Welcome to my travelogue blog! This is the website of the science fiction and fantasy author Danica Cummins. Come see the universe (or at least my small part of it). I post every Friday.

And More: The Fast-Forward Festival has launched its first issue! To read some funny, creepy stories about Time, hit up www.fastforwardfest.com.

I have a new story out in Luna Station Quarterly. Huzzah!

Friday, December 30, 2011

The Last Post of the Year

            Santa Barbara. 
I once wrote a poem where I compared the light in Santa Barbara to palomino horses galloping down the arroyos into the sea.  It was a wild image, and I'll stand up for it to naysayers and meteorologists and simile-haters alike.  Now, however, I just want to play a game with that city's initials: Santa Barbara, Silver Barnacles.  Salamander Barbecue.  Second Bassoon. 
            When I first thought seriously of describing Santa Barbara again, I wrote, “It would be an interesting post, but I’d much rather talk about pirates.”
            You can’t always choose your memories or obsessions, though.  Santa Barbara, that affluent city between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific, was the place I grew up—not in the sense that I lived there as a child, but in the sense of what is sometimes called (yech) ‘blossoming.’  I feel a bit like Winnie the Pooh, having had episodic adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood—except that my friends weren’t ornery owls and gregarious gophers.  And my Hundred Acre Wood was Isla Vista, the tiny, packed, overpriced borderland between the University of California and the rest of the world.  Isla Vista is a town that stinks when the sun goes down of sweat and cheap vodka, where the streets closest to the sea are packed from Tuesday to Sunday with scantily dressed drunkards who wander from house to house, searching for something they can’t name. 
            All right, I’m being melodramatic.  I can’t help it—Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer whose works abound with paradox and dead-ends, might have invented Isla Vista.  When I think of it and Santa Barbara (and I apologize for any confusion that might arise from how I lump them together), I think of driftwood fences, cold water, and substance abuse.  I think of Pirate, the homeless man who lives off of the UC students’ excess booze, and speaks with a gruff, nautical growl.  When I was a freshman, he tried to impress me by lifting his eye patch and smoking a cigarette out of the empty socket.            
            A lot of things happened to me in Santa Barbara.  I made friends and lost friends, learned how to craft essays, rode an orange bike up and down the seashore, drank bloody marys, ran across beaches full of snowy plovers, became a feminist, became a caffeine-addict, saw a few brush-fires, climbed a few mountains, slept on a few dorm room floors. 
The Pacific surges against the dark horizon, and the cliffs that line it erode a little bit more each year.
The hobos and the crazy people epitomize Isla Vista.  When Greg and I were twenty-two, just after we graduated, we rented an apartment where, for six months, we were routinely awakened in the middle of the night by the man who lived downstairs hurling himself against our door.  He pounded the door so hard that a piece of wood around the jamb cracked away from the rest of the plank.  When we called the police, the man defended himself by saying that we were always “tapping on his walls.”
            I suppose someone who hasn’t been to Southern California might not know what I mean when I say that So-Cal has its own special kind of despair.  It’s a glitzy, narcissistic kind of despair—maybe it’s not a despair at all, but a type of recklessness.  I’ve seen a young man throw himself against the hood of a moving taxi and yell, “Fuck yeah!” as he bounced off.
            Isla Vista can be sweet, too, with its unrestrained hordes.  Election night of 2008, people yelled “Obama!” across the town until three or four in the morning, and were always echoed by an equally exuberant “Obama!” from somewhere else in the dark.  The UC won a free Coldplay concert because, out of any college in the nation, the highest percentage of us voted.  My friend Evan spent that Tuesday grumbling about being the only Republican within city bounds.
            Isla Vista is a city of bike theft.  Everyone flits about on two wheels, and individuals with mad eyes leap from bushes offering to sell purloined bikes for five dollars.  I spent my first two years of college walking places, but finally caved and bought a swift orange Beach Cruiser—which is still the only concrete image I have for the word “freedom.”  It got stolen on the day after I graduated, as if to emphasize that, when one door opens, another closes.  
            In another instance of subtext from the universe, the bittersweet lyrics of “Scarborough Fair” drift down from the apartment above me as I write.

“Remember me to one who lives there…
She once was a true love of mine.”

            So good evening, fellow travelers on this murky highway of words.  This is, I suppose, only a partial post—a fragment of what it could be, but a wee bit more than nothing.  I find this fizzling ending somehow appropriate for December 30th--one day short of December 31st, the fizzling end of the year, when it's goodbye to 2011 already and guten Tag to the Year of Our Lord two thousand o-twelve.
I promise to come back and talk about pirates later. 

Friday, December 23, 2011

Potpourri


            The winter solstice.
            Despite my dislike of the cold, winter is my favorite season.  I love the way the hills in Northern California turn green, and my parents’ house spends the mornings cloaked in white mist.  I love the way birdcalls echo sharply through the air, and the smell of plants intensifies after the passing of storms.
            Winter is the time for hibernation or storytelling, depending on your particular species' inclination.  December 21st, the winter solstice, is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.  Last year’s solstice was accompanied by a lunar eclipse, and that is when my nephew was born.  He’s a wizard, to be sure.
            I once rose at dawn on the solstice, and climbed up a mountain with my brother to greet the sun.  Unfortunately, that particular mountain was drizzly and swamped with fog.  We sat with a man who called himself “Gatherer,” then climbed home, where I, for one, went back to sleep.  I dreamed that I was eaten by a giant glass alligator, who defecated me into a grocery store for refugees.
            Seeing as the northern hemisphere has made the turn toward light and heat again, I thought I’d use this post to talk about beginnings.  More or less.  I’d originally, in fact, planned to rant about why I’m forced to hear “Santa Baby” every time I go out in public at this time of year.  What kind of joy is that spreading, hm?  What kind of peace and goodwill toward man is engendered by me having to listen to a 90s pop version of “Jingle Bells” in the AT&T store?
            I’d intended, in actuality, to make a thorough case for the Grinch.  He’s an unsung hero, for making those Whoville whatsits realize that Christmas doesn’t come from a store (maybe Christmas means a little bit more).  Take that, capitalism!  So what if he’s grouchy?  I’m grouchy.  My computer crashed this morning after I had this whole post written, and I’m rewriting it at a speed that would impress even the career typists of the 1930s.  I gave my nephew an Eeyore doll for his first birthday, just because it’s important to be cranky and disheartened sometimes.  Oscar the Grouch, and the Grinch, and Ebenezer Scrooge knew that.  Sometimes, in fact, being cantankerous and upset is one of the greatest joys of life.
            Anyway…  Beginnings.
            As a writer, the type of beginning that I know best is the story beginning: the art of the first line.  I’m considerably more adept at first lines than last lines, considering that I start three stories for each one that I actually finish.  Many super, zippity-doo-dah ideas get mugged down when I actually try to stretch them into words—but it would have to be a gobsmackingly-awful story that couldn’t even be begun. 
            One mistake that a lot of novice writers make (I know because I made it myself, not too long ago), is to think that an opening line has to be flamboyant or flashy.  It certainly can be—one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels begins, ‘“Hell,” said the Duchess.'  The only real requirement of an opening line, though, is that it makes the reader want to know what will happen next.  Whether the clocks are striking thirteen (1984), it’s the best of times and the worst of times (A Tale of Two Cities), or Catharine Morland was never meant to be an heroine (Northanger Abbey), all the beginning of a story needs to do is make the reader wonder what will happen next.
            To celebrate some of my abandoned beginnings (and in the spirit of giving), I’ve decided to display them here.  Take them and run, Dear Reader.  Maybe they’ll become something in your hands that they never could have been in mine.
            This first one is the start of a story that Greg and I invented while imbibing way too much caffeine.  Enjoy…

