.
Walkway (under the freeway, Oakland): photo by efo, 30 June 2013
Elsewhere, the author wrote:
'Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.'
Publisher's Note appended to Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman, 1967'Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.'
Commuters wait in standstill traffic to pay their tolls on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in Oakland, California: photo by Ben Margot/AP, 1 July 2013
Flyovers, Oakland: photo by efo, 15 April 2006
MacArthur Maze and former Key System trestle in fog, Oakland: photo by efo, 16 January 2008
MacArthur Maze double, Oakland: photo by efo, 6 May 2005
MacArthur Maze Trestle, Oakland: photo by efo, 6 May 2005
Trainyard redux. Ansco memo. Oakland trainyard beneath the MacArthur Maze: photo by efo, 4 July 2009
MacArthur Maze panorama, Oakland: photo by efo, 12 December 2007
MacArthur Maze multi-panorama, Oakland: photo by efo, 4 July 2009
Zampa Bridge No. 2, Carquinez Straits, Crockett, California: photo by efo, 10 September 2013
Revetment Sign and Hale-Boggs Bridge, West Bank, Mississippi River, Luling, Louisiand, 1998: photo by Richard Misrach, from Richard Misrach and Kate Orff: Petrochemical America, 2012
You said it. Curtis
ReplyDeleteYou really captured it.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tom,
ReplyDeleteAt last, I understand why belt highways always seemed like a version of hell! Strong echoes of Beckett in this wonderful Flann O'Brien piece.
-David
Thanks, friends. They say America has a billion stories. Or was it a million? 500 million?
ReplyDeleteAnd this, sad to report, is just one of them.
Don't really like being stuck out with my defenseless medicare cane on the freeway feeder below the 6-spoke corkscrew roundabout imitating prospective road kill so much any more... but some nights, there's this restless feeling...
Tom,
ReplyDelete"beginning of the unfinished . . . re-discovery of the familiar . . . fresh-forgetting of the unremembered"
efo's great photos -- roll on commuters, down those freeways, toward that bridge that leads us to the sky
Tom,
ReplyDeleteI love the link.Pretty funny and sad at the same time. As for hell,perhaps
"monster" trucks would feel quite at home on the freeway..being in one of them ? i'm not sure about that..
Efo’s black-and-whites are perfect for depicting what used to be called high-speed travel, before it became instead the hell of the daily commute, ‘the re-experience of the already suffered.’ What’s on the car radio? Maybe we’ll find The Music Goes ‘Round and Around” (and it comes out here) . . . an antidote of sorts.
ReplyDeleteWe have our own version of hell round our way.. Apparently they wanted to prettify it.
ReplyDeleteFlann and efo make a perfect fit here.
This post gives a whole new dimension to that old saying “Hell on Wheels”.
ReplyDeleteI fear that Spaghetti Junction Project will never be a patch on the MacArthur Maze until they are able to exhume a full harvest of gangster corpses from under the Trestle.
ReplyDelete(Perhaps that's why they've summmoned in the "American internationalists" on the project... ?)