, the forest is not a place of beauty and wonder. You don't find the discussion of the forest is the work of God, and we must understand the work of God. No, it is a place of terror. These are people who are literally waging more or less constant warfare against the indigenous nations to inhabit this landscape, just as they are waging a kind of ecological war against the forest itself, trying to tame it, to improve it in their language, so that it submits to settled European agricultural practices queued down, distumbed, distoned, carved into lines. So the dreamwork of landscape, at that point, strongly associates the New England Forest and evil, disorder, paganism, and Satan himself. So here are a few verses of the harvest him, an 18th century hymn for this time of year, celebrating a bountiful harvest. But doing so in a way that literally demonizes nature itself. And I'll do that for you now. The fields are all white, the harvest is near. The reapers, all with their sharpsicles, appear to reap down their weed and gather in barns, while wild plants of nature are left for to burn. Hear the sad cry, ascending the sky of those in distress that have nowhere to fly. They call for the rocks and the mountains to fall, upon their poor souls war to hide them from thrall. Twill all be in vain, the mountains must flee. The rocks fly like hailstones and shall no more be. The earth it shall shake, the seas shall retire, and this solid world will then be all on fire. You know, I do like those Puritan tabs to do an honor. So not very similar to a modern understanding of the natural world and its beauties, not really a CRM club pamphlet. Sinners who are not regulated are compared to wild plants of nature, which, because they have not been regulated, must be destroyed. The Puritan must hack and burn and bring to order the soul within them so that they are prepared for the work of hacking, burning, and bringing to order the hostile wilderness around them. Discipline streams straight down from God to a landscape that needs to be assaulted and dominated. This ideology of a satanic wilderness still adheres, I think, in the New England Gothic. There is something about our landscape that still strikes many people, especially city dwellers, as a fit site for horror in the Macomb. To some extent, as Faye Ringle has suggested in her recent book about the New England Gothic, this darker legacy is the return of the repressed, a dim, shameful memory of the crimes necessary to settle here in the first place. But the American attitude toward the landscape of mountain and forest grew less grim in the 19th century. For the first time, we start to see major schools of American painters celebrating the breadth of the country and the sublimity of its spaces. Earlier, I spoke about the picturesque beauties of Claude Lorraine. I don't know why he's typically called Claude for short instead of Lorraine. Suddenly, we just choose his first name, but that's what people do. Maybe it's kind of like Cher, I don't know. Anyway, in the 19th century, Americans talk about how our rugged landscape combines the kind of the gentler beauties of Claude, the picturesque beauties of Claude, with the jagged Gothic paintings of Salvatore Rosa, a particularly American sublime that combines beauty and terror. So with Rosa, you have these kind of jagged rocks. You have that the forms are very kind of irregular and violent, especially in paintings like this, which is actually of a witch's sabbath. You see this crooked tree is the center. And it is the union of that sort of like satanic, broken Gothic ideal and the softer ideal that then produces paintings in this country, where we are trying to capture the wilderness that is seen around us. So these painters, talking about Rosa and Claude, I'm sorry, so the American painters who speak of those painters as their forebears, they also talked about moving energetically beyond the pretty pastoral of the old world European countryside, a landscape tamed to quaintness 1,000 years before. Forget the flowered and garlanded pastoral poetry of the Augustan poets. No, these painters imagined those old cannons of European pastoral transformed by the raw American wilderness. Instead of sloping hills, there would be crags. Instead of classical ruins, there should be classical columns. There would be stumps and fallen birches hurled down in new world tempests. And by the way, just for interest, here is that that's Franconia Knowledge. So here is the real Franconia Knowledge. Isn't that cool? Yeah. So the most famous of these 19th century landscape painters are the so-called Hudson River School, who used landscape to capture the potency of the young nation. People like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kenseth, and Jasper Kropsey, the poet of New Jersey. This seriously is supposed to be a painting of New Jersey. So and also here's some trickle-down Hudson River from my own collection, a nameless that gives a sense of the diffusion of this style. This is a nameless local artist, Vermont or New