Images of Windows. Tamsweg, Austria

I’ve certainly allowed my website to slide the past month. But I have a good excuse. Not only have I been publishing articles elsewhere but I’ve been developing the first guide to the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. Most importanly I’ve been teaching a writing course at Eastern New Mexico Univeristy (ENMU) out on the endless Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico.

I was graciously awarded the Jack Williamson Endowed Chair in Literature for 2015. Luckily this position doesn’t come with the requirement that I be away from home and kids for more than two weeks….AND it has been fabulous experience so far. I’ve got a load of extremely talented students and I’ve been blessed to meet some great professors and see an old friend.

And of course there really isn’t any place in New Mexico I don’t like.  Even Portales has its charms.  Such as the restaurant in a tire shop where I had breakfast this morning.

Never mind that ENMU is a small university in a very small and somewhat backwards town, it has been a relief of sorts to be around a university atmosphere again as well as to have a good chunk of the day I can dedicate to working on my long-struggling novel instead of busting butt every minute to bring home the bacon. This experience again has me considering returning to university both to study and to teach. I’ll be here one more week and then teach the rest of the class from home. As part of the endowment I gave a reading of three of my short stories yesterday, did a radio interview for the station KENW and will present a public lecture next Thursday. I’ll find a way to post all of that here on the website in the coming weeks.

(If anyone has a clue how to take the iPhone voice recording I made of my reading yesterday and turn it into a file I can post here…please let me know….)

What does any of this have to do with images of windows from a tiny Austrian mountain town? Not much I guess….other than I have so many posts lined up that I want to get out onto the innertubes and this was the easiest place to begin!

All of these were shot September 29, 2014.

Images of windows have always fascinated me as a creative motif. Perhaps it is because we have no idea what is on the other side. Or at least there is that illusion. The window offers a view into another world and I often wonder if someone is peering back at me from that other world while I’m setting up my perspective.

And more than a few times have I been berated for taking pictures of someone’s window. Once in Switzerland a woman even launched a well-aimed fork at me through her window.

Understandable.

Five-hundred years ago Leon Battista Alberti wrote that paintings themselves were more or less a view onto the world through a freshly opened window. As if by painting a new scene the artist created a whole new universe to access….if you could just find a way to climb up and through the window.

Much like they did in the movie “Mary Poppins”….one of my favorite films of all time.  Wouldn’t that be fabulous?

Settlement of the Tamsweg area dates to Roman days when it was part of the Noricum province. Surely there were people in the area earlier however….thousands of years earlier. Slavs moved into the area in the 8^th Century and the name Taemswich first appeared in writing in 1156. The region swayed back and forth between control of the Bavarian dukes, the Archbishopric of Salzburg the Hungarians the French and then the Austrians. It was always a relatively wealthy area thanks to exports of salt and iron. The first railway appeared in 1894. I rode that little railway up the narrow little valley past crumbling hillside castles and fields of hay crammed into the rare flat land to be found in the valley bottom.

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See More from this Trip:

 Bratislava by Night

Slovakian Wilderness

My European Wilderness Trip