I made it safe and sound (if a little delayed) to Atlanta, Georgia, where giant peaches perch atop buildings and everybody calls me "Sugar."
I'm currently hiding from the sun and hopping on a wifi signal at a Caribou Coffee in downtown Atlanta, and soon I will be taking my rental car down into the depths of rural Georgia. A certain somebody who will not be named described this region to me as "hot, humid and mean." Whoohoo!
Seriously, though, I am excited, so I won't spend too long typing up a blog post and I'll try to hit ye old dusty trail pretty soon. Just a few things to note:
1. One of the conductors on my train had an accent EXACTLY like Kenneth's on 30 Rock. I always though Kenneth's accent was completely made up, but turns out there is in fact a strain of Southern accent just like that. File that under things-i-never-knew.
2. I'd forgotten how surreal the Southern landscape could be. There were times when the view out the train window looked like it was ripped out of a fantasy novel or a scifi film. Don't know what I'm talking about? One word: KUDZU. I didn't snap a picture but I'll see if I can sooner or later - imagine forests so coated in vines that you can't even see the trees underneath. It's both beautiful and deeply creepy (and an ecological disaster, of course).
3. A caribou coffee employee just came by and offered me free samples of a pineapple coconut smoothie. And then made me take two, because nobody else was drinking them. Life is great.
4. Does travel = freedom? Companies certainly promote the idea - my Hertz folder actually has FREEDOM written across it in giant yellow letters. Do people believe it does? Is this an American concept? Travel doesn't have to be linked to freedom - it could be tied to escape, to adventure; it could be seen as a mark of economic prosperity; it could be seen as a duty, or as self-improvement. My rental car packet screaming "FREEDOM" probably has me biased, but right now I'm feeling like in America, we travel to prove our freedom - we go somewhere to prove that we could go anywhere. Agree? Disagree? Should I stop with the national identity essentialism?
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
i'm leaving, on a diesel train...
Is it mandatory, when leaving on a trip, to sing this song? I think it is.
So tonight - TONIGHT! - I depart for Atlanta. And in Atlanta I pick up a rental car. And then I drive south to the part of Georgia that is almost Alabama, and also almost Florida. And then I will drive up to the house of my grandmother's niece, give her the regards of all my family, settle into her spare room and start trying to explore my family history and what it means to be rooted in the soil of rural Georgia.
But right now - RIGHT NOW! - I kind of need to pack. Because we're looking at D minus 1 hour, where D is the time I must Depart in order to get to Charlottesville early enough for my travel terror to stay under control.
Travel terror, n. The almost-uncontrollable fear that all of your travel plans will be destroyed because of a traffic jam, a declined credit card, a clerical error, confusion over dates, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, unexpected rebellions, train crashes, lost cell phones, airplane-goose collisions, unscheduled apocalypses, acts of God, acts of man, acts of children, or action-movie-like-explosions. The only known remedy is to leave your house three or four hours early for everything.
Anyway, I won't write a long post now. I just wanted to let you know that I won't have email access everywhere on my trip - I might not even have it OFTEN on my trip. I make no guarantees of frequent bloggage. But wherever I have cell phone access, I can tweet (on my 20th-century-phone, lacking a keyboard and any-and-all smartphone capabilities, but texting twitter still works!)
So check my twitter - @camilareads - or look in the sidebar of this blog for frequent assurances that I'm alive.
My bag is calling, so Camila out.
So tonight - TONIGHT! - I depart for Atlanta. And in Atlanta I pick up a rental car. And then I drive south to the part of Georgia that is almost Alabama, and also almost Florida. And then I will drive up to the house of my grandmother's niece, give her the regards of all my family, settle into her spare room and start trying to explore my family history and what it means to be rooted in the soil of rural Georgia.
But right now - RIGHT NOW! - I kind of need to pack. Because we're looking at D minus 1 hour, where D is the time I must Depart in order to get to Charlottesville early enough for my travel terror to stay under control.
Travel terror, n. The almost-uncontrollable fear that all of your travel plans will be destroyed because of a traffic jam, a declined credit card, a clerical error, confusion over dates, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, unexpected rebellions, train crashes, lost cell phones, airplane-goose collisions, unscheduled apocalypses, acts of God, acts of man, acts of children, or action-movie-like-explosions. The only known remedy is to leave your house three or four hours early for everything.