Hampshire, who painted Mount Chakorah in New Hampshire, but is still using all the traditional clodian landscape elements, as well as some sort of twisted trees. Next to the foreground cover is a scoop of water in the middle of the receding flats leading to a distant prospect. So I love these paintings. They fill me with a sense of American expanse. Here's an art critic writing about Jasper Kropsey's paintings in 1847. The acts of civilization is busy with our old forests, and the artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts of the red man, and where the wild deer roamed in freedom are becoming the abode of commerce in the seats of manufacturers? Yankee Enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left before it is too late, end quote. The painter Thomas Cole, who I showed earlier, that Franconia Noggi, wrote a poem called The Complaint of the Forest, in which a forest avails its own destruction. We feed 10,000 fires. In one short day, the woodland growth of centuries is consumed. There's this idea that these artists are capturing wild, untamed nature, often including the tiny figures of lone Native Americans as artistic appurtenances to give scale and gravity to the scene. But once again, this is, to some extent, the dream work of empire. Of course, they rework these scenes. Often, they deleted whole trains, whole trestle bridges, to keep the wilderness pristine. Their work contains deep American paradoxes. For example, this is one of my favorite paintings of all time, although the color reproduction here is crappy, so you can't really tell exactly why. It's very silent in the original. Anyway, it's by Samford Gifford. It beautifully evokes a sunset over a white settler's cottage, a powerful image of a home perched on the edge of the sublime. But it's also a picture of destruction. It does not lie. Look at the stumps in the foreground. It recognizes what much American painting in this period tried to conceal. The vision of the untouched landscape is intimately wrapped up in the destruction of that landscape. It is a painting of a man who has made the wilderness into a place that will be gentler to him, habitable, home. But at the same time, in doing so, in making that place submit to him, he changes it fundamentally. Even as painters and poets were trying to record their awe at the immensity of the American landscape, they were also including in that buoyant excitement, including in that buoyant excitement, at the possibilities for exploitation. They wrote a lot about celebrating the majesty of God's creation. They also wrote a lot about how God had given this land to the white American for use. Just like the Puritans, they were obsessed with, quote, improvement. Even as they sought out the wild, the tangled, the vast, the forbidden, they were actively planning regulation, raising, planting, displacing. You still hear these arguments from apologists for the displacement of Native American populations in that period. People will still argue that the Indian nations were not using the landscape to its full capacity so that they somehow did not deserve stewardship of that land. So in the end, Well, they were using it enough. Well, yeah, well, also, you know, I mean, by the course of international treaty, it was not ours to take. Anyway, but yeah, so in so many of these paintings, we see explosive sunsets. God himself luring the brave American to the unconquered West manifest destiny, the promise of Divinely demanded resource extraction. This gays West is not a mere metaphor. Most of the Hudson River School at one point or another went out on junkets to the West. Bierstadt, Kenseth, Wittrich, Gifford, Moran. But they weren't just going out to paint and record this untamed land, which in fact was under cultivation, but they weren't out there just recorded before it disappeared. They were literally accompanying surveying missions. They were the scouts for destruction, regulation, displacement, the binding of the West in iron bands. They are not merely weeping for what is being lost. They are instrumental in that loss. And we need to be aware of the same sort of paradoxes in our own time. So here, for example, is Asher Durand's painting, Progress, The Advance of Civilization. So it's a celebration of the American landscape. It's not just a sentimental view of woods and a distant settlement. You can't really see, but I'm trying to blow up a little bit. In the background, there is this little town. You have a train on a viaduct, in fact. You have steamboats. These are very early steamboats. You have smoke stats from some sort of factory. So it is actually kind of the idea is here is the progress of the future. And then in the past, and once again, I'm sorry, you can't really see this, but there are three Native Americans right up here. One of them pointing out to the other one, like, look at the wonders of this world. So you have the kind of the opposition of the settlement pattern over here and over here, the wild, which is also supposed to include the Native