            “Last call for supper on the City of New Orleans!” a stentorian voice commanded, upsetting Humphrey’s dreams.  He recognized the voice’s cadence—but from where?  The stretched vowels, the clipped beginnings, had they belonged to his father?  No.  No, they belonged to Hollywood, to the hundreds of the films he’d watched to stuff up the gap in his life where there should have been a personality.  He rose woozily, and realized with his fine, thin eyelids still closed that the ground under him was moving: a steady rattle, a steady quake.
            He was on a train.
 
Gracias.  And another…

            There was magic in the kingdom of Riddle, but it was usually the sort that knotted shoelaces together, or switched sugar with salt.  In the neighboring kingdom of Enigma, now there were some bonified curses: Enigma had princesses whose hair fell out as soon as they turned thirteen, wicked damsels with the teeth of crocodiles, and a king who would lose his toes if he ever said the word “of.”  Their maladies had style, and they were proud of it.  The citizens of Riddle, who only had to worry about their dentures being replaced with soap replicas, were really much less content than their neighbors—because their neighbors could actually claim, with reason and relish, to be enchanted.

And a third…

            The blind queen will gather everyone into the great antechamber, and call me Anoctel the Traitor--even though another has worn that name before.
            To her it will be the Truth.  To the children and the line of children after them it will be the Truth.
            And let it be the Truth!  I will content myself with other words.
            I’m going up into a world of wind.

And lastly (but not leastly)…

            I am a well-traveled tree.

            Intrigued?  I could explain the plots that follow each of these nuggets, but where would the fun be in that?  Make of them what you will.  I’m off to the computer repair store, and a happy Boxing Day to all!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Confusion, Discontent, and Elizabethan Drama


            The first time I was in Oregon was for a tour boat ride on the Rogue River.  I was fifteen.  We boarded—it was an open-topped jet-boat—found seats, and set out across the gray water.  On the bank opposite the landing, a woman and a man leaned over and mooned us, the man’s buttocks bare, the woman’s garnished by a red thong.  A lady behind my seat chirped (without any great surprise), “Welcome to Oregon.”
            The second time I went to the Beaver State was when I was twenty, for the Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Ashland is a small town, in the low hill country just over the Siskiyou Pass, east of the Rogue River.  Here’s something for you history buffs: the inland area surrounding Ashland, including much of southeast Oregon and a large chunk of northeastern California, once tried to become a separate state.  Its state-name was to be “Jefferson,” because Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clarke on the Oregon Trail.  Other proposed monikers were “Siscurdelmo,” “Bonanza,” and “Discontent.”  The proposal was backed by enough earnestness to get a turn before Congress—but the attack on Pearl Harbor drove energy and effort away from the secessionists.  The movement, though still smoldering today in back-country kitchens and saloons, never truly regained its blaze.
            (And by the way, can I just say how much I love the west coast?  Where else would you find a serious proposal to form a state called Discontent, or have a band of politicos hold up traffic on a major highway and issue a proclamation claiming they were “in patriotic rebellion” against Oregon and California, and would “secede every Thursday until further notice”?  It happened.  November 21st, 1941.  Look it up.)
            Ashland, however, is not so famous for its political leanings, as much as for its literary ones.  The Shakespeare Festival isn’t a one-day event: oh, no.  It’s a year-round brouhaha, with a staff of highly trained actors and about eight plays showing per day.  The heart of the town is a complete reproduction of an Elizabethan theater: a round, roofless gray structure with (unfortunately) very uncomfortable chairs.  Since the non-noble spectators in Shakespeare’s time, however, would have been forced to stand, I’ll cut the plastic seats some slack.
            There are several other theaters, and a gift shop where one can buy playbooks, guides to theatrical accents, costumes, and various other baubles of a thespian bent.  There are hotels and motels and inns.  Greg and I stayed in a campground, though, because we didn’t have much money—but we spent most of our days in town, mingling with the crowds.  Camping in Ashland was awful: summer heat baked us dry, and the only division between our campsite and our neighbor’s was a tan log.  We very much enjoyed taking refuge in the Ashland Starbucks, and in a charming bookstore/coffeeshop called Bloomsbury (named after the Bloomsbury group, a collection of intellectuals headed by Virginia Woolf).  Bloomsbury, I remember, was where I ordered a chai tea and the barista, leaning over her counter confidentially, said, “It’ll kick you in the ass.”
            It was very strong tea.
            We saw three plays, all for moderately low prices (the cheapest was $20): Henry VIII, All’s Well That End’s Well, and Equivocation, a modern play about the elusive character of Shakespeare himself.  Two of the plays involved an actor whose last name was Tufts.  This caused me no end of delight.  It just seemed like the perfect name for a Shakespearian actor, seeing as Shakespeare was the man, after all, who named characters “Bottom”, and “Sir Henry Belch.” 
            And another thing that made me happy: nowhere did we encounter any of that Anti-Stratfordian nonsense.  The Anti-Stratfordians are the people who insist that, despite a great lack of evidence, Othello and Juliet and the rest of the merry band were not, in fact created by the man we call Shakespeare.  These scurrilous scholars put forward a lot of other candidates ( i.e. Sir Francis Bacon), all of whom were members of the ruling class--as if a peasant could never have been brilliant.  I find the Anti-Stratfordians almost as aggravating as the 19th century folk who insisted that Bramwell Bronte, not his sister Charlotte, wrote Jane Eyre. 
I had a professor in college who trounced the Anti-Stratfordians roundly in the ongoing battle of wits.  She was a blond with a deep Southern twang and crooked teeth, and whenever an Anti-Stratfordian accosted her, she’d say two words: “William Faulkner.”  William Faulkner was another Southerner, one who wrote such disjointed modernist novels as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.  He was as common-born as they come, and had no formal education after middle school.  “I would have liked,” my professor often said, “to get a look at William Faulkner’s brain.”
Her point was that some people, whether forced through a school system or not, are just really smart.
As you can probably tell, I’m quite a bit protective of good old William Shakespeare.  Maybe it’s because he invented the word “eyeball.”  Maybe it’s because of all the cross-dressing women in his plays, like Viola in Twelfth Night, and Rosalind in As You Like It.  Maybe it’s because of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are dead.
I can tell you that my favorite line in all of Shakespeare’s plays is when Hamlet leans toward Polonius (leering, I’ve always thought), and says, “Buzz buzz.”  I can tell you that my favorite stage direction in all of his plays is when, in A Winter’s Tale, a character is directed to “exit, chased by a bear.”
Where did the bear come from?  This question has puzzled scholars for centuries.  The bear waited, a shadow in the wings, ready to lumber into the story and take a bite from the Player, as it will from us all…
But I digress.
The drive to Ashland was pretty, especially taking the route through the coastal redwoods.  Near Crescent City, these ancient trees closed in on the road, giving me the eerie sensation of being transported to the Third Moon of Endor.
That drive was also when Greg and I stumbled upon Confusion Hill.  Confusion Hill, as some of you may know, is one of those zany West coast tourist attractions (of the same caliber as the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot and the Oregon Vortex) where something has purportedly gone wrong with the laws of physics.  I’m not exactly sure what they claim has gone awry with the laws of physics: there was a tour, but Greg was too freaked out and disgusted to want to take it.  I think what really got his goat about the cluttered little stop were the numerous signs saying “Confusion Hill: Home of the Chipelope!”   Not to mention the gift shop full of stuffed chipmunks with antlers.
In fact, we ate mediocre burgers at Confusion Hill, then sped away through the forest.  If we were characters in a play, the stage directions would have surely been, “Exit, chased by a chipelope.”
&
I could end this post by talking about why I think Shakespeare has such an enduring place in our culture.  That, however, is one of those questions that can never be adequately answered; and far greater scholars than I have tried.  Instead I’ll just say, “Zounds!” and have done with it. 
The course of the Intergalactic Coffeeship never did run smooth.

