Status Updates From River of Shadows: Eadweard ...

I’m around halfway through this book now and finding it a bit of a slog. Perhaps it will make more sense when I reach the conclusion and reflect upon it? Perhaps I’m just not that interested in the history of California?

The murder section is a bit more interesting and revealing

The men and women of the West scraped clear the glass of their own lives whenever they wanted to make a new image there, and San Francisco was a hothouse made out of these lives, incubating fantasies, erasures, and new beginnings. (Like the glass used for early photographic negatives and later repurposed for green houses)

That exotic new world of images speeding by would become the true home of those who spent their Saturdays watching images beamed across the darkness of the movie the-ater, then their evenings watching images beamed through the atmosphere and brought home into a box like a camera obscura or a crystal ball, then their waking hours surfing the Internet wired like the old telegraph system.

Through the new technologies-the train to the landscape, the camera to the spectacle-the Victorians were trying to find their way back, but where they had lost the old familiar things they recovered exotic new ones. What they had lost was solid; what they gained was made out of air.