A few images from my 2022-2026 fieldwork — in no particular order, largely without explication, and selected for no better reason than that they give me pleasure I hope to share.
More Is More
September 9, 2026Standing on the Shoulders of Cyclopes
September 7, 2026Ibn al-Haytham (aka Alhazen) is supposed to have written his Kitāb al-Manāẓir (The Book of Optics) from 1011-1021 AD while feigning insanity under house arrest in order to avoid the worst of what the “Mad Caliph” al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah might have otherwise done to him for failing to properly dam the Nile. In it, al-Haytham describes what we now call a camera obscura in terms of “al-bayt al-muẓlim” (“the dark house” or “the dark chamber”). “Bayt” means “house” in Arabic. In 11th-century Cairo, however, it would have more specifically connoted a self-contained apartment within a larger family compound; that is, a sort of “personal living quarters” or “private chamber.”
Translated into Latin around 1200 AD as De Aspectibus, the Kitāb al-Manāẓir had an enormous influence on the study of light, optics, and vision in Europe for the next several centuries – both as a direct source and, even more broadly, by way of Perspectiva-lists like Roger Bacon, John Peckham, and Witello (aka Vitellione) who quoted or paraphrased it extensively as they engaged with, reworked, and systematized its ideas.
Curiously, none of them provided a direct translation of “al-bayt al-muẓlim” to describe Alhazen’s experimental set-up. Instead, they mostly used the architecturally unspecific term locum obscurum (“dark place”). I don’t know why, exactly. Aristotle’s influence being what it was then, however, I suspect it might have had something to do with Bartholomew of Messina having recently translated the Problemata into Latin. In Book XV, Aristotle discusses the pinhole effect in terms of crescent-shaped images of an eclipse projected onto the ground through the sieve of a tree’s leaves. Given the source, these high-medieval proto-scientists may have felt it was necessary to use nomenclature general enough to account for his outdoor example, but I couldn’t say.
What I can say is that in the 1558 first edition of Giambattista della Porta’s bestselling Magia Naturalis, he has, in some sense – empirically, if not philologically (there is no evidence della Porta could read Arabic) – returned to the source, describing his own experiments, as Alhazen had, as having taken place “In obscuro cubiculo…” As with “bayt,” “cubiculum,” doesn’t just mean “room” or “chamber.” It specifically refers to a “bedroom” or some other “private chamber.”
By 1589, when he brought out a hugely expanded edition of Magia Naturalis (and presumably after reading Friedrich Risner’s 1572 re-translation, as Opticae thesaurus, of the whole Kitāb al-Manāẓir), della Porta had settled on a nominative construction that echoed the recurrent use of “locum obscurum” in the Perspectiva tradition he’d inherited: “cubiculum obscurum.”
Which leads us to Kepler.
In 1604, Johannes Kepler published Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (c.f., the aforementioned Witello). If, a century later, Isaac Newton’s Opticks would prove to be a Chicxulub, the impact of Kepler’s book on the field was a Tunguska Event, at least. When Newton wrote Robert Hooke in 1675, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” this is the sort of clavicular platform he had in mind.*
Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena is peppered with variations of “obscura camera” (e.g., “obscuram cameram,” “obscuritas camerae,” etc.): the first-ever uses of the now-familiar term “camera obscura” (albeit shuffled syntactically) that I’m aware of. And the word choice interests me.
“Camera obscura” means “dark room,” of course. That said, classical Latin didn’t really have a generic word for “room” as we do now in English. Rather, there were different terms for rooms that corresponded to their specific forms or functions. Deracinated on the Italian peninsula, “camera” – on loan from the ancient Greek “καμάρα (kamara)” for “vaulted roof” – came to mean a vaulted or arched chamber. Over the centuries, this architectonic specificity eroded, so that by the time Kepler employed it, the word (in scientific Latin, as in his native German (“kammer”), and in many other languages the lingua Romana cataracted into (e.g., “camera” in Italian, “cámara” in Spanish, “chambre” in French, and so forth) had come to more generally mean “chamber” or “room” in our present sense.
Not specifically a bedroom or other private chamber, I want to emphasize.
I don’t imagine this was just a re-branding exercise. So why did Kepler – who was familiar with Alhazen’s work (by way of Witello’s, at the very least), and had, like most other scientifically minded Europeans of that era, almost certainly encountered Magia Naturalis – opt for this particular word instead?
I don’t know. One day, under different geopolitical circumstances, it might be worth rooting through Kepler’s archived correspondence in St. Petersburg to try to find out.
If I had to guess, I’d say he landed on it, mainly, to restore to the medieval “locum,” as della Porta had with “cubiculum,” a sense of spatialized – architectonic – enclosure in which a specific sort of experiment could be conducted. In Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, Kepler – who may have been deliberately echoing Guillaume de Saint-Cloud’s description of a camera obscura in his 1292 Almanach Planetarum as a “domus clausa” (“closed house”), with its own intriguing echoes of Alhazen’s “bayt” – explains that a particular image did not form clearly enough to be useful in his obscura camera because it had not been light-sealed (“clausa”) properly. It wasn’t closed.
