River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

Cinema can be imagined as a hybrid of railroad and photography, an outgrowth of those two definitive nineteenth century inventions, the technologies Stanford and Muybridge represented, in which case fatherhood is too simple a metaphor for it. After all, zootropes, photography, and magic lanterns are also key aspects of it, and Muybridge only initiated and did not complete the invention of cinema. The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kind of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before; broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world itself a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

The movies, it can be argued, were born with a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took a snapshot of a horse. Under the patronage of California railroad magnate Leland Stanford, Muybridge was trying to discern what happened when a horse galloped. Equestrians and scientists couldn't even agree at the time whether a horse always had one hoof on the ground or not. Muybridge's innovations allowed for a photograph to be taken with an exposure time short enough to capture the horse mid-stride. (It turns out that a horse does not have a hoof on the ground at all times.) As a revolution in sight, this was huge; as Solnit points out in her book River of Shadows, the nation's most accomplished painters of horses had to go back and rethink all the work of their careers. But more was to come, because when Muybridge put such snapshots together later in a sequence, the "motion picture" was born.

I found Solnit's biography of Muybridge to be incredibly fascinating. She captures some of what has made Muybridge himself a subject of fascination: he was an English weirdo who changed his name a half-dozen times and ended up killing his wife's lover in cold blood. But the strength of the book is in the way Solnit connects Muybridge's innovations to the changing technological landscape of the Western United States and the world as a whole. The motion picture, she shows, is deeply connected to the way that the railroad--that technology pioneered by Leland Stanford--transformed the lives of Americans. It's true, there's something about looking out a railroad window that is replicated in the experience of the frames being pulled hastily over the projector. But more convincingly, Solnit connects both technologies to the nineteenth century attempt to "annihilate space and time," to break down the barriers that separated people by time and distance.

Muybridge's achievements weren't only in motion photography; he was also known for pioneering large-scale landscape and cityscape photography, taking, for example, some of the earliest panorama shots of the city of San Francisco. Solnit takes these in, too, connecting Muybridge's time photographing the Modoc War in northern California to the rapidly shifting face of the West. (I chuckled a little at the academic attitude toward the word technology, which takes in both horses and the "Ghost Dance" of the nineteenth century West, and which certainly made making these connections easier.) Solnit does a good job, too, of making the case that Muybridge shows the centrality of California in the emergence of the modern world. It's the reason the railroads were built, after all, and Muybridge was at the center of the innovations by which California changed the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

I don't know much about Solnit; I associate her with the book Men Explain Things to Me and a cultural flashpoint over stuff like "mansplaining." This book is, I'm pretty sure, much earlier, and perhaps a relic of a time when Solnit was less of a well-known name, but I thought it was really insightful and erudite, and I can easily imagine why such an intelligent and thoughtful writer would bristle at being spoken down to by male chauvinists. Really enjoyed this one.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Larry and Sally Morgan return after many years to the Vermont cabin where they once spent their happiest moments. Their old friend, Charity Lang, is dying, with her husband Sid at her side. Charity's impending death promises an end to a lifelong friendship between the foursome, fused at first in the crucible of the University of Wisconsin, where Larry and Sid were professors of literature. After losing their jobs in a flurry of firings during World War II, rich Sid's Vermont property was offered as a safe haven to the poorer Morgans. An idea of a life was constructed there, in which the Langs might act as patron to their friends, but the idyll proved to be short-lived, as Sally's sudden polio whisked them away. Now, as Charity is dying, it is an occasion for narrator Larry to look back on a beautiful friendship that never quite made as large a part in anyone's life as they would have liked.

I found the first half or so of Crossing to Safety terrifically boring. We are asked to believe that these two couples are amazed and awe-inspired by what they find in each other, but outside of a clear kind of sympathy, it was never independently clear to me that any of them was quite worth the hearts in the eyes or the dropped jaws or what have you. And the setting of the academy of the 1940's, when someone like Larry could receive a check equivalent to a quarter of his yearly salary for writing a single short story and mailing it off to the Atlantic, made the book feel sort of self-consciously "literary" in a way that people tend to make fun of. (Stoner, anyone?)

But I thought it became more interesting when the cracks started to show in the friends' relationship: we're told that Sid nurses a crush on Sally, for one. More than this, I was interested in the relationship between Sid and Charity: he sees himself as a poet but she pressures him into a narrow view of success, academic success, something at which he is manifestly less talented and less passionate about. Larry's brief success as a writer activates Sid's jealousy, and more than that, his resentment toward Charity. There's a great and telling scene where the friends go hiking and Charity is so slavishly devoted to the counsel in her guidebook that she nearly kills them with undercooked chicken. (When it says "three minutes on one side," everyone points out to the stubborn charity, it means hamburger, not poultry.) Charity even tries to die "by the book," sending Sid away at the last minute and "slipping away" (I guess this means suicide?) so that she might die cleanly, without burdening anyone. Of course, this isn't what Sid wants--he wants to be by his wife's side--but even at the end of their lives, the differences between the two seem intractable.

I don't think I'd recommend this one. It has some nice elements to it, but I found the whole thing a little tweedy and twee, and it often felt that the book was too insistent, and consequently not persuasive enough, about the power of the foursome's friendship.