Friday, December 2, 2011

High Times in Nevada


This post is largely a continuation of the last one—because I realized, about three minutes after I’d finished the last one, that there was a lot I hadn’t said.
So I’ve taken all the scraps I cut out of “Time, with the Canyon”, and woven them into their own story.  This story, appropriately, ends where the other left off: when we’d turned the car back toward the sea, and were zooming through the deserts towards home.
Nevada announced itself with casinos and dusty hills.  Welcome to the Hoover Dam.  When we’d finally escaped the bottlenecked traffic across the Hoover Dam, Welcome to the Fabulous Boulder City.  It was only an hour between the Fabulous Boulder City and the Fabulous Las Vegas (and might I point out here, Nevadans, that a word used too often degrades in meaning?).
I drove us to Las Vegas, but, after Greg’s GPS again led us astray (blithely insisting that Caesar’s Palace was out in the suburbs), I let him take the wheel.  Thank god, he was the one who drove us into the street of hotels known as the Strip.  What with seven lanes, abrupt turns, and taxis zipping back and forth like ping pong balls, it was an automobilist’s nightmare.  None of this was helped by the omnipresent, gigantic billboards looming at us with pictures of Cher and Carrot Top, nor by the fact that other billboards were embedded in the backs of trucks.  Seriously.  I can just imagine some publicity exec getting up one day and saying, “You know, we just don’t advertise enough…but I’ve got a swell idea!  Let's make it so that drivers can never escape pictures of Cher and Carrot Top!”
Saying things like “Urgh,” and “Stay calm,” we finally managed to find the vehicle-entrance to Caesar’s Palace.  We opted out of valet parking.  Later, at the reception desk, the concierge betrayed some surprise at this.  Self-parking was quite a faux pas. 
We stayed at Caesar’s Palace for one night, and then, because the next day was St. Patrick’s Day and prices skyrocketed, we moved to the low-budget Luxor.  That’s the casino shaped like a pyramid.  It was at the Luxor, in fact, that we saw an extremely drunk, disgruntled leprechaun wandering dazedly across the casino floor.
Caesar’s Palace was a megalithic labyrinth.  Our first night there, we searched for half an hour to find an exit onto the street.  Finally spotting a panel of dark glass doors, I yelled, “Quick!  Before the walls change!”  Unfortunately, those doors just led to the pool.
We finally found a back entrance (near the much-espoused valet parking), and straggled from there, eventually, onto the main drag.  Along these sidewalks between casinos, after dark, rushed a wave of giddy, intoxicated humans.  The wave carried us as far as the casino Treasure Island (or, as it now wants to be known, “T.I.”), where Greg heard the sounds of a pirate show in progress.  He glanced back at me, wide-eyed, and started running. 
When we breasted the front of the crowd, however, he was already bristling in anger.  Above us on a fake ship, a few women wiggled striped-bikinied hips—and Greg hissed, “Those aren’t pirates.”  
&
One archetypical instance was on the second night, when Greg and I were on a semi-deserted sidewalk near the Venetian hotel.  A man dressed exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow leaned out of the darkness of a nearby alcove and said “Ello love” to me. 
“Surreal,” Greg said.  He was right.
                                                                    &
The Southwest desert—as described by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams, Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony, and Willa Cather in The Song of the Lark (among others)—has made a special burrow into my imagination.  Because many of these books play with the mythology of the Ancient Pueblo peoples and other indigenous groups, I think of the Southwest desert as coyote-country, jackrabbit-country.  Land of the great tricksters. 
In many Native American cosmologies, the god Coyote made the world—but Coyote, being a bit of a rascal and far from omniscient, always gets himself entangled in misadventures.  Las Vegas seems to me like one of Coyote’s mistakes: an alternate reality of perpetual daytime and insincerity and fogged mirrors…  Coyote would trot away with his tail low, but his tongue still lolling, not having learned his lesson very well.
Las Vegas is a skin-deep place.  All the gaudy hotels had themes, like New York, or Paris, or Clowns—but once inside, they were all the same: grungy, smelly casino floors, blinking slot machines, and uber-chic restaurants with names like “Areola.”
Last week, I talked about how so many of our historical travel records are narratives of conquest.  My favorite type of travel narrative, on the contrary, is one that respects the places it visits, and tries to understand them from multiple perspectives.  I’m trying my best to respect Las Vegas, but, my oh my, it’s harder than usual.
In fact (if you must know), I spent the whole trip being miffed that none of the slot machines were educational.
Fabulous, indeed.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Time, with the Canyon