Needless to say, Johannes Kepler was a bright bulb plugged into a very particular epistemological moment. So it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that by introducing this more general word “camera” as a replacement for “cubiculum” he had also meant to subtly signal a shift from an esoteric approach to an exoteric one; an evacuation of “private chambers” in which the likes of Giambattista della Porta had conducted and shared most of his research into a public framework with similar, or even greater, empirical affordances, but stripped of the sense of secret knowledge production: the last turn of the wheel for late-Renaissance natural magick, unto a revolution of scientific-rationalism.
But that big wheel keeps on turning.
…
*By 1704, when Isaac Newton published Opticks, the term “camera obscura” had passed into common usage in scientific circles. Even so, he chose to refer to it, in English, as “the dark chamber,” “my very dark chamber,” or similarly, throughout his book. In this respect, as in others, Newton : Kepler :: Dante : Virgil.
Seeing Like a Hamadryad – Part 2
August 31, 2026
Last spring, Rob Petit and I temporarily converted the hollow ash tree rooted astraddle a 30,000-foot wet cave system in the Mendip Hills of England through which both Robert Macfarlane’s book and Petit’s film Underland begin into what I called a camera geologica, to facilitate the co-production of an image with the earth.
I wrote about my earliest (unexpectedly epic) experience of the tree-cave in a previous post entitled “My Typology of Fun: Rob Petit Edition“, and about this camera geologica project in “Seeing Like a Hamadryad“. They’re both worth scrolling through, I think, even just for the visual documentation. Depending on what exactly Oscilloscope chooses to do with the Blu-ray of Underland, I may have even more to share with you about our work soon.
Meanwhile, stimulated by something Matthew Battles, editor of the journal Arnoldia, wrote to me last summer, I’ve been thinking about the fact that the heartwood of the old ash – freshly exposed, as some of it was – may have acted as a sort of film stock for our earth camera.
Heartwood of the “common” ash (Fraxinus excelsior) – some of it white or a pale cream – contains cellulose, hemicelluloses, tannins, lignins, and various phenol extractives. These last three – the lignins, especially – all photo-oxidize when exposed to UV light, transforming colorless compounds into darker pigments. What’s more, they darken more darkly with more and brighter light. So, by sealing the tree’s riven trunk and restricting the influx of sunlight through the oculus to a single perspective, we inadvertently directed a photon stream (of varied density, corresponding to the external radiance field) that darkened its heartwood more where the projected image was brighter, and less so where it was dim. An organic negative, in short.
Heartwood provides structural support for the tree. But as a trunk hollows, its core becomes surface – of a horizontal depth of dark-ening matter receptive to light-ghosts. As Petit and I worked around it, the tree was producing, inside itself, in dead tissues, a stable representation of an otherwise contingent image – of us, and of its own still-living exterior – facilitated by late-stage dehiscence; enhanced, to some degree, by our (minimally invasive) collaboration with/in it.
I can’t help but think now about Earth wrapping itself around hell for structural support.
Re: Transoxiana
August 2, 2026
It isn’t the only place I long to visit, but I long to visit Uzbekistan. I have so, so many things I want to see for myself there; so many questions to try to answer, however provisionally. About its earliest Scythian kingdoms and the Achaemenid-period Sogdian satrapy.* About Alexander’s progress across it (from Alexandria on the Oxus to Alexandria Eschate: the point at which he is supposed to have finally answered the question – in one cardinal direction, at least – “Unto where, Alexander?”) and the century of Greco-Bactrian rule that followed his death and subsequent forty years of bloody “funeral games” among his Diadochi. Bukhara. Khiva. Samarkand. Those blood-sweating horses (descendants of Bucephalus?) that Wu-Ti dispatched Chang Ch’ien to negotiate for in the Ferghana Valley. Hyphae of silk roads. The White Huns, and the Turkic Khanagate, and the Tang. Xuanzang’s very long walk. Traces – however faint now – of Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeanism. Transoxiana’s forcible conversion to Islam by scimitar-wielding Arabians. And the Samanid missionaries who followed behind them, along a path of broken husks of Buddhist stupas. Avicenna. Al-Khwarizmi. Omar Khayyam (who wrote his Treatise on Algebra, and perhaps even began the Rubaiyat, in Samarkand). The Mongols. Episodes from Marco Polo’s Travels and the Rihla of Ibn Battuta. Tamerlane and the Timurid Renaissance. Grandmaster Ali-Shatranj. Shah Rukh. Ulugh Beg and his marvelous observatory. The proto-Mughal chieftain Babur. Uzbek re-conqueror Muhammad Shaybani Khan. And much later, players of the Great Game (e.g., Alexander “Bokhara” Burnes and William Moorcroft) and its mirror Tournament of Shadows (Aleksey Kuropatkin, certainly; and perhaps also the likes of Przhevalsky and Fedchenko). Tsarist annexation. Bolsheviks and Duma loyalists machine gunning each other in the streets of Tashkent – and the birth there, just a few months prior, of Natalia Androsova, who was also Princess Natalia Alexandrovna Romanovskaya-Iskander: circus motorcyclist, coerced Stalinist spy, and, along with her brother Kirill, the last of two Romanovs who were permitted to live in what became of Russia; and who both died in it without ever leaving. The Basmachi revolt. The Uzbek SSR and, after 65-odd (very odd, by most metrics) years, its bloodless assertion of independence. The vast playa that remains of the Aral Sea. The dust.
—
*For instance, where was the supposedly impregnable Sogdian Rock fortress near Samarkand that, according to Arrian, in his Anabasis, Alexander seized in 327 BC (along with the princess Roxana: the second-best-looking woman in Asia, according to the Greeks) by means of “men with wings” – i.e., a volunteer group of military rock climbers; approximately three hundred of whom, utilizing flax ropes and makeshift pitons, managed to scale a sheer cliff up to the fortress in the dark of night? And can their line be repeated without aid?
Iliadics
July 21, 2026After Aristotle gifted Alexander (not yet ὁ Μέγας) a copy of the Iliad he had annotated and provided a critical recension for, the king is supposed to have carried it around all 11,000+ miles of his Asian campaign, sleeping with it under his pillow.*
In 2020, in the midst of a 13,000-mile road trip of my own, having recently read or re-read E.V. Rieu’s exemplary prose translation of the Iliad, Christopher Logue’s War Music, a 12-page précis of the Trojan war by Apollodorus, Alice Oswald’s de-narrativized redaction, Memorial, and all four volumes of Eric Shanower’s lamentably abandoned Age of Bronze, I stumbled, unawares, into a clutch of egg-white rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art hung with Cy Twombly’s 1978 painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam. It dented my retinae.
Obviously, part of me is very into the idea of spending the rest of my life headfirst in rabbit holes, blackening one small notebook after another with idiosyncratic observations about Homeric esoterica. After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey twice this past weekend (wrapped in a shit-tortilla: a 3.25-hour director’s cut of Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy so execrable it took four days to finish), I got to thinking about just how many thousands of words I’ve already written about this stuff in recent years for those precious few of you who read Chamblissian.
The answer? Not nearly as many as I should have, or will.
I’ve been meaning to write about Twombly’s weird Iliadic decaptych ever since I took it in. And maybe I will one day. In the meantime, by way of paying down the vig on my debt to that future self, here are an initial ten thousand words (at the standard exchange rate of 1000:1 image):
*I sometimes wonder what became of this “casket copy” of the Iliad — so-called by Plutarch because it was supposed to have been transported from Persia to India and back in a bejeweled casket (or capsa, maybe) seized from Darius III. I like the idea that someone rescued the papyrus scrolls from destruction in 323 BC before Babylon and the rest of the left half of Asia were engulfed in fifty years of Alexander’s “funeral games” (aka the Wars of the Diadochi), and that they survived to the present day in Baghdad, from which they were looted by some Daesh douche who subsequently lost them (and his life) to a YPJ tank commander who afterward bequeathed her war trophy to the incipient Amara Library in Qamishlo, Rojava: Penthesilea’s revenge.
Κύκλωψ / σεισμός / κατάβασις
May 22, 2026
Just under halfway through Ulysses (page 447 in my edition), after Leopold Bloom skedaddles from Barney Kiernan’s in heated argument with the antisemite Citizen-cyclops (who is blind with rage), and gets a biscuit-tin-boulder hurled at him, and the ill-tempered Irish wolfhound Owen Garry (née “Garryowen”: “We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors, / the watch knock down by threes and fours…”) set in hot pursuit, Joyce describes the scene in superficially hyperbolic/seriocomic/symbolic terms of a catastrophic earthquake — e.g., as having completely flattened the part of Dublin where “all the lordly residences in the vicinity of the palace of justice” lay.
This is interesting, inasmuch as that figurative earth-shaking — a discharge of verbal, physical, and social violence Bloom flees from the legal center of Dublin to the sea — largely severs the public narrative of the first half of the novel from the more private, sometimes phantasmagorically interior, chapters that follow. And it’s historically spicy, given the explicit comparison Joyce makes to a previous seismic event in 1534 — i.e., the onset of the quashed Silken Thomas Rebellion, which led directly to Henry VIII seizing control of Irish affairs to an unprecedented extent and installing himself as the newly made king of the island; thus planting a seed of the Citizen’s xenophobic animus which by 1904 was in full, uh, bloom.
But! The book is called Ulysses.
If the Citizen is a cyclops, then he is also a son of Poseidon “Earth-Shaker,” whom Tiresias warned Odysseus — on (or just beyond) the littoral of Hades — would vengefully block his passage home at every turn.
Given everything else Joyce threw into his Mulligan stew, we should probably also keep in mind the earthquake on the shore of Avernus (i.e., the footfall of Hecate approaching through the forest dark) that immediately preceded Aeneas rushing into the hellmouth after the Cumaean Sibyl. And the quake that rent the temple veil as Christ died on the cross (Matthew 27:51), prior to his own descent into hell to harrow it of the unsaved righteous (see: the Gospel of Nicodemus, etc.).
