Wednesday, November 1, 2017

In the Infinity Room



The Infinity Room, left,
juts out 218 feet (66 m) from the House on the Rock, near Spring Green, Wisconsin.
______________

Below: bink walks down the Infinity Room to place Red Hair Girl on the viewing block



Below: Red Hair Girl on top of the viewing block:


II. "places of power" or "never-ending rummage sale"? 

Below: image via the Wisconsin Project blog
"The House on the Rock at Spring Green, Wisconsin, on Highway 23", c. L.L. Cook Co., from Ektachrome transparency, c. 1965
The blog points out that Neil Gaiman includes inthe House on the Rock in his novel American Gods (description of chapters 5 & 6):
"Shadow and Wednesday drive through Madison, WI, and down country roads to the House on the Rock. Wednesday explains to Shadow that people feel pulled to places of power, and in other countries they build temples and monuments, while in America, they build roadside attractions, which gives this particular location its power." 
Some people do not like the House and its huge neighboring outbuildings full of collections--a mix of a thrift store and a magical archive. 

Reviewer Frank Bures of Madison Magazine is one who does not like it, not at all. He writes, " I feel like I’m being caught in someone’s bad dream, or a crazy man’s mind, or a never-ending rummage sale", and he describes his panicked reaction to being in "one of the world’s strangest tourist attractions":
"All of a sudden I want my mother.
… My mind is reaching out for reasoning, for a kind of logic, but around each corner there is none. It’s just one spectacle randomly grafted onto another, the roadside equivalent of a French philosophical novel."
To be fair, he's not talking about the relatively mild experience of the Infinity Room. He's reacting to spectacles such as the 200-foot– (61 m) tall construction of a giant squid battling a made-up kind of whale.

bink (below) and I LOVED it.

4 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

It’s all coming back to me ... years ago, someone suggested making a trip there and gave me a brochure. What? What?! What?!?

Fresca said...

That's it, Michael:
"What?!?"

At midlife, I feel blasé about lots of cultural sites, but this one really wowed me.

gz said...

(O)

bink said...

I can't believe we've been driving by all these years and never stopped before! It needs to be a regular pilgrimage site.