Hitting the Road

I have neglected this blog for the past few weeks by concentrating on my Substack instead. That's where I am writing more things about the political moment, and well, that's been a busy beat lately. I have shifted this blog into mostly being about music and culture, and the "listen throughs" I've been doing of legacy artists has been a fun way to focus things. I am doing another one come autumn on Richard Thompson, but in the meantime I've had to figure out what I want to write about. I am realizing that the stresses of the current politics news will burn me out if I'm not careful. I am heading off for a road trip next week, so I will turn this site into a travelogue.

My inspiration to do this came from one of my nerdiest fixations: reading 19th and 20th-century travel writing. I have my hands in two separate research projects involving travel writing as a source base and as a kind of scholarly Stockholm Syndrome I can't stop reading this stuff. One of those projects centers around travel writing in the 1970s with the theme of "finding America." After the tumult of the 60s many wondered what had happened to the country and its identity, and went to find it in the out of the way places on what William Least Heat Moon called "blue highways." My own writing over the next two weeks might hit on similar themes of evaluating the state of the nation in an uncertain time. I'll be going to big cities as well as small towns, but almost completely within the Midwest. Maybe someday I will attempt a full cross-country trek. 

As a bonus, here's some of my favorites of the travel writing genre outside of the 70s that aren't household names that I would recommend. 

Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas

Two summers ago my favorite read was Frederick Law Olmsted's account of a trip across Texas in the 1850s. It brought a different time and place to life while also being a fascinating document of Northern disdain for life in the South on the eve of the Civil War. My interest had been piqued years ago when I was living in Texas and a highly fatuous colleague who was way into being Texan said he hated it. If that kind of Texas Uber Alles blowhard disliked the book I knew it must be good. I have a love-hate relationship with my former state of residence, and this book gets and the state's heritage of oppression and Philistinism that is represented well in the hate column for me. 

Tony Horwitz, One For The Road

A friend loaned me this one back in grad school and I had a wild hair to read it again this spring. Horwitz later became famous for his American history-themed travelogues like Confederates in the Attic. His first is still my favorite, though. In the 1980s he was living in Australia as an expat journalist, and decided to hitchhike across the entire Outback. As you would imagine, this was quite a challenge. In the process, however, he meets quite an array of characters that make you think the Mad Max films are close to being documentaries. The book reminds me of one of my favorite things about travel: seeing some really weird shit you'd never be able to anticipate.

Henry David Thoreau's travel writings

I kinda liked reading Thoreau in high school, but stopped thinking about him after. A few years ago someone convinced me to read all of Walden, and I was suddenly hooked. Thoreau understood one of the key questions of modern life right at its inception: what is necessary to live? He did not put creature comforts high on the list, but he did include nature. Apart from Walden, Thoreau's other book length works were travel accounts, only one of which (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) was published in his lifetime. Two others, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, came after his death based on unpublished writings. All are worth a read because he chronicles the early stages of industrialization and its impact on natural landscapes and our relationship to them. 

Joan Didion, South and West

Here's another work unpublished at the time, an account of travel in the early 70s, mostly through the deep South. Didion is probably my favorite essay stylist, and her tart observations hit just as hard here as in her published works. This book is also an interesting artifact of the South in the period right after the Civil Rights movement. I also appreciate that instead of fetishing the "blue highways" like so many other writers, she touches on the small pleasures of interstate highways and Holiday Inn swimming pools. The search for authenticity is the bugbear of too many travel writers.