And, of course, the ones in Dante’s Comedy:
Prior to Virgil’s wayfinding confoundment in Cantos XII (28-45) and XXIII (127-144) of Inferno, by structural damage done to hell during the Christquake of 33 AD — and to the shade of Statius explaining still another tremor that Dante and Virgil experience as they mountaineer up to the Eden-acme in Purgatorio, Canto XXI (34-72), in terms of how its geophysics relates to the metaphysics of Christian salvation — the first seismic event Dante describes in his Comedy occurs in Inferno, Canto III (130-136), as Virgil and Dante cross the Acheron. In line with a medieval theory dating at least as far back as Seneca, of seismicity being a consequence of subterranean airflow blockages, the quake is accompanied by a cyclone that erupts from the subterranean rock.
“From the reports of eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character,” Joyce wrote six hundred years later.
What I’m getting at:
Although the sixth episode of Ulysses — in which Bloom and his acquaintances bury Paddy Dignam/Elpenor — is called “Hades,” it’s important to remember that in Joyce’s novel, as in Hamlet, “the time is out of joint.” The Bloomsday narrative has a chronological order (or, rather, a helical, frequently slippery, stair-stepping sequence of events), but its episodes also map conceptually, if sometimes obliquely, onto those of Homer’s Odyssey. Not always in the same order, however. By that, I mean neither in the order of the books of the Odyssey, nor that of events narrativized within those books — which, having begun in medias res, loop back repeatedly thereafter.
Of course, the episodes of Ulysses are also arranged in dialogue with multiple other texts, including Shakespeare’s play and Dante’s Comedy — in what often feels like a hyper-dimensional structure one can only ever grasp part of at any given moment; which could be what Joyce meant when he told Nabokov, “I may have over-systematized.”
In any case, to whatever extent Ulysses may be said to include a katabasis, that part of its story begins with an earthquake — just like every other katabasis story to which Joyce refers throughout the novel. It’s only after the “seismic disturbance” in episode 12 that Bloom actually crosses the threshold into the underworld, I think. By episode 15, when he walks past the Nighttown “hellsgate,” he’s deep in. There’s a dog there too, which is described alternately as a spaniel, mastiff, and bulldog (or else there are three dogs; it isn’t clear) — c.f., the matter of Cerberus in Odyssey, Book XI (808-810); Aeneid, Book VI (416-425); and Inferno, Canto VI (13-33).
And so forth, and so on.
Another curious detail on page 447: Joyce says the seismic incident, having “registered in all eleven shocks” at the observatory in Dunsink, was “all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale.” Now, if you don’t have Mercalli’s whole scale committed to memory (for shame!), what Joyce meant is that it was only a moderate event; something pretty much everyone nearby would notice, and that might even do some damage, but probably not the sort of thing to flatten whole buildings.
It’s the “all of the fifth grade” part that snagged my eye, though. Specifically, the fact that during a grade-5 earthquake “Pendulum clocks may stop.”
That’s exactly what happens. After the Cyclops encounter, temporality seems to be suspended, in an eerie continuous night that Bloom first enters into on Sandymount Strand. When Cissy Caffrey dashes over to ask him the time, his watch has unexpectedly stopped. So the girls keep track of the hour, indirectly, by the audible progress of a nearby Catholic mass: a distinction between sacred vs. profane time readers of Dante should be well acquainted with.
The beach where Bloom — later in this same Nausicaa episode — jerks off to the sight of Gerty MacDowell watching the fireworks is also familiar (c.f., “…a wind that crackled with bloodred light, / a light that overcame all of my senses”), insofar as it resembles both the shore of Avernus and the near bank of the Acheron from which Aeneas and then Dante pilgrim (who swoons during the aforementioned earthquake, btw, and awakens on the other side of the river — prefiguring Bloom’s own petite mort?) cross over into Hades proper.
And does Bloom himself not subsequently enter a realm of infernal darkness — finding home again only by way of consultations with his ghosts? Doesn’t he harrow Nighttown and liberate Stephen Dedalus? Isn’t he an Aeneas, to whom the future founding of a great city (by immigrants fleeing from across the seas: “the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future”) is revealed? Does he not play Virgil to Stephen’s Dante — and/or the part of another directive ghost, Hamlet king to Hamlet son?
In a word: yes.
Some field (of view) notes
May 15, 2026
1.
I want to produce a 3D scene out of camera obscura images. Which will be damn tricky to do, despite the fact that in photogrammetric camera resectioning every point in every image of which a 3D scene is composed gets parameterized in terms of an ideal camera obscura.
When I first proposed the idea — of feeding Structure from Motion algorithms with images from fixed, architecturally instantiated single-point perspectives — to my pal Myles Sutherland, I was thinking about it in terms of converting rooms in three Las Vegas hotels into camerae obscurae triangulated around a large street-level object to inform the 3D.
Myles pointed out that I could also do it with images from three windows of the same hotel.
Now, ideally, I’d like to minimize the amount of AI/ML-based interpolation that’s required, but I’m no artisanal photogrammetry hipster. So when, after finding the entrance to Airmen’s Cave — a 3,500-meter-long system of twisty little passages extending through the karst beneath one of Austin’s major roadways south of the (other) Colorado River — in the Barton Creek Greenbelt last Saturday, what first occurred to me, looking at it, is how much it appeared to be looking at me. And that by turning even just two of its three mouths into eyes, I should be able to produce a binocular, stereoscopic (i.e., 3D) image of the surrounding vegetation, or of a figure emplaced within it.