            I’ve always lived on the edge of the world.
            I mean that I’ve always lived near the ocean: which for many people, for many millennia, was the boundary of the knowable world.  California, especially, was insulated: cupped between what we now call the Pacific, and what we now call the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I’ve been thinking, lately, of a trip I took a few years ago, when Greg and I left our accustomed haunts on the western shoreline, heading east.  Heading east, into the great American deserts—where I drove faster and faster, because the speed limit was 75 and there were no other cars on the road.
            We started from Greg’s Orange County, taking a two-lane road through lifeless gravel-dunes.  And it wasn’t until now, years later, that I wondered if that was the Mojave Desert.
I mention it because so much of this post is about names.  “Mojave”, you see, was the name of the first (and practically only) eye-shadow I ever bought.  The eye shadow was a coppery bronze color.  The Mojave Desert (for so it was) was dry brown, with a suggestion of gray--the color of rotting telephone poles.  When Greg and I finally crossed into Arizona, how turquoise the Colorado River seemed: it was the only color of the rainbow I’d seen in the landscape for hours. 
The Arizona desert was much redder than the Mojave, craggier and alien and vast.  Most towns in the desert were ghost towns; we blew through them more quickly than we could say their names.  Chiriaco Summit.  Vidal.  Shinarump Drive (which kept making me think of a large lady rubbing a pink feather boa across her rear end…). 
As the desert widened around us, the Christian radio stations spread through the FM, until we were faced with a choice between sermons, mariachis, and one fuzzy classic rock station on which, through the brambles of static, occasionally emerged the haunting chords of an electric guitar.  It seemed to fit our surroundings—and we listened to it until we entered the mountains again.             
Just before Phoenix, we left Interstate 40 to head north again on Route 66, passing the town of Tusayan, which we later learned means “mountain lying down”. 
            In typical fashion, our first view of the canyon was utterly unintentional: we’d reached a cluster of cabins, but the GPS was going haywire trying to locate our specific lodge.  Bickering and stressed, I pulled the car uphill into a parking lot to turn around…and there it was, just beyond the Hondas and Chevrolets.  A slice out of the Earth, glowing in layers of orange, yellow, and red.  Immense.  Terrifying.  Intoxicatingly beautiful.
            “Whoa,” I said.
            Greg laughed.  “Yep.  That’s pretty grand.”
&
The Hopi name for the Grand Canyon is “Ongtupqa.” 
            Greg’s favorite part was the snow.  A child of the Southern California urban deserts, he’d been waiting his whole life for the chance to interact with snow.
It was February, and the digger pine forests of the South Rim were heaped with the stuff.  There we were, on the lip of the wondrous abyss, and Greg had eyes only for the mounds of white powder.  He left the trail, giddy, sinking up to his thighs.  A young boy behind us wailed, “I want to go in the snow!” and his mother declared, glaring, “It’s not allowed!”
            Once we actually managed to find our lodge (and Greg had finished kicking the snowdrifts outside it), we asked a woman at the information desk for itinerary advice, given the limited duration of our stay.  She stared at us over the top of her glasses.  “It takes time to bond with the canyon.”
            “Well, tomorrow we’re driving to—”
            “Las Vegas?”  She smiled knowingly.  We managed, I think, to give her the impression of being squirrelly, one-dimensional kids.  The next day, I temporarily dislocated my right kneecap by trying to check the back of my jeans for mud.  Because Greg and I are, on occasion, a couple of squirrelly, one-dimensional kids, we watched Tool Academy on TV while the swelling went down.
&
One of the most interesting structures on the South Rim was the Hopi House, in which Greg read Death in the Grand Canyon while I perused the feathered bracelets.  It had low, curving adobe and sandstone architecture—doors that even a short woman like me had to stoop to enter—a careful use of shadows and thick walls…but it was not built by the Hopi.
            It was designed by Mary Jane Colter, and has been open since 1910 as a concession stand of Indigenous American crafts. 
Native Americans inhabited the Grand Canyon, and its rims, for thousands of years.  The Pueblo people considered it a sacred site, and made pilgrimages to it, leaving some of their intricate cliff dwellings behind. 
We don’t know any of their names. 
We do know the name of the first European who visited the canyon: Garcia López de Cárdenas, a Spaniard, in 1540.  I haven’t read any account he wrote of the “discovery”.  I’m afraid that, whatever awe he might have felt on viewing Ongtupqa, his record would have been a narrative of conquest, rather than respect.
It would be wonderful to read an Ancient Pueblo woman’s account of Arizona.  But the Pueblo people didn’t write.  They took their history with them.
&
To a person who thinks in terms of oceans and mountains, in terms (in other words) of California, a canyon is…well, new ideological territory.  A new world to stare into, gaping across.
            We could’ve ridden mules into the canyon—but we didn’t have the time. 
Our bus driver joked, “There’s never been a tour bus that went over the edge.  You guys ready to be the first?”—but he didn’t drive in. 
In traveling, as in affairs of love, the things you don’t do can take on a kind of rhythm of their own.  Greg and I only got to stare at the canyon.  The closest we came to entering was when he leaned over the edge on his stomach, taking a video that would later terrify his parents.  Even then, we couldn’t see the thin, blue river that we knew must be at the bottom.
I was only near the Grand Canyon for a day and a half—and then it was west to Las Vegas, driving too quickly, and on with the radio again.  Searching for that lonely electric guitar once more.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Spastic Fantastic

