Review of David Foster, Glimpses of Phoenix:
The Desert Metropolis in Written and Visual Media
(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013)
In nuanced and beautiful Glimpses of Phoenix, Regents Professor David Foster
offers us vivid reminders of the dominant narratives of our city, and the
alternative voices struggling to be heard over the din of endless construction and
the bustle of snowbird tourism. In this grand tour of the literary legends of our city
he presents far more than a list of required reading for those who wish to venture
into the dark and even dangerous places of Phoenix intellectual life. Foster
carefully constructs from selected literary voices of this place important narratives
about the meanings of place, dystopia, sexuality and racism previously whispered
in the close quarters of hot summer nights.
As I read Foster’s challenging prose I found myself sighing and laughing, reaching
for my pen and wanting to validate and debate words that contradict many of the
Phoenicians I have met in my work over the last 25 years. It has long been my
impression that there are two kinds of people in Phoenix, those who insist that we
genuflect before the pioneers of the wild west, or those who want others to build
the gleaming 21st century city and forget about what it was like here before there
was air conditioning. Nevertheless, since the 1950’s Arizona Collection curators
have dutifully represented 20th century Arizona through jejune cowboy novelists,
records of the Luhrs Family businesses, Herb and Dorothy McLaughlin
photographs, and papers of larger than life politicos such as Barry Goldwater and
Carl Hayden. Thanks to David Foster we are reminded that there are other softer
voices, fleeting glimpses of beauty and love and risks taken and lost that shine
with barrio colors and wet tears.
The glimpses are fleeting given the accelerating pace of destruction and purported
renewal. Foster shares our concern for the demise of “cultural repositories” such
as the Wallace and Ladmo Show, whose obsolete quad video tapes slowly decay in
a local archive, or the apparent lack of Phoenix literature here at the ASU Libraries
(an illusion of shallow cataloging rather than the co-conspiracy of
underacknowledgement Foster tentatively asserts in his conclusion).

Department of Archives and Special Collections
Arizona State University Libraries
P.O.Box 871006, Tempe AZ 85287-1006
480.965.4932
archives@asu.edu

I want to suggest that there is hope here at ASU for the fleeting voices of Phoenix
authors and artists. Here raw materials and milled products of the counterculture
can also be compiled, collected and cataloged under the valued shelter of
academic freedom. Benson’s depiction of ASU football coach Frank Kush’s firing
could be juxtaposed with the papers and radio interviews of the irascible socialist
ASU philosophy professor Morris Starsky (also terminated in the 1970’s), or 3,000
original Reg Manning cartoons. Whispers of dissent can be heard from Carolina
Butler’s Citizens Against Rio Salado collection, or in the eighty boxes of our B.J.
Budd Memorial Library, likely the largest surviving collection documenting our gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
But Foster rightfully rejects complacency. There is so much more work to be done
in collecting and preserving the work of Phoenix authors and artists. In Glimpses
Foster shines his eloquent light upon ten of the most visible, most soulful voices of
the alternative discourse, but only Cecilia Esquer has donated her papers to our
archives. As we have seen with the recent departure of the Frank Lloyd Wright
archives, or the demise of the Phoenix Museum of History and the Arizona
Historical Foundation, keeping Phoenix history alive requires vigilance, advocacy
and investment.
Dr. Foster helps us with the first two. His work is a profound gift that for a
moment reaches out from under the suffocating tirades of the pioneers and the
gleaming city, and offers us a wisp of dusty wind and deep azure from the Phoenix
that was. Fleeting glimpses of Phoenix might even cause us to wander into the
dark, desolate and dangerous night, to venture into a neglected Grand Avenue
gallery, to gather frayed patches of our community into a soft quilt of warmth and
brightness tied with faint hope and light thread.
Robert P. Spindler
Tempe AZ
September, 2013

Department of Archives and Special Collections
Arizona State University Libraries
P.O.Box 871006, Tempe AZ 85287-1006
480.965.4932
archives@asu.edu