So Wednesday morning, Eric Sweet and I headed back out there for a quick and (very) dirty study — to see how easily I might light-seal the rock holes with Gorilla Tape and some cheap black plastic sheeting, and to test the field of view at different focal lengths inside the cave using a white drop cloth as a projection surface.
I wasn’t precious about it. Mostly, because I’m recuperating from a recent L4-L5 disc herniation, and too much spinal flexion is verboten. But also because the cave is full of soft-bodied ticks that will feed on you and drop off quickly enough you don’t even know you’ve been chomped on unless you fall ill later.
The whole cyclops set-up took us 5-10 minutes. Per the usual, it worked like a charm. Next stop: bins.
2.
To recap:
The camera obscura, reduced to its essentials:
A dark enclosure.
An external light source.
A hole.
What a camera obscura enables is the formation of a real image – from a fixed perspective, of whatever can be seen from a point in space – onto a projection surface. That fixed, single-point perspective is unique. And there should be, in theory, infinitely many of them.
If you move the oculus of a camera obscura, you project a different image. And so one might also describe it in the following terms: any given fixed, single-point perspective is identical with the camera obscura (each of which can be defined based on singular extrinsic [position, pose] and intrinsic [focal length and lens distortion] parameters) that will enable its visual representation. Camera resectioning in photogrammetry – to facilitate the reconstruction of a 3D scene from 2D images of it – depends on this: the poses of the cameras that produced the 2D images are estimated based on the parameters of matrices of idealized camera obscuras corresponding to every point of those images. By which, it seems to me, the photogrammetrist (photogrammarian? photogrammatologian?) is simultaneously treating the camera obscura as a calculable abstraction, and the idea of space as a potentially infinite array of fixed-point cameras.
It’s worth considering whether the camera obscura is an apparatus that enables the visualization of a specific perspective, or if it is something more like an attribute of space infested with light: its perspectival visualizability, at every given point, in the context of certain necessary geometric organizations of the paths of light rays.
Both at once, probably. Every cart is part horse.
Here is a thing I love about the world: wherever it doesn’t occur naturally, it only takes a minimal reorganization of the geometry of whatever separates its zones of light and shadow to enable it to project images of itself upon its own surfaces. Images that are like the sorts of representations we produce of it, but are actually constituent of itself, contingent, and contemporaneous.
Reading Carlo Rovelli’s lovely little The Order of Time the other day, it occurred to me that on a planetary body, relative to that at any arbitrary set of spatial coordinates used to designate the location of a temporal standard, the rate of time’s passage will be uniquely different at every other point of the gravity field.
A camera obscura therefore not only represents a single unique spatial perspective, but a unique spatiotemporal one.
Is fossilized evidence of such minute relativistic effects preserved — at some scale, atomic or subatomic — in the mud of a mineral’s crystal lattice, or are those lattices constantly being shaken apart and reformed, while remaining putatively ‘solid’, in ways that make forensic detection impracticable?
You may, dear reader, mon semblable, already know this, but photons transmitting color — which I was taught as a larval mad scientist retain certain wavelengths while others get absorbed whenever light reflects off the surface of an object — don’t actually bounce. Rather, they strike the object and excite it electronically, which causes new photons to be re-radiated (among other sorts of angled emanations) at the wavelengths of the original photon that the atomic/molecular configuration of the object-surface couldn’t easily ‘absorb’. Those wavelengths that are ‘absorbed’ produce heat. The excited configuration of the struck surface relaxes back into an equilibrium state as a phonon (a quantum of vibrational/sound energy) shakes the crystal lattice, or messier organic equivalent, like thermal wind in electrical chimes — raising its temperature minutely, but measurably, before the chromatic exhaust dissipates.
Where might relativistic progresses of time leave lasting evidential traces in this process, if anywhere (of anywhen), I wonder? And if such traces of gravity-field-point-specific time dilations do exist, how might one go about detecting them chromatographically?
Stay tuned.
3.
On the subject of fossilized temporalities, Eric spotted this beauty in the dry creek bed on the way in. For scale, he wears a size 13.
C Is for Cheetah
April 30, 2026
Around three o’clock this morning, reading “The Tiger’s Bride,” Angela Carter’s second, more heterodox take in The Bloody Chamber on Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête,” her description of the Beast on horseback caused me to fall into a gauzy, opioid-insensitive (alas) Wikipedia reverie on pleasures pursued in 13th-century Xanadu (Shangdu), in which I learned, among a great many other things, that Kublai Khan and his kurultais, in addition to their menageries of other non-human hunting partners, sometimes galloped around with hooded, muzzled cheetahs (from among a population of a thousand such “leopardi” Marco Polo claimed to have seen on the grounds of the palace) trained to ride behind them until let slip to course deer.
Felid falconry.
what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
April 8, 2026
I’ve walked every mile of the Mississippi River from its headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
In a sense.
I’ll get into that assertion another time. Suffice it to say, for now, that I learn with my feet. So once I got it into my brain cave to visit New Orleans for the first time (a couple of weeks after my 2016 Los Angeles River walk), I decided to pick a distant starting point upriver and hoof the levee back to the city for the climax of Mardi Gras.
