It's easy to feel stuck when you're in your 30s. I think the luster of your career has largely worn off as you realize you're going to spend the majority of your time working and not making meaningful relationships with other people or even the world around you more broadly. It's also the beginning of your "mid-life" and you are likely coming to the realization that all of what you are going to be is the result not only of choices you have already made but of millions of choices that were made even before you were born.
It's a helpless feeling, I've been there myself and I've seen many of my peers there. This is part of what made the Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami such an interesting book to me. It chronicles a 30-year-old man named Mr. Okada in Japan at an interesting time. He has recently quit his administrative job after feeling the uselessness of it becoming too unbearable, his wife is becoming estranged as she continues engaging in her professional life and eventually disappears altogether (hardly a spoiler it's on the back cover summary), and his cat has gone missing.
Murakami is writing an existential novel and it's interesting - although I'll be honest it gets a little tedious - to see Okada written like Meursault from The Stranger. He seems listless; barely looking for work, certainly not looking for the cat like his wife asked him, and a good portion of the beginning pages is just detailing what Okada makes for breakfast.
There is a prevalent theme of water in the novel, both physical manifestations of it like at the bottom of wells (there is quite a bit of time spent in the bottom of wells) as well as meta-physical representations of life flowing all around us, a connecting force to us in the past, a flow of decisions that culminate in your current life and the life taking place before you. Okada knows that the Japanese occupation of Mongolia in WWII has a lot to do with the current blockage his life is undergoing and we are treated to some truly horrific - albeit brilliantly written - vignettes about various characters in that time.
Clairvoyance is a partner theme throughout the Windup Bird Chronicle, the idea being that life modeling the flow of water means some people are able to look forward and see the immutable future. Those who learn their future like the WWII veteran Mr. Mamiya are unable to change the course of the water and lead meaningless lives as a result, again stuck in middle-aged fear of life's mundanity. We follow Okada as he attempts to make the sort of drastic decisions needed to change the events of his life, a journey that takes him in the past, down possible other futures and the various tributaries, swamps, and rivulets that his path may take him. It's worth noting that the novel's villain is someone who can control the flow very well, rising in his political and academic career; cast as a completely vile and insufferable person.
World War II makes an interesting generational juxtaposition as well. I'm not very certain about the cultural view 1980s (when the novel is set) Japan has towards World War II, but if it's anything like the US, and there are some things in this novel that imply this is the case, then WWII is the last generation of men who did anything great. In my country, we call this generation the Greatest Generation. Japan obviously committed some striking atrocities during the time, but atrocities were also brought upon them by the Soviets and of course the US. The horrors explored in this novel are among its best-written parts, punctuating reminders through an otherwise pretty languid story of the horrific violence that came before.
These vignettes are something this novel desperately needed. I think the sort of "lost in translation" lost guy in his 30s who meets a manic pixie dreamgirl who prompts him to take control of his life is really overwrought and pretty outdated. I'm sure if I read this 25 years ago I would have thought it was great, but I think we're past that now. Largely because I'd like to think we're past the point of thinking that women - and especially young girls - are not props for the self-discovery journey of very sad men. However the war scenes are vivid enough to cancel out some of the more annoying dream sequences, the tale of Mr. Mamiya is so haunting and reviling that it removes any stain from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle that would mark it as a cute novel. In fact, I would argue this makes the novel worth reading at all.
There is this joke comedian Kurt Metsger makes where he references the movie Precious. He notes that Precious as a character is fake, entirely fiction, the character is not a real person, and that the creators just made her that way and did those things to her for no reason. It may be a trashy or distasteful joke, but it has always sort of stuck with me as an interesting way to think about fiction.
Authors often make their characters suffer, sometimes psychologically and sometimes physically, many times both. There is generally a purpose served, especially by the more profound suffering a character may undergo. Characters in Tony Morrison novels suffer as a reminder of the dehumanizing and brutal nature of racism (this is the sense I get from the movie Precious, though if I recall correctly it wasn't done very well). Others may be less concrete, the young boy protagonists in Cormac McCarthy novels suffer as a dark twist on the coming-of-age tradition.