Americans. And they are looking on admirably at what the invader has done there. In that regard, it's a beautiful painting, but it is also a chilling painting. It is, in essence, a genocidal painting. It is a painting about, we are going to replace you. And that's a good thing. That is what progress, the advance of civilization, is. So it confronts the myth of the untamed wilderness, quote, unquote, with the muscular excitement of technocratic imperial expansion. And it is, and I think this is an important point, it is unsurprisingly, a commission from the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. So after all, these landscape paintings are not merely expressions of a vision. They are commodities sold to people who wish to feel a certain way about certain things. There are the same tensions surrounding those Western paintings of Albert Bierstadt. They were composed for robber barons who feel both pride in the unspoiled nature of wilderness and also in their ability to tame it, quote, unquote. That this complex of tensions best described in Leo Marx's groundbreaking book on the mythology of the American wilderness, The Machine in the Garden. This complex of tensions is still actively at work in the American psyche. Whenever we see a car commercial with a four-door sedan cruising along a serpentine path through unspoiled countryside, the same set of tensions are at work. We view a supposedly unspoiled landscape only by girding it with roads, altering it with our presence, our exhaust, our hunger. And of course, very few of those imagined Eden's of pristine Mesa and Butte or Rudoland fall forest are actually where we drive IAMs or utility vehicles. Consumers don't want their wheel wells spattered with mud. That's part of the work of Myth 2, selling a machine described as rugged so that we can drive back and forth to work through the slopes and the cities. But still, that sense of the 19th century sublime, this is my attempt at a Clodian painting done in Hartwick. It's not painting, sorry, it's a photograph, but I got a, I hope you know it, I got a stump in the foreground. And the scoop of water. Yeah, see? Receiving flats. Yeah. But still, that sense of the 19th century sublime remains part of our consciousness when we look at it from the top of Hunger Mountain or Camels Hump. It has survived in our culture more robustly than the puritan sense of the cursed wilderness. Gradually, the 19th century focus on the spread of civilization gave way to the early 20th century regionalist focus on landscape as the site of production rather than raw wilderness. Here's where the images of Vermont begin to appear most regularly. Think of artists like Luigi Lugioni, who, this artist of a sort of precisionist pastoral, who recently had a really revelatory show at the Shelburne Museum, which some of you may have seen. Or Asa Chaffetz, Thomas Nason, and even Edward Hopper, who spent quite a bit of time down in Royalton as Bonnie Kloss has written about. The regionalist painters love a farm. They love production. They love agricultural bounty. Art critics have even pointed out that the most famous of the American regionalists, Graham Wood, though I don't think he actually ever visited or painted Vermont in particular, that Graham Wood sees fields and pastries as a continual flow of smooth, breast-like forms, a suckling loam, a mother earth. They also loved a ruined farm. So no, wait, there's a whole Facebook group I belong to that posts nothing, but photos of ruined Vermont in times, okay? In the 1920s and 1930s, Vermont agriculture was in a tough space. So there is some literal reportage of decline and Asa Chaffetz had a ruined farm for you. There's a literal reportage of decline and decrepitude going on here. And it was important for the regionalist painters to catch those social realities, to the negative as well as positive of their world. Many of them aim to capture the real struggles of the people around them and that is very commendable. But why do these scenes of ruin appeal to us now? Why have they become a visual state? I think there are three reasons that ruins appeal to us. Number one, there's a connection to history in a nation where historical memory is short. The sense of the past is not a small thing. We want to know the people who have gone before. We long for connection and signs of others in our landscape connect us to the dead. Number two, there is the pleasures of melancholy sorrow, especially when the economic ruin isn't ours. Just as Europeans from the Renaissance on loved including the ruins of dead empires in their backgrounds. It's a real luxury to feel picturesque sadness at someone else's misfortune when it hasn't touched you. And number three, in a strange way, I think they imply continuity. These ruins dot our landscape, but at the same time we know the milk is still flowing. Cabot still turns out, bricks of extra sharp. These overgrown hulks sagging back into the hills comfort us with the sense that agricultural production is naturalized in this landscape, longstanding