The weekend forecast called for forty miles of mud, but in my time I have chased trains at night, waving a whisky bottle, wearing nothing but unlaced boots and a cowboy hat. Even before I started having friends bury me alive, it wouldn’t have been the dirtiest I ever got. And so, with a half-filled hip flask, a Gerber fighting knife, and a copy of All the King’s Men in stow, I made my way from PDX to Louis Armstrong.
What I wrote about the river two days later, on the flight back:
“Friday night, I waded across Canal St., through the Knights of Hermes parade, into the French Quarter, to see what all the fuss is about. My maternal grandmother briefly attended a boarding school run by Ursuline nuns in New Orleans. While there, she, all of seventeen, stormed into the kitchen of Antoine’s (a restaurant that’s been operating since 1840) and browbeat the chef into divulging his secret gumbo recipe. For the rest of her life, she made it using his industrial proportions for ingredients, exactly as she copied them down: 5 lbs of this, 10 lbs of that, etc. I went there first, told the manager Charlie my tale, and sat down for a bowl of the gumbo. Good, but not as good as grandma used to make. Later, I saw a kid on Bourbon Street try to start a fight by pulling his pants & underwear down and walking purposefully at his opponent. Then a gal at a bar named Tanya (“I don’t look anything like Tanya Harding, do I?”) from San Diego explained to me that “there are no black people in Southern California.” So I figured it was time to split.
The next morning, after the worst breakfast I’ve ever been served in a restaurant, anywhere in the world, I grabbed a $75 taxi out to Norco (a town named, acronymically, for the New Orleans Refining Company). The friendly wheelman’s name was Gary. He asked me if I was an engineer. As it turns out, Gary was himself a retired oil pipeline engineer from Nigeria. He hated the cold – and so, naturally, had worked on petroleum infrastructure in arctic Canada, North Dakota, and Colorado most of his career, before relocating for a sizable (tax-resistant) income someplace warm. The idea of my walk blew his mind. He told me he used to run three miles a day, but “got lazy.” He still walks 10,000 steps daily around the airport taxi lot, along with several other cabbies I interacted with over the weekend – all of whom swore by their Fitbits. As we drove through the flooded spillway west of the city (“Alligators in there! And…what do you call those snakes, the really big ones that swallow you? Those too!” Note to self: don’t fuck with Louisiana pythons), he told me I’d inspired him to try walking the thirteen miles back to his house from the airport the next weekend.
As I got out, Garry wished me luck, and gave me the rest of his shortbread cookies.
I proceeded to walk 35 miles along the Mississippi River levee from the Valero St. Charles Refinery back to Huey Long’s old haunt, the Roosevelt Hotel. I saw all sorts of stuff along the way: Some guys sorting the last stage of analog-robot rubbish separation at the top of a clanking, wheezing trash mountain; a mass of gulls circling silently, bait balling a garbage heap like air orcas; tangles of pipes and towers vomiting flames; the cyclopean hulks of Shell’s Norco Manufacturing Complex and ADM-Growmark; hundreds of bunched crosses, like a garden choked with weeds, memorializing “the 3,062 babies aborted in America every hour”; an antebellum cotton plantation preserved as a tourist attraction; exotic flood control infrastructure; disheveled horses, black roosters, ibises, evidence of corvid sapience; barges, supertankers, and container ships (those latter-day riverboats) with names like African Kingfisher and Amazon Victory. And, all over everything, the smudged fingerprints of that dirty old pirate, Lafayette.
Things I did not see along the way: alligators, pythons, the homeless; or pretty much anyone else.
For lack of company, I sang to myself. The Louisiana state trooper who removed me from an Army Corps of Engineers construction site caught me in the middle of a spirited rendition of Led Zepplin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” complete with John Bonham-style air drumming. He was pretty nice about it, all things considered.
After detouring a few miles through Harahan, I was able to regain the river.
On the edge of Audubon Park, I quaffed a couple of beers at a po’ boy shack and decided to skip the last oxbow, making a beeline across the city along Carrollton for the Roosevelt instead.
After hosing off and re-dressing my feet, I plunged back into the Quarter. And oh, what a difference a day makes. The six blocks of Bourbon Street I navigated were like immersion therapy for haphephobia. Given the crush of flesh, a near-total absence of sobriety, and the potential for sexually, racially, or just semiotically motivated violence, people were remarkably well behaved; helpful, even, to those visibly worse off than themselves.
I kept expecting a stampede, or that someone would spill their “hand grenade” on me, or vomit on me, or drunkenly mistake me for the asshole their girlfriend ran off with and try to land a punch. Instead, it was a mostly genial, if appallingly gradual, push ENE around tiny islands of admiration for bared breasts, asses, abs. Felt sort of like groundwater recharging an aquifer. Only with, you know, more beads.
Bead negotiation is fascinating, btw.
By then, I was looking for High John the Conqueror root (aka Johnny Conqueroo). Not drugs. Hoodoo. It’s what Muddy Waters was talking about when he sang, “I think I’ll go down to that old Kansas Stew/and bring back my second cousin, that’s Little Johnny Cockaroo…” in “Mannish Boy.” He’s got another great song about it being part of his mojo bag, in which he keeps growling, “I’m gonna rub my root! I’m gonna rub my root!” I finally tracked some down, for a friend in England who’s a retired curse breaker and combat magician.