The question of why any given character is given to suffering was consistently in the back of my mind as I read the Human Stain by Phillip Roth.
By all accounts, the Human Stain is a good book. Its profile of the last months of Professor Coleman Silk and his lover Fawnia Farley is of course magnificently written and fascinatingly complex in its layered story telling. I did enjoy it as a literary form, as though I could love it from afar, but in the intimacy of actually reading it I found it, many times, to be unnecessarily and nauseatingly cruel.
There is a lot I could theoretically spoil here, some I already have. You find out relatively early on in the novel that Professor Coleman Silk has retired in scandal from his university over false allegations that he is a racist, that he has taken a lover named Fawnia Farley half his age (her 34, him 70), and that he has died. You also learn that the entire novel is written by Roth's novelist alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, whom he has deployed in other novels; American Pastoral and I Married a Communist.
Roth, as Nathan, is giving an account of Silk's life, bracketed by its present end, with the sort of beautiful narrative flair that the best literary masters of the universe deploy. Nathan is an impossibly unreliable narrator with the Melville/Ishmail-like oscillation between a fully present character in the narrative doing things like interviewing Silk's family and befriending Silk himself, attending Silk's funeral, and speculating on how Silk died to omniscient third-person narration as well as the first-person perceptive from inside the heads of Fawnia, her former husband Les, Silk's university enemy professor Roux, and Silk himself.
This latter exercise is different than the way I've seen this method deployed by greats like Faulkner or Melville. It is not so much an embodiment of the perspective but an invasion of the subject, a pure manipulation and an ultimate display of their suffering that left me sort of sick and confused as to why it was needed, artful though it may be.
The Vietnam trauma and what Les goes through both as a soldier and veteran is heartbreakingly well written. Stomach-churning. Also entirely confusing. Why is he doing this? Is it to justify Les' cruelty and racism? Is it to cast him as a bad man with reason? Maybe I'm too dumb to ascertain it, but if I'm dumb let the record show I was struck so by the inclusion of some of the most gut-wrenching passages of wanton mental suffering I have probably ever read. This is great writing to be sure, but again, in service of what?
Then of course there are the women. I know there is a lot of eye-rolling speculation on the great modern writers like Foster-Wallace and Franzen as it pertains to their depiction of women, some of it valid, some of it a bit wrought. Roth is sometimes added to this list. I'll leave to you to determine how valid it is, but Roth doesn't treat any of the women in the Human Stain kindly. At best, the women in the Human Stain are props; Silk's sister, daughter, or wife for example are all in service of plot progression. Coleman Silk's university rival Professor Roux is lived in breifly only to profess her love and envy for Professor Silk and her self-hatred because of it. Again, why are we doing this? Hopefully it's not to make a point of ambitious women.
Then there is Fawnia, one of the more tragic characters I have encountered. The 34-year-old illiterate lover of the old-ass Coleman Silk. Roth details with horrible explicitness her sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her step-father, her physical abuse and constant murder attempts by Les, the death of her small children in an apartment fire while she performs fellatio on a boyfriend in a car outside, she is possibly illiterate - Nathan doesn't think she is - although Roth leaves it a mystery for god knows why, because I guess it's fun to chin-stroke over whether Silk was taking advantage of her or not. What fun! Nathan inhabits her head narrating in and out of relevant drama but sometimes just ruminating on the horrors visited her by the past. It's disturbing and doesn't accomplish the literary heights that Roth wields when he's inside the head of someone like Les (which I have to say again, is always gripping, some truly amazing writing here).