            This is a moseying blog post.  It keeps slipping away from its subject, hopping sideways, categorically refusing to tread a linear path.  My ostensible topic today is the difference between science fiction and fantasy.  I write them both—as well as poetry, straight-up literature and, as you can see, a screwball kind of memoir. 
I was thinking I’d start with an objective distinction: “Science fiction is such and such, whereas and thereat fantasy can only be this and that.”  Ha!  There’s a reason the two genres are stocked on the same shelves in most bookstores.  A number of great stories could easily be classified as both.
There are familiar tropes, of course: for fantasy, dragons and wizards and incognito heirs to the throne.  The most pop culture kind of fantasy (which is by no means, thank goodness, the only kind of fantasy) takes place in a faux-medieval society where magic operates as a kind of physics + chemistry + religion.  For science fiction, by contrast, the staples are aliens and galactic federations and time traveling cowboys.   
I’m tempted to say that science fiction is a more heady genre: slower and more speculative, bent on framing questions about human existence.  On the other hand, I’ve read plenty of speedy SF, and plenty of sedate fantasy to which questions of human existence are quite at home.   
I’m beginning, in fact, to despair of ever finding a system of classification.  Where’s Linnaeus when you need him?  I might as well talk of other things—of shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and rings of power and Grendel’s mother and “Use the Force, Luke!”…
Yikes.  What have I gotten myself into?
&
Here’s something I can latch onto: I think I got a sizable chunk of my imagination from Jim Henson.
Thank goodness for all the supremely fantastic, supremely dark children’s movies of the eighties.  Thank goodness for Mrs. Brisby using a magic ruby to drag the sinking house with her trapped children out of the mud.  Thank goodness for that wine-drinking, riddle-clacking skeleton head in The Last Unicorn.  Thank goodness for the broken, dystopic Yellow Brick Road in Return to Oz (how cool was that!).  Thank goodness for the Bog of Eternal Stench, and David Bowie’s tight white pants.
            And thank goodness for my parents, who watched all those movies with me.
            It was a rich stew, to be sure.  A rich stew full of strange lumps, some delicious, some tasting of garlic and hard taffy and magic shoes.
            Fantasy, for me, is the stuff of dreams.  Death.  Unexpected love.  Existential decisions. 
Magic shoes.
            A few years ago, in fact, I did have a dream about magic shoes; I found them in Costco.  They were slippery and elfish, with silk skins, rather (now that I think about it) like the ballet slippers I wore as a child.  The special power of these shoes was that, whatever color they were currently painted, the wearer could find a refrigerator of matching color and use it as a portal to other worlds.
            Since I then found myself being chased by a pack of Velociraptors (thanks for that, Jurassic Park), it was quite lucky that Costco was, at that moment, having a blowout sale on refrigerators.  There were the usual black, white, and silver ones—which were utterly useless, since my shoes were currently pink.  Craning my head, I noticed a few more refrigerators on the second shelf.  I hopped onto a forklift and shimmied up to its roof.
            Having climbed onto the thin ledge of the higher shelf, I spotted what I was looking for: a refrigerator as pink as Elvis’s mother’s Cadillac.  I swung the door open and dove through. 
            Fittingly, the place I ended up was a very cold prison cell.  There was one window, which overlooked a square where a bride was about to get married.  The only other occupant of the cell was a mottled-brown falcon, who introduced himself as the Viscount of Silence.  
The Viscount of Silence was my loyal, enigmatic, and taciturn companion for the rest of my adventures, which would have been much longer if a crow outside my bedroom hadn’t woken me up, trying to gobble the cat food.
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            All right, then.  After that notable interlude, returning to the question at hand…
In reality, I don’t consider as many of my pieces SF as an average reader might.  To be counted in the genre, I require that the story integrates, in some manner, science.  An achievement of science, a conjecture of science, or the facts about science itself.  Science fiction, as I define it, is about a peculiarly rational process of inquiry, and its repercussions.
            Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be so analytical.  Princess Umba, in her magical world, could meet her own double without ever questioning how this came about (though she might want to).  Fantasy, as I write it, is about myths, dreams, poetic language.  Uncertainties. 
Jokes.
My fantasy stories tend to move in circles, like this blog post, pivoting on an emotional reality rather than a tangible fact.  They tend to be the kind of stories that teach the reader to think in a different way: to imagine other perspectives and realities, to leap beyond the pale...
            For anyone who wants to write fantasy, I say: go for it.  You may end up thinking in extended metaphor, or carrying a falcon named the Viscount of Silence on your shoulder…but there are worse fates.
You may even look up one day and realize, with a great swoop of clarity, “Damn!  I’ve been writing the wrong thing all along!”  I’ve come to that conclusion, once or twice.
And then I smiled to myself, and kept going.

Friday, November 11, 2011

The Orangest Detective Around

I found two poems this week:
1) The original message, on a bathroom mirror in the UC Irvine library, was (or so I’ve extrapolated), “Thefts happen.  Please be aware of your personal belongings.”  Someone had chipped it to read:

            hefts happe
            Please     ware         person     longings.

2) From Wikipedia:

