exchangeably I’ve been flirting with the idea of pulling up the roots and heading out West – an idea which maybe all Americans entertain at some point or other – and Arizona has been particularly on my mind. The Boston Globe has a curiosity-provoking review of my friend Tom Zoellner’s book A Safeway in Arizona – which it describes as “an opportunity to examine everything – from the paradoxical role alien labor plays in Arizona’s economy to the state’s self-mythologizing image ‘as a land tamed by the gun.'” A friend once said to me that Las Vegas was “the soul of modern America” – but perhaps Arizona can claim that title: fragmented, individualist, environmentally unsustainable, isolating, land of retired golfers, Burning Man desert hippies, arms-bearing minutemen, illegal immigrants, and a dwindling, indebted middle class.
http://city-made.com/2010/09/ I know nothing about any of these things except what I’ve read – all I have is an intuitive sense that there are in life no fresh starts, no evasions of consequences, and that this fact must always war with the idea of the West; but I have a real thirst to see it all for myself at some point. And in the near term – there being no possible evasion of our true selves – to start reading about it.
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