Reemergence
American Oasis is coming January 14, 2025
Hello, stranger! Haven’t seen you around these parts in a couple months, though I suppose that’s mostly the fault of your humble proprietor. In my defense, I’ve been a little busy finishing the book — luckily, things have progressed to the point where I can finally share some details! First off, let’s take a gander at the spectacular cover:
Now, the nitty-gritty: American Oasis is set for publication on January 14, 2025. That feels like a lifetime from now, I know, but the good news is that preorders are now open through your finest online book dispensaries, all of which are linked through the page set up by the good folks at Pantheon (before you smash that pre order button, please do take a second to enjoy the fab jacket copy).
Between now and 2k25, I’m planning to ramp up the newsletter with a bunch of good stuff from early drafts of the book that didn’t make the final cut. First off, we’re heading taking a quick trip down to Marfa to look at some glittery metal boxes, then over the next couple months we’ll meander through Palm Springs, the “real” Las Vegas, Civano, the Bhutanese Lhakhang in El Paso, and lord knows where else. Now that I’m back in a more regular freelancing rotation, I’ll also be getting back to sharing my most recent work every month (and let me tell you, May, at least, has been a busy month!)
Thanks for your readership over the years — there’s no group of folks I’m more excited to share American Oasis (plus outtakes) with than you.
It's tempting to impose order on the desert. When Donald Judd moved to Marfa from New York City — following the same path that Ernest Blumenschein had taken to Taos and Georgia O’Keeffe to Abiquiu — he responded to the plateau of thick gramma grass studded with Soaptree yucca that surrounded the withered railroad town by building boxes. Each of his 100 untitled works in mill aluminum fits within a three-dimensional envelope of forty-one by fifty-one by seventy-two inches. Some of the boxes have one opening, some have several. Most are composed entirely of right angles, while a few are inset with plates of sloping metal. All are displayed together in a grid formation, protected from the elements by artillery sheds that have been retrofitted with wall-to-wall windows so that a maximal amount of light will bounce around on their reflective faces.
Walking through the gallery, I was struck by the sensation I’ve often had while flying over the cities of the Southwest and looking down at all the houses tightly ordered into rows, columns, and cul-de-sacs, predictable motifs that are inevitably interrupted by the natural undulations of mountains and rivers. I crouched down, and, in losing the detached, airborne perspective, gained that of the suburbanite. Even while peering through a box that allowed a vision of the desert beyond the window, my perspective was still compromised by the regimentation of the aperture. Each box was individuated, but according to a prescribed plan, like a neighborhood of identical homes that had each been personally furnished.
Tilting my head, I realized the surface of one aluminum panel had flipped the view outside the window on its head, turning sky to ground and the yellow flowers of a Chamisa bush into a radiant sun symbol. I was feeling light-headed: all the windows and the lack of air flow meant that, even on a relatively mild summer day, the galleries were sweltering.
Outside, Judd’s 15 untitled works in concrete were spaced at two-hundred-foot intervals in a precise north-south axis. The concrete boxes followed a similar pattern to the aluminum ones in the galleries, though each cluster of them, rather than be set into a common grid, featured a unique configuration. There was satisfaction to be found in each set of artworks, a contentment of regularity. But in scrutinizing them, I sensed Judd’s unease with the desert. A belief that this landscape, on its own, was not enough. The same could be said for Michael Heizer’s massive land art installation, City, which is located 150 miles north of Las Vegas. There, the artist spent forty million dollars to scrub an area the size of the National Mall clean of sagebrush so that he could groom the sand into a personal colony of curvilinear basins and angular pyramids. City may be the largest land art installation of its kind, but it’s hardly singular. Spiral Jetty, The Lightning Field, Roden Crater — since the ‘70s, artist after artist has flocked to the desert and sought to reform it into a landscape of specified purpose.
I understood the urge to tame the desert, to answer fear with order. After all, wasn’t that exactly what the founders of all the great cities of the Southwest had done? Still, I could not abide the hubris. As the wind howled in the gutters between Donald Judd’s boxes, I found myself leaning down to the wildflowers that were sprouting at their bases. In front of one box, a cluster of Coulter’s Globemallow was flowering vivid orange above a thicket of white anemones. Another sculpture hosted clouds of purple flox and a towering pink thistle, bending in the wind.
When I turned to walk to the next collection of concrete, I stepped wrong and collapsed the roof of a gopher hole. The ceiling of the subterranean lodging, I surmised, had been softened by rain from the thunderstorms parading through West Texas that week. It was a reminder that I was a guest in this place, like all humans are. The pocket gopher would build another hole, while I’d retreat to my more elaborate shelter in town. His world would persist no matter what detritus we left behind — the trick was just to limit our damage in the meantime.
This month’s Harper’s includes my report on how the political press covered the Republican primaries — sort of a Boys on the Bus for the Trump age. For the story, I spent a couple weeks in both Iowa and New Hampshire shadowing reporters, elbowing my way into gaggles, and staring at Ron DeSantis’ boots to figure out if wears lifts (I’m like 80 percent sure but regret to say I couldn’t nail down that particular scoop). While DeSantis v. Haley is ancient history at this point, I hope you’ll give the story a read because I think the media inventing a Race for Second Place so that it had something to cover speaks to the deeper ways in which many reporters still haven’t figured out how to do their job in the era of Trump. For a more wide-ranging treatment of that question, check out my recent interview with Andrew Keen.
Also this week, I wrote a dispatch for Sierra Magazine (the official magazine of the Sierra Club) about how rangers at my beloved Acadia National Park are rushing to get ready for the summer crush of tourists after a pair of winter storms caused tens of millions of dollars in damage to facilities all over the park. Given that the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water on earth, Acadia is at the frontline of responding to sea level rise. I’ve become fascinated by how the Park Service is balancing that necessity against the exigencies of serving the 3.9 million folks who visit Mount Desert Island every year.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading, subscribing, and preordering American Oasis (c’mon, what are you waiting for?) You can find me on my website, or spreading out a nice big, picnic blanket in Hastings Square to enjoy the first hot evening of the year.
Your pal,
Kyle
YEAH!!! Gorgeous cover, so psyched!!!