            Of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.
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It was just last week that I told Greg, in my usual impetuous manner, “I want to write something about pumpkins!”
            At the time, I was imagining it would be a story.  Fiction.  I already have one (currently being serviced for faulty pacing) where a woman on an alien moon escapes her colony by climbing a native vine into the unknown lands in the clouds.  I was thinking I could work pumpkins into that—until I realized it was an awful idea. 
This is much better.
The theme of pumpkins was suggested to me, not by a single source, but by a gradually accumulating conspiracy of sources.  I’ve not only been offered pumpkin pie, lately: oh no.  I’ve tasted pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin bagels, and pumpkin ice cream.  I’ve balanced a pumpkin on my head (see last post), and avoided the sad smashed remains of one in the street.  I was in Santa Barbara two weekends ago—sweet alma mater—for Halloween festivities, which didn’t just consist of gallivanting down the street in disguise.  No, there was also a pumpkin carving contest.
Like any true artist, Greg designs his Jack o’ lanterns to be a conversation between content and medium.  This means, of course, that (every year) he picks the sickest, most gnarly-looking pumpkin in the pumpkin patch, and carves it into a vomiting face.  The vomit is made of the pumpkin’s own seeds.  There’s something macabre about that.
And Greg always wins.
This year, I came in second: I decided to do a tribute to Humphrey Bogart.
Humphrey Pumpkin turned out quite well.  Hat tilted rakishly to the side, he looked up at me and said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Well, not really.  But he definitely had that stoic Bogart grimace, as if he were, at that very moment, having to choose between love and virtue.
I would have offered to help with the choice—if his lips weren’t pressed into such a thin line.
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Pumpkin: genus Cucurbita.  The word originates from the Greek pepon, which the French adapted to “pompon”, and the British to “pumpion”.  The American colonists changed it to “pumpkin”, and I for one want to say thank you, pilgrims, for giving us one of the cutest words in Webster’s diction.
As orange as a smoggy sunset, grooved and plump, pumpkins strike some kind of chord in my imagination.  They make me think of heedless, headless horsemen galloping through dark autumn nights.
Then there’s Peter: Peter Pumpkin Eater, who had a wife but couldn’t keep her. 
Isn’t that one of the eeriest sentences in all the nursery rhyme worlds?  At least with old women living in shoes, and blackbirds baked in a pie, you have a concrete image of what’s going on.  Mr. Pumpkin Eater (not to be confused with his cousin, Peter Piper who ate a peck of pickles) has a story that’s evocative, yet unspecific.  I am led to ask, why couldn’t he keep his wife?  Was she just jonesing for Old King Cole? 
Maybe Mr. Pumpkin Eater made his wife live in a pumpkin.  It’s possible: the largest pumpkin ever recorded was 1,810 pounds.  But heck, who wants to reside in a vegetable, even if it’s as big as a timeshare?  The walls would rot, and all your underwear would smell like cold soup…
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I apologize for writing about the spirit of Halloween (which, by the way, is an excellent name for a boat) at about the time I should be chanting “Remember, remember the fifth of November” and running around town in a Guy Fawkes mask.
I’m a late bloomer, in the pumpkin sphere: I’m just coming into an appreciation of them now, in my mid-twenties.  My family didn’t celebrate holidays for much of my childhood, and, even after that, we never made a big fuss over Halloween—so I hadn’t carved a single Jack o’ lantern until three years ago.
Last year, I got so mad at the pumpkin I was carving that I hurled it into the trash.
            I’m just not very good at Halloween.  Like Ebenezer Scrooge with Yuletide, I’ve never really understood the holiday—candy?  Zombies?  The existential choice between tricks and treats? 
Humbug!
Ebenezer was visited by three ghosts.  Logically, if ghosts come on Christmas, they wouldn’t appear on All Hallow’s Eve—they’d be too dang appropriate to make an impact.  What will I be visited by, then?  Three elves?  Three wise men?  Three kings?
There’s a fair chance I was visited by a ghost last Halloween, as a matter of fact.  I slept on my friends’ futon, and, every night at one o’clock, I heard the sound of a rolling suitcase on the sidewalk outside.  Back and forth, back and forth it rolled, the wheels tripping every few seconds on the division between squares. 
This wouldn’t be nearly so strange if my friends’ house wasn’t inside a gated community, which, during the course of Halloween weekend, was regularly patrolled by security guards.
I dubbed it the Rolly-Bag Ghost, and I’m waiting for it to strike again.
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Though the university is called UC Santa Barbara, most students live not in the larger city, but in the much smaller Isla Vista, a town adjacent to campus.  It’s a quirky place in the calmest of times—rather like a post-apocalyptic world where everyone over twenty five has disappeared, and giddy groups of drunks wander between impersonal gatherings all evening.  During Halloween time, Isla Vista’s natural characteristics are, let’s say, enhanced…
It’s a difficult scene to capture in a few decisive strokes.  Imagine a sea of costumes, ranging the gamut from the elaborate to the half-assed (I mean that literally).  Imagine a “sexy Elmo” being escorted by a man with nothing on but a carefully positioned box of Cap’n Crunch. 
Imagine all this nonsense crowded into one street: Del Playa Drive, the avenue by the sea.
Giant neon arches should be put on either end of Del Playa, flashing the words “Liminal Zone” to anyone who walks underneath.  A liminal zone is a place where uncharacteristic behavior is the norm.  I’ve had this theory for a while that cultures which repress the most (rights, diversity, desires) are usually the ones that produce the best ghost stories.  Very little is repressed in an Isla Vista Halloween, except, of course, common courtesy. 
When you’re wearing nothing but your person longings, etiquette lessons take backstage.
There is, however, a thorn in this lion’s paw: Imagine a battalion of cops wending through the costumes, some on horseback—reminding us that, however free we may think we are, this is more of an authoritarian state than ever.
But Humphrey Pumpkin wouldn’t be intimidated by that—so neither will I.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Canadian Times


