As our favorite London-based/native Texan photographer Lilly Husbands captures perfectly, Marfa, Texas, is equipped with one of the most enchanting comfortable/rugged hotels one might dream up. Tumble out of your car into the dust of El Cosmico, a sophisticated trailer park and campground that's the perfect place to spend the night in a yurt, under a full moon and leaden Pendelton blankets.
Lilly Husbands: London dweller. Native Texan. Landscape & Travel Photographer. Film Researcher. Experimental animation & cinema specialist.
I picked up Ali Smith's Hotel World as I was waltzing out of town, alone on a long trip for work, first to take a flight to Nice, and later to take a train across La France to the Atlantic coast side of things. (To be honest, no waltzing was involved, just sweating and banging my shins on stuff).
In any case, I cracked open the slim Hotel World as soon as I nestled down into my purple velour seat upon the TGV, which was literally rattling from the Côte d'Azur towards Paris. From then, I was captive: I couldn't put it down, even for the hour I was in Paris (I'm a dummy), nor could I stop reading as my train continued to hurtle down south, through endless sunflower fields.
There's something in common between Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel and Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl. They give us hotels that are entire worlds: their corridors house luxurious accommodations as well as morgues, writing rooms, grand ball rooms, and entire social orders. But each also appears as a little sort of eddy in a river of war washing across an unhappy world.
Herewith the first of several recommendations for your summer reading: books featuring hotels, in all their glamorous, complicated, and luxurious (or down-and-out) glory.
First up is a classic you may already have on your bookshelf, but that is well worth a re-read for its silent backdrop of imposing facades, marble staircases, and brass bars, never mind the war and wasted youth: Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned.
Artist and photographer Frances F. Denny understands about ghosts. Maybe it's because we're all previous residents of Rhode Island (she received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design), but like us, Frances is in tune with the special magic of 200 year-old New England houses and the silent tread of spirits on worn floorboards.
The Menil Collection is a low-slung block of grey in the middle of a quiet green square in an old Houston neighborhood. Daylight wafts in through the roof’s white leaves. Tropical plants fill the atrium of its African art gallery, and bamboo thickets at the exterior windows protect artwork in passageways from direct sun.