Maybe this is all Roth's point. This is why he uses the insufferable novelist character to tell the story in a presumptive, misleading, and entirely misogynistic way. With a title like "the Human Stain" it's fun to speculate what the human stain actually is. Is it a reference, as Fawnia (the only character to mention the title) says, to the disgusting human race that stains our planet? No, too simple. Is it a point about race? Our racial identity and the misfortunate or fortunate that follows is a stain on our skin and our lives? The novel has a core racialized theme in it, so this would be an interesting read. I believe that Roth thinks the novelist is putting the human stain on the page; a stain is gross, it's unwanted, and it's a depiction for anyone to guess the story behind what was once a messy accident. Everything that describes the way that Nathan - who of course is just a stand-in for Roth - writes Silk's story. It's possible that Roth is embodying the very best of the novelist only to communicate his disdain for the craft.
But who the fuck knows.
Here is the Metzger joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMhjtVWpwg
There is a long tradition of science fiction/dystopian writers and texts that have "good" politics. A lot come to mind; Ursala LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson first and foremost. I also thought the non-simpleton reading of Dune had a very salient, anti-interventionist political point. Phillip K Dick certainly has a politics at the heart of his novels that question foundations of power and authority, as does Orwell. There is a lot of writing about H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft and their subversive body of work as a political statement against the status quo. Go all the way back to something like Gulliver's Travels which had a pretty palatable critique of society, it may even still to today's audience.
By good politics I mean a leftwing, democratic and human-centered politics specifically. There is probably a hefty volume of sci-fi writing devoted to reactionary, right-wing and maybe even fascist politics, but it doesn't seem like that's what breaks into the mainstream.
I'd like to make another entry in the sci-fi writers with solidly good politics category. I recently read Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky and was blown away not just by the fascinating world-building and character crafting needed to make a sci-fi novel, but the way it also manages to be a great and unobvious indictment of a multitude of modern industrial complexes and societal structures. All while being really fun to read.
The world-building that Tchaikovsky does so well is crafting a future civilization literally on top of our current civilization, form equalling content. Cage of Souls is set in the far, far future where the sun is bloated and dying, human civilization has been brought to the brink of extinction several times and the last remaining human civilization exists in a single city by the name of Shadrapar
The majority of the novel however takes place on the Island; a prison island where the inmates - the criminal and dissident element of Shadrapar - are forced to mine the swamps for various chemicals that help the singular city survive.
Stefan Advani serves as the narrator and fictional author of the book. Advani is an "academy boy" whose crime is discovered later in the story. As a narrator, he's somewhat reliable and very entertaining, as well as intentionally and hilariously annoying. As Advani's journey takes him to the deserts, the underground of Shadrapar, the jungles surrounding the island, and of course the island itself, Cage of Souls becomes many different kinds of novels itself.
Cage of Souls is a prison abolitionist novel, it is an anarchist novel, it clearly favors engineering and artificers and the power of the human mind as a tool for advancing good, it's a societal indictment, but it's also an ecological novel.
This last emergence surprised me. The entirety of civilization understands that the sun, as the novel is set so far into future, is in its final days. The sense of impending doom hovers over the whole narrative. In fact, much of the conflict arrives from the final vestiges of civilization, still possessing all the obsession with craven growth we hold today, meeting the end of the road, and still attempting to extract, grow, and profit. Did I mention Cage of Souls is Anti-capitalist?
None of this is to imply Cage of Souls is preachy or overt. The plot is such a mesmerizingly good time the theories and concepts at play are an afterthought, but they're there as a solid foundation to hang the genre necessary world-building and characterization on. It's a great and riveting story and it's got me excited to read Tchaikovsky again.
During the height of Covid I remember catching this Pew Research statistic about how half of US adults between 18 and 30 are living at home with their parents, the most in history since the great depression. I was shocked, although the more I thought about it the less surprising it felt to me. Lots more people attending college these days and it makes financial sense to stay with your parents from 18 to 22, which ended up being the biggest share of that statistic. When I looked at ages 25 - 35; less than 20% of adults live at home with their parents.
Why was the initial statistic so shocking to me though? And why is the statistical increase of 25 -35 y/os still so newsworthy to so many. The answer is pretty simple; living with your parents sucks.