Vancouver.  The rain brings out the gray in the roofs of houses.  Every house looks shabbier in the rain—more like a ship, lit against foul weather and riding the swelling hills.
            I’ve been to Vancouver four times: once for my brother’s wedding, twice for Christmas, and once (last week, in fact) to babysit my nephew.  Seeing as he’s about ten months old and becoming increasingly active, I kept my energy up primarily through frequent doses of espresso.  There was one night, however, where my brother and I relieved our stress by dancing to German electronic music from the 70s.  The band was called Kraftwerk, and the lyrics ranged the gamut from, “Fun fun fun on the Autobahn,” to, “We are showroom dummies,” to a wistful and lovelorn, “Computer…”
For most of the week, I could only snatch four-minute windows during the day to write anything.  On top of that, I received at least one short story rejection letter every single day of that trip, up until the day I left.  It is at these moments in life (when you feel sucker-punched by the universe) that it’s particularly wonderful to be surrounded by people who will jig with you to dorky German electronica, or sit in a circle with objects balanced on their heads (stuffed alligators, cookie tins, pumpkins) just to make the baby chuckle.
I also relieved my feelings of frustration by drumming on the toilet seat and singing “Hope that something better comes along” from The Muppet Movie.  I’ve got bruises under both my knees from crawling on the tiles.
&
Vancouver: mountains disappearing, gradient by gradient, into the fog.  The nearest were coal black, the farthest only ghostly gray outlines. 
Perched between towering coastal mountains and the Pacific ocean, Vancouver might be my favorite city—and I say this despite the fact that I’ve only visited it in the wintertime, a season, undeniably, of heavy rain.
I’ve only read two books set in Vancouver.  In one of them, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling, British Columbia is the last area in North America where people are allowed to choose their own religion.  She says it’s because everyone is too exhausted, after fighting the rain, to care about enforcing dogma.
The other book I’ve read (or, more accurately, trilogy) that’s set in Vancouver is Tanya Huff’s Smoke series, which tells the story of a vampire detective whose sidekick works at a TV show about a vampire detective.  But that’s another story.
The Vancouver rain falls on conifer forests and coffee shops with “Go Canada!” displayed above their doors.  It falls on the dark skyscrapers.  It falls on a seemingly endless variety of Indian, Thai, and sushi restaurants.  It falls on the store Schlockbuster, which only rents out awful movies, and on a foot-ware chain called The House of Clogs.  It falls on the King George Highway.  It falls on the Cash Machines (ATMs, to us in the States), The Future Shop (a Canadian version of Radio Shack), and Stanley Park (an area of forest near the downtown where there reputedly resides a hobo named Stanley Park).  The rain falls on the Vancouver Art Museum, where I once saw a piece of framed toast.  It pummels down on the tiny island community (named, appropriately, Snug Cove) where my brother got married, and whose harbor is more littered with goose turds than any other place I’ve walked.
            I’ve always loved rain.  Storms are a way that nature invades even the most encapsulated worlds.  At one point in my visit, Brett explained to me that one of the reason he prefers Canada over the U.S. is that, in the snowy North Woods, there isn’t nearly as much pressure on the environment as in California.  That’s certainly true: I once gallivanted through a pine forest in one of the mountains above Vancouver.  Dusk gleamed red through the trees, and eerie white hillocks coated the ground.  No two snowflakes fell in the same direction: they flurried like gnats.
&
            I left Vancouver last Thursday, via bus to the Seattle Airport (in order to avoid the inflated prices of an international flight).  Just above the U.S. border, a group of Korean tourists loaded themselves in; unfortunately, these people did not speak English or French, and didn’t understand that they were supposed to declare any perishable items they were bringing into the country.  “Food?” one woman repeated blankly at the customs official who was searching her bag.  This group had, between them, over ten suitcases—and food (mostly bread products) was squirreled away in various parts of each. 
            The upshot of that incident was that my bus was an hour late crossing the border.  On top of that, Seattle traffic was a nightmare—and the “Quick Shuttle” (Misnomer Alert!) didn’t arrive at the airport until five minutes after my plane left.
            Luckily, I made it onto another flight: the last one to Orange County that night.  This is all to explain why last week was bereft a blog post, for which I sincerely apologize.  When I finally dragged myself into anything resembling home, Thursday night, I felt utterly and honorably, defeated.
            In fact, being honorably defeated is the thread that weaves my whole week in Vancouver together.  Once, maneuvering my nephew’s stroller around a corner of the wet sidewalk, I was conscious of this: of feeling a piquant mixture of failure and triumph, success and defeat.  A pile of rejection letters is certainly a gloomy vision—but it is also evidence that I’m deeply enmeshed in the writing world, that I am (to be blunt) doing what I set out to do. 
            Cheers to that.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Wimsey

The first time I read Gaudy Night, finishing it was like waking amid the flotsam and jetsam of my former self. 
That’s what I wrote at the time: “Gaudy Night has left me wrecked on the shore.”  When I picked it up again last week, I noticed that my copy had no creases down the spine—meaning I hadn’t once set it down, open, to mark my place.  I barreled through it.  Sleep was no option for me.
            The Intergalactic Coffeeship hasn’t given a book review yet, but Gaudy Night is worthy of being the first.  It’s the penultimate Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, a series written by the British author Dorothy L. Sayers.  I recommend the Wimsey novels to anyone with a taste for well-developed characters, witty dialogue, and period detail.  They were written from 1922 to (roughly) 1938—between the wars.
Gaudy Night isn’t really the same species of novel as Sayers’ other books, though.  Rather than sticking with the loquacious, penetrating, and impeccably dressed Lord Peter, the story follows the actions of one Harriet Vane—a detective novelist who, a few books earlier, had been tried for murdering her lover and acquitted only because of Wimsey’s powers of deduction. 
The books follow real time; Lord Peter spends the next five years asking Harriet to marry him, and being categorically refused.  Harriet Vane is both a necessarily independent woman, and a completely disillusioned one.  In Gaudy Night, she returns for the first time in a decade to her alma mater, a women’s college in Oxford (rather humorously named ‘Shrewsbury’).  Shrewsbury has been under siege by a “poison pen”—someone who leaves violent sexual drawings around the school at night.  Viewing Harriet as a kind of detective, the dons of Shrewsbury plead for her intervention—so Harriet sets out to disentangle the evidence and catch the poltergeist.
Personally, I find mystery and romance to be the easiest plot-types to read.  I know this isn’t universally the case—but Gaudy Night has both.  Furthermore, it’s a respectful and complex look at the social position of British women in the 1930s.  The story is, in one way, about Harriet’s quest to discover if she can get married and be independent.  Would marriage necessarily entail a sacrifice?  Is Wimsey enamored of her, or only of an idea of her that he's created in his head?  The writing is precise; it grasps concepts that I haven’t otherwise encountered in any books published before the 70s.
Here’s an example.  Lord Peter Wimsey is talking with the Warden of Shrewsbury.  She says, “But probably you are not specially interested in all this question of women’s education.”
Lord Peter replies, “Is it still a question?  It ought not to be.  I hope you are not going to ask me whether I approve of women’s doing this and that.”
“Why not?” asks the Warden.
“You should not imply that I have any right either to approve or disapprove.”
&
Harriet Vane decides, midway through the novel, that she wants to write a book about “actual human beings.”  Given the fact that Dorothy Sayers, like her leading lady, is a mystery novelist, I’m tempted to take this as Ms. Sayers’ reflection on her own writing.  She certainly does herself a disservice—Lord Peter Wimsey is simultaneously endearing and intimidating, and no flat character could be both.  With his monocle and dapper suits, his love of wine, penchant for quotation, and the guilt he feels about sending criminals to the gallows, he cuts an unforgettable figure.
            Gaudy Night, though, has more scope than Sayers’ other mysteries, and certainly more audacity.  If I was going to teach a class on the most under-read (but deserving) literature of the 20th century, I would assign Gaudy Night right before Cold Comfort Farm.  The novel’s only problem, I think, is an excess of scholarliness: Miss Vane’s emotions are described in such articulate and thorough detail that the narrative occasionally becomes surreal.  She remains a solid character, though—a character whose struggles are familiar to anyone who’s tried to decide between personal ideals and the expectations of society.  