Later that night, I gathered gifts for two of the Guédé loas – Baron Samedi and Papa Ghede. Gifts, not offerings. I didn’t want anything in return from those cranky old spirits. Just trying to be a good guest.
Sunday morning, as the horror floats were evacuated under police escort, I paid visits to a pair of Southern gothic cemeteries – St. Louis no. 1 (where Marie Laveau is interred, and Nicholas Cage has staked out a tomb for himself) and Lafayette no. 1 (where Anne Rice once had herself wheeled inside a glass-top coffin in a mock funeral procession) – carrying two unremarkable-looking brown paper bags.
I left my gifts on the western thresholds.
Between the necropoleis, I walked more of the river, croaking John Lee Hooker’s “I Cover the Waterfront,” exploring an abandoned power station and unpeopled parts of the port, until six of New Orleans’ finest rocked up on their motorcycles with sirens wailing. Satisfying himself that I was probably harmless, the lead cop, a huge African American guy in mirrored aviator shades, said (with surprising patience), “Brother, you gotta get out of here.”
And so I did, before any of them wanted to have a look in the paper bag. “What the heck are those for?!” I imagined one of them asking. “Psychopomp and circumstance,” I was ready to answer.
I spent some time inside Lafayette no. 1 under a magnolia tree with a cawing crow for company. Even its walls were made of bodies. Experienced my usual pareidolia in there: seeing skulls where they weren’t, &c. Then caught a cab back to the hotel with just enough time for some Popeye’s chicken. Drug deals went down on either side of my narrow table. Debts were forgiven. Violence was intimated. All in about twenty minutes. The density of unspoken communication going on in that place reminded me of The Dosadi Experiment.
Anyhow, that was that. I cabbed back to the airport past the big pink billboard for Larry Flynt’s Barely Legal Club once last time, and flew home.
They’ve caged (but not tamed) the mighty Mississippi. As a consequence of that, and riverbed engineering to support the petroleum industry, Louisiana is drowning at the rate of a football field of land per hour. Meanwhile, the cultural alluvium of New Orleans has been – is being – laid down in thick deposits. It’s a “place stained with time,” to borrow a phrase from Mark Fisher. I saw traces of slavery, piracy, gambling, Dixieland, hoodoo, voodoo, (erased, displaced, replaced) tribes of Native Americans, the French, the Spanish, Creoles, Caribbean flava, Buffalo soldiers, the Union navy, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, highly evolved LGBT cultures, “Dirty South” hip hop, cotton, oil, drugs, Katrina, and much besides. I couldn’t do the place justice, and won’t bother trying. I will say this much: if I ever do come back for Mardi Gras, it will be to see how it’s celebrated in neighborhoods outside the French Quarter (i.e., the anthrobroscene).
Also, I’m giving up machismo for Lent.”
The river is everywhere.
April 6, 2026
Difficult to believe it’s been a decade since Brad Garrett, Deb Chachra, Adam Rothstein, and I walked all fifty-one miles (plus a few ambulatory digressions) of the Los Angeles River from Canoga Park to the Port of Long Beach.*
Owing to unusually heavy precipitation in the week leading up to our journey, the river was in spate. Facebook messages flew fast and furiously:
Some of you may have heard about the rain we’re getting. Let’s put it this way: The river has an average daily discharge of 320 cubic feet per second. Yesterday, it peaked at 31,132 CFS. So if you tune into CNN Saturday night and see footage of two idiots riding a flash flood through Compton in a hand-pump raft with street signs for paddles, think well of us. And Stacey, remember: half for you, half for my godchild. Take what you want from my storage locker and burn the rest.
and
Escapability from the river varies. The amount of water currently emptying through it, to which a wet Saturday will add, is impressive. Earlier this week, there was talk of a breach. Folks living in the culvert were evacuated. It hasn’t flooded its banks (yet), but we won’t be able to safely sleep in the drains, which was the original plan. We won’t even be able to walk inside the culvert the whole way. Fortunately, there are trails alongside some sections of the river. As for the rest of it, we’ll have to play it by ear.
and
None of us wants to go out by drowning in the LA River. Too absurd. We’ll give the thing — and the city around it — all due respect.
and so on.
Fortunately, the weather stabilized, the river disgorged its excess, and that was mostly that.
Mostly. Approaching Vernon (aka Vinci in the unwatchable second season of True Detective: an ‘Exclusively Industrial’ city five miles from downtown Los Angeles, population 112; so corrupt, it teeters perpetually on the brink of disincorporation) 2/3rds into our walk, it began to rain, and the concrete culvert that channelizes the river — the slope of which, we’d failed to notice, had risen up from a moderate 35º into a rectilinear slot canyon with featureless walls eighteen feet tall — began to fill with alarming rapidity. As Deb and Adam splashed ahead in quickening calf-deep water, Brad and I lingered for a moment to hatch an escape plan, should one become necessary. “This isn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s getting there,” I grinned. He grinned back.
It all turned out fine.