I'm sure there are a lot of books out there where characters of various ages live at home with their parents. Home by Marilynne Robinson is specifically and thematically intent on exploring the return home as adult children. Returning to the universe of her novel Gilead, Home centers around the same cast of characters but with a different focus. The Reverend Ames is just a backdrop, instead the story of Home is told from the perspective of Glory, one of the Reverend Boughton's daughters.
Glory has returned home to live with and care for her ailing and aging father. Almost all of her other siblings are living their best lives with their husbands and wives and children and careers, but Glory has retreated home; leaving a failed engagement she told everyone was actually a marriage, abandoning her career and dreams if a family in the wake.
The only other of the Boughton offspring is the estranged, criminal atheist son Jack. Readers of Gilead - and I'll note here you don't have to have been a reader of Gilead to read Home - will know some things about Jack that I won't spoil here. Suffice it to say he joins Glory in the great post-failure return home after nearly 20 years away with no contact.
Robinson is a masterful writer, which generally means she can pack an entire universe of meaning into a small gesture or a broken-off sentence. She shows incredible prowess in Home, crafting in Boughton the epitome of an annoying, old dad, Jack as the redemptive villain, and Glory as the pitiful lost soul. The three, with guest appearances like Reverend Ames or a random other Boughton sibling, navigate all your least favorite topics that come up when you visit your provincial hometown; religion (of course), past and ancient personal offenses, politics, racism, even vaccines make a brief conversational appearance (polio).
Home is completely comprised of Robinson at her best. There are no Randian rhetorical flashes of a character letting loose a torrent of theology or ideology, but rather the constant striving an aging family has to make, huddled together at their worst point, to love one another and themselves. It is moving in that you feel you are striving right along with them.
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As an aside, I needed a return to fiction after a long stint of almost exclusively non-fiction. Non-fiction was beginning to depress me severely, reading was becoming a chore and I was despairing at how little I was retaining. Home was a perfect entryway back into the novel. Moving, life affirming, a story of hope and forgiveness even in the midst of loss and tragedy and strife. I think I'll be grateful to it for a long time.
I started the 600-page book II of the My Struggle series in, according to my Goodreads account, December of 2022. I devoured a good portion of it and stopped to focus on some books about climate change. I read two books and then picked it back up.
This is not to suggest I was getting bored with Knausgaard, in fact, I couldn't wait to get back to it, but I couldn't get through 600 pages in time to get to some other texts I had planned to read for a personal writing project.
This is all to say there has to be something I really love about Knausgaard's work, something that really drives me to read it. Which is funny because it really shouldn't; the text isn't exactly suspenseful, it is certainly poetic but not classically, grippingly so. The narrative itself is practically absent, I could pick it up after reading two other books and it's not like I had to really remind myself of what happened because everything is only conceptually connected rather than by pieced together with important plot points.
There is some faint reliability in what I'm reading in My Struggle, but just barely. In my brief review of Book I in 2017 I seemed to feel the same way (I also didn't even appear to like it that much but that's strange because I look back fondly on it now). It's not called "Your Struggle" for a reason. When I read Book I about his adolescent years and his relationship with his father in his 20s, I was also reconciling some personal relationships with my father and thinking a lot about my high school days/early 20s (since they were coming to an end).
In Part II Knausgaard reflects on becoming a father and a husband, as well as his struggles to balance these things with his career as a writer. I was reading this in between having my two children and also balancing my career, so there are obviously a lot of really relatable aspects of the book in theory.
When Knausgaard gives the harrowing account of his wife giving birth I was instantly transported to memories of my own wife giving birth. Taking his children to Rhyme Time at the local library, navigating awkward conversations with his in-laws; very "been there, done that".
Except there is a lot that I don't share with Knausgaard. The intense self-loathing and doubt, the disdain with which he regards so much around him. I was struck in that same scene where he takes his children to the music program at the library, or really any scene in which his wife and children are present, how self-centered and critical he was of himself. Terrified of the way he appeared.
It's a reoccurring theme in Part II; how he appears to strangers when his pregnant wife accidentally gets locked in the bathroom and a boxer has to kick in the door, how he appears to other parents at the daycare co-op when another child is dunking on him, the last 50 pages of the book is a torrent of Knausgaard obsessing over how he comes off in a literary magazine interview. While I can imagine myself in these situations and settings, really a majority of situations and settings Knausgaard finds himself in, the suspense comes from the rising panic in Knausgaard himself, something I don't share but find endlessly fascinating.
The actual events of Knausgaard's life are seamlessly transitioned; you're taken from Knausgaard with three children living in Norway and attending a fair, to Knausgaard meeting his soon-to-be wife Linda at a conference, to giving birth, to living with two children, one child etc etc. It flows so incredibly well as though you were simply in conversation with Knausgaard, which is emphasized all the more with the punctuated philosophical flourishes that Knausgaard will spontaneously put forward.
These reveries, short and sporadic enough to not be overbearing or preachy, are just another aspect that drives my interest in My Struggle. I remember enjoying it in Book I, which usually waded into thoughts of death and eternity. Book II also dwells on the themes of the novel and offers some truly impactful writing on the nature of parenthood, on being in love, and on the nature of fiction itself.
Only 19 pages in and we get this beautifully articulated paragraph on parenthood:
"When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they 'are' for me. And what they 'are' has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breath, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they 'are' has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can't do, but is more a kind of light that shines within them."
Poetic, conversational, and relatably human is probably everything I could say to explain my fascination with what could easily be described as a boring, insular, and too-long book. Which I would imagine seems inadequate, I might have just had good timing. It seems Book 3 is about his childhood, the final installation (Book 6) is apparently about Hitler (so I've heard), so time will tell if timing is really everything as I continue to pick up Knausgaard.
“Only to live, to live and live!Life, whatever it may be!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
When it comes to climate change I have borrowed a phrase in my own writing from my good friend and climate change pragmatist Chris Powers that goes something like “Things might get bad, but I won’t be pushing my children around in a shopping cart in some Cormac McCarthy-style apocalyptic wasteland anytime soon”.
One of the things that always seemed to make the climate crisis somewhat easier to reconcile with is how far away all of the consequences seem to be from me and, since having them, from my children.
Things might get bad, I may witness some nascent systemic failures and even some far-away climate-driven atrocities, but I won’t be inflicted with the worst of it. The world will not become uninhabitable. That is until I read David Wallace-Wells book The Uninhabitable Earth where he explores the very real shopping-cart-in-wasteland-possibilities.
Wallace-Wells opens the Uninhabitable Earth explicitly and aggressively challenging the concept that the climate crisis is a distant crisis. Part one, titled only “Cascades” lays out two arguments to consider. The first is the possibility that the climate model’s predictive power is only so good and we could be in for more devastation, and sooner, than the scientific community previously thought. The second is that it is inaccurate to expect a singular, apocalyptic event to deal a final blow-style devastation, but rather cascading increments that will start to shape and change our lives, the pace of that change determined only by our efforts to mitigate damage to the planet.
In “Cascades”, Wallace-Wells contextualizes the crises in a way that feels very personal to my generation, explaining how the historic fossil-fuel burning in the Industrial Revolution “is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today”, and that “the majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld”, which was exactly one month before I was born. If the purpose of reading texts like these is to reconcile the climate crises with my decision to have children, the Uninhabitable Earth is essential reading; this framing brings with it an awareness that there is a cost to my life’s comfort and that is the comfort of my children.
But only possibly. Throughout the Uninhabitable Earth, we are reminded that “some climate research is speculative, projecting our best insights into the physical processes and human dynamics onto planetary conditions no human being of any age or era has ever experienced”, particularly as it pertains not to the reality of climate change but rather to the devastation it will wreak. It is inevitable that “some of these predictions will surely be falsified; that is how science proceeds. But all of our science arises from precedent, and the next era for climate change has none.”
So while we cannot know what the horizon will bring to our children or even ourselves, Wallace-Wells expects the changes to come in small cascading and interconnected phenomena that in many ways we are experiencing the very early stages of right now. He titles these the “Elements of Chaos” and each is devoted its own section in part two: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters no longer natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse, climate conflict, and systems [collapse].
Each “element” is expressed both as a singular possibility and as a compound with other elements. The singular possibilities are themselves compounding, sometimes taking the form of an unlikely and unconsidered phenomenon, such as the “hunger” element featuring something called “the great nutrient collapse where every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising” thereby making food itself less filling. But hunger also ties into economic collapse, or supply chain systems collapsing, or water scarcity; themselves all their own elements as well.
This is how the climate crisis will impact us. Not through one giant disaster (although jury is not out there either), but rather death by a thousand cuts. The idea that climate change will mount some singular horrific act that will affect tragedy onto one’s personal life is rooted in individualism; it centers the person imagining the horror. In reality, climate change is a systematic change that will impact us exactly because of the interconnectedness of everything.
And in many ways, we’re seeing it already. We’ve seen fires increase their scale and damage, same with different varieties of storms. Even in my home state Michigan, sometimes marketed as some sort of climate change oasis, the winter wonderland can be made all the more deadly; “the warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes - that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s Snowpocalypse, 2014’s Snowmageddon” and 2016’s Snowzilla”. Just last year I watched my kids choke on wildfire smoke from Canada (wild fires and air pollution are elements of chaos explored in the book). Nowhere is safe even if they are safer than others.
Systems we have come to rely on will be pushed to the max, some already seem to be bending. And this is not some distant world of 5 degrees of warming, this is the very real, very present possibility given our trajectory; “at just two degrees, cities now home to millions would become so hot that stepping outside in summer would be a lethal risk…wildfires would burn at least four times as much land. The sea level rise would flood or down hundreds of major cities sooner, with as little as two degrees of warming.”
The Uninhabitable Earth also has very little room for optimism or any insistence that we will avoid this future, the only question is when we will endure it. Wallace-Wells beefs with everyone here; major infrastructure investment arguments of the left receive jabs about the improbability, pointing out that to avoid two or three degrees of warming we’ll need “a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet” when in reality “it took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line.”
Techno optimists and market pragmatists receive their fair share of doubt. Wallace-Wells points out the complete failure of market forces to deliver a “green energy ‘revolution’” despite “yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most wide-eyed optimists”. Pointing out that it “has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started…that is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system”. The market is not designed to scale down engines of profit, only to build on them.
Christopher Suarez, “The Download,” 2023
So if we are to watch the world become uninhabitable and the only question is how fast we will watch it become so, how do you reconcile having children? I’m now cursed with the knowledge that I have brought them into a world rapidly in decline. Wallace-Wells seems to feel similarly to this as a father himself:
“I know there are horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children…She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future of themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it - quite literally the greatest story ever told.”
It doesn’t feel particularly great starting this piece on a 70 degree day in February, after what many are deeming “the winter that wasn’t”. Yes, many of the explanations for the anomalous weather center around the El Ninio hurricane, but I just finished a book about how all the climate models could be incorrectly skewing optimistic and we could be facing an apocalyptic-level crisis in the next week or month or 12 years. The hurricane explainer might have helped me breathe easily before reading the Uninhabitable Earth, but I’m sure I will never feel that way again. It’s one of those books that curses you with a knowledge that is not forbidden, just foreboding.
There is no happy ending or optimistic lift to this piece. There was nothing like that in the Uninhabitable Earth either. Just the reality of how we will “deal” with what is to come:
”People will likely fall into spasms of panic - some of us, sometimes - considering that a future of so many more of them seems so unlivable, unconscionable, even uncontemplable today. In between, we will go about our daily business as though the crisis were not so present, enduring in a world increasingly defined by the brutality of climate change through compartmentalization and denial, by lamenting our burned-over politics and our incinerated sense of the future but only rarely connecting them to the baking of the planet, and now and again by making some progress, then patting ourselves on the back for it, though it was never enough progress, and never in time”
Andy Abeyta photographing billboard by Thomas Broening for The Desert Sun...
