neither debate,” citing, for example, redfish and speckled trout, “two fish (that) constitute as strong an argument as there is for the brilliance of Darwin or God.” In “Indigo’s” more cosmic moments, Powell teases a running theme he calls the “God v. Norman Mailer was Powell’s first major influence, until a professor gave him William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!,” which, he says, was, and is, “as close to a religious experience as I am likely to suffer on Earth.” (He “works through a mirror” situated about eight feet from his paintings of turkeys, creek bottoms and longleaf pine.) Ford Riley, the Florida “habitat artist,” he interrogates Riley about his technique and method. Like the filmmaker Werner Herzog, Powell wants to know how things work, and this intellectual curiosity distinguishes “Indigo.” The straightforward travel piece, “Bermuda,” for instance, elaborates on the proper construction of Bermuda shorts.
“ is photographic evidence of enough nut blood and thespian gameness in my clan,” he writes, “to get any but the truly uninterested off to a well-grounded start in the art of assembling strange truths in less strange lies…” At first look, Powell would seem to have been a renegade from the South’s dilapidated gentry - indeed, he describes himself in boyhood as “a bourgeois snot.” In “Indigo’s” wonderful autobiographical piece, “Hitting Back,” with its accompanying picture album, his family appears to have been a mostly hard-drinking tribe, bookish and eccentric.
0 kommentar(er)
