Packing for Paris

I leave for Paris tomorrow, so I have been doing a fair amount of planning of what I want to bring. As a reader and a writer, that means I've spent most of my time trying to figure out what books and projects to bring along with me. (I'll handle the clothes and other incidentals later. I mean, the flight doesn't leave until, like, 8 or something.) Packing, as a reader, is all about balance. You never want to be stuck without something to read and you don't want to pay the extra fee for having too heavy of a bag. Furthermore, you need to leave at least a little room for the books you are going to buy on vacation, because, let's face it, you're going to buy books on vacation. Paris poses an extra problem, because along with being one of the great walking cities, eating cities, and drinking cities, it is also one of the great sitting cities which naturally leads to being a great reading and writing city. So, with all that in mind, here are the books and projects I'll be bringing with me to Paris.

BOOKS

The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

Eventually, I'll find myself back in my hotel room winding down from a long day of coffee, cheese, wine, and walking, and I've always found big old critically acclaimed fantasy epics relaxing to read before I go to bed. Hurley's series has come highly recommended by a number of people I know who read more fantasy than I do, so the first volume was a natural fit. I've also, already read about half of it and have really enjoyed it so far, so I know it's a safe bet for the nightstand in the hotel.

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a genius. That's just science. Eros the Bittersweet is her exploration of the idea of of “Eros” in classical literature and all the ideas of language, metaphor, and storytelling that grow out of that exploration. Though the content is challenging, the book is organized in relatively short chapters, so it's easy to incorporate into a coffee-sit. You can read a chapter, look up, watch the people around you, talk, stash it back in the satchel to take with you to a park, read another chapter, rinse and repeat.

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

I love Jesse Ball and the galley of his new novel is the perfect packing size. Furthermore, as I as was chatting with another bookseller at Porter Square about my upcoming trip she said something to the effect of, “It's nice to start something on a trip." I don't entirely know why this was a compelling argument, but it was. Also, read more Jesse Ball. 

Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clebert

My original packing list was just the three books above. For reasons lodged in the mysteries of consciousness, I wasn't particularly motivated to read a Paris-themed book in Paris. But then I was shelving at Porter Square and came across this fucking thing. I mean, just look at it. I mean, according to the jacket it was “embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid.” What the fuck else was I supposed to do? I'm not made of stone.

PROJECTS

I'm not setting any goals and I'm not sure if I'll do any writing, but as with reading, I don't want to find myself inspired to work and not have anything with me. Furthermore, Paris has been so important to so many English-language writers, including some of my heroes (Joyce and Stein), that it would feel almost sacrilegious to go to Paris without a notebook and a few drafts. Also, if you're curious what I'm working on, well, here's your answer.

Side Project A: The Biography of Alisoun

This is a novel that (at the moment) will be composed of two distinct parts. The first part, which is the one I'm working on, is composed of vignettes of varying length and set at varying times in the titular character's life. The second part will be (at least at the moment) a linear narrative of a particularly dramatic series of events in Alisoun's life. (Chaucer fans will take note of the spelling.) Because it's told in vignettes this is a really handy side project because I can basically write about whatever is in my head at the moment I feel like writing for as long as I feel like writing about it. Though I do have some vague hopes and goals, the current state of this project is very much anything goes. Which makes it perfect for hanging in the satchel while I wander around Paris. Also, in case you can't see from the picture, this was the notebook I got for attending the sixth Winter Institute.

Draft of a Chapter from the New Novel

Specifically, the “Coyote Casablanca” chapter if that makes any sense or is in any way intriguing. I decided I didn't want to bring my laptop so made sure I had drafts that I could read and edit if I felt so moved. This way, progress doesn't have to stop completely on my novel. Furthermore, drafts can be easier to pick away at if motivation comes in little bits and bites and fit a lot better in my satchel.

Draft of Short Story: "The Morning Skate"

Because the first thing you think of when you hear the word "Paris" is “Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.” This actually began life as a chapter in an essentially abandoned novel. I've been chipping away at it for a few years now and I think I'm almost done. It's about a youngish, sports journalist, working on a feature-length story about his home town's junior hockey team. One of the reasons I like to juggle a lot of different writing projects is that I always want to have something to work on, regardless of my mood, energy level, or ideas. And packing a bunch of drafts is a lot easier than packing a bunch of notebooks and a laptop.

Draft of a Short Story, "The Summer Slip"

This is actually a story my father started that I'm going to finish. It's about a family opening their summer camp for the first time after the patriarch and grandfather of the narrator died. They struggle a bit early on to remember all the steps to getting the camp ready for the summer, which they eventually connect to the idea of “summer slip,” the stuff students forget over the summer. It also features of a short collection of classic Lewiston Quebecois swearing. I purposely set this draft aside a few months ago with the intention of letting it rest for awhile.

The Satchel Notebook

Everything else, should there be anything else, will go in the catchall satchel notebook.

Fifty Hours on Planes (or more) and a Theory of Travel: Honeymoon Part 1

Flight supplies.

