Road trips to Las Vegas are the occasion for this entertaining meditation on the quintessentially American experience of driving across the desert. William Fox, successively exiled from California, Nevada, and New Mexico, has spent more time than most of us driving to Las Vegas--and he has taken notes on three recent trips, his own way of bringing cohesion to the vast and mind-numbing aspects of the freeway. Approaching the most postmodern city on the planet from three directions, he examines the landscape and what we do to it while also trying to figure out who he is, what that means, and the nature of the transformations of land into landscape through art and architecture, landscape design, and advertising. Fox's history of the region, both natural and cultural, highlights the creep of the urban supergrid across the most extensively traveled desert in the world. This is a profoundly personal, even idiosyncratic book about the most public of subjects--living in the postmodern West at the end of the millennium and what the cities, the freeways, the open spaces, and the billboards tell us about ourselves.

Driving by Memory

History

Fox, William L.

Americas

University of New Mexico Press

Mark Klett has been photographing the American West for nearly twenty-five years. He directed the Rephotographic Survey Project in the late 1970s, which located and rephotographed the sites of images made by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and other photographers surveying the West in the late nineteenth century. Klett has also published several books of his own work.Using his travels in the Nevada desert with Mark Klett and his current rephotographic team as the starting point, William Fox offers here an examination of the history of photography in the American West and of Klett's role in documenting the landscape. Like the story of photography itself, this is a multilayered narrative. Part historical overview, part travel journal, part biographical study of Klett, View Finder explores the evolution of our view of the land from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Fox looks at the legacy left by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Robert Adams. And in focusing on the work of Mark Klett in the last quarter century, William Fox reflects upon the meaning of the landscape at the beginning of the millennium. Because Klett's work has been so closely connected to the great photographic surveys of the 1870s, and because he has been so influential to a new generation of photographers, his is the ideal viewpoint from which to measure our changing approach to the American space.

View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Mark Klett has been photographing the American West for nearly twenty-five years. He directed the Rephotographic Survey Project in the late 1970s, which located and rephotographed the sites of images made by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and other photographers surveying the West in the late nineteenth century. Klett has also published several books of his own work. 
Using his travels in the Nevada desert with Mark Klett and his current rephotographic team as the starting point, William Fox offers here an examination of the history of photography in the American West and of Klett’s role in documenting the landscape. Like the story of photography itself, this is a multilayered narrative. Part historical overview, part travel journal, part biographical study of Klett, View Finder explores the evolution of our view of the land from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Fox looks at the legacy left by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Robert Adams. And in focusing on the work of Mark Klett in the last quarter century, William Fox reflects upon the meaning of the landscape at the beginning of the millennium. Because Klett’s work has been so closely connected to the great photographic surveys of the 1870s, and because he has been so influential to a new generation of photographers, his is the ideal viewpoint from which to me! asure our changing approach to the American space.

Univ of New Mexico Pr

Foreword by Jeff Kelley. Nevada's open spaces have long inspired complex responses from a population largely shaped by European sensibilities toward land and its uses. In Mapping the Empty Fox considers how eight of the state's most distinguished and innovative contemporary artists have responded to the harsh, enigmatic landscapes of the Great Basin and how, through their work, they have expressed and helped to define our attitudes toward the space we call the West. The artists are Jim McCormick, Rita Deanin Abbey, Dennis Parks, Walter McNamara, Robert Beckmann, Michael Heizer, Bill Barker, and Mary Ann Bonjorni.

Mapping The Empty: Eight Artists And Nevada

History & Criticism

University of Nevada Press

The ascetic and enigmatic expanse of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writer, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In Reading Sand, Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert—its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In "perforated object," the collection's central piece, Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the inscrutability of the Great Basin's complex past. The result is an intellectually provocative and aesthetically moving work of a lean grandeur rarely found in recent poetry

Reading Sand: Selected Desert Poems, 1976-2000 (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Writer-poet William L. Fox has spent much of his career contemplating the complex ways that landscape, human cognition, and history collide to create our perceptions and treatment of place. In Playa Works, Fox considers the West's emptiest spaces - the playas, or dry beds, of the ancient lakes that once filled much of the Great Basin. Among the flattest, most barren places on the planet, the West's playas have haunted the American imagination since the Fremont expedition first surveyed them in the early nineteenth century. In these eight brilliant essays, Fox explores many of the major playas of the American West, examining locations as diverse as Nellis Air Force Base and Frenchman Flat, where the federal government has tested experimental aircraft and atomic weaponry; the Great Salt Lake Desert, where land-speed records have been broken; and the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, site of the colorful Burning Man arts festival. He analyzes the geological and climatological conditions that created the playas and the historical role that playas played in the exploration and settlement of the West. And he offers lucid and keenly perceptive discussions of the ways that artists have

Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (Environmental Arts and Humanities Series)

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle

Humor & Entertainment

Pop Culture

In this one-of-a-kind travel book, William L. Fox navigates us through the stunning void of the Great Basin and the neurophysiological processes by which we make sense of the landscape with art, architecture, and narrative.

The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle

Puzzles & Games

At last, the ultimate travel book, a journey not only through the stunning Great Basin but also through our own minds wherein land becomes landscape by means of art, architecture and narrative. This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. 
The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. In a book that has become a classic of contemporary desert literature, Fox navigates us through a landscape so alien it has much to tell us about who we are. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In "The Void," he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. "The Grid" leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. "The Sign" wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. 
In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.

The Void,Grid & Sign

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

University of Utah Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fox, William L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fox, William L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fox, William L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Driving by Memory

View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape

View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape

Mapping The Empty: Eight Artists And Nevada

Reading Sand: Selected Desert Poems, 1976-2000 (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (Environmental Arts and Humanities Series)

In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle

The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin

In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle

The Void,Grid & Sign