Chamblissian

A few images from my 2022-2026 fieldwork — in no particular order, largely without explication, and selected for no better reason than that they give me pleasure I hope to share.

Photo by Deb Chachra Ibn al-Haytham (aka Alhazen) is supposed to have written his Kitāb al-Manāẓir (The Book of Optics) from 1011-1021 AD while feigning insanity under house arrest in order to avoid the worst of what the “Mad Caliph” al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah…

Last spring, Rob Petit and I temporarily converted the hollow ash tree rooted astraddle a 30,000-foot wet cave system in the Mendip Hills of England through which both Robert Macfarlane’s book and Petit’s film Underland begin into what I called a camera g…

— from “Oil” by Alexei Parshchikov, in my translation It isn’t the only place I long to visit, but I long to visit Uzbekistan.

After Aristotle gifted Alexander (not yet ὁ Μέγας) a copy of the Iliad he had annotated and provided a critical recension for, the king is supposed to have carried it around all 11,000+ miles of his Asian campaign, sleeping with it under his pillow.* In 2…

From the Penguin Modern Classics edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Eric Sweet, trapped in the Negative Zone.

Painting of a royal hunt by Liu Guandao, 1280 AD.

I’ve walked every mile of the Mississippi River from its headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

Photo by Geoff Manaugh, from our hike south of the 6th Street Viaduct in August, 2015.