Brad and I once discussed co-authoring a book about our various riparian adventures together, but life flows too quickly to dam it up and put it to work like that. At this point, what remains of the walk, as with so many of my other escapades in that period, amounts to a fistful of photographs (most of them taken by somebody else), some highly specific place knowledge of semi-legal provenance, and a mindhoard of still-vivid, if now somewhat tattered, recollections.
Well, all that, and a powerful urge to spend more time with dear friends than I’ve managed to in recent years.
In this instance, a set of kaleidoscopic notes — jotted down on the backs of bar napkins a few days afterward — have also survived time’s bonfire of inanities:
As Hesse put it in Siddhartha: The river is everywhere. Stevie Nicks singing, “When the rain washes you clean you’ll know, you’ll know…” as I drove into the city. Jumping a locked gate in the pre-dawn hush on Friday — and then every other fence we encountered before hitting Universal City security. Fake trees disguising telco infrastructure: palm, pine, and eucalyptus. Mantling a stone wall to get a better look at Starfleet Academy. An empty parking lot beneath which, until quite recently, 18 nuclear missiles were siloed. Drinking whiskeys old enough to legally drink themselves. Will Self’s unexpected cameo at the Ace Hotel before a tray of room service champagne and our addled realization that all the records we liked best we had played at the wrong speed. Being guided through the ephemera of Bowtie Parcel by local artists with a powerfully strong sense of place. Buckaroo Bonzai’s logo on a warehouse. Deb explaining ’emotional labor’ to me as I peed upon a locked public restroom in a park. Being asked by an Uber driver if we were bank robbers. Dawn on the rooftop of an abandoned building in Downey. The privilege of observing nature with an engineer whose mind moves at 200 mph. Adam’s heavily annotated Thomas Guide, his impeccable route finding, his Benjamin quip, and his savage sentences re: Griffith J. Griffith. A mysterious government pickup truck, laden with chopped wood, driving at speed through the river. Bridge graff of a shadow coyote pack annotated: “Fuck the other side.” The guy in bright red leathers popping a wheelie on his motorcycle, tearing hell down the bike path toward Long Beach. The guy who had lashed his gear, and himself, into the girders beneath a bridge with a web of cables. The guy in an electric wheelchair who drove against traffic with three leashed pugs mushing ahead of him, blasting a tiny radio, then hopping up to walk into the liquor store. The old guy with the wispy Fu Manchu, ponytail, and sailor’s cap who shouted, “Close that FUCKING door!” at us, then went back to contemplating his horchata, statue-like. The peregrine falcon that rifled out at me from the bushes. The corkscrew staircase between I-5 and the 110 at the confluence of Arroyo Seco and the river. A decapitated Mickey Mouse, its body twisted at the bottom of a cliff, as downtown LA came into clear view. Going garbage Tarzan on Trash Island. Swinging on the Tree of Woe in a pasture behind Disney’s animation studio. Talk of indigenous lizard people. Horse favelas. All of the amazing readings en route — but especially when a flock of birds circled overhead, ominously, as Harriet Hawkins read via Skype from and about Lewis MacAdams; and how Lucy Lippard’s passage in Undermining about Spiral Jetty dissolved into whorls of razor wire separating Compton from the river. Brad recovering his balance after slipping on bird shit in a no-fall situation. The swaying, rusted catwalk we both ventured out onto. Ceremonies at the Mulholland fountain: a water offering, sigils, the naming of names. And a last group photograph, snapped by a bearded fisherwoman with the Queen Mary behind us. Beyond that, the Astronaut archipelago trailed off into the Pacific like an ellipsis. The rest was silence.
It wasn’t perfect. Brad was injured throughout. Adam got hurt. Despite lugging a heavy, 30-year-old raft >50 miles, we never put it into the water. Despite carrying full kit, and discovering ideal bivvy sites both nights, we didn’t camp.
But we did wade into the river beyond the 6th Street Viaduct at dusk and slosh it for miles through a concrete box canyon in a drizzling rain on the phase boundary of real danger. And we traversed the concrete desert south of Vernon, with commercial logistics operating on both sides of us, relentlessly, under sodium lights, in supernal silence.
Unstable memories of the journey are already starting to decay, irradiating my insomnia. But that night, at least, will have a half-life like U-238.
A few snapshots for visual reference:
—
*I set off on this river trek less than forty-eight hours after a single-push hike up San Jacinto Peak — the biggest gain (10,400 vertical feet over 17 linear miles) on any mountain in the continental United States — with friends Jared Rogers, Jay Owens, and Ryan Whitehead to celebrate the odometer flip into 2016.
We, I, used to go somewhat harder back then. Perhaps I will again someday. After all, one need not go fast to go hard.
On the occasion, I wrote that “Jared and I have caught more sunrises together on the flanks of mountains than I can easily count on my fingers & toes. Jay and I saw a pretty good one this past summer, as we did sun salutations with Brad down at Badwater. Ryan and I watched one detonate over the gorge that cradled our species from the summit of Kilimanjaro. And another atomize the night surrounding Mt. Rainier. Estimate the years you have left. Tally up the days. Watch as many of those suns rise as you can. After the last one, it’s an endless dark.”
Chamblissian 