Monday, September 11, 2006
DAY SIX: Travel from San Diego to Rock Hound State Park, New Mexico
I've had this Sufjan Stevens song stuck in my head, the only one of his I know. It was in the movie last night and I've played it all day from a mixed cd Haden Nicholl gave me. It's called "Chicago," where I'm headed, and about scrappy travel and love and mistakes. "I made a lot of mistakes," he says over and over. It makes me weepy (I can't figure out if I've made a lot of mistakes or not enough.) And there's a youthful gaggle of singers who make everything grand, important, and dramatic. Just the sort of song to get through wide expanses of desert in overpowering heat and little sleep.
I got up with early with Colleen and Jason so I could take their portrait before Colleen headed to school. Jason and I had breakfast together and chuckled over things I can't remember at the moment. I realized I should have taken more documentation of their apartment, and especially the car (as I watched Colleen drive it away.)
I've taken to driving like a drug. Once I get started I don't want to stop for anything. I could have driven an hour north of the 10 in California to see the Salten Sea. Or two hours north of here to see my friend Nancy Rosenbaum. I get locked on how many miles I've acrewed and how many I can get under my belt before it's absolutely necessary to stop.
I listened to "Nietzsche in 90 Minutes" on audiobook, and began "Memoirs of a Geisha" before I began to fall alseep. The Nietzsche narrator described "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" as the sort of long-winded overwrought book liked only by teenagers, on par with Hesse and Dostoyevsky books. The 15 year old character Dwayne in "Little Misss Sunshine" reads this book and models his life after the philosopher/psychologist's "will to power" maxim. It makes me think that there is a reason we read certain books during high school. It's sort of absurd to think that the only audience for "To Kill a Mockingbird" is 7th graders, but that is when most of us read it and are affected by it. It's as if there is this lineage of writers who, without knowing it, write specifically for that audience. Adults maybe think them boring or dramatic, but where these authors fail one audience, they win over another one. It takes a convergence of very specific but equally random elements to speak to this population of alienated open readers. I'd like to compile a list of these elements and the books that successfully combine them. I am sure many of them lie in the bildungsroman genre, like "Jane Eyre" or "Demian." But there have to be other random books that make a 15 year old's neckhair stand on end because she's finally found the character who thinks the very same nasty thoughts she thinks.
And then I began thinking about beginnings and endings again. And how we are not fully conscious of our own life beginnings nor, typically, our ends. And that means the part we are most familiar with is the middle—the long confusing winding middle. Maybe this is why the beginning and end of a particular time period in our life is appealing to define and rally around. We have more control over these smaller stories and can celebrate the bookends, whereas we do not have that opportunity with our own lives.
I've had this Sufjan Stevens song stuck in my head, the only one of his I know. It was in the movie last night and I've played it all day from a mixed cd Haden Nicholl gave me. It's called "Chicago," where I'm headed, and about scrappy travel and love and mistakes. "I made a lot of mistakes," he says over and over. It makes me weepy (I can't figure out if I've made a lot of mistakes or not enough.) And there's a youthful gaggle of singers who make everything grand, important, and dramatic. Just the sort of song to get through wide expanses of desert in overpowering heat and little sleep.
I got up with early with Colleen and Jason so I could take their portrait before Colleen headed to school. Jason and I had breakfast together and chuckled over things I can't remember at the moment. I realized I should have taken more documentation of their apartment, and especially the car (as I watched Colleen drive it away.) I've taken to driving like a drug. Once I get started I don't want to stop for anything. I could have driven an hour north of the 10 in California to see the Salten Sea. Or two hours north of here to see my friend Nancy Rosenbaum. I get locked on how many miles I've acrewed and how many I can get under my belt before it's absolutely necessary to stop.
I listened to "Nietzsche in 90 Minutes" on audiobook, and began "Memoirs of a Geisha" before I began to fall alseep. The Nietzsche narrator described "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" as the sort of long-winded overwrought book liked only by teenagers, on par with Hesse and Dostoyevsky books. The 15 year old character Dwayne in "Little Misss Sunshine" reads this book and models his life after the philosopher/psychologist's "will to power" maxim. It makes me think that there is a reason we read certain books during high school. It's sort of absurd to think that the only audience for "To Kill a Mockingbird" is 7th graders, but that is when most of us read it and are affected by it. It's as if there is this lineage of writers who, without knowing it, write specifically for that audience. Adults maybe think them boring or dramatic, but where these authors fail one audience, they win over another one. It takes a convergence of very specific but equally random elements to speak to this population of alienated open readers. I'd like to compile a list of these elements and the books that successfully combine them. I am sure many of them lie in the bildungsroman genre, like "Jane Eyre" or "Demian." But there have to be other random books that make a 15 year old's neckhair stand on end because she's finally found the character who thinks the very same nasty thoughts she thinks.
And then I began thinking about beginnings and endings again. And how we are not fully conscious of our own life beginnings nor, typically, our ends. And that means the part we are most familiar with is the middle—the long confusing winding middle. Maybe this is why the beginning and end of a particular time period in our life is appealing to define and rally around. We have more control over these smaller stories and can celebrate the bookends, whereas we do not have that opportunity with our own lives.
