J.W. Burleson photo / Boquillas del Carmen, Coah.

PHB

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Brooklin, Maine, United States
We own a 1975 GMC Sierra Grande 15 in Maine and a 1986 Chevrolet Custom Deluxe 10 in West Texas. Also a pair of 1997 Volvo 850 wagons. Average age in the fleet is 28 years--we're recycling. I've published 3 novels: THE LAW OF DREAMS (2006), THE O'BRIENS (2012), and CARRY ME (2016). Also 2 short story collections: NIGHT DRIVING(1987) and TRAVELLING LIGHT (2013). More of my literary life is at www.peterbehrens.org I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for 2012-13. I'm an adjunct professor at Colorado College and in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. In 2015-16 I was a Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Autoliterate office is in Car Talk Plaza in Harvard Square, 2 floors above Dewey Cheatem & Howe. SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUTOLITERATE DAILY EMAIL by hitting the button to the right.

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Ferrari, St Louis and Francis Parkman

 
You don't see these in Cambridge. I think they do breed Teslas here–maybe in Kendall Square, or out on 128. But Basha caught the F-car in St Louis. 
Which is where the young Bostonian, Francis Parkman, set out from in 1846, seeking adventure on the Great Plains and determined to generate a book. He had his adventures and returned to Boston to write The Oregon Trail. ,
I imagine my native ground as more or less a rectangle with Montreal, Quebec City, Boston and Penobscot Bay at its corners. When I returned to the East after several years in California, my strategy for digging back into said native terrain meant diving deep into Parkman's France and England in North America, the 2 vol. Library of America edition, published in the 1980s. As history, it is not irreproachable; but Parkman knew his ground, and he connects history to the  maps in ways that answered my own need to locate myself again in a Québec/New England geospace.

Oh and by the way, another Ferrari note: we are watching the Ferrari Formula One team go through a wild year on season 5 of the Netflix documentary series, Formula One

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