in that there's something immutable about it, though individual farms may die. It quiets our fear of change. Oddly though these scenes show us failure, they imply that the system is ongoing. That at least is my explanation of the subconscious draw of those images. So Vermont's flagging agricultural economy was gradually boosted by tourism. The sense of the sublimity of mountain views was not just some whiff of spiritual aestheticism, it was big business. But for it to be big business, it requires self-reflexivity. The Vermont landscape has to be painted as a Vermont landscape. The tourists coming to the Vermont landscape has to feel that they have arrived somewhere because it is iconic. We post pictures of the Vermont landscape because they look like what we think the Vermont landscape looks like. By so doing we feel the pleasures of memetic circularity that we have clearly been successful as viewers of the Vermont landscape. We stand and gape at a white steeple offset by orange trees in the fall. It is beautiful because the colors shock, but it is also beautiful because it resembles what is supposed to be beautiful. It is photographed for its rightness, for its conformity to what we expect from a Vermont scene. Growing up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, I was surrounded by images of cows and barns because that is how the suburb mythologizes itself. It's how it moves itself towards the countryside by having images of what it wants to be. The cow print curtains are like the image of Casper the ghost on the chest of a child's costume of Casper the ghost. They show us how weird a process of face that resembles the character we know but a body that is in no way natural or supernatural. We cannot view nature in the raw. Each scene we look at, each real scene we look at is full of dropdown menus feeding us a lifetime of guidelines and meanings and a lifetime of images gleaned not just from the Hudson River School and the WPA regionals, but from boat covers, ski resort ads, diner placemats, hardware circulars and the laminated covered bridge photo above the shitter at the Montpelier Shaws. As the post-modernists would say, the landscape here is always already landscaped. Discussing the English landscape, the poet William Cooper famously said, God made the country, man made the town. There are a few problems with that. If you consider our own Vermont landscape, when we walk through the woods, we might consider we are in a natural landscape and so we are in a sense, but it has been already fundamentally shaped by human kind. Most of you would know the story of, for example, the Merino sheep craze, which means that for some strange reason, the, you know, Napoleon's attempt to take over Europe through a strange sequence of events meant that most of Vermont was deforested in the 1820s and 1830s. There is no easy division between the human and nature in this landscape or any other at this point in the sixth grade extinction and the Anthropocene age. We hunted beavers into extinction in this state. When we then had trouble with flooding and wetland regulation, we literally had beavers flown back in during the 1920s. So in July, our Vermont woods our vistas. This state has not been this forested since 1815. It will never be this forested again. We are in a beautiful, beautiful moment. Leo Marx in that book, The Machine in the Garden, talks about how these pastoral American tropes deeply cloud our politics, our legislation, and how our legislation then transforms the landscape itself. As Leo Marx points out, American voters and legislators have a mythical relationship with agricultural production. It's easy for agribusiness to pull one over on us, whereas in other nations the word farm, whatever their word for farm is, may have very little emotional valence. Here it summons up immediately the red barn, the hardworking family, the cow and the chicken sitting cross-legged and talking near the dot pond. This small family farm is no longer the statistical agricultural reality in this country. Overwhelmingly, the farms in our country are factory farms. This state is an anomaly. For the most part, American farms are not like the ones we see around us here. Many states have so-called ag-gag rules that stop us from seeing how mass-produced factory farming works. Laws that make it illegal to photograph inside industrial farms. The illusion of rural kindness and ethical action is important. Under that pastoral illusion, we still push for legislation as if all farming is small-scale farming. Huge, huge federal subsidies and tax breaks are pushed through for mega-farms because the American public imagines them to be like the farms here in Vermont. And in some of the most infuriating cases, legislation that makes it almost impossible for small-scale local farmers to hold onto their businesses is passed for the benefit of mega-farms under cover of our American myth of the silo and barn. All these visions, these stories of utopia and Eden of the beautiful and sublime, all of these things