Anne Merrill: Tracing Tor House, “Tor House,” and Torrid Zone
Saturday | June 21, 2025 | 2:00-2:45
Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar
I am assembling a rock collection and building a stone wall. Each text is a single stone that I am attempting to fit carefully into its place. In an attempt to think elementally, most recently with/through rocks, I draw lines of connection between outsider architecture, palpable artifacts, and a broader conceptual process of the physicalization of political and social separatism.
Might the materiality of Robinson Jeffers’ California home Tor House (assembled from local and exotic rocks) together with the poet’s “Tor House” (1928) be an entry point? What does an additional rock add to the wall, say, ReBecca Béguin’s pulp lesbian murder mystery Torrid Zone (1997)? In looking at the space that exists between Tor House, “Tor House,” and Torrid Zone, at the gaps between poems, pulp, and the real places that appear in the archive, my presentation proposes a path that allows us to encounter and dwell in a time-resistant experience.