Category: Writing

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Airport — Liminal Narratives

In an endlessly fascinating essay – Non-places: an introduction to super modernity – Marc Augé contrasts anthropological place (any space bearing the inscriptions of the social bond or collective history, such as churches, market places and town halls) with non-places. Described as spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, they are the places we inhabit when […]

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Yūko Tsushima — the [blank] garden

Yūko Tsushima (pen name of Satoko Tsushima, 30 March 1947 – 18 February 2016) was a Japanese writer. Her father, the writer Osamu Dazai, committed suicide together with his lover, when Tsushima was one year old, and she was raised by her mother. Tsushima began her literary career by contributing to the private literary magazine Bungei shuto, and published her first stories […]

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“Say who you are… in your life and in your work…” — Art of Quotation

“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about […]

via “Say who you are… in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years…. you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because…” — Art of Quotation

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The Domestication of the Garage – J.B Jackson

Wherever we go, whatever the nature of our work, we adorn the face of the earth with a living design which changes and is eventually replaced by that of a future generation. How can one tire of looking at this variety, or of marveling at the forces within man and nature that brought it about?

The city is an essential part of this shifting and growing design, but only a part of it. Beyond the last street light, out where the familiar asphalt ends, a whole country waits to be discovered: villages, farmsteads and highways, half-hidden valleys of irrigated gardens, and wide landscapes reaching to the horizon. A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it. *

* J.B. Jackson, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Landscape, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1951) as quoted in Paul Groth and Chris Wilson, “The Polyphony of Cultural Landscape Study: An Introduction,” in Everyday America, 9. The essay borrows its title from a 1920 poem by Robert Frost. 

J.B. Jackson’s 1976 essay on the evolution of the American garage displays his rare ability to combine deep erudition with eloquent and plainspoken analysis.

Read on Places Journal

Citation: “The Domestication of the Garage,”: Introduction by Jeffrey Kastner. Archival text by J.B. Jackson, “The Domestication of the Garage,” Places Journal, February 2019. Accessed 07 Feb 2019.    https://placesjournal.org/article/j-b-jackson-the-domestication-of-the-garage/