A word or two of context to this expedition:
I was until recently engaged to be married - a destination of sorts and also the start of what I think felt too daunting a journey. I travelled asleep for almost six years and recently woke up not recognising where I was. The house I own is not a home any more and for a month I have been making little journeys between friends, some of the hardest and sweetest trips of my life.
I can't and wouldn't want to be able to describe my wanderings to this point. I would, though, like to get those who read these entries to a position from which they can see me clearly at this initial point of my journey, and for this I'll have to get them - you - to travel from a position of ignorance to...somewhere else.
It's important that you know what I'm running away from, a broken heart, and what I'm aiming for: only what the Christians get to call 'communion' and what atheists have to name for themselves - further definitions to come from the people I talk to in America.
Whatever I'm looking for I think it is vital to me and hitherto missing and it begins to confirm a suspicion I have that all writing is travel writing - a phrase which, for now at least or until I come down on exactly what it means, you can consider a second tagline to this blog.
This post is a one-off: the entries from this point will have adventure at their heart. I am going on a course of adventure therapy and will try to keep constitutional updates to a minimum. If, though, some entries are shot through with either lunatic empathy or a selfish malaise it's a broken heart leaking through the cracks and to be ignored. You are forewarned.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
AIR FRANCE Flight 3666, Seat 33C, 35,000ft above Nova Scotia
Eleven people got me on this flight: one amateur and ten professionals helped me limp to Heathrow Airport and up into the sky. Five of them, namely the taxi driver and airline employees, are directly paid to be friendly; five are paid to be stern. One, though I whisper this as he's in the seat next to me, is possibly my closest friend.
My bags are packed for a research project: I have a magnetic and a digital dictaphone; empty notebooks I've rendered less intimidating by wrapping them in duct tape; the best of Martha Gellhorn (to be given to a friend - more on Gellhorn later) and initials written on my hand that stand for nothing other than Studs Terkel, first and only name on my travelling book list.
I am travelling to America to interview friends, probably friends of friends and hopefully friends of friends of friends and what I am researching is simply them: one by one I'm going to ask them why, how and when they are friends of their friends and also ask them what they think friendship means, now and in America.
I'm interested in the economics of things that look like friendship and might or might not be, and in the mechanics, digital, vegetable and animal, with which Americans make and stay friends.
Economics: when the taxi driver told us his daughter works in the Empire State building he gave us something for free, something such as the security screener took from me when, as an exasperated father to petulant child, he barked 'You just can't leave that tray where it is! You just can't!'
Mechanics: read this blog and send me an email. I'll reply to it, I'll advertise your blog or your website here and if, as I hope, you know of someone who might like to be interviewed for this book, I will visit them and deliver to them something by hand. I'm going to be travelling from one coast to another, on the great highways of the twentieth century, and at the same time along what promise to be the great highways of the twenty-first: the social networks of the Internet that have at once collided the American coasts and made every corner of the States part of the heartland.
In more precise terms - and if these entries reek too strongly of Hemingway, I hope it is merely in avoiding the abstract when the precise will do - this means I will be knocking on doors, usually announced but always unsure of what the welcome will be. I will be handing over parcels and asking, in return, questions that I myself would struggle to answer (my sleeping schoolfriend kicks out as I write). The project relies on the openness and hospitality of strangers, and it's my faith in American warmth and enthusiasm that makes me worry less about the chances of success. All I have to offer is my own enthusiasm and a present or a message from a loved one.
In two hours the project begins: two weeks in and around New York, two weeks back in the UK to
1. deliver items by hand picked up in the USA
2. learn to drive
3. shake off the aftereffects of a broken leg
then back to the USA to continue the travels for as long as the networks of friends or the US Government allow. This first post has focussed on me, more than I would like, but I hope now just to pull aside the curtain and introduce the players themselves: the interesting people I'm lucky enough to know already and those I'm looking forward to meeting. This is a travel blog and a mass biography, the story from one particular viewpoint of America in 2009.
My bags are packed for a research project: I have a magnetic and a digital dictaphone; empty notebooks I've rendered less intimidating by wrapping them in duct tape; the best of Martha Gellhorn (to be given to a friend - more on Gellhorn later) and initials written on my hand that stand for nothing other than Studs Terkel, first and only name on my travelling book list.
I am travelling to America to interview friends, probably friends of friends and hopefully friends of friends of friends and what I am researching is simply them: one by one I'm going to ask them why, how and when they are friends of their friends and also ask them what they think friendship means, now and in America.
I'm interested in the economics of things that look like friendship and might or might not be, and in the mechanics, digital, vegetable and animal, with which Americans make and stay friends.
Economics: when the taxi driver told us his daughter works in the Empire State building he gave us something for free, something such as the security screener took from me when, as an exasperated father to petulant child, he barked 'You just can't leave that tray where it is! You just can't!'
Mechanics: read this blog and send me an email. I'll reply to it, I'll advertise your blog or your website here and if, as I hope, you know of someone who might like to be interviewed for this book, I will visit them and deliver to them something by hand. I'm going to be travelling from one coast to another, on the great highways of the twentieth century, and at the same time along what promise to be the great highways of the twenty-first: the social networks of the Internet that have at once collided the American coasts and made every corner of the States part of the heartland.
In more precise terms - and if these entries reek too strongly of Hemingway, I hope it is merely in avoiding the abstract when the precise will do - this means I will be knocking on doors, usually announced but always unsure of what the welcome will be. I will be handing over parcels and asking, in return, questions that I myself would struggle to answer (my sleeping schoolfriend kicks out as I write). The project relies on the openness and hospitality of strangers, and it's my faith in American warmth and enthusiasm that makes me worry less about the chances of success. All I have to offer is my own enthusiasm and a present or a message from a loved one.
In two hours the project begins: two weeks in and around New York, two weeks back in the UK to
1. deliver items by hand picked up in the USA
2. learn to drive
3. shake off the aftereffects of a broken leg
then back to the USA to continue the travels for as long as the networks of friends or the US Government allow. This first post has focussed on me, more than I would like, but I hope now just to pull aside the curtain and introduce the players themselves: the interesting people I'm lucky enough to know already and those I'm looking forward to meeting. This is a travel blog and a mass biography, the story from one particular viewpoint of America in 2009.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Salinger story idea:
a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extra-marital love affair. Seymour doesn't describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst - in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared - to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn't say, but it can't be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring.
a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extra-marital love affair. Seymour doesn't describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst - in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared - to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn't say, but it can't be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring.
rom the NYT review of Revolutionary Road:
crippled by their own acute self-consciousness and their sense that they are superior to the excruciating banality they have fallen into. Fantasies about what Frank calls his “own exceptional merit” haunt the couple, a delusion they cling to like a lifeline and that registers as mutual neurosis and a symptom of some vague, larger social ill.
crippled by their own acute self-consciousness and their sense that they are superior to the excruciating banality they have fallen into. Fantasies about what Frank calls his “own exceptional merit” haunt the couple, a delusion they cling to like a lifeline and that registers as mutual neurosis and a symptom of some vague, larger social ill.
n April 1971, Mr. Kissinger accepted a call from the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who hoped to arrange a meeting between top Nixon administration officials and antiwar activists.
“Perhaps you don’t know how to get out of the war,” Ginsberg ventured.
Mr. Kissinger said he was open to a meeting. “I like to do this,” he said, “not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to, but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think.”
Then Ginsberg upped the ante. “It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television,” he said.
Mr. Kissinger’s reply is transcribed simply as “Laughter.”
“Perhaps you don’t know how to get out of the war,” Ginsberg ventured.
Mr. Kissinger said he was open to a meeting. “I like to do this,” he said, “not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to, but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think.”
Then Ginsberg upped the ante. “It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television,” he said.
Mr. Kissinger’s reply is transcribed simply as “Laughter.”
His supporters launched an attack on Saigon in March 1913, drinking potions that purportedly made them invisible and planting bombs at several locations. The insurrection against the French colonial administration failed when none of the bombs detonated and the supposedly invisible supporters were apprehended. - lost the reference for this note
Notes from Georges Perec, Especes d'Espace:
I write in order to peruse myself. - Henri Michaux
Alexandre Dumas had a tower built each stone of which had the title of one of his books engraved on it.
The bed is an instrumenty conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two patrons, but no more
The bailiffs don't have the power to seize YOUR bed
Marcel Mauss - 'Techniques of the Body', Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378 - sleeping lying down isn't natural
summer of 1954 - following the Geneva Agreements and negotiations with Tunisia and Morocco, the entire planet experienced peace...for only a few days
what does 'nycthemeral' mean?
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot Mon Ami
We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?
Is 13A an odd or even number?
that part of the town you don't need to go to, precisely because you're already there
Why not have five or six rooms dotted around Paris?
Flaubert thought sugar was luminous and wanted to paint Paris houses with this or other luminous coatings
Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we're forever meeting people who have compasses, very seldom people who have compasses
a 'journal' is a unit of space, it's the surface area a farm labourer can work in a day
Elephants are generally drawn smaller than life size, but a flea always larger. - Jonathan Swift
A written confession is always truthful. - Italo Svevo
He drew a few circles on the yellow wooden seat of the bench
The conjuror who was so good at deceiving himself
the carapace of writing behind which I concealed my desire to write
these crudenesses didn't signify but they did signal
On that day, the analyst heard what I had to say to him, what for four years he had listened to without hearing , for the simple reason that I wasn't telling it to him, because I wasn't telling it to myself.
I write in order to peruse myself. - Henri Michaux
Alexandre Dumas had a tower built each stone of which had the title of one of his books engraved on it.
The bed is an instrumenty conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two patrons, but no more
The bailiffs don't have the power to seize YOUR bed
Marcel Mauss - 'Techniques of the Body', Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378 - sleeping lying down isn't natural
summer of 1954 - following the Geneva Agreements and negotiations with Tunisia and Morocco, the entire planet experienced peace...for only a few days
what does 'nycthemeral' mean?
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot Mon Ami
We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?
Is 13A an odd or even number?
that part of the town you don't need to go to, precisely because you're already there
Why not have five or six rooms dotted around Paris?
Flaubert thought sugar was luminous and wanted to paint Paris houses with this or other luminous coatings
Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we're forever meeting people who have compasses, very seldom people who have compasses
a 'journal' is a unit of space, it's the surface area a farm labourer can work in a day
Elephants are generally drawn smaller than life size, but a flea always larger. - Jonathan Swift
A written confession is always truthful. - Italo Svevo
He drew a few circles on the yellow wooden seat of the bench
The conjuror who was so good at deceiving himself
the carapace of writing behind which I concealed my desire to write
these crudenesses didn't signify but they did signal
On that day, the analyst heard what I had to say to him, what for four years he had listened to without hearing , for the simple reason that I wasn't telling it to him, because I wasn't telling it to myself.
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