The World’s Largest Ball of Paint

Mike Carmichael is still caring for (and helping paint) the world’s largest ball of paint in Alexandria, Indiana. It is very much worth a trip just for the joy of meeting him and adding your own layer to the ball. You can email Mike at [email protected]. Thanks to Emily for joining me on many trips to visit roadside attractions, and to Ransom Riggs and Kathy Hickner, who took a cross-country road trip with me where we discovered much about roadside America. Speaking of which, Roadside America (roadsideamerica.com) has for decades been a wonderful guide to the world’s largests and smallests. We used it in college, and I use it still, infuriating my kids with side trips to, say, the office building shaped like a picnic basket. More recently, Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com and, in book form, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders) has become an indispensable resource. Eric Grundhauser’s Atlas Obscura article on the ball of paint was very helpful to me. Finally, a special word of thanks to ArcGIS StoryMaps article “Big Balls,” by Ella Axelrod, which contains many wonderful pictures and also some magnificent subheadings, like “Big Balls: An Overview” and “Balls of Various Composition.”

Sycamore Trees

This review references two of my all-time favorite books: Jacqueline Woodson’s devastating and perfectly wrought If You Come Softly and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Among its many gifts to me, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek introduced me to Herodotus’s story of Xerxes and the sycamore. I learned of the so-called Pringle Tree on a visit to Pringle Tree Park in Buckhannon, West Virginia. I first read the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem “Not So Far as the Forest” in her 1939 book, Huntsman, What Quarry?

“New Partner”

“New Partner” appears on the Palace Music album Viva Last Blues. I first heard the song because of Ransom Riggs and Kathy Hickner, who heard it because of Jacob and Nathaniel Otting. Kaveh Akbar’s “The Palace” was first published in the New Yorker in April of 2019.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

This review would’ve been utterly impossible without help from the online community Tuataria, especially Ketie Saner, who translated a lot of German for me and tracked down all kinds of leads. I would never have learned the story of the young farmers without the dogged reporting of Reinhard Pabst in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. In a 2014 article, Pabst collected other research about the young farmers as well as accounts of the men from their surviving descendants. I am also immensely grateful for Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Powers’s books have been with me for twenty years, and they always seem to find me where and when I need them. A 2014 conversation (archived online at srf.ch) between Christa Miranda and Sander researcher Gabriele Conrath-Scholl was also helpful to me in learning about the photograph. The John Berger quote is from his book About Looking. I’m also indebted to Susanne Lange’s book August Sander in the Photofile series, to the Sander collection August Sander: Face of Our Time, and to the 2013 collection August Sander: People of the 20th Century, edited by Susanne Lange and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl.