Dust devils that chase me up into the barn and throw my supplies in a heap. The lingering odor of helium and latex. Time to think. Drawing for hours and hours until I passed out with my pen in my hand. Getting dizzy and telling myself to get out of the sun. Fighter jets buzzing by a few dozen feet above me as I drove north up the Panamint valley. Trona. Man-made rubies. The wind blowing from every direction at once. Mercury. The white scar on the rocks at the southern end of the valley just south of the Amargosa farming area turnoff towards Shoshone, gleaming from miles away. Searching for seafoam green chips of gravel for hours. Listening.

I appreciate the reference to Misrach; the canto is an appropriate structure to respond to the richness and paradox of the desert, which is hidden. It reminds me of the cowboys and ranchers that I met. Intimately engaged with the land, they do not willingly seek out the taxonomies of science. Desert nomenclature is colloquial; mountains have personalities, with names like Charley or Wayne, who are putting on grey hair when its cold, even in the summer; the valley is a familiar who wears a pretty spring dress.

Vince Dziekan: I really like the anecdote about desert colloquialism, so I might seize on this to take us back to the visual personality of the images you've crafted. Can you speak some more about their highly poetic vernacular and how asemic writing – which you mentioned earlier – relates to some of the concepts you are exploring in your work?

Paul Catanese: With regard to asemic writing, on the one hand, it was something I was most specifically thinking about with regard to the unique venue for the release of the image. I decided from the beginning that any of the images should be able to function as a starting point; and though there are certain irreversible concepts present, traversing the multiple visual narratives should be