Anyway, I won't write a long post now. I just wanted to let you know that I won't have email access everywhere on my trip - I might not even have it OFTEN on my trip. I make no guarantees of frequent bloggage. But wherever I have cell phone access, I can tweet (on my 20th-century-phone, lacking a keyboard and any-and-all smartphone capabilities, but texting twitter still works!)
So check my twitter - @camilareads - or look in the sidebar of this blog for frequent assurances that I'm alive.
My bag is calling, so Camila out.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
i see an epigraph in here...
The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs
Amy Beeder
Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush,
something in the silver-tinted background: always
that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked
those dark men bunched, clutching shovels, indistinct
in coils of smoke, and engines whole...
the rumor of America
long-gone & slumbering, that even thus lost rushes on—
Read the rest at VQR online.
Amy Beeder
Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush,
something in the silver-tinted background: always
that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked
those dark men bunched, clutching shovels, indistinct
in coils of smoke, and engines whole...
the rumor of America
long-gone & slumbering, that even thus lost rushes on—
Read the rest at VQR online.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
the next trip
So this blog will shortly become, once again, a travel blog in reality as well as in name.
I will be departing on a cross-country - or rather, country-circling - train adventure. Yes, indeed, America has trains (True story: I had to explain this to a non-native friend, who was actually under the impression that we had no trains at all).
Along the way I'll be visiting the parts of the country where my family tree is rooted - rural Georgia, the northern reaches of Montana, southern California - and trying to gather some family stories, histories and legends along the way. And thinking about trains, and immigration, and migration, and rootedness, and why we tell the stories about our past that we do.
That's the idea, anyway.
To prep I've been... well, I haven't been doing much yet. Reading some Paul Theroux. Brushing off my voice recorder. And getting gifts from my father, from a family tree to old letters. A short list of things I never knew before these presents: our last name was originally spelled Demanowski. My great-great-great-great-grandmother, a short, heavyset woman who immigrated over 150 years ago, had 9 children in 18 years. Her blue-eyed husband could not read or write - though they arrived in 1852, they weren't the fleeing German intellegentsia we studied in AP US, when we memorized immigration demographics.
***
From one of my grandmother's cousins, a Catholic priest - no, not just a priest, the bishop of Atlanta! - we a letter survives. He had never met my grandmother, but wrote to congratulate her on the birth of her fourth child, and to apologize for not writing earlier, due to his illness. He mentioned:
"Let me say here that in every Mass I make a remembrance of "all my dear ones in all sides of the family". And, since I am an Easterner, in order to keep the heavenly record straight, I mention explicitly my good cousins (an ever increasing clan, it seems) in California. Incidentally, I forgot to tell the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who is of Polish descent, that I have some Polish cousins in California. However, since three of the children are red-heads, it would seem as though the Irish strain predominates..."
But just how Polish are the members of red-headed Domonoske clan? When the Demanowskis emigrated from Europe, there was no Polish state - their passports were Prussian.
Time to bone up on my continental European history...?
I will be departing on a cross-country - or rather, country-circling - train adventure. Yes, indeed, America has trains (True story: I had to explain this to a non-native friend, who was actually under the impression that we had no trains at all).
Along the way I'll be visiting the parts of the country where my family tree is rooted - rural Georgia, the northern reaches of Montana, southern California - and trying to gather some family stories, histories and legends along the way. And thinking about trains, and immigration, and migration, and rootedness, and why we tell the stories about our past that we do.
That's the idea, anyway.
To prep I've been... well, I haven't been doing much yet. Reading some Paul Theroux. Brushing off my voice recorder. And getting gifts from my father, from a family tree to old letters. A short list of things I never knew before these presents: our last name was originally spelled Demanowski. My great-great-great-great-grandmother, a short, heavyset woman who immigrated over 150 years ago, had 9 children in 18 years. Her blue-eyed husband could not read or write - though they arrived in 1852, they weren't the fleeing German intellegentsia we studied in AP US, when we memorized immigration demographics.