Don’t think the novel is all somber reflections, though: at points, it’s a comedy of manners worthy of Jane Austen.  At other instances, Gaudy Night is chillingly prescient: the specter of the Nazis and World War II are looming on the horizon. 
You can find the works of Dorothy L. Sayers in the mystery section of most bookstores (except, for some reason, in Canada).  One word of advice: read the novel Have His Carcase before Gaudy Night.  It is hilarious, gripping, and sets the scene.

Friday, October 14, 2011

I Happen to Like New York


On the counter of the convenience store sat two items: a bottle opener, and tube of Neosporin. 
As any reader of detective fiction knows, objects can tell stories just as well as words (and with much less dithering).  These items most assuredly told a story: a tale of imprudence and woe.  A tale of liquor and high spirits.  A tale involving Greg’s inability to get through Earth Girls Are Easy without being at least slightly drunk.  A tale involving our lack of the proper tool to access said liquor, and our misguided (but enthusiastic) plan to go at the bottle caps with bare hands.
A tale about New York.
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We ate breakfast in a Hungarian coffeeshop, then walked across the street to the world’s largest cathedral.
We saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, and the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe on West 26th.
We randomly stumbled upon the Jewish deli where Jerry and the gang schmooze in Seinfeld, and almost collided with the comedian Louis C.K. outside the David Letterman Theater.
We had gelato in Greenwich Village, and margaritas at Harry’s Burritos.
Here are the only generalizations I’ll make about New York: it was a town of friendly strangers, surprising restaurants, amazing public transportation, a careful respect for diversity, and a delightful variety of bookstores.  Carmen and I got to drag Greg to half a dozen bookstores; Greg, in recompense, was perfectly happy dragging the two of us across the city on a quest for the perfect cookie.
Greg and I flew in separately (so I only know this by hearsay)—but, as his plane began to circle down, the businessman at his side whispered, “F*** you, New York!”
I must say, sir, I disagree.
            It was hot as blazes, though.  It was August; we would have been fools to expect any different.  We stayed with Carmen in her thick-walled apartment in the Bronx.  Each night, I was faced with a brooding question: should I leave the windows open and get bitten everywhere by mosquitoes—or close them, and wake up at six am., parched and exhausted and wonky with sweat?
Defeated by humidity, surrendering to our need for air conditioning, we ended up getting a hotel room for a few nights.  The inn was in a nice, leafy location near Central Park and the Natural History Museum—but the room was so tiny that the only place to sit, beside the bed, was the toilet.  I felt as if we’d chugged Alice’s “Drink Me” potion and were rapidly becoming too large for the furnishings.  Greg couldn’t fit in the closet even by turning sideways.
Good old New York.
&
This is one of my favorite memories:
We were searching for someplace to eat breakfast (pushing our way through the sea of tourists in Times Square), when we noticed a restaurant called The Starlight Diner.  “With Singing Wait-Staff!” it announced on its marquee.  Not knowing quite what to expect, we crossed the threshold—and were confronted with the aspect of a waiter with a microphone, running between the booths and belting out the song, “Shout!”
“What is this place?” I asked in hushed tones.
A man at a nearby table answered, “A heck of a good time.”
            “Hey-ey-yey-yey!” our waiter sang.
It turned out that the marquee had been blunt: there was in actuality, singing wait-staff.  We deduced that this was where the people who wanted to perform on Broadway started their careers.  As waiters and waitresses, they were fairly surly; but man—did they rock those solos. 
&
One afternoon when it was just Carmen and I, we were slumped on a bench in Washington Square Park, debating what to do with ourselves.  One of us finally admitted, “Well, I think we have to go to Coney Island.”
The idea had been put into our heads in the subway—there were posters everywhere declaring, “The fun is back!” above montages of roller coasters.  With the impetuousness of true adventurers, we set out. 
Public transportation in New York is astoundingly accessible—especially compared to L.A., where 60% of the real estate is devoted, in one manner or another, to private automobiles (if you’ll forgive a conceit, to having the ability to get out of L.A.).   In New York, trains screech underground.  Greg repeatedly compared the subway to teleportation.
It took us an hour to ride the subway to Coney Island.
            It took us about an hour to ascertain, staring at the mess of slipshod and unappealing carnival rides, that the fun was not back.
            But we stuck our feet in the Atlantic, and complimented each other on our guts and whimsy.
&
On our last Sunday before leaving, Carmen took Greg and me to Central Park.  We sat on boulders, watching a practice baseball game.  Bandstand music wafted from behind us on the hot breeze.  Before us were American elms, and above them rose the blue towers of the city.
I’ve never felt more proud to be from these United States. 
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My town is a one-horse town (or its modern equivalent—it only had one stoplight for most of the time I was growing up).  I tell you this because knowing the perspective of a travel writer can help the reader understand what she notices, and what she’s forced to overlook.
            My town is a one-horse town in Northern California.  A small place.  A pit stop in the wine country.  New York, now: New York is so big that its bureaus have their own accents. 
I’m a compulsive note-taker.  While I was in New York, my pages stayed blank. 
Small places hold out moments of pure idiosyncrasy to the traveler--a stranger's smirk, a piece of graffiti, an abandoned CD.  It seemed as though the gigantic city, by contrast, didn’t allow anything so precise.  I was overwhelmed.  Pleased—but overwhelmed.  It wasn’t until I was sitting on a plane in Minneapolis, streams of water crossing the porthole window in zigzag paths, a mosquito bite on my finger slowly becoming infected, and lightning creaking the world outside, that my faculty of description came awake.
I’ve skirted around this post for two months, gathering up and sorting through my impressions.  In the end, all I can say is that I got a taste, this trip, of how New York can inspire passionate devotion.  I’ve been humming the words of a Cole Porter song while writing this:

“I happen to like New York; I happen to like this burg,
And when I have to give the world a last farewell,
And the undertaker starts to ring my funeral bell,
I don't want to go to heaven, don't want to go to hell.
I happen to like New York.”