some driving books
Jan. 29th, 2004 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbWhen I was picking out books to bring with me on my cross-country drive this fall, I vastly underestimated the amount of time I wouldn't have for reading. I guess I knew that if I was going to be driving for, say, nine hours one day, I wouldn't be reading during that time, but I don't think I grasped it at a gut level. Nor did I realize that when I stopped driving, I would either go to an open mike and pay attention because these were all people I'd never seen before, or spend the evening exploring a new or familiar city, or be too tired for any intellectual exertion more strenuous than The Daily Show.
So I must have stuffed dozens of paperbacks (and a few hardcovers) into my suitcase and my backpack and my jacket before I left, and I read only a few of them, some of which I didn't even finish until the Minnesota trip this winter. Most of them were novels, but here are a few that weren't.
When I was planning the trip, several people asked me if I had read William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. I told them that I hadn't (and I still haven't), but that it was kind of beside the point. His book is a classic about traveling along the back roads of America and exploring the country deeply. My trip was about speeding down the interstates, accumulating superficial impressions. You could make a fine case that his journey was a better one to make, but it just wasn't relevant.
So I was happy to see run across the book Roads, by Larry McMurtry, who takes the same approach I did but writes better about it. He compares the interstates to the great rivers of nineteenth-century America, like the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Rio Grande:
As soon as I started reading Roads, somewhere in the Southwest, I made a rule--at first without knowing it--that I would only read it when I was actually on the road. Not literally, of course--when I stopped for lunch or breakfast or dinner or rest or, well, to read more of McMurtry's book. But as soon as I checked in at a motel or knocked on a friend's door, the book was off-limits until the next day. When I had an overnight stay I'd read a little more of Tam Lin or Burning Chrome, but in those few places where I stopped driving for a few days at a time--Asheville, Morristown and Manhattan, Boston, Minneapolis--I'd turn to a very different book about places.
John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic is about the virtues of exploring the built environment, carefully, on foot or on bike, and about some of the things explorers find. Each chapter--bearing a title like "Lines" (power lines, railroad lines, and how they're related)--has a little observation, a little poetry, a little history all tied together. The chapter on the interstates--which can't be traveled directly by Stilgoe's pedestrian explorers--looks at frontage roads, the backs of highway signs, and the origin of the interstate highway system as a weapon. This is one of those books that makes you see the world a little differently when you're done with it.
On a more specialized subject: Since I started performing as a singer and musician a few years ago, I've read or skimmed a lot of books about songwriting, about the music business, the logistics of touring, and so on. Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers's The Complete Singer-Songwriter, published late last year, is the book I wish I'd had from the beginning. It doesn't cover every detail of what you'll need in a press kit or what kind of effects to use with your guitar, but it's a very good beginning-to-intermediate overview of writing, performing, and recording. It's full of good advice, much of it in the inspirational form of interview excerpts from people I admire--Joni Mitchell, Peter Mulvey, Malcolm Burn, Beck, Erin McKeown. Inspirational except for the section on booking, which pretty much confirms that it's hard and there's no way to get around it. But that's a subject for another post.
So I must have stuffed dozens of paperbacks (and a few hardcovers) into my suitcase and my backpack and my jacket before I left, and I read only a few of them, some of which I didn't even finish until the Minnesota trip this winter. Most of them were novels, but here are a few that weren't.
When I was planning the trip, several people asked me if I had read William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. I told them that I hadn't (and I still haven't), but that it was kind of beside the point. His book is a classic about traveling along the back roads of America and exploring the country deeply. My trip was about speeding down the interstates, accumulating superficial impressions. You could make a fine case that his journey was a better one to make, but it just wasn't relevant.
So I was happy to see run across the book Roads, by Larry McMurtry, who takes the same approach I did but writes better about it. He compares the interstates to the great rivers of nineteenth-century America, like the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Rio Grande:
What I want to do is treat the great roads as rivers, floating down this one, struggling up that one, writing about these river-roads as I find them, and now and then, perhaps, venturing a comment about the land beside the road.In the end, much of what he writes about isn't the roads, but what the roads remind him of--people he's known, places he's been, but mostly books he's read. He's read thousands of travel books, and knows the life stories of many American writers, and is able to tie the places he visits and the places he passes to his literary life.
As soon as I started reading Roads, somewhere in the Southwest, I made a rule--at first without knowing it--that I would only read it when I was actually on the road. Not literally, of course--when I stopped for lunch or breakfast or dinner or rest or, well, to read more of McMurtry's book. But as soon as I checked in at a motel or knocked on a friend's door, the book was off-limits until the next day. When I had an overnight stay I'd read a little more of Tam Lin or Burning Chrome, but in those few places where I stopped driving for a few days at a time--Asheville, Morristown and Manhattan, Boston, Minneapolis--I'd turn to a very different book about places.
John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic is about the virtues of exploring the built environment, carefully, on foot or on bike, and about some of the things explorers find. Each chapter--bearing a title like "Lines" (power lines, railroad lines, and how they're related)--has a little observation, a little poetry, a little history all tied together. The chapter on the interstates--which can't be traveled directly by Stilgoe's pedestrian explorers--looks at frontage roads, the backs of highway signs, and the origin of the interstate highway system as a weapon. This is one of those books that makes you see the world a little differently when you're done with it.
On a more specialized subject: Since I started performing as a singer and musician a few years ago, I've read or skimmed a lot of books about songwriting, about the music business, the logistics of touring, and so on. Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers's The Complete Singer-Songwriter, published late last year, is the book I wish I'd had from the beginning. It doesn't cover every detail of what you'll need in a press kit or what kind of effects to use with your guitar, but it's a very good beginning-to-intermediate overview of writing, performing, and recording. It's full of good advice, much of it in the inspirational form of interview excerpts from people I admire--Joni Mitchell, Peter Mulvey, Malcolm Burn, Beck, Erin McKeown. Inspirational except for the section on booking, which pretty much confirms that it's hard and there's no way to get around it. But that's a subject for another post.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-01-30 06:30 am (UTC)(1) I can never figure out how much reading material to pack or not pack for a vacation or trip. Inevitably I end up reading the trashy fiction and The Economist and not reading, well, the eggheaded stuff I thought I would want to read.
(2) Blue Highways is a great read whether or not you're on the road. I've read it a few times, and love it. The author evolves a very special means for evaluating diners just by looking in the window, which has proven useful a few times.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-30 07:46 am (UTC)