autoliterate

Larry Levis "Whitman"

2012-02-24T08:27:00.004-08:00

Whitman:

“I say we hadbetter look our nation searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosingsome deep disease.” -Democratic Vistas

“Look for me under your bootsoles.”

On Long Island, they moved myclapboard house

Across a turnpike, & thenfelt so guilty they

Named a shopping center afterme!

Now that I’m required readingin your high schools,

Teenagers call me a fool.

Now what I sang stopsbreathing.

And yet

It was only when everyonestopped believing in me

That I began to live again—

First in the thin whine ofMontana fence wire,

Then in the transparent,cast-off garments hung

In the windows of the poorestfamilies,

Then in the glad music ofCharlie Parker.

At time now,

I even come back to watch you

From the eyes of a taciturnboy at Malibu.

Across the counter at thebeach concession stand,

I see you hot dogs, Pepsis,cigarettes-

My blond hair long, greasy,& swept back

In a vain old ducktail,deliciously

Out of style. And no onenotices.

Once I even came back asme,

An aging homosexual who theTilt-a-Whirl

At county fairs, the chilledpaint on each gondola

Changing color as it picked upspeed,

And a Mardi Gras tattoo on myleft shoulder.

A few of you must have seen myphotographs,

For when I looked back,

I thought you caught themeaning of my stare:

Still water,

Merciless.

A Kosmos. One of the roughs.

And Charlie Parker’s graveoutside Kansas City

Covered with weeds.

Leave me alone.

A father who’s outlived hisonly child.

To find me now will cost you everything.

-Larry Levis, from his Winter Stars

Jaguar Mk VII

2012-02-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

This image just in from photographer Alison Langley. My guess is: a 1956 Jaguar Mk VII. But I'm not very up on big English saloons of the 1950s. I know that a big Jag was one way to go if you wanted walnut-and-English-leather ambience without paying for Rolls or Bentley. Never could quite figure where Daimlers fit into the English car class-system. Saw the Queen riding in one, once.

Toolboxes & Workshops

2012-02-08T18:02:00.000-08:00

Brooklin Boat Yard. Brooklin, Maine.

Don's toolboxes. Marfa, Texas

Dan Picasso's shop. Marathon, Texas

Don's bike shop. Marfa, Texas

Don's bike shop, Marfa Texas

Socket set from Liberty Tool. Brooklin, Maine

Toolbox. Brooklin, Maine

Bill Grant's Boatyard. Sedgwick, Maine.

Writing room. Brooklin, Maine.

Rob Fischer at Chinati

2012-02-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

Rob Fischer was Chinati artist-in-residence at Marfa this winter. This piece--shed with steel frame and glass panels-- was powerful, delicate, strange. At the old Marfa Ice Plant on Oak Street---a musty, cavernous space, like an ancient indoor hockey rink--RF hoisted his glass shed high into the air using ancient ice block-tackle, then spun it around, smashed it, & filmed it. I was aboard with Rob for while while the spinning & smashing was going on...wasn't sure the tackle would hold....it felt a bit like being on an Italian cruise ship, except the captain wasn't abandoning ship.

THE O'BRIENS in Booklist

2012-02-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Review of The O'Briens in Booklist (Feb 1 2012)
“Illuminating . . . . an epic along the lines of Middlesex in the way it follows a family through time and examines the results of their actions . . . . A brooding novel, engrossing in its scope and detail, The O’Brienskeeps sight of the family’s personal stories amid the larger history of much of the twentieth century.” —Booklist, February 1, 2012

You can pre-order THE O'BRIENS at Amazon. U.S. pub. date is March 6, 2012.

A.R. Ammons poem "Driving Through"

2012-01-31T07:04:00.000-08:00

Driving Through

by A. R. Ammons

In the desert midnight I said

taking out my notebook I

am astonished

though widely travelled having

seen Empire State and Palestine, Texas

and San Miguel de Allende

to mention extremes

and sharpened my pencil on the sole

of my shoe

The mountains running skidded

over the icy mirages of the moon

and fell down tumbling

laughing for breath

on the cool dunes

The stone mosaics of the flattest

places (parting lake-gifts) grouped

in colors and

played games at imagery: a green

tiger with orange eyes, an Orpheus

with moving fingers

Fontal the shrubs flooded

everything with cool

water

I sat down against a brimming smoketree

to watch and morning found the

desert reserved

trembling at its hot and rainless task

Driving through

you would never suspect

the midnight rite or seeing my lonely house

guess it will someday hold

laurel and a friend

in Collected Poems: 1971-1971,

orig. in Corsons Inlet (Cornell U P, 1965)

Marfa Trucks. 73-87 GM. West Texas Vernacular

2012-01-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

Okay, love the poems, but it's time to get back to metal. Trucks. Don't know why I like 'em, exactly, but I do. Perhaps it has to do with growing up in an apartment in the middle of a city, with a European father, and living inside a totally truckless culture. They came to symbolize removal, freedom, escape. The trope still has pull. Trucks also mean the West to me. When I worked on a cattle ranch in the Alberta foothills in the 70s I drove a '61 Chevrolet Apache from the ranch to the beer parlour in Sundre, Alberta every Saturday night; and once to the Calgary Stampede. Then Toby Clark and I headed from Alberta to Texas in 1984 in a 1-ton grain truck, a 1952 Chevrolet. Oh I forgot to mention learning to drive when I was 12 in Ste-Marguerite Station, Quebec in a 1952 Chevrolet pickup with a suicide knob and Montana plates.

Now we spend a piece of the year in Marfa, Texas where there's a warm wind, plenty of dust, and no rust, so old trucks around: it's distracting. Here are a few examples of everyday old trucks: West Texas Vernacular Vehicles. All 1973-87 Chevrolets and GMCs, except the handsome 1958 Chevy immediately below.

My Brilliant Careerism, part 10

2012-01-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

My new novel The O'Briens will be published in the US March 6 2012 (Pantheon.) Starred review in Publishers Weekly. You can pre-order at Amazon.

The O’Briens

Peter Behrens. Pantheon, $25.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-307-37993-1

Afamily saga spans the 20th century, from Pontiac County, Quebec, to Venice Beach, Calif., and beyond, through two world wars and countless intimate tragedies, in Behrens’s powerful second novel (after The Law of Dreams). Joe O’Brien, the eldest of five children, takes on the role of patriarch at age 13 when his father is killed in the Boer War and his family struggles to make a life in harsh northern Quebec. Joe’s business savvy, the power he feels in his bloodline, a strong work ethic, and a mentor in a well-traveled local priest help Joe build a lumber business by the time he’s 15. But difficulties remain: their new stepfather, who married their mother six months after their father’s death, molests Joe’s little sisters and hardens all the O’Briens—to his own detriment. This is a family possessed of a “strange, rough beauty,” as the priest describes them, and it’s this dichotomy that keeps them struggling internally long after they leave Pontiac County. Joe wins a construction contract for a railroad project that takes him to the Selkirk mountains of British Columbia and then to Venice, Calif., where, en route to Mexico, he visits his brother, Grattan, and meets Iseult Wilkins, who has just taken the first risk of her life by moving into her own apartment near the Beach. Iseult is soon on friendly terms with not only Grattan and Joe but also their gruff sister Elise, who sells the young woman a camera. By choosing Joe, Iseult welcomes a riskier, messy existence, and what follows, as their children age and the couple grows apart, is just that. Moments of grace and romance are rocked by cruel words and violence in this epic, a piece of rough beauty itself. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (Mar.)

Don McKay & the syrinx of speed

2012-01-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

Ode to My Car

by Don McKay

As if. As if it oiled your idle

notions, machined,

massaged them till there was no

clunk no hand me that spanner no

crank 'er over.

As if motor were simply the syrinx of speed as if

movie movie all you ever have to pay is your attention, focus

on the docudrama in the windshield, stay tuned

to the hummingbird who hums in the accelerator, in the cylinders

the six brave heart attacks are singing and the clutch

performs the sigh with which the lovers shift into

more comfortable

positions:

there.

Something has come from nothing, as if

a handful of its blackberries had been

gathered. Something in a tooth

deserves to speak in tongues. Something in a consonant

attends its vowels, as if

minuet. Synchromesh.

Momentum. Here lies the precise

mystery of transmission.

in Apparatus (McClelland & Stewart, 1997)

The Detroit Auto Show. Other cities have art fairs...

2012-01-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

These billboards were up in Detroit during the auto show in early January. Great to see GM embracing it's heritage instead of driving away from it, too often in something like an Aztek. Can they come up with new cars as wild, dreamlike, & stylish as these bombers but translated into a language that makes sense for a planet waking up to global-warming? Or has the moment, and the need, passed? Maybe GM and the car industry is no longer in the business of engineering dream machines. Maybe Apple does that for us now. Maybe its all in the cloud. Maybe if you really want to drive something with the crazed feline style of a '59 Impala, you'll have to find yourself a '59 Impala; otherwise, it's Volts,Volts, Volts.

Major Jackson, "Indian Song"

2012-01-23T08:09:00.000-08:00

Indian Song

Freddie Hubbard’s playing the cassette deck
forty miles outside Hays and I've looked at
this Kansas sunset for three hours now,
almost bristling as big rigs bounce and grumble
along I-70. At this speed cornfields come
in splotches, murky yellows and greens abutting
the road's shoulder, the flat wealth of the nation whirring by.
It's a kind of ornamentation I've gotten used to—
as in a dream. Espaliered against the sky's blazing—
coud-luffs cascade lace-like darkening whole fields.
30,000 feet above someone is buttering a muffin.
Someone stares at a Skyphone, and momentarily—
a baby’s cry in pressurized air. Through double-paned squares
Someone squints: fields cross-hatched by asphalt-strips.
It is said Cézanne looked at a landscape so long he felt
as if his eyes were bleeding. No matter that. I'm heading west.
It's all so redolent, this wailing music, by my side
you fingering fields of light, sunflowers over earth,
miles traveled, a patchwork of goodbyes.
-Major Jackson

Jackson's latest book is Holding Company (W.W.Norton, 2010)

Fireball Roberts

2012-01-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

I've always had a thing for 1959 Pontiacs and this is maybe the coolest poncho I've seen. The photo is from the Fireball Roberts website:

From the website: "Tragedy certainly describes the end of the life of Edward Glenn "Fireball" Roberts..."

The Ford F100 thing

2012-01-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

People are passionate about F100s and I can see why. They are a hardy and good-looking truck. When I worked as landscaper in Banff in the early 1980s we used a beige 1968 F-100. It was a rugged machine that never let us down except for vapor-lock on a hot day. We would head off into the bush with the truck, following the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks, digging up small spruce trees from the CPR right-of-way that we would replant as hedges in town.
"Railways" in Canada are "railroads" in the US.
I saw this very basic 1982 F-150 on ebay: it's in Maryland, and it's the sort of truck I like: plain clean cheap.
Then there's this 1969 F100 "Custom Cab" in Oregon that looks like a great truck.
Saw this 1967 F100 "Custom Cab" yesterday in Alpine TX: cleanest example of the genre I've see in in a while.

A great thing about the F100 & F150: there are a lot of parts out there. This lineup is in southern Saskatchewan. There's another, very similar, on the edge of our town in W. Texas.

From the Upriver Bus

2012-01-21T06:19:00.000-08:00

("Do you want a little context..bus-rides between Montreal and Fredericton, St. John River Valley winding northward for a western destination (Montreal), the long period before I finally got a driver's license at the age of 44."-BB)

"From the Upriver Bus"

by Brian Bartlett

At a steering wheel wide as a ship’s wheel

he sighs high, comically small.

Unknown others drone downriver, bearing

lumber or livestock, furniture or oil.

His hand, a winter-wrinkled leaf,

floats up toward the windshield.

His hand held up – not for a holdup

with a pistol, but for a greeting

unpremeditated as a kiss – brings him

no cheque, no deer meat, no

rainbow-papered gift on the doorstep.

Like a lone birdwatcher saluting another

if neither thinks he owns the meadowlark, like

a swimmer flinging one word in mid-lake

to a stranger swimming from the opposite shore,

he hardly thinks of the gesture he makes.

When this river country was broken

by a trail a storm could erase, a man

with frost-hooded eyebrows sped along

in a sled, his family half hidden in fur.

Bells of a stranger’s horses

became clearer and clearer.

Gloved hands, calling forth their imminent

gestures, slipped free of reins.

Struck by great waves, two ships warning

or threatening each other

startle the dark with blinking light.

Though early today his bones cried out,

he waves his unmistakable wave

as long as the sun stays above the trees.

Only when no hand answers

from behind the other windshield

does he wonder why he lifts his hand at all.

--from Planet Harbor (Goose Lane editions 1989), reprinted in Wanting the Day : Selected Poems (Goose Lane, 2003)

Dodge and Chevrolet Grainers

2012-01-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

From our Saskatchewan correspondant, Alex Emond:
Gotta coupla old grainers for you. Couldn't do much driving around when I was in Ponteix because of two sessions of freezing rain and the ensuing ' verglas ' that made it kind of foolhardy to put myself out there . The orange Chevy is for sale, sitting just off Hwy 13 in Kincaid . The Dodge ,which seems to be a few years older , was in Hazenmore. Both have nice lines.

Chevrolet 440, 1 1/2 ton, @ 1952?

Dodge 1 1/2 ton, @1940?

Horny Toad & Road Candy

2012-01-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

That is the glamorous BB herself zooming across the Deer Isle Bridge at the wheel of our 1976 GMC Sierra 15 while on a Christmas-season shoot for Santa Barbara-based outfitter, Horny Toad. The photo is up at their blog. Originally bought at Casner Motors in 1976, the GMC was in Marfa until 2010, when we shipped it up to Maine, where it's been ever since. It is available for photo shoots in the Northeast, and our 1986 Chevy Custom Deluxe (see below) is available for West Texas. Contact: himself@peterbehrens.org t718 744 8129

Home, home on the range.

Found a 4x4 edition of the truck for sale in Virginia

1986 Chevrolet Custom Deluxe: plainest of Janes. Big Bend N.P.

Big Bend N.P.

Northern Chihuahua Desert Research Center

Newlove: "Driving"

2012-01-12T06:53:00.000-08:00

DRIVING

Younever say anything in your letters. You say, 

Idrove all night long through the snow 

insomeone else's car 

andthe heater wouldn't work and I nearly froze. 

ButI know that.

Ilive in this country too. 

Iknow how beautiful it is at night 

withthe white snow banked in the moonlight. 

Aroundblack trees and tangled bushes, 

howlonely and lovely that driving is, 

howdeadly. You become the country. 

Youare by yourself in that channel of snow 

andpines and pines, 

whetherthe pines and snow flow backwards smoothly,  whether you drive or you stop oryou walk or you sit.  

Thisland waits. It watches. How beautifully desolate 

ourcountry is, out of the snug cities, 

andhow it fits a human. You say you drove. 

Itdoesn't matter to me. All I can see is the silent cold car gliding, 

walledin, your face smooth, your mind empty, 

coldfoot on the pedal, cold hands on the wheel.  

-John Newlove, from his Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992. Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill.

Picasso in Marathon

2012-01-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Visited Marathon, Texas last weekend and found interesting old metal. I like this Ford F600 because it's rugged and plain, without being menacing. Too many trucks these days look like they're designed to be action figures in some superhero movie. Never liked the trucks-on-steroids look.

I guess the owner of this 1963 Chevrolet 1/2 ton is worried about his machine being stolen so he's chained it to the house. It's a nice truck, and pretty solid, but with those tires it's not going anywhere soon.

A clean F-100, I'm guessing 1975, with what looks like original paint:

A 1961 Beetle:

The Beetle belongs to illustrator Dan Picasso,

Dan was working on the engine of his VW bus when we met him at his shop.

He had a 1955 Oldsmobile and a Ford Galaxie in-progress inside. (It's dusty in West Texas, especially with the drought.)

Back in Marfa that afternoon, the sky cleared, and a peacock was falling in love with the Custom Deluxe:

Suburban For Sale

2012-01-03T07:31:00.000-08:00

Autoliterate came across this 1988 Suburban parked by a West Texas highway with a For Sale sign on the windshield.

If AL didn't already own two trucks of the era, we would have to consider buying it. But, since we do, we're not. Haven't been out that way for a couple of days now, but the truck may still be there. The engine appeared to be the tried & true 350. It's a 2WD truck. Paint looked original, and the rubber looked good. If you're interested, give the seller a call. (See below. Local area code is 432). It looked to us like a very strong machine that has probably spent its life in high, dry West Texas. (There's a San Angelo dealer emblem). No rust that we could see. Don't know the mechanicals, have not driven it, or started it, or spoken to the owner---but everything we saw was in excellent shape, and had been well maintained. Immaculate interior--it looked like no one had ever sat in the back seat(s). People who maintain the body and interior usually take good care of the internals (engine, trans., etc.) too.

Offcenterharbor.com

2012-01-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

There is an astounding depth of the saltiest boat-knowledge back in our home town of Brooklin, Maine and this year a lot of it has come together on the videos at the offcenterharbor website. OCH is five Brooklin guys

who, if you left them on an island on Penobscot Bay for a month or two with a couple of axes and a Swiss Army knife, could probably build you a schooner. Or at least a Friendship sloop. Teach you how to sail the thing, as well. And show your six-year-old how to have huge fun rowing the dinghy. Offcenter harbor has developed a series of great lively videos packed with authentic know-how on a bunch of salty, boat-oriented topics, including this one, on teaching kids to row.

No better introduction to do-it-yourself boating, sailing, building. If you can't make it downeast this summer, a trip to offcenterharbor could be the next best thing.

West Texas Wide Tracks

2011-12-30T18:33:00.000-08:00

I have been tracking a couple of Pontiac convertibles. The 1964 Bonneville is part of the Food Shark fleet, and on days when the Shark is serving, the B'ville can be found parked on Highland Avenue or El Paso Street. Hector Sanchez pulled some major dents and repainted the car this year at his shop at the west end of town.

Out towards Chinati this evening, I was glad to see a 1963 Catalina that I've had my eye on for a couple of years. Both these Pontiacs are survivors and seem to be mostly original. My favorite kind of ride. The Catalina has an issue with its top, which I hope gets resolved before the rains return to West Texas, if they ever do.

The interior is rough--but why oh why did Detroit stop making cars this cool?

I was passionate for Ponchos as a kid. My father had a 1959 wide-track Catalina,

and a 1962 Pontiac Laurentian.

Pontiacs, and especially 1959 Catalina steering wheels, were somewhere near the source of my car obsession/fetish as a kid. (I've written about all that in an essay, "Love Cars", which you can find here.)

Most of the Pontiacs generated since @ 1975 were terminally dull, including some spectacularly ugly ones (remember the Aztek?). And now the "brand" is extinct. Though I guess no "brand" is ever beyond re-inflating, and I suppose Pontiac will be revived by GM at some point as a "brand" if not as a Division that once produced some wonderfully sleek chunks of automotive machinery.

40 years later this was someone's idea of a Pontiac.

Texas Dodge 200

2011-12-28T18:03:00.000-08:00

We're in West Texas for the winter. Looking around town I've seen a bunch of trucks to admire. Old trucks tend to last out here, because it's so dry. And the Texas highways are smooth. I like what sunlight does to old trucks. It fades the paint, of course, buffs it down to a matte that I find appealing. And I like the layering of paint, primer, and surface rust. (Don't like the word patina, but there it is.) Winter light here in the high desert is a beautiful instrument, and the air is so clear that dusty old objects often own a kind of sharp self-possession that makes the act of looking a delight. So here it is: the male gaze, focused on aged machines rather than youthful females. I admire the blue in this Dodge 200, which I estimate to be a 1970 critter.

The line started with a 100. The 200 was the 3/4 ton pickup. I don't know much about these trucks but should you want to learn more, start here. Autoliterate found one 1966 Dodge (with 24000 original miles!) for sale in Canada back in 2004 for $4200 (Dodge trucks were sometimes badged as Fargo trucks in the great white North):

There is a 1962 Dodge Power Wagon (the 4wd version of these trucks) up at ebay with a buy-it-now price of $2495. My sense is that Dodge trucks are valued quite a bit lower than Chevrolets and Fords of the same vintage.

Autoliterate admires plain-Jane trucks and there's nothing plainer than the "Sweptside Special" trucks Dodge dealers were offering to commercial and fleet buyers in the early 70s. Much prefer them to the garish, optioned-and-chromed "Dude" editions offered by the same dealers, same years.

plainest of Janes

And back to that West Texas light:

F250, CHAPTER 4

2011-12-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

Notes from photographer Jarrod McCabe on the last leg of the epic Montana-to-Massachusetts road trip with his 1971 F-250. All photographs are ©2011 Jarrod McCabe
"We spent a full day in carbondale, illinois fueling up on biscuits and gravy and surprisingly good burritos and working on clementines custom flair. meers, the blacksmith, was to do a copper repoussé on the gas cap for the main tank.

"I talked trucks with a machinist that meers knows and he'd noticed the differential was leaking a tiny bit. nothing serious, but worth adding some thread seal tape to keep it from leaking when i got home. he left for a while and came back with beers and some stainless steel screws and washers for my license plates as a parting gift. folks sure do like clementine. for a nightcap we took clementine down to the lake and lit off fireworks. it was grand.

"We left carbondale in the early morning on the 22nd. we had 21 hours of driving time ahead of us according to google maps. plans to camp were soon reconsidered as the high of the road trip began to wear off. east of topeka the roads felt a bit more like home, so we figured we might as well get there. why not end the road trip with a bang and knock off the last chunk in one fell swoop? i pulled the first 15 hours then handed her off to dom - he'd napped in the cab most of the day. coca-cola's and hot dogs brought us all the way home after 25 hours of driving. there was a bit of snow in the berkshires that turned to rain. we sure did see it all weather wise.

"It felt great to park clementine at home. i took her out after a solid nap to try and find some VR1-30, a racing oil with high zinc and phosphorous content, that tobe, my mechanic in bozeman, said would suit her engine best. the trip totaled up about 3,200 miles and she was due for an oil change. it was an unsuccessful adventure given the proximity to christmas and most auto parts stores being closed.

"Driving clementine around town was kind of nerve wracking at first. i don't know why, but i was awfully paranoid of some wild massachusetts driver slamming into her sideways and putting some sad stake into the heart of my road trip. it's a bit more congested here than kansas, colorado, wyoming, montana. i think she likes it better on those back country roads. so do i."---JM

Re. zinc: there are differing opinions on whether the zinc additive is needed for older engines. The current blend of SAE motor oil (SM, SN) that is available doesn't have it. You can buy the ZDDP additive online and add it to whatever oil you are using.

And Autoliterate shares JM's wariness of Massachusetts drivers. Every time we cross that Bay State line, the level of automotive aggressiveness and general road rage seems to amp up considerably. It was therefore odd to read a recent piece in the Portland Press Herald claiming that driving in Mass. is statistically safer than in Maine. This is apparently because the road net in Mass. is better than in Maine, which has a lot of crumbling back-country semi-highways. Hmmmm. Anyone driving in or around Boston, or on the Cape highway, may not agree.

Texas Toolbox

2011-12-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

It is really a tackle box--see the fish head?-- but I use it to keep tools for work on the Custom Deluxe. Bought the box last year, for five bucks, at a junkyard on the east side of town. I am slowly assembling a collection of Texas tools. I'm learning it doesn't pay to buy cheap tools: and when I was at Liberty Tool in Liberty, Maine a couple of weeks ago, I longed to gather a hoard of good quality second- or third-hand mechanic's tools...but shipping tools all the way to West Texas didn't seem to make much sense.

Shadow dancers, W. Texas

Maine to Marfa

2011-12-22T06:35:00.000-08:00

We're in West Texas. Finally. At seven-thirty in the morning, the sun is just up, the sky is pale blue edged with pink, and it's a chill high-desert 27 degrees out there. Yesterday by noon it was 60. A couple inches of snow are possible for the weekend: Marfa is only fifty miles from the Mexican border, but it's also 4500' above sea level and in the West it's usually altitude, not latitude, that matters when it comes to cold.
A few weeks ago we abandoned our original plan to drive the 2700 miles from downeast Maine to far-West Texas in the fifteen-year-old Volvo, with the five-year-old aboard. We flew instead. It still felt like a long haul.
We left Brooklin, Maine on Monday afternoon, and drove three hours to Freeport for a Christmastime dinner with BB's family. Spent the night in Freeport, and woke up at 3:45am. Basha's generous papa drove us to the Portland Jetport (not airport, mind you: jetport) for a six a.m. flight to Chicago. The three of us were groggy. BB and HBB managed to sleep but PB could not: he is @ four inches too tall to comfortably crank his legs into the space allotted to an economy seat, let alone snooze in one, so spent the flight reading a book he'll be reviewing for the Washington Post: James Barret's The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City, the newest vol. in Penguin's History of American Life series.
From Chicago we caught a flight to El Paso and arrived in Texas around noon Mountain Time. We had arranged for the community Trax bus to pick us at the airport and take us to Marfa, three hours to the southwest. The Trax is used by people in the Big Bend area--Van Horn, Marfa, Alpine, Presidio--to get to El Paso, for shopping trips and (mostly) doctor appointments. We spent two hours waiting outside a medical clinic for one lady so the last leg of the trip wasn't exactly speedy. But West Texas sunshine was having its usual positive effect, so even hanging about outside a medical clinic in the drear exurbs of sprawling EP was okay; at least for the first hour-and-a-half. Fellow passengers on the bus were three ladies from Van Horn, Texas ,and the French artist Wilfred Almendra, who is in Marfa with Field Work Marfa, which is a joint project of three European schools: ESBA Nantes Métropole, HEAD-Genève, and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

l'equipe Fieldwork Marfa

Almendra is a sculptor interested in studying how humankind impacts the environment. “Marfa is like a lab for me,” he says in an interview in the Big Bend Sentinel, as translated by our Parisienne/ Texan friend Valerie Breuvart Culbertson, who is the project's Marfa liaison and project manager. “My interest may be to contrast places like the Sunbelt with the authenticity of a place like Marfa.”

Marfa, The Horses AcrossThe Street

The bus dropped us off at our Marfa house around 730 pm Marfa (Central) Time, which made it an eighteen-and-a-half hour travel day. HBB dozed most of the last couple of hours, but kept waking up and demanding to know when he was going to see his Marfa copain, Victor.

Les gars avec leur poulets

PB immediately caught a ride on the bus over to Ricky Rojo's house to grab our Marfa wheels. Ricky has been babysitting the Custom Deluxe and rebuilding the transmission: the truck is in good shape, and we are contemplating a truck-trip to Austin sometime this winter.

Icy Morning, West Texas

But right now it feels great to settle in here. The three of us went out to lunch yesterday at the Food Shark, which we dream of when in Maine, and saw a bunch of our Marfa amigos. BB is setting up her winter studio at Wrong, Buck and Camp's gallery, downtown: she'll be fabricating and selling her gold and silver jewelry at Wrong this year.

P.S. PB's interview with Shelagh Rogers on her CBC Radio show The Next Chapter originally broadcast on CBC1 December 19 will air again at 4pm December 24th, on CBC1. Here's the podcast. PB did this interview at the early, Vancouver stages of a massive transcontinental head cold, which is why he sounds like he is talking from deep inside a snowdrift.

F-250 Storms the Midwest

2011-12-21T07:31:00.000-08:00

Notes and images from photographer Jarrod McCabe, on the road this stormy week in a 1971 Ford F-250, from Bozeman MT to Framingham MA:

Colorado Shell

"we stayed with some friends in colorado and gave clementine a bit of a rest saturday. she looked great against the backdrop of the rocky mountains in boulder. we lit out of denver late sunday, gassed up, and made it to eastern kansas to set up camp.

we awoke at the rest stop just over the border to howling wind and grey skies. clementine started up quick. we checked her oil and transmission fluid, prepared ourselves for wet weather and got an early start. we dodged tumbleweeds and headed east on i-70, hoping to cover some ground before we hit the storm.

we wanted to hit some back roads. colby, kansas was our jumping off point after getting 300lbs of sand for the bed and sending some postcards. the studded tires helped a lot in the early snow, but after lunch it was clear we'd need the chains. for about 50 miles we were chained up on the rear end and crawled our way to salina, ks letting ambulances pass us by.

the snow turned to rain then back to snow by morning. it would be a few hours before we passed the storm. about an hour out of salina i saw a small modern hatchback come careening over the 20 foot median straight toward us. it kicked up frozen dirt and grass as the driver tried to regain control. we watched the car slide behind clementine, maybe 20-30 feet, before it regained control.

that, was way too close.twelve hours later we arrived here in carbondale, illinois. we had some killer barbecue along the way and picked up some fireworks in missouri. our friend here is a blacksmith and we're going to try and get clementine a little flair. another day here and we're into the hard push home for christmas. --JM

Birds Before the Storm, Kansas

Kansas Lunch Stop

Prepping Gear for the Blizzard, Kansas

Chained Up And Heading East

F-250 & the Badlands

2011-12-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

Road notes, and some wonderful images, from photographer Jarrod McCabe who is on the American road this week, driving a 1971 Ford F-250 from Bozeman Montana to Framingham, Massachusetts. (Autoliterate found one 1971 F250 for sale today on ebay; looks okay from here. But it's long way from here.) All images © 2011 Jarrod McCabe

Daybreak Ford, South Dakota

"we pulled into the badlands about 1:30am on saturday the 17th.

i tested the high beams again. they can only run straight for maybe half an hour. then something happens and they flicker on an off. it was a bit worrisome the first time it happened. but just click them off and run them normal and they're fine. not sure what that's all about. the high beam switch is a small round button on the floor that is clicked with your left foot.

we woke up before sunrise to see the badlands in early morning light and take pictures. it's funny how i can wear myself down when i'm on the road so much and not even think about it, but i knew i'd get a good nights sleep in boulder, our next stop.

i ran the tank way down on our way to boulder. it was a good 70 mile stretch on 18 & 85 between Edgemont and Lusk, WY. i just had to see how far down that needle went. part of me wanted to run out of gas just for fun." -JM

Badlands N.P., South Dakota

Electric Badlands

Daybreak, Badlands.

Road at Daybreak, South Dakota

Interstate Antlers

F-250 Road Trip

2011-12-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

Autoliterate has been hearing from photographer Jarrod McCabe, on the road this week from Bozeman, Montana to Massachusetts with a new/old truck, just bought in Bozeman.
Clementine is a 1971 Ford F250 Custom. She started the trip with 90k original miles; it's her first-ever venture out of Montana. Jarrod was in Wyoming yesterday and reports everything running fine, except for a problem with the main tank; likely a fuel line or filter clogged. The auxiliary tank is working fine.

Clementine in Yellowstone Day 1

Buffalo, Wyoming, Day 2

Route 16, Wyoming

Bennington Vermont in the 1980s

2011-12-08T16:58:00.001-08:00

Something moving and disturbing about these photographs of Bennington, Vermont in the mid 1980s, which are up on the Hemmings site. Bennington had been a factory town. As with a lot of New England towns, that was long gone by the 1980s. The photographs suggest a landscape that has lost its organizing principle, a community without much sense of purpose.

The LL Bean shoot & the Fairlane

2011-12-08T16:10:00.001-08:00

Back in October we were involved in an LL Bean photo shoot over on Mount Desert Island. They were basically reconstructing a catalogue cover from the early 1960s, which had a station wagon of the era, canoe strapped on the roof, etc. I'd been recruited to be one of the characters in the scene--I think I was supposed to be "Gramps" though no one actually said that. Anyway, I was given a pipe as one of my props. The most interesting thing from my POV was this nice little Fairlane wagon that they had scouted and had come up from Massachusetts. I have a weird passion for station wagons , especially of that era and especially Fords.

I'm not sure why, but if I could have any car in the world, I would probably want a 1960 Ford Country Squire. Black, with a red interior. Like this one:

But back to LL Bean. As is the way with photo shoots, nothing much happened for a very long time while we waited for the late afternoon magic hour light that all commercial photographers seems to prefer. BB spent some time in the base-camp RV, getting make-up to make her look like some stylized version of an early 1960s mom. I don't think the art direction on this shoot was very accurate; she ended up looking, not early- but mid- to late-1960s, in a very Jean Shrimpton-esque style. No one wore that shade of lipstick in 1962. But I like being married to a supermodel. I also admired the make-up tech's toolbox. There is something very moving and aesthetically exciting about the way professionals in any field arrange their tools.

Sweater. Cap. I looked like one of the old Irish sports I used to see at the Wonderland track in Boston, weekday afternoons, betting on the ponies.

More Montreal

2011-11-29T17:48:00.001-08:00

Visiting Montreal last week, we stayed with artist friends Rebecca Duclos & David Ross in St-Henri, in the southwestern part of the city. It was always a working-class neighbourhood and, for a long time, the poorest neighborhood in Canada. It is just down the hill from perhaps the richest neighbourhood, Westmount. Herbert Brown Ames-- philanthropist, shoe manufacturer, city alderman, and Member of Parliament-- revealed southwestern Montreal's dire poverty, in 1897, in his pioneering The City Below the Hill: a sociological study of a portion of the city of Montreal. In many quality of life statistics, the district ranked below Calcutta.
There are acres of old industrial buildings. Imperial Tobacco was the big employer in St-Henri, along with tanneries, and shoe mills. Now the Métro (subway) stops here, which makes the district easily accessible for the rest of the city. The Atwater Market is a brilliant place to buy Quebec produce, and an startling variety of bread, meat, cheese. The Lachine Canal, which was a reeking industrial sewer, has been cleaned up. Many industrial buildings have been condominiumized or are in the process. This process, which has slowed down in the US as the property market has slumped, seems to be going strong in most of urban Canada.

It is probably because I grew up there, but all forms of Montreal vernacular architecture have a powerful hold on me. A lot of 19th century Montreal resembles parts of Dublin, and other Irish and British provincial cities. And parts of Montreal look like nowhere else. The crazy winding staircases may not have been the best choice for the city's subarctic winter climate, but they were cheaper to build than indoor staircases, so hundreds of Montreal streets are lined with them.

At the massive St-Henri police station/ firehouse, looking up, I noticed these bas-relief scenes of cops and robbers and firemen:

Speaking of crime, my favorite Montreal blog, Coolopolis, has a post on the latest in the city's ongoing Mafia war.

Wide-Track Pontiacs

2011-11-29T17:44:00.001-08:00

Always loved Pontiac ads from the early-to-mid-Sixties. The cars were stretched so wide and the people were so tiny. There's a good piece on the 1962 Grand Prix Pontiacs up at one of my favorite sites, jalopy journal

Advanced Design

2011-11-11T10:32:00.001-08:00

Don't often see 60 year old trucks in Maine, the saltwater state. Especially trucks like this one, clearly a survivor, not a meticulous restoration. Photographer Scott Dorrance spotted it on Park Street, just of Congress Street.

The only thing I can imagine is that the truck spent most of the last 6 decades in a
barn, or in a truck-friendly climate, like the other Portland. This is one of the Advanced Design Series trucks that GM produced 1947-55. I drove one from Banff, Alberta to Panther Junction, Texas (and back!) in 1984, with Mr Toby Clark. It wasn't the fastest road trip ever...

Deer Lodge, Montana (I think)

...as we were towing 6 canoes, and the truck wasn't up to Interstate speeds--but it was an...adventure. The best kind of road trip.

Montrèalicite.

2011-11-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

I have always been intrigued by Montreal architecture, and when I was last there, in September, on the Endless O'Briens Book Tour I went around taking photos of buildings and streets which I admired. Of course in that September light the whole place looked "beautiful"; like a (somewhat banal) movie of itself. In one of his Montreal short stories, the author Clark Blaise has a character thinking, as he's driving on a hideous road in the sprawl of northern Montreal exurbs, that Montreal can also be a heartbreakingly ugly city, one of the ugliest. And that is undeniably true, especially in, say, March. But there's also no denying its radiant power as a built place, as a vibrant & changing town with a sure sense of itself. Montreal has always possessed its own urban style. The town Montreal may remind you of most is not Paris (the only thing they have in common is the French language, sort of; the argots of Montrealais and Parisien are the same language, but only just) but Brooklyn, another mostly 19th century sprawling industrial town: row houses, neighbourhoods, industrial zones, churches. Of course Brooklyn has Manhattan across the river, which makes a difference. One o the wonderful things about Montreal compared to any other city in the world counting as major is how easy it is to leave. Cross the bridges to the south shore and in fifteen minutes you're driving past cornfields. Head north, and in forty five minutes you're into bear and moose country.

Above, rue de la Commune. Actually this part of town is much more like Dublin along the quays, or bits of Liverpool, than anywhere else. Like them it was mostly built as a 19th century trading/industrial city within the British Empire.
Most Montreal houses are joined by at least one wall with their neighbours, which makes for more efficient heating, and this city has wickedly cold Januarys.

The Victorian city:

Montreal has a pretty strong modernist moment in the 1960s; I.M. Pei's Place Ville Marie is one of the important buildings of that era. Most of what was built in the Seventies and Eighties was, by comparison, unfortunate.

Centre-ville, seen from Westmount Summit:

Street, lower Outremont neighbourhood:

The fromagerie, ave. Bernard, Outremont:

P'tit dejeuner, ave Bernard, Outremont:

Yikes, I went to kindergarden here: Notre Dame de Sion, attached to the lycee Marie-de-France.

Westmount houses:

The Hart house on Cote St-Antoine: I believe that Hart was elected to the Legislative Assembly from Trois-Rivières in the 1840s and was the first Jew to be elected to a legislature in the British Empire and then after a struggle, and a reelection, finally permitted take his seat .

Lansdowne Avenue:

More Westmount houses:

The Westmount novel genre is a bit thin. Two that immediately come to mind are Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game. And Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven. And of course there is always The O'Briens.

Mercury Monarch in Vancouver

2011-11-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

Back in July, Autoliterate came across a wonderful and mostly-original Canadian Mercury M-3 pickup in Wolfville, N.S. Mercury trucks were essentially rebadged Fords that were sold in Canada.
The Mercury Monarch was another Canada-only Ford model, and we just found one, parked out by English Bay, in Vancouver's West End. Best guess is that it's a 1951 model. Not an unrestored original, certainly. Nor is it a classic Mercury lead-sled. (See Autoliterate's post on Mercury Charlie) But it did look like a pretty cool ride, sun visor, fender skirts, suicide doors and all.

Maple leaves, a British lion, a crown. Canada, eh?

My Brilliant Careerism, part 9

2011-11-09T06:52:00.000-08:00

Just received an ARC of the U.S. edition of THE O'BRIENS. U.S. pub. date is March 6 2012, with a launch party at the Irish Arts Center in Hell Kitchen, NYC, co-sponsored by NYU's Glucksmann Ireland House and the Canadian Consulate in NYC.

(A list of events planned for NYC, TX, NC, ME and VT is up at my website. Hope to see you along the way.)

"A distinctly 20th century family epic . . . pitch-perfect. " —National Post

Nissan Figaro and Mitsubishi Space Gear

2011-11-08T07:12:00.000-08:00

I walked around Vancouver on Sunday afternoon, trying to overcome some serious jet-lag. Of course I had my camera, the Canon SX210IS, which has turned out to be a great machine, and kept my eyes open for appealing vehicles. Autoliterate has been long on literate, lately; short on autos. Time to readjust the balance.
The first Vancouver machine that caught my eye, in an alley in the West End, was this little Japanese import:

It had right-hand-drive, and a certain lustrous quality of fit and finish: Japanese cars sold into their home market seem to exceed the (pretty high) standards of fit and finish typical of the cars Nissan, Toyota, Honda, et al sell in North America. This is a Figaro, and it's a Nissan, though the Nissan nameplate is nowhere to be seen. Nissan built and sold 20,000 Figareaux in the early Nineties. They were originally intended exclusively for the home market, but a bunch went to the U.K.. And imported Japanese specialty cars are quite a hot item on the Canadian West Coast, apparently. Learn about importing Figaros and other Japanese vehicles here.
The Figaro radiates a certain Hello Kitty-esque cuteness, perhaps annoying; and I suppose a lot of car men would see it as the classic girl-car: teeny and twee. But I distrust gendering of vehicles, find it kind of boring; anyway girl-cars are generally more appealing to me than the ersatz masculinity which North American manufacturers ladle onto vehicles aimed at the man-market, especially those monstrous huge pickup trucks, which seem toylike and babyish really: enormous bruto-Tonkas.

I've spent a lot of time on the British Columbia coast this book-tour season, and have noticed that imported Japanese 4WD vans are extraordinarily popular out here, right-hand drive and all. I've seen a lot of Mitsubishi Delica "Space Gear" vans (gotta love Japanese vehicle nomenclature; and these compact, rugged-looking little vans do seem to have a lot of space for gear, though they seem rugged too, and nimble--anything but "delicate"). In the U.S., almost everything has to be huge, or at least getting bigger every year. In the rest of the world, small is tough.

The vans seem to be popular with tree-planters and hippies out here in British Columbia, and surfers, and people who spend a lot of time on bad roads through rain forest or the mountains.

I first noticed them abaord ferries to Vancouver Island and Denman Island last month. My most recent sightings were on the sedate streets of Vancouver's West End. Learn more about importing them here.

Freighters on the nod, English Bay

2011-11-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Whenever I'm in Vancouver, I walk the path along the seawall in Stanley Park, missing Maine and reconnecting with the idea of ocean. There are always bulk carriers parked on moorings out in the Bay, waiting their turns to steam up Burrard Inlet and fill with coal, wheat, potash, etc. You can tell they're empty because they are riding high. And there are more of them out there than usual: I wonder if the declining economy and the drop in commodity prices has slowed international trade? China isn't as hungry for Canadian raw materials this year as it was last year.
When I see the ships out on English Bay, I'm always reminded of lines from Bruce Cockburn's Wondering Where the Lions Are:
Freighters on the nod on the surface of the bay
One of these days we're going to sail away
Sail into eternity
Some kind of ecstasy
Got a hold on me
And I'm wondering where the lions are.
Did Bruce write the song, or have the vision, while staying at the Sylvia?--my favorite Vancouver hotel. Excellent views of English Bay. The Chelsea Hotel of the Pacific Northwest.

Well the B.C. Lions (Vancouver's (Canadian) football team) look to be heading for the Grey Cup...if they win their Western Finals, as expected...the 99th Grey Cup is being played in Vancouver, later this month. The Montreal Alouettes still have a chance in the east...but the Hamilton Tiger Cats whipped them badly last weekend. Are the Toronto Argonauts still in the running? What about the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers? The Calgary Stampeders, and the Edmonton Eskimos?

Freighters on the nod/on the surface of the bay.

Clark Blaise, Alistair MacLeod, and moi.

2011-11-07T15:38:00.000-08:00

I spent part of last weekend at the Windsor (Ontario) Book Festival. From my room on the 19th floor of the Riverside Inn I had a view of a weirdly Oz-like Detroit shining across the St. Clair River:

One of the wonderful things about this fall's Endless O'Briens Book Tour has been the chance to spend time with my old teacher and mentor, the short story writer Clark Blaise, who has a new collection The Meagre Tarmac out this fall. Clark and I have been on the circuit together over the last few weeks: Calgary, Vancouver, Windsor...

Meagre Tarmac was on the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, and is shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Prize. Reviews have been excellent--more are anticipated as the book reaches the U.S, market--and it is wonderful to see this man, a classic example of a "writer's writer", getting the wider attention and acclaim his work deserves.
BTW I wrote the introduction to Clark's collected Montreal Stories, and that book is an excellent introduction to the work.
At the Windsor Book Festival last Saturday night I read with the great short story writer (The Lost Salt Gift of Blood; As Birds Bring Forth the Sun) and novelist (No Great Mischief) Alistair MacLeod, and that was an enormous honour. Alistair was a generous teacher when I met him at the Banff Centre, thirty years ago.
From Thonmas Mallon's review of No Great Mischief in the NY Times a few years back:

month ago, the fiction of Alistair MacLeod was entirely unknown to me. The 64-year-old Canadian writer has published just three books, and ''No Great Mischief,'' his only novel, is the first of them to be widely available in the United States. Having spent the last few weeks reading, in avid succession, volumes that his Canadian devotees have been given after long intervals of anticipation, I can report that MacLeod's world of Cape Breton -- with its Scottish fishermen and their displaced heirs, the miners and young professionals it has mournfully sent to the rest of the nation -- has become a permanent part of my own inner library.

My favorite Blaise short story? There are a bunch, but one that always comes to mind: I'm Dreaming of Rocket Richard, partly because it woke me up to the possibility of writing about my hometown, Mo/ray/al. (In my introduction I wrote that Rocket Richard always pairs in my mind with Truffaut's 400 Blows.)
My favorite MacLeod story? A toss up between Vision and The Closing Down of Summer, which I first heard Alistair read at Banff, in 1981.
It was such a beautiful day at Windsor. Guys were fishing (pickerel and perch) in the St. Clair; big bulk carriers were steaming by heading for Lake Huron, leaving big, splashy waves to bang up against the river shore....and gleaming Detroit looked like anything but a rust-belt town.

Speaking of the Endlessness of The O'Briens Book Tour: we're starting to schedule events around the time of the US publication in March 2012. Right now, it looks like readings, book signing, talks, and slide shows in New York City, Maine, Vermont, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and California. Details will be going up on the website events calendar over the next few days. I've just received an ARC of the US edition from Pantheon, and it looks great.

Lee Friedlander & the cars of 1964

2011-11-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

In 1964, two young art directors at Harper's Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander's jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaarwas to obtain the photographer's best work he should be let alone to make it. It's difficult now to comprehend how anticipated next year's cars were to Americans of the 1960s, but if Friedlander was aware of this, the photographs he delivered (on time) don't betray it. Rather than depicting the cars in seductive locales, he had them delivered to parking lots near burger joints, cheap furniture stores, downscale beauty parlors and-most ignominiously of all-a used-car lot. As Friedlander says, “I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal.” The magazine's editor-in-chief was unamused, fearing that the photographs would deter car manufacturers from advertising in Harper's, so Friedlander was paid for his work and the photographs were soon forgotten-until he stumbled across them in 2010. Even a cursory study of this project reveals a compendium of strategies that would soon bring Friedlander acclaim and wreak havoc with widely accepted notions of what constituted a good photograph. Now, the Continentals, Eldorados and Mercury Meteors of 1964 have their day in this beautifully produced volume.

You can find it at Photo-eye bookstore

Looks like a 1964 Bonneville

Mercury Monterey

Alison Langley's Chevrolet C50

2011-11-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

Enough book. Enough Canada. Enough travel. Enough poetry. Time to get the Autoliterate focus back. This blog was inspired originally by my unrequited passion for gnarly old trucks. While visiting photographer Alison Langley last month, I noticed this wonderful machine in her driveway,

and asked Alison to consider it as a subject. She is usually out on her chase boat in Penobscot Bay, or at the Antigua Classic, taking pictures of classic sailboats, but she obliged me with these shots of the beast.

The C trucks were produced from 1967 to the late 80s in a variety of bodies: they were farm trucks and commercial haulers, medium-duty. (We're getting a bit trainspotterish here, I realize.) This one is in the period 1973-90 but my limited expertise can't get any closer than that. It looks to be in pretty solid shape for an old saltwater Maine truck.

Style? Yes, I would say so. This truck looks like a tool to do a job. No glamor to the truck or the job but a certain je ne sais quoi beauty, nonetheless. When you look at the photos you can just about hear the grumble of the engine, and feel the machinerumbling and grunting up toward second gear.
Form follows function=true style.

Wychwood, U of T, The Annex

2011-10-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

Been in Toronto for most of a week, book-touring. Last night read at an IFOA event in Hamilton with my fellow Anansi authors Lynn Coady, Stephen Kellman and Patrick DeWitt.

It was an excellent event at an art gallery in Hamilton, an old steel-mill town, but on the ride home we were all so exhausted from hearing ourselves talk that there was not a word spoken in the van during the 45-minute ride across the monstrous Greater Toronto sprawl.
BTW if any Torontonians are looking for signed first editions of The O'Briens, there are a few at Book City, on Bloor St., and at the Indigo store on Bay Street, downtown.
I spent most of today on foot, hiking between various meetings, and enjoying the October light and some of Toronto's neighbourhoods and buildings. My favorite neighbourhood is Wychwood Park, a bit of countryside tucked away in the middle of west end Toronto. No trophy homes, though. And lots of trees. A Canadian hardwood forest in the middle of this enormous, noisy town.

I found lots of buildings from different eras around the University of Toronto that were impressive. The Leslie Dan Pharmacy Bldg., corner of University Ave. and College Street, certainly caught my eye. During the Seventies, when I was starting to analyze my responses to buildings, most new buildings, especially in Canada, were brutal. It was a terrible time for architecture, and for Canadian cities, which were being built in hideous, urine-colored concrete.
I still feel exactly the same way about the architecture of that era--we can't tear it down fast enough, as far as I'm concerned--but there have certainly been lots of graceful new buildings since then, and it's always encouraging to see a powerful statement of the modernist aesthetic, especially when it's not an office tower.

Also much liked this U of T building (below): the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research:

The best thing about Toronto are the neighborhoods and while I walked from a meeting at College and Bathurst to another in Rosedale, I kept to the quiet and shady streets of The Annex neighborhood, which are thriving but don't feel triumphalist, yet, though I realize even the homeliest house in this part of town is well over a million dollars. Mostly they are simple, not particularly well-built houses from the 1880s-1920s. Almost all red brick, of an Ontario clay quite different from Montreal red brick. So much red brick that when I spotted this little yellow house, I had to catch it.

Ontario Road

2011-10-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

I'm on the book tour, which starts to seem endless. Airports and hotels. The only thing to do is to get in a car, get out of the city, find the country roads, and get lost. On Wednesday--no, Thursday--I headed out of Toronto, where I'm at the IFOA, for Belleville, Ontario, and a talk/reading the city's Public Library. Instead of zooming on the 401 freeway, I cut away at Port Granby/ Bond Head and followed a patchwork of little roads heading east along the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The road wound its way through rich alluvial farmland and tiny Ontario towns: a Loyalist/Irish Protestant landscape, "the Front" as it was known in Susannah Moodie's day. I kept coming across tiny brick schoolhouses---"separate (Catholic) schools" from the days when public education in Ontario (and Quebec) was denominational.

The road was...well, let me put it this way: it was not the 401 Freeway.

It woke me up to a part of Canada that freeway travel had obliterated from my consciousness. The "Eat Slow" movement suggests we also need a "Drive Slow" movement, when we're driving at all...preferably in a recycled vehicle at least 25 years old.
It's all in the details. You don't see anything at 70 mph. People hate driving now, and road trips, because their experience out there is on freeways, interstates, nowheresville fastfood colonies. There is a whole country out there. It's gorgeous and strange. I met a stonemason working on the 19th church at Wesleyville, ON, and he let me inside the building to have a look. Nothing fancy, but I do love that plainspoken Ontario style of brickwork. And the robin's egg blue paint was clearly the right choice. And the little organ has been there for 100 years.

I found my way into the town of Port Hope, and signed some copies of The O'Briens at Furby's Books. These Ontario towns look & feel so (Co. Tipperary) Irish to me. Settled as they were by Irish (Protestant & Catholic) in the 1830s

Not all brick either. Lots of stone foundations and stone buildings from the mid 1800s.

And the Loyalists were here, even earlier, and did their best to rebuild Georgian New England in Ontario.

Kubota and Queen

2011-10-25T18:01:00.000-07:00

I've been on the road (in the air, mostly) around Canada for most of the last two weeks, reading & talking on behalf of my new novel, THE O'BRIENS, which is out in Canada now (House of Anansi Press), and comes out in the U.S. in March 2012 (Pantheon Books). At the moment I'm in a hotel in Toronto and having some trouble remembering where I've been in the last 10 days. Oh yeah....Calgary, Banff, and Edmonton; but I think I've already posted about those places. Well, I flew back to Maine for a couple of days R&R, but then flew out to Vancouver last weekend. The Vancouver Writers Festival on Granville Island was wonderful, as usual, and in the middle of it I took off for 24 hours to see old friends--Blake O'Brian and Jenny Lee and their family--at their farm--Orkney Farm--on Denman Island. The trip started with a ferry out of Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, heading for Departure Bay on Vancouver Island: a 1:40 hour trip from the mainland to VI, across the Strait:

leaving Horseshoe Bay

I landed on Vancouver Island and drove an hour up the island's east side to take another ferry to Denman Island

Spent Saturday walking and exploring the farm with Blake and Jenny (also did a talk/reading at the Denman Island Arts Center). Blake is very proud of his shiny new Kubota.

The best thing about book tours is getting off track, seeing old friends, and exploring astonishing parts of Canada, such as Denman Island. (Below) is a actually a view of Hornby I., from the beach at Denman. It was supposed to rain (this is British Columbia--the coastal rainforest, after all) but it didn't.

Trees are large, out there.
From Vancouver I flew to Ottawa for the Writers' Festival, and a talk reading at the Ottawa Public Library, and an early morning walk around Parliament Hill in bright October sunshine.

I ended up sitting in the morning sunshine, jet-lagged and dazed, at the foot of the Victoria Regina bronze on Parliament Hill; another grateful subject of Her Majesty.

This afternoon I flew to Toronto, where I'm reading at the International Festival of Authors this Saturday Oct 29 at noon. There's an IFOA interview, here. I read/talk at lunch at the Womens Art Association tomorrow, October 26; that's not open to the public, but an IFOA event at Hamilton 7pm Sunday October 30th, is; so is an event at the Belleville (ON) Public Library at 6pm on October 27th.

1959 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special

2011-10-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Our south Saskatchewan correspondent, Alex Emond, noticed the 1959 Fleetwood Sixty Special in Herbert, Sask. last week. Fifties exhuberance at its best, or worst. I think the perfect car for cruising the Great Plains, where parking is not a problem.

Oh and it's for sale, too.

Weather's Good There in the Fall

2011-10-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Four strong winds that blow lonely, etc. Thanks to Ian Tyson for the song, and Neil Young for the versions he's delivered over the years. I'm on the road in Alberta, Canada. Last night at WriterFest, the book festival in Calgary, I was lucky enough to read to an SRO crowd of booklovers at the Vertigo Theatre, on a powerful list with Wayne Johnston, Elizabeth Hay, Johanna Skibsrud and Anita Rau Badami. We were introduced by Calgary's brilliant mayor, Naheed Nenshi, a reader/politician...really and truly. He says so, anyway. And I believe.
Did an another event at Audrey's Books in Edmonton tonight.
But what I've really been doing is driving a lot, and getting out and walking whenever I can.... wishing to reconnect with this powerful Alberta landscape that meant so much to me as a young man. Something about October out here: when I worked on a wheat farm October meant the harvest was nearly over and we could think about where we were going to head for to spend the money we'd been saving up all the summer.
Aspens sharp yellow and shivering in the October winds, all along the foothills...I'm trying to write this post in 10 minutes before going off to dinner and the bookstore reading, so I think I'll just put up a couple of photographs from this week, and write more about context, along with some personal history, when I have a little more time.

Strands of my own personal connections to Alberta: When I was 18 I came out west on my own steam and found a job as a hand on a cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills. I ended up going back for another season, and learned there most of what I know about horses and cattle, hayfarming and fence mending and small town beer parlours. I also learned just what I could and couldn't do on my own. The photo above was taken near Caroline, Alberta a couple miles from the GH Ranch, where I worked. Fall roundup was happening. I remember how tough it was working cattle in those aspen groves: not exactly the wide open range. But the forest is good cattle browse, and our cows were certainly free-range, and organic as hell.
Another Alberta connect for me: I put in time on a crew building and rebuilding hiking trails in the Rockies. This week I hiked from lake Louise to Lake Agnes on a trail we rebuilt in the mid-eighties. I remember hiking up that trail with Toby Clark, both of us toting Swedish rock drills on our shoulder.
No rock drills, mattocks, and helicopters this time. No grizzlies, either. This photo is moi, up at Lake Agnes.

Below: Lake Louise was looking like, well, like Lake Louise. i.e., like nowhere else.

Driving west on the Trans Canada, that first glimpse of Castle Mountain is always a thrill:

Today the wind was blowing maybe 20 knots NW, (ref. Ian Tyson: those winds sure can blow cold/ way out there). Classic Alberta autumn, and the sky was mostly clear. Down south the aspens were still blazing yellow but closer to Edmonton things were starting to look bare. I stopped at Rocky Mountain House, and walked the bank of the North Saskatchewan River, and through the site of the 19th century Hudson's Bay Co. (and Northwest Company) fur trading posts. I think the No. Saskatchewan may be the most beautiful river on the continent.
Back in in southern Alberta, on the Stoney Reserve:

Looking forward to heading back to Banff tomorrow: dinner with old friends, then another event at WordFest in Calgary on Saturday.

round ranginess of earth

2011-10-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

This poem, from David Rivard's fifth book, Otherwise Elsewhere, sums up how I start to feel ( as a green midge/ or/ as a pine tree) on book tours.

In Quebec, while driving home to Maine, after reading in Montreal.

NOTETO MYSELF

Havingsurvived self-

esteem(both low & high), like

surfacing

outof a to-do

listfor civil war

inthe heart—

Having

beena back-stabber (when said

backwas my own) or

luckyDarwinian

holderof

theAce of Spades,

inmy mind—

Gettingto see myself

as agreen midge

as apine tree looming like

afetching samurai

atthe edge

of ameadow—I get a little

tired--&strangely

everywhereI go

seemsone

stepcloser to wherever I

thought

Iwas when I left

forwherever

Iwanted to be.

Giventhe round

ranginessof earth, always

thinkingof myself—

that’sit for me, tho. Enough. No

more,thank you. No, really.

There is a there, there.

2011-10-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

from Places and Novels, a piece I wrote for the blog, Canadian Bookshelf:
I need to seed a book in a place. In my mind I plant the idea of the book in one very specific patch of ground and hope it will grow from there. Until I know where that patch of ground is, I'm lost and the story, the book, that I'm trying to write does not come into focus. I can’t grasp it. I have no traction on a story until I have a place...

The place I'm focused on now. Anyone recognize it?

My Brilliant Careerism, part 7

2011-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

I'm on the Canada book tour this fall; my schedule is posted here. I'm happy to sign books, and love to see old friends along the way.

Last weekend in Montreal I read/talked/signed my new novel THE O'BRIENS at Westmount Public Library, and at the last moment decided to include a slide show of family--that is, O'Brien--photographs.

French Appalachia

2011-09-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

Hwy 212, near Notre Dame des Bois, QC

One of my favorite roads in the world: the route from the Maine coast to Montreal. There are actually many different ways to go, none of them involving major roads and all featuring moose--rather than traffic--as the main road hazard. This stretch near Notre Dame des Bois Quebec is on my current favourite route: Quebec Highway 212 from the Maine border at Cobourn Gore ME/Woburn QC to Cookshire, QC. Then to Lennoxville and on to Montreal.
I like this road because of the farms, villages and mountains. The mountains are les Appalaches, elsewhere known as the Appalachians, which start way down in Alabama and end as the Notre Dame Mountains in the interior of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula.

La Patrie, Qc

Upland dairy farming near N.D. des Bois, Megantic County, Quebec.

It is interesting how much borders matter. I've heard people say the Canada/US border is meaningless, barely noticeable....it is actually one of the more dramatic and telling borderlines in the Western world. For one thing, along most of its three-thousand-mile length it corresponds to a geographic divide, usually riverine. In most of Quebec, the border is a squiggly line between the watershed of the St Lawrence, and the watershed of the Atlantic coast of New England. North of the border everything (water, business, culture) slopes toward the St Lawrence Valley; south of the border, rivers and the cultures flow elsewhere, toward the Atlantic seaboard and its cities. Civilizations--Amerindian and others--were shaped by this divide. (Likewise, in the West, the 49th parallel pretty much marks the divide of the Hudson Bay watershed and the Gulf Coast watershed (east of the Continental Divide in the Rockies, that is). The Canadian "Nor'West" was explored and organized into the Hudson's Bay Co. fur empire, along rivers running into Hudson's Bay: from where company ships would sail to England.
But I digress.
Cobourn Gore, Maine is about 2.5 hours from Montreal, but it feels a lot further away than that. Borders signify.

Montreal. Not Maine.

Autobody & Ballroom Marfa

2011-09-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

AUTOBODY

CURATED BY NEVILLE WAKEFIELD

featuring the film NORTH OF SOUTH WEST OF EAST

All events are free and open to the public.

_______________________________________________

(Fall is happening in Maine, with beautiful sunny days (so far). Apples have fallen, and been gathered; breezes out on the Reach tends to NW; and we start to think of our winter home in West Texas.

One of the reasons we like Marfa so much is events like this one, upcoming at Ballroom Marfa.

Another reason we like Marfa is old trucks and the Marfa guys who work on them. Speaking of autobody, check out Hector Sanchez's work on our truck at H&M Auto in Marfa (just behind Mando's) )---PB

AutoBody, curated by Neville Wakefield, explores the mythology of the American automobile through the carcasses of an industry turned art. From Robert Frank to Richard Prince, the automobile has been the driving force of American freedom: its promise of escape provided in an image of mobility. However, as JG Ballard pronounced over 40 years ago, "the car as we know it is on the way out... for as a basically old fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashion idea: freedom." The American dream that it once represented, and freedom-the idea it once enshrined-may, like the car itself, be turning obsolete.

With a nod to those windshields that cinematized landscape, AutoBody features the newly commissioned four-channel video work, North of South West of East, by emerging artist Meredith Danluck and produced by Matthew Shattuck. Shot on location in Detroit, Michigan and Marfa, Texas, North of South West of East uses the car as an entry point, a subtle connective tissue, between the equally loaded but seemingly disparate archetypes of the Cowboy, the Rebel, the Immigrant, and the Actress. Eschewing the simplification of abstraction, the film employs the mainstays of narrative with a strong focus on temporality. Each of the four character's retention of the past, attention to present actions and future anticipation play out on separate screens simultaneously manifesting both mobility and stasis-the chronic existential crisis that is American identity.

Marfa local punk band Solid Waste and New York musician John Carpenter are featured on the film's soundtrack.

This is happening at Ballroom Marfa in--where else--Marfa Texas.

_______________________________________________

FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2011

6-8 pm: Opening reception

with a performance by Mick Barr

8:30 pm: Community dinner at the Capri

followed by a performance by Mariachi Las Alteñas

SATURDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2101

2 pm: Exhibition walkthrough with artists

Learning to Drive, sort of

2011-09-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

I learned to drive on King's Highway, Goose Rocks Beach, Maine when my father would sit me on his lap and let me steer the '59 Catalina from our beach house down to Verriere's Store to pick up the Montreal Star. When I was visiting cousins at the beach last week, I let my son do the same, in our aged Volvo. He was pretty good at it, too.
What a powerful memory that is: my hands on the wheel, at last; the old man trusting me to make the decisions.
One of the reasons I've always been a Springsteen fan: that song My Hometown:

"Eight years old/runnin with/
a dime in my hand/
to the bus stop to pick up/
a paper for my old man.

"Sit on his lap/big old Buick/
let me steer as we drove through the town/
he'd tousle my hair, say/
Son take a good look around/
this is your hometown..."

Next Novel (My Brilliant Careerism, part 6)

2011-09-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

Finally started next novel, in a brand-new Rhodia (No 16) notebook. Three years. Starting now.

Mid-1950s Drag Races, Spokane, WA.

2011-09-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

1950s drag racing footage shot in 8mm.

"THE O'BRIENS" (My Brilliant Careerism, part 5)

2011-09-01T05:10:00.000-07:00

PB hits the Canadian road this fall with his new novel THE O'BRIENS (House of Anansi). Tour schedule is posted on the website. Hope to see you along the way.

Six weeks now on Macleans Canada bestseller list!

Eldridge Pub. Library, Sand Cove NS, July 2011.
A library with a Loyalist section.
Don't see that in Maine.

The O'Briens comes out in the U.S. in March 2012. (Pantheon)

Banff & Thunderbird

2011-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Alex Emond spotted this relatively rare specimen, a 1961/63-era T-bird. Ornithologists out there ought to be able to classify with more precision, so please inform.

"The Bird was perched at the south end of my back lane here in Banff. Lots of little style touches adding up to a cool and confident look. Knock-off hubs that don't; a hood scoop that doesn't. Faux louvres and the Landau unit also strictly for looks...

"Maybe more faux than go...

"but I'm sure it would beat my Corolla in a quarter-mile...

"Fun, fun,fun, till the T-bird took my Daddy away."--AE

Once upon a time, the quiet back lanes of Banff led to more-or-less homemade "tourist" cabins which, in a different era, Banff people would rent by the week to summer visitors. Some were ratty, but many were charming. They had an appealing simplicity. By the Seventies, the alley cabins were outdated. Tourists and tour groups--a horde by then, not a stream--were being sold vacation packages: banal hotels/ "resorts" with all modern cons. , i.e. places that felt pretty much like anywhere else, etc. So the alley cabins were available to those of us of the hippie and post-hippie generation who'd settled in Banff. Cheap, funky places to live: mostly tiny, but cozy and charming. And they felt like...well, Banff--they didn't feel like anyplace else.

All that gone now. Decisions were made to turn Banff town into a high-density high-velocity service center for the tourist industry. Understandable...the town is smack in the middle of a famous chain of national parks, after all. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world want to go there. Starting in the 1980s Banff town was pretty much eradicated as an historic town, as a community with layers of unprepossessing, vernacular architecture from different eras, as an ex-railway town, as a place with a sense of itself. Maybe it was all over even before the Ralph Lauren store opened in the underground mall. Anyway, Banff town is pretty much an aesthetic disaster now.

When it's bad, Canadian architecture is very very bad. And when it's bad in tourist towns, it's worse.

But. The Rockies are still there, and so are the parks (Banff N.P., Koootenay N.P., Yoho N.P. , Jasper N.P.); and Canadians do national parks very very well. You could hike or ski for years, and not know half the mountain trails. So buy yourself the 7th edition of the classic Canadian Rockies Trail Guide and dodge Banff town, or use it as little as possible. Take yourself into the backcountry as deeply and as often as you can.

And don't neglect the rest of Alberta province. You can follow the front range of the Rockies all the way from Jasper to the Montana border, more than three hundred miles of astounding country, mostly empty. Hwy 40 down the Kananaskis Valley is one of the most delightful road trips, especially if Highwood Pass is still open for the season. When driving Hwy 22 south to Lundbreck and the Crowsnest Pass Highway we always saw bald eagles somewhere along the way And one you get down to south-southern Alberta, which is Blackfoot country, make sure to find your way to Head Smashed In.

XKE, 1938 Ford Woody, & Schooners

2011-08-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

There are always interesting machines out at Affordable Performance, Sean McKay's car shop on Naskeag Road in Brooklin, Maine.

Don't know what the XKE is in for, but it looked pretty healthy.
We caught this 1937--guessing-- Ford wagon...and then our camera battery died. We'll head back out Naskeag Road for more, later.

Speaking of beautiful machines, and Naskeag Point, we went out sailing Eggemoggin Reach and spied a schooner speeding on the first big NW winds of late summer.

Ho-hum. Another day in Maine.

Susan Choi & American Driving

2011-08-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

This piece by the novelist Susan Choi (American Woman, The Foreign Student, Person of Interest) first appeared on moistworks, the audioblog, in 2007. It’s certainly about music, but it’s also about driving. With Susan's permission we reprint it here.

THREE RECORD STORES

1982: Cactus Records and Tapes

I don't know a thing about music and I never will. Still, like most kids, music and its precincts define freedom for me like nothing else. In 1982 my mother and I have been in Houston, Texas for three years. Our lives have come apart as thoroughly as they ever have yet. My mother is seriously ill and disabled. My father is, ambiguously, elsewhere; in time this ambiguity will take on the legal status of divorce but it will never, even to the early years of the twenty-first century, be resolved. No matter; that knowledge wouldn't have made any difference. We rely on the kindness of young foreign students in equally straightened circumstances, if hale health. One of them, an aspiring nurse from Indonesia, lives with us in a cockroach-infested apartment in a complex my fellow Girl Scouts are not allowed to visit. She pays us some minimal rent on which we rely, although I tell the Girl Scouts she's my sister. Is there any chance they believe me? Another, a dazzlingly handsome young Iranian aspiring chiropractor, takes us grocery shopping alternate weeks in his hazardous Volkswagen Bug. We pay him some part of our take from the nurse. I sit folded in the slot behind the front seats; my mother sits folded beside the dazzling young man, a woman in her mid-forties who looks sixty, parchment paper and bones.

I get a bicycle, make a friend.

I begin to spend hours, long afternoons, whole Saturdays at Cactus Records and Tapes. It's a long, hazardous bike ride from our apartment along streets without sidewalks, stitched with crabgrass swelling from the cracks. I don't know if Houston was as hot then as it is now, but it was astoundingly hot, ninety six degrees, ninety six percent humidity, the sun an angry white bulb in the sky. Suzan Seggerman and I, pedaling our three-speeds, our feathered hair flying behind us. We're so young, we're so homely and lonely, any slight attention from any hideous male and we strain toward it, gawky sunflowers aching for sun. Suzan burns easily and has pimples on her shoulders. I am waistless, I have braces, I'm still wearing terrycloth tops from the Sears catalog. In Cactus Records and Tapes we trail aimlessly through the long aisles, the air-conditioning turning our sweat into fine powdered salt. We stay for hours. We absorb the music passively, undiscerningly, hungrily. We never, ever buy anything. Once I am picked up by a much older man, taken to an apartment to participate in witchcraft rituals, chanted at while lavender burns in a large metal cup. A young child wails, ignored, from a bedroom; a telephone incessantly rings, ignored, in the kitchen. When she sees me again my mother - shrinking, receding, clutching her twin metal canes - asks me where I go, and when I tell her, Just the record store, she asks what I do. What am I doing? Only later do I grasp what she already knows: I'm going. I'm learning how to be free.

1985: Sound Warehouse

I fall in love with Bill Sherborne at first sight and stalk him to the cash register at Sound Warehouse, where I ask him to give me a job application. Three long years, and things have changed. No longer waistless. No more braces. No more clothes from the Sears Catalog. I get the job and before my first day I get Bill Sherborne, too, but he isn't, as it turns out, the thing I take away from Sound Warehouse into the rest of my life. That's a Sony UCX-S60, which isn't some virile speed vehicle but a flimsy sixty-minute cassette. I'm listening to it right now, at ten p.m. on a Monday, while my son sleeps and entire sad, strange, plain embarrassing times of my life I've apparently failed to forget newly blossom before me, as if all this while they've been pressed into capsules, awaiting some magical touch.

The other Sound Warehouse employee who makes me his business is Chris Kemmerer: wry, sly, often standing apart in wire-rims and a vintage trench coat, smugly watching the world go by. To me he always seemed petite, but he and I were probably about the same size. Our chaste partnership somehow immediate. Bill Sherborne makes all of the turbulent weather; unperceived in the midst of those hurricane winds Chris ensconces himself as my most indispensable comrade. Bill Sherborne and I share a damp, inarticulate passion; Chris and I can't stop yakking our heads off. With Bill Sherborne I think I've ascended, become iconic and noble, a Woman in Love; with Chris, I now realize, I've stumbled upon the adult that I'm actually going to be. A gawky and talkative smarty, happiest when companioned by same.

Like all of the men in my life, Chris gives me music, but he's unique among them in discerning, many years before I do, the sort of listener I am. I still don't know a thing about music. Chris can see that I won't ever learn. And yet for me music remains the condition for freedom, the way water and air are conditions for life. Haven't I come to Sound Warehouse seeking passion and friendship, as if obeying some primal instinct?

Inventorying tapes, squaring albums, re-alphabetizing, I become exalted by the most random things: Lydon's howl; Eno's trance; The Cocteau Twins' eerie yodel. I bask in these sounds the same way that I bask in good weather: ecstatically, gratefully, entirely resigned to the knowledge that nothing I do can protract or repeat my enjoyment. I very rarely learn band names or song names; I almost never acquire the songs I most love. I still don't know why I'm like this: a girl secretly starring in her own movie, who wants the soundtrack to happen to her, without lifting a finger.

Somehow, Chris Kemmerer understands this. While Bill Sherborne records whole albums for me, or collections of the best songs by a given artist (Todd Rundgren) or a given songwriter (George Harrison) - trying to teach me, in this realm as in so many others - Chris, within the first year he's known me, gives me mixed tape that I like for my soundtrack about as well as anything I've heard since. He doesn't try to inform me about the musicians. I'm not expected to seek out other records they've made. The tape is self-sufficient: it's intended for basking. Do I continue to like it just because I liked it so much then, when I was only seventeen? Is it like comfort food, permanently beloved because early consumed? It's possible; but there's a lot of other stuff I liked at seventeen that I can't endure now.

By 1985, one other big thing has changed: I'm a licensed driver. I take Chris' tape and jam it in my cassette deck, and I drive and drive and drive the endless freeways of Houston, as fast as I can. Great slabs of concrete that ascend and descend and describe graceful arcs in the air. Dividing and merging, separating and joining, sometimes even falling asleep: at seventeen I drive drunk with no fear, and I don't wear a seatbelt. The Tape urges speed: Chris and I used to joke that Houston has worse gravity than the rest of the planet. It's a city of reduced expectations, of torpor. We all dream of leaving and we never get out. What the hell is the escape velocity for this dump, anyway? It's late at night, I'm alone on the road; I step hard on the gas pedal, lift off the ground.

1988: Tower Records

But I've fudged for the sake of the story. The truth is, by the time that Chris gives me The Tape, we both know that I'm leaving.

I'd gotten into Yale, which was, in the context of my life at that time, akin to having been chosen for a mission to the moon. No one I knew had gone there, or anywhere near there, or anywhere like there. I myself was only certain it was going to change my life, not as in, make some alteration in my life, but as in, drop an entirely new life into the slot where the old life had been, so that the old life, down to its last grain, no longer existed.

But at Yale I kept getting homesick. Every winter, spring, and summer break, I rushed home. Sometimes, when I went home, I worked at Star Pizza, which was across the street from Sound Warehouse and down the block from Kinko's Copies, where Chris Kemmerer was now working. Sometimes when I went home I worked at the River Oaks Theatre, which was where Bill Sherborne was now working. I kept making damp angst with Bill Sherborne and I kept yakking all night over coffee with Chris Kemmerer, while, at school, I jittered uneasily from one department to another until, in the late summer of 1988, I told my parents if I didn't take a leave of absence from Yale, I might leave for good.

But I knew that I couldn't go home. Something had jammed the works and I kept toggling, back and forth, back and forth, never moving upward, and going home would just keep up the toggling. So I called Chris Kemmerer and somehow, in a very brief conversation, it was decided that Chris would quit his job at Kinko's Copies and drive to New Haven in his miniscule red Mazda to fetch me, and from there we'd drive to San Francisco and see what transpired.

I packed The Tape.

In San Francisco my Sound Warehouse experience got me a job right away at Tower Records, and our adventure, which could so easily have been a debacle, turned out a success. We scoured San Francisco. We felt an earthquake. We shared a six by ten room subdivided with milk crates. That December we drove East again, and whatever in me had needed settling had finally settled, and I returned to school and changed almost everything I had been doing, and I did well and throve.

But before all that, before the rest of my life, when we were first driving to San Francisco, Chris had pulled into the left-hand emergency lane and made me take the wheel.

I'd never driven a stick. Chris said, "Keep shifting - up - up-up!" and when at last I'd reached fifth he said, "just leave it there," and I would, for as long as six hours, while The Tape and five other tapes played, until we had to eat or pee or get gas. Then I'd stall out the car on the offramp, and we'd coast to a stop. Into the West! Out of Texas, through Albuquerque and Flagstaff, past the Grand Canyon. And then the road turned northwest toward Nevada, and it all seemed to gel: The Tape and the Mazda's momentum; the particled indigo air. The sun had set, but the twilight had not yet grown monochromatic; instead it was the richest and most nuanced landscape that I'd ever seen. Charcoal mountains in purple and blue sliding past to the east. The sky's fading gray gently drawn overhead like a cover. Along the distant seam where the desert gave rise to the mountains, a line of boxcars crept by, crayon colors, but each dimmed by evening, as if dusted with ashes. The Mazda was not air-conditioned, so that we always drove with the howl of the wind, but now that battering pressure seemed buoyant, lifting us with each ticking degree that the light left the sky. While I drove Chris filmed me with his Super 8 camera. I wonder if that footage exists, if he ever developed it. And then, while I dreamed at the wheel, my austere, lonesome road was drawn into a tumult, enfolded by mountains, the road suddenly climbing and twisting, and because I had only learned fifth I was shouting in panic and grinding the gears - until we were corkscrewing down as if poured from God's funnel, and our road shot forth out of the jumble, straight and narrow again, with the gleam of a vast inland sea stretching off to one side and a void, an abyss, on the other. A swift shadow swarmed overhead: a cloud of bats, heading out to Lake Mead. The Mazda, spent, rolled to a stop atop the great Hoover Dam.

When we got out of the car I was jelly-legged, hardly able to stand. We hung over the rail and the great blank expanse of the dam glowed at us like the face of a glacier. We'd driven all that way without a map, ignorant and defenceless. Now the sublime had ambushed us and pummeled our hearts.

Then we got back in the Mazda, restarted The Tape, and drove on to Las Vegas.

. . . . . . . . . .

Econoline

2011-08-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

This just in from our South Saskatchewan correspondent, Alex Emond:

"I espied this Dodge at a farm halfway between Vanguard and Pambrun, Saskatchewan. It is interesting how you can lose so much paint and get this surface rust, yet have no harsh body-eating rust. This truck, which is older than I am, looks good to go, and even handsomer than moi. Get yer Hollywood Hilton valet parking dude to park this unit. Much nicer than a 4-door Porsche."

"Check out this fine Econoline unit in beautiful Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan. Looks original in every way. Maybe even the air in the tires is from the early 60's...

Made in Texas

2011-08-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Our Austin correpondant Bill Geisler caught this handsome machine at the Austin Speed Shop. Bill was coming off a 4-day road trip, from Maine to Texas, (not the right direction to be traveling, in August) in an SUV, with twins aboard. Which may be why his camera hand (actually cellphone, he reports) was not as steady as usual. There's a bit of shake here, but that's what 2000 miles driving with children through the heart of summer will do.
The truck looks like a 1958 Chevrolet Apache 31 Fleetside truck with 4WD.

Old Faithful Shop, Vancouver

2011-08-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

Found this Ford C-Series image by photographer Brad Moore up at Old Chum, one of our favorite websites, always loaded with intriguing imagery. The people who operate it have an eye. We learned of the site when we happened into Old Faithful, a startling Vancouver shop that the websters also operate. They say that, "Old Chum is the inspirational image archive which informs Old Faithful Shop." Hard to describe the place, but we'll try: a very stylish Old Curiosity Shop.

Against Gravity

2011-08-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

AGAINST GRAVITY

Blue sky, ungated clouds, & on a sand-pitted

highway sign the number 10 stands out--

a minor footnote in a monograph on drugs,

a reference instructing the reader to study

my nap on the floor of a Ford Econoline

summer after high school. As if rest, & only rest,

were what we found ourselves made of, sometimes.

Though rest is only one trait, actually, when

you've been hitching between Tucson & El Paso

and gotten picked up by a van. The equally ingenious

others look like tie-dye & restlessness, like

rest stops & silvered heather, maybe jimson,

and a little lantana raising its nippled red speckles

into the scent of sagebrush rained on & drying.

They got me high, three men & a woman costumed

estimably in the style of out-of-work jesters,

jovial people of 1971, wearing the standard issue--

fusty cloches, velveteen pants, embroidered emblems,

with shiny balls like cat bells dangling

off one or two ears. For one a self-etched tattoo,

its motto the equation ACID=BLISS framed

by a multiplying fungus or exploding chloroplast.

For another, a fu manchu & fedora. A synaptic Apache

snake cinching the woman's frayed macrame belt.

Mirror sunglasses for all. And small mirrors,

like tiny ponds, frozen pools, had been sewn

onto the woman's India print blouse by some

Kashmiri laborer, who, if he could have looked into

them, might have seen me dozing off, stoned

on pan hash, bits of myself reflecting back,

scattered, a tired grin from the woman's

right sleeve, the puffed wrist, pale ear at the tip

of a breast, nose on her stomach. And haven't I

always loved being broken up & abrogated by sleep?

But when I woke we had pulled off the road

into a ranch. From the tape deck "Brain Salad Surgery"

blared, a form of premature senility disguised

as endless synthesizer riffs. For a second, in the nazz

and compression of noise, still stoned, I thought

they intended to kill me. An intuition

so melodramatic & dumb the sight of two of the men

kissing in the front seat had to wipe it away.

I had never seen two men kiss, & the surprise,

which in another setting might have shocked,

even disgusted, my sheltered murmurous little self,

somehow reassured me. The kiss implying

not so much gentility as distraction.

Then, out of the eddies of shade, the woman

ran, having tossed off her incongruous imitation

alligator heels, naked now except for

purple tights, she ran & turned cartwheels

three times across the yard. Gravity.

Gravity. They had wanted to visit a friend

who, they claimed, was connected to anti-

gravity research being conducted there.

Merely a windbreak occupied by

an adobe shed and barn, it seemed abandoned,

as if during the night the hard rains,

the lightning, had chased away the enemy

of gravity, & now we were to take his place.

-David Rivard, from Wise Poison (Graywolf, 1996).

Aisle a Ho

2011-08-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

From Isle au Haut in Penobscot Bay photographer Winky Lewis sent these images of summer kids and captive vehicles. Barging is expensive, so cars and trucks that make it out to Isle au Haut tend to stay there. The only scheduled connection with the mainland is a daily mailboat out of Stonington, which carries mail, people, and some freight, but no vehicles bigger than bikes.

Because this is Autoliterate, after all, I'm going to nerdishly try to identify the machines that Winky shot. It's not quite trainspotting, perhaps, but it's close. I believe this guy (above) is snoozing in the same '66 Dodge Dart, as below.

And what could this be but a 1952 Pontiac Chieftain?

No split windscreen? Must be a 1954 Chevrolet "Advanced Design" truck.

Matched pair.

No state roads--and no staties--on Isle au Haut, so up-to-date registration is not a priority.

I believe this gorgeous beast is a 1948 Plymouth.

I went to a fishing camp with my father when I was eleven. Our guide had one of these Willys Jeep wagons, circa 1960. I forgot all about fishing and spent the afternoon behind the wheel, driving up and down a range road in Quebec.

See? No state roads on Isle au Haut. Not a lot of traffic.

There are les than a hundred year rounders Isle au Haut , with a few more summer residents. A chunk of the island is a part of Acadia National Park. If you're looking for the mailboat schedule, here it is.

My Brilliant Careerism, part 4

2011-08-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

PROFILE

Peter Behrens blends fact and fiction in family saga The O’Briens

JOHN BARBER

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 29, 2011 4:30PM EDT

Last updated Monday, Aug. 01, 2011 10:07AM EDT

(P.S. "The O'Briens" comes out in the US in March 2012 (Pantheon).

Autobody at Ballroom Marfa

2011-08-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

AUTOBODY is the upcoming show at Ballroom Marfa.

MEREDITH DANLUCK
Fairlane, 2009
Digital C-print
30 x 40"

Autoliterate hopes that Ballroom invites Hector Sanchez, Marfa autobodyman extraordinaire, to the opening. See more Autoliterate posts about HS and his work on the Custom Deluxe here and here.

Autoliterate en France

2011-08-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

From our correspondant a Paris, Sam Holdsworth:

"Is this a car guy who needed the boat accessory, or a boat guy who needed the car accessory? Either way could you find a better tender for this massive iron barge than an Amphicar? Indispensable if you happen to have forgotten the baguette at the last lock."--S.H.