***
From one of my grandmother's cousins, a Catholic priest - no, not just a priest, the bishop of Atlanta! - we a letter survives. He had never met my grandmother, but wrote to congratulate her on the birth of her fourth child, and to apologize for not writing earlier, due to his illness. He mentioned:
"Let me say here that in every Mass I make a remembrance of "all my dear ones in all sides of the family". And, since I am an Easterner, in order to keep the heavenly record straight, I mention explicitly my good cousins (an ever increasing clan, it seems) in California. Incidentally, I forgot to tell the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who is of Polish descent, that I have some Polish cousins in California. However, since three of the children are red-heads, it would seem as though the Irish strain predominates..."
But just how Polish are the members of red-headed Domonoske clan? When the Demanowskis emigrated from Europe, there was no Polish state - their passports were Prussian.
Time to bone up on my continental European history...?
intruder alert
The other day two men tried to break into my friends' apartment while two of them were there. William, one of the roommates who was not there, mentioned this offhandedly.
"WHAT?" That is me speaking, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with William could probably infer. William's speech could very rarely be transcribed using all caps.
"Yeah."
"WHY? WHEN? What did they want? What happened? Did they call the police? Did the police get there in time? Did they catch them?"
"Yup."
"YOU DIDN'T ANSWER MY OTHER QUESTIONS!"
"Oh, and it turns out one of them was [another friend]'s brother. And he had a stun gun or something."
"WHAT? EXPLAIN!!"
"I dunno, I think that's mostly it."
William, I concluded, is terrible at telling stories - although it must be said that withholding that last little fact made for a nice twist ending, very clever, sneaky bastard, etc. So we went to the apartment and I went straight to the source - the friend, Patrick, who saw it all happen and called the cops.
"Yeah, somebody rang the doorbell and I looked out and didn't know him. So then he left. But then I saw somebody trying to break in, so I called the cops."
In despair - what does it look like when you see somebody break in? Who were they? What were they carrying? What were you thinking? What did the cops say? - I turned to our friend Annie, who took over the story-telling with an epic, action-packed, gesture-filled, dialogue-heavy narrative that, while occasionally inaccurate (Patrick was the prime witness, after all, and occasionally corrected her) had all the human drama the boys' versions lacked. There was her, blissfully unaware as Patrick dialed 911 and watched a screwdriver stabbing at the deadbolt; there was Patrick, running outside to try to get a good look at the fleeing would-be intruders, an act that seemed to me extraordinarily stupid; there were cops, shouting "POLICE! DOWN!" just as the script would call for, there were perps giving false names, wielding odd weapons, seeking revenge on supposedly cuckolding younger brothers. It was a much more satisfying narrative.
I will not proceed from here to some cockamamie argument about female superiority in storytelling, although I've presented as much evidence as many pop evolutionary psychologist regularly provide in their books. I hate evolutionary psychology so much. So much. I don't usually waste energy actively hating (pseudo)scientific disciplines but I can't help it. So much hate. I am derailing myself.
My point was simply to support a writing-related assertion: the truth is not enough.
"WHAT?" That is me speaking, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with William could probably infer. William's speech could very rarely be transcribed using all caps.
"Yeah."
"WHY? WHEN? What did they want? What happened? Did they call the police? Did the police get there in time? Did they catch them?"
"Yup."
"YOU DIDN'T ANSWER MY OTHER QUESTIONS!"
"Oh, and it turns out one of them was [another friend]'s brother. And he had a stun gun or something."
"WHAT? EXPLAIN!!"
"I dunno, I think that's mostly it."
William, I concluded, is terrible at telling stories - although it must be said that withholding that last little fact made for a nice twist ending, very clever, sneaky bastard, etc. So we went to the apartment and I went straight to the source - the friend, Patrick, who saw it all happen and called the cops.
"Yeah, somebody rang the doorbell and I looked out and didn't know him. So then he left. But then I saw somebody trying to break in, so I called the cops."