By the time we landed back in Boston, at the end of a roughly 40 hour November 3rd, Rissa and I had been in flight for 50 hours or more over the course of 2 ½ weeks. Some of that time was spent productively; Rissa actually knit the pair of gloves she would wear for the trip and I got some reading and writing done, but there's a point where the productive parts of the brain just shut down and, depending on where you are in your travels and how well you can sleep on a plane (which for Rissa and I, not particularly well at all.) you can end up with a lot of dead time.

How did I spend that dead time. Well: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The LOTR Trilogy (original cinematic releases, which are not as good as the extended releases), Pacific Rim, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, some Wolverine-based abomination, and maybe one or two more. It was easily the most movies I've watched over that stretch of time, probably in my whole life.

There's a lot to consider in this display.

The travel itself, was, of course, exhausting and if we had any “dark nights of the soul” on our adventure, they came on our trip from Boston to Cairns. Our flight out of Boston was delayed almost an hour, which meant that when we landed in San Francisco we had 15 minutes to make our connection. Thus began the legendary San Francisco Sprint! I'm not going to lie, I miss playing sports, and so a part of me kind of appreciated the chance to tear ass through the airport. And running on a people mover makes you feel like a superhero. We even had a “Go! Just leave me!” moment when I totally ditched Rissa (at her rational insistence) to try and get there in time to hold the plane. We did, though, thanks to the delay, we hadn't eaten since about ten in the morning. Luckily Air New Zealand serves good food and free wine. Seriously, after dinner service flight attendants walked up and down the aisles with bottles of wine.

And then the flight from Auckland to Cairns. Really, there was nothing wrong with it. Another perfectly lovely flight with another free meal. (Making for the rare no-lunch-3-breakfast 36 hours.) The failure was in our awareness of geography. The times on the tickets implied to us (who didn't think about it for a goddamn second) that it was a short three hour flight. If we had taken a tiny fraction of an instant to look at a freakin' map, we would have seen there was no way it could be a three-hour flight. It was a six-hour flight. Those last three hours were agonizing. We were so exhausted that we couldn't even make it through the New Zealand vs. Australia rugby game that was on a giant freaking screen in a bar in Australia later that night. (And it was such a good game! Or, at least the first half was.)

But I always reminded myself every time the travel started getting gross, of one fact; for the vast majority of human history, what we just did was impossible.

This is "flyover country" in New Zealand

Though I wasn't quite as productive as I'd hoped to be across those 50 plus hours, I did get some thinking done about travel itself, specifically, about why travel is so vital to some people, while others despise it. Whether it's new places or new people, newness puts you on your guard. That's just basic evolution. Being on guard has, essentially, two different emotional expressions; anxiety and alertness. How you feel about travel is likely to be determined by the balance of those two states in your mind. Honestly, I feel a lot of anxiety when I travel (I tend to get to airports very early), but the balance of my experience is alertness, a drive to observe, to see all that is around me, to “get a handle” on a place. There are plenty of times when I travel, when a nervousness builds in my stomach, but, to me, there is such a primal joy in seeing something I've never seen before that I pretty much always push through it.

Of course, the tragedy (probably too strong a word) is that those who, on balance, experience more anxiety will have the least motivation to push through their anxiety to experience the benefits of being alert, and because anxiety and alertness are self-reinforcing, all it takes is a slight balance one way or the other. The anxiety balance will elucidate all of the potential risks, thus increasing the anxiety, while the alertness balance will keep the mind open for all that is new and exciting happening around it.

Now that I'm reflecting on this idea, it really isn't limited to travel. Any new experience with virtually any level of potency, with inspire your brain to ask either “Will it kill me?” or “Can I kill it?” leveraging our evolved intelligences to either enumerate all the reasons to get out of dodge or observe with an inspired focus the environment around you. And from that, so much of how you experience the world and what you will experience follows.

On the flight home I found my relationship to the time line of this trip odd, almost paradoxical. On the one hand after months of planning, suddenly it's over. All the time from the first conversation to that moment on the plane felt like an extracted tooth; it's there and then it's gone. In contrast, it also felt like we landed in Cairns months ago. The same experience felt instant and extended.

Also, I bought shoes. Weird, huh.

Perhaps it is simply that so much of that time was filled with so much activity that my perception recalibrated it to more closely match my activity-per-day average. I did more in that block of time than maybe I have ever done in a similar block of time, and so, almost the way time and space interact, my sense of that time is partially expressed by the activities themselves. Also, over the course of that time, we developed and redeveloped our daily routines, a process usually not so quickly repeated. And, in that much of how we experience our lives comes from our daily routines, it is almost as though Riss and I went through four major passages in life.

There are, of course, other ideas that came to me as I traveled, because, well, that's how I see the world, but I'll get to those when I write about the specific cities we visited. If there is one final lesson, Riss and I might have gleaned from the travel is that we can take it and it's worth it. There were times when it sucked, when it was uncomfortable, when it was close to miserable (though, watching that Wolverine movie was my own fault) but, every bit of it was worth it. Hong Kong, Singapore, or Tokyo, or Spain here we come.

Weird Travel Experience 1: I have a pretty good sense of direction that I always assumed was simply based on remembering the turns I'd taken or, if I've looked at a map, being able to keep track of that map while I walk, but now I suspect it might actually be..magnetism. Because I seriously completely lost all sense of direction in the Southern Hemisphