Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

Photo by Stephen Shore, from Robert Macfarlane's "The Crapola Sublime"

One of the most absorbing reviews I’ve read recently is Robert Macfarlane’s “The Crapola Sublime” (The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020), a consideration of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of Jackson. According to Macfarlane he was a “pioneering American cultural geographer.” He calls Jackson “an unorthodox observer, whose ways of seeing ran against the grain of midcentury American landscape conventions, with their attachments to the picturesque and the sublime.” He says Jackson was “nerdily fascinated by that degraded phylum of Americana that the artist Philip Guston once referred to as 'crapola': junkshops, edgelands, strip malls, and trailer parks.” He says,

There is a tenderness to Jackson’s engagement with “crapola.” By studying what he called “the commonplace landscape,” he sought to invest mundane places of work and dwelling with a value at least comparable to venerated landscape sites such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

All of which is catnip to me. I’m drawn to such places and to the artists and writers who celebrate them (e.g., Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Hopper, Agnès Varda, Garry Winogrand). 

In his piece, Macfarlane mentions three essay collections by Jackson: Landscapes (1970), The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (1980), and A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994). I think I’ll try to find at least one of them, and check it out.