In despair - what does it look like when you see somebody break in? Who were they? What were they carrying? What were you thinking? What did the cops say? - I turned to our friend Annie, who took over the story-telling with an epic, action-packed, gesture-filled, dialogue-heavy narrative that, while occasionally inaccurate (Patrick was the prime witness, after all, and occasionally corrected her) had all the human drama the boys' versions lacked. There was her, blissfully unaware as Patrick dialed 911 and watched a screwdriver stabbing at the deadbolt; there was Patrick, running outside to try to get a good look at the fleeing would-be intruders, an act that seemed to me extraordinarily stupid; there were cops, shouting "POLICE! DOWN!" just as the script would call for, there were perps giving false names, wielding odd weapons, seeking revenge on supposedly cuckolding younger brothers. It was a much more satisfying narrative.
I will not proceed from here to some cockamamie argument about female superiority in storytelling, although I've presented as much evidence as many pop evolutionary psychologist regularly provide in their books. I hate evolutionary psychology so much. So much. I don't usually waste energy actively hating (pseudo)scientific disciplines but I can't help it. So much hate. I am derailing myself.
My point was simply to support a writing-related assertion: the truth is not enough.
Monday, May 9, 2011
late spring
and the world has turned a deep, enclosing green.
The road to our apartment is wrapped in the heavy scent of honeysuckles.
Yesterday I walked home from the grocery store and watched two geese and seven goslings pick their way across the road.
At night I hold the names of Russian formalists close to my chest and wonder how people learn to be happy.
The road to our apartment is wrapped in the heavy scent of honeysuckles.
Yesterday I walked home from the grocery store and watched two geese and seven goslings pick their way across the road.
At night I hold the names of Russian formalists close to my chest and wonder how people learn to be happy.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
i don't yet hate my neck
Beautiful women of a certain age run the risk of being called "well-preserved." Well-preserved! Can you think of a more atrocious form of praise? Like any woman whose wrinkles have formed in all the right places, or whose face has been chemically smoothed and surgically ironed straight, is some sort of Damien Hirst installation, soaked in formaldehyde. An aging document that has been carefully stored in a climate-controlled, low-humidity, museum-quality environment, protected from the elements and all the dangers of living. A precious object that has somehow survived the centuries without entirely falling apart.
When I'm pushing sixty, seventy - heck, eighty - I don't want anybody looking at me with the clinical eyes of a taxidermist, checking to see if all the seams line up and the cracks aren't showing too clearly. I don't want them to dare think the words "well-preserved." No, I want them to admire the sharp wit hiding in the creases of my eyelids and think to themselves that all the doe-eyed ingenues of the world couldn't compete. I want young men to tuck their attraction to me away where they keep all their dark secrets; I want them not to understand it. I don't want anybody to whisper that I'm "remarkably..." anything "for my age." I want them to think it to themselves in astonishment, ashamed at their surprise, silent in their admiration. I want to be all glory, nothing faded about it. I want to make people doubt whether they are in the prime of their years after all. I want to have nothing whatsoever in common with an old jar of jam or a salted piece of meat.
I was trying to read the NYT's review of Mary Gordon's new novel and couldn't make it past the second paragraph. Words, man. Sometimes they're like landmines that blow up in my face and throw me terribly off track. A handful of letters and a hyphen and boom...
When I'm pushing sixty, seventy - heck, eighty - I don't want anybody looking at me with the clinical eyes of a taxidermist, checking to see if all the seams line up and the cracks aren't showing too clearly. I don't want them to dare think the words "well-preserved." No, I want them to admire the sharp wit hiding in the creases of my eyelids and think to themselves that all the doe-eyed ingenues of the world couldn't compete. I want young men to tuck their attraction to me away where they keep all their dark secrets; I want them not to understand it. I don't want anybody to whisper that I'm "remarkably..." anything "for my age." I want them to think it to themselves in astonishment, ashamed at their surprise, silent in their admiration. I want to be all glory, nothing faded about it. I want to make people doubt whether they are in the prime of their years after all. I want to have nothing whatsoever in common with an old jar of jam or a salted piece of meat.
I was trying to read the NYT's review of Mary Gordon's new novel and couldn't make it past the second paragraph. Words, man. Sometimes they're like landmines that blow up in my face and throw me terribly off track. A handful of letters and a hyphen and boom...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)