COVER STORY
Water
Kurt Andersen and the poet Billy Collins talk about the amazing and seductive properties of water.

Basil Twist
Even though puppeteers usually control every little movement of their creations, puppeteer Basil Twist says water does what it wants. Twist created a puppet show called Symphonie Fantastique, swirling around in a 500-gallon water tank, and set to Hector Berlioz’s composition of the same name. Produced by Benjamin Shaw.
Go to Basil Twist's website

Disciplining Water
How do you make sculpture out of water? The people at W.E.T. Design, a fountain design firm, have a pretty good handle on it. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to the Wet Design website
Go to Pic Patrol for more photos of the fountain

Death of a Valley
In 1956 Pirkle Jones got a call from Life Magazine for a photo assignment like no other. The farm town of Monticello California would soon be submerged under Lake Berryessa and vanish from the face of the earth. Jones joined his hero, the photojournalist Dorothea Lange, to document Monticello’s final year in a series of photographs called Death of a Valley. Produced by Tania Ketenjian
Go to the San Francisco MOMA press archive of the Death of a Valley exhibit
Go to Aperture’s website on the book, Pirkle Jones: California Photographs

Watercolor
The artist Stephen Dolmatch paints urban industrial landscapes in gorgeous precise detail. He paints in watercolor, even though he finds it far less forgiving than oil or acrylic paints. Sarah Lilley talked to Dolmatch about the challenges and happy accidents of painting in this tricky medium.
Go to Stephen Dolmatch's website
Go to "White Ships" at the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery website
Go to a recent watercolor exhibit at the DFN Gallery
Go to a brief history of watercolor

SPECIAL GUEST
Billy Collins
Billy Collins served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, and is now the New York State Poet Laureate. As U.S. Laureate he worked to raise the profile of poetry among readers, launching the Poetry 180 program to introduce high school students to the work of living poets writing in an accessible style. He also edited the very popular anthology Poetry 180. His volumes of poetry include Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Nine Horses.
Go to Billy Collins’ poems Water Table and Elk River Falls
Go to the Barclay Agency website on Billy Collins
Go to Billy Collins’ poem Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
Go to a website with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc”
Go to Robert Frost’s poem “Neither out far nor in deep”
Go to Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving but Drowning”

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Commentary
Beautiful Oddness/Odd Beauty
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A Work in Process
Most of us don't have a clue how we'd begin to write a novel. In this story, the writer Richard Ford explains how he does it. Richard Ford is one of the best observers of middle-aged American male angst. He’s now in the middle of writing his third book about Frank Bascome, the divorced dad protagonist of Ford’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Independence Day. Richard Ford prepared for two years before starting this novel, and Caitlin Shetterly asked him to describe precisely how he works.
Go to the Richard Ford Random House website

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