
Sky Writing
Lightning is a natural phenomenon that claims: a science (fulminology), an official fear (astraphobia), persistent metaphors (enlightenment, eureka), one of the best examples of concision in English literature (“picnic, lightning,” Nabokov’s explanation of a death in Lolita), and a false maxim (“Lightning never strikes the same place twice”).
It has also inspired an epic artwork, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 1977, located in a remote New Mexico valley. Laura Raicovich’s new book is, as she writes, “dedicated to the recall of highly specific, vivid experiences” of De Maria’s project. It