transform how we see the world. But they also transform the world itself. So in conclusion, the future. Vermont is going to transform utterly in the next few decades. As the climate warms, fur and spruce will die off, oak will extend their reach further north. New mites, new parasites, new arboreal diseases will reach us, the woods will change. But the greater change will be the human transformation of this landscape as climate refugees pour into the state. At first, the myth of the Vermont landscape will be one of the things that actually draws them, the stories of space and solitude. Then it will be simple need and panic and sort of logistical reality that sends people scurrying here. We'll have bearable summers. We need to be prepared for these transformations. Going into this period of extreme change, we need to be prepared if we want any of what makes Vermont's landscape unique to survive. We need to get the different populations of Vermont talking with each other so that we know our neighbors and so that we can respond to the needs of those actually trying to make a living off the land here. So that we are aware of the realities of agriculture, not simply the attractive pastoral fantasy of work being done by others. We need to build up systems for mutual support. We need to focus on the revitalization of town centers. The importance, for example, of constructing small-scale apartment buildings and mixed-use buildings, the encouragement of local businesses in walkable communities, rather than blindly racing toward the suburban subdivision as the model of the way forward. This is not a simple ask because the American imagination takes suburbanization so deeply for granted as a given of settlement and land use. The Europeans, by contrast, are used to walkable village centers and see that as generally desirable. So there will be increasingly the pressure on Vermont Act 250 as construction demands grow. In those times, the argument will be that the appearance of the landscape is an insubstantial aesthetic concern. We need to remember that this is not true. For one thing, Vermont Act 250 has altered metrics like price points and tax income the metrics Americans take as the bedrock of the retail. We can look across the border and upstate New York to understand its legacy. But more importantly, we must remember that the suburban ideal itself is an aesthetic. It is a half-assed aesthetic, sure, but it is an aesthetic nonetheless. Not a serious and self-evident reality of how humans must live. It is a particular American aesthetic, literally half-assed, one cheek in the country, one cheek in the town, living on the expansive lawn as a sterile little dream of pastureage. It is a tremendously wasteful system. There is no good in its replication. The suburban ideal for takes of these myths of the countryside every bit as much as our desire for sweeps of mountain and pasture. These things assume that the importance of landscape is its utility, its use value to humans for extraction, settlement, recreation, even visual pleasure. But things do not have to be useful to humans to deserve life. The networks around us, the mycelia groves, the tiny lives and the hungers and affections in the woods and fields and lakes. Creatures experiencing this landscape with as much emotion as us. They should not be extinguished because they are inconvenient. We have a duty to preserve the systems of life on this planet as well as we can. We must ask ourselves, why do we deserve to continue here if we are not stewards? We are soon going to be surpassed in intelligence and speed by the work of our hands. How will we then judge our own worth? Who will look out upon the vistas we build? Who will judge them tomorrow? Not small matters. These questions are mountains and stumps and valleys where we make our homes. These are questions of the sublime, which is the collision, after all, of beauty and terror. Thank you. Anyone has any questions? We do have a few minutes. What was the picture before this one? That is the tunnel that goes under Route 89 The tunnel that goes under Route 89 is it? Right, exactly. It's the railroad that goes under there. Was that used to be a railroad tunnel? No. It's near what used to be the railroad. The railroad goes up to it and then continues past it but this was created for it's too narrow for a train. I think it's supposed to allow wild animals to get under the rail. I don't know if they dare go in there. I don't know. There weren't any there when I was there. Lights are on. You walk through it. Lights come on on there. Oh, I don't remember that. Okay, nice. Could you give me the last one? Yes. Here you go. That's the last one. Okay. What brought you personally at this point in your life to this topic? Because I felt a sense of urgency from you. I felt personal. Is there anything in your story that or has this always been something that's been really important to you? No, it really has just as I said in my talk, it really was since my 20s when I first connected with this sense of the sublimity of the breadth of the country and then started to question what that meant and why those myths are very powerful to me but that means that I feel like I also need to be able to see beyond them to be a good citizen. Yeah. I feel like it's been a thing which has been building for many decades and I have read about different portions of this at different times. Like during the pandemic I read a lot of stuff on Chinese landscape painting particularly because one of the neat things with Chinese landscape painting is the sense of blankness that is possible in it so the idea is that a lot of the painting is actually not there and so in Vermont, especially that winter as it happened in the middle of the winter you have what essentially is a kind of a black ink on white rendering of the landscape with in fact mass and presence described best through the absence of anything you can see. That is to say where there is white that is where there is something heavy and solid. So I found that really fascinating so I started to read a lot about and so for the Chinese that's kind of like a Chan Buddhist meaning their version of Zen Buddhist thing to have this sort of absence that is a presence. For me it was just a once you start to study a landscape school this is I think the other thing that's interesting you see its forms around you in reality whereas before you weren't primed to so I remember that winter walking around and everywhere I was looking I could see in a sense the Shanshui forms of things disappearing or being defined through the simplest of black lines in the sky. Well it's not like he stands on top of shouting his books down the proximity doesn't really but yeah I mean I read his translation at the top and yeah so I mean I really love his approach to Chinese nature poetry which is definitely like for example on many of those paintings there are poems inscribed right on the painting sometimes even by a later hand so yeah I've read a lot of his translations of and I highly recommend his translations of Chinese nature poetry in particular. Oh sorry David Hinton who lives right around here in the way that Vermont is so weird but he lives in the middle of nowhere but he is one of the nations probably top three translators from Chinese but of course he lives near Montpelier Yes, Didi. Really charmed by the thought that occurred to me as you were speaking that we all go unwittingly accepting those ingredients of nature that are in the classical paintings in every picture postcard you buy and any little drawing drawn by children in this room there is always blue and the trees always have brown bark even when you look at them maybe that's not so but we all know those ingredients and when I like to paint and when I paint a picture if I bought those ingredients way back there in the background I was something absurd in the foreground but they're back there Yeah, but on the other hand as you do have a dog with a human's head in the foreground it probably doesn't read in exactly the same way I mean you Yeah, right Yeah It is us But it is interesting that once you start to look at another tradition and fix yourself in another tradition how the way that they do leaves in 18th century drawings you start to see trees that fit that particular well and you're like now there is a tree whereas if you're seeing someone else's trees if you're seeing Salvador Rosa's trees that are all crooked and empty of leaves then you see that that's a great tree there so it's interesting the way that it changes how we perceive the natural world Yes So I walk out in the spring and I look out in the fields and I see beautiful greens in the sun shining in a blue sky and I hear the birds and I smell the flowers or about 50 years from now I take a multimedia helmet on my head and there's a vision of the spring and there's a beautiful green in the spring I am wearing now that character that is the character I'm playing in my Halloween costume that is not real but it's so real what does it mean? Does this transform an understanding of the landscape? I think it will, but on the other hand I also think that the difference is partially in accountability and control one of the powerful things about looking at a real landscape is that you are not in control of it which is part of the idea of the sublime is that you are this small thing looking at something fast whereas if you are in something in a simulation that has been created by an algorithm or by human AI artists or whatever then you know that it contains space which is different even if the details are the details look incredibly realistic nonetheless the pull away from you from something that is not accountable to you is an important part of the experience so I would argue that beyond the question of do you want other things on this earth to flourish and live even the experience for the human in that instance is going to be different it's going to feel very very different even if it looks exactly the same I'm sorry that's all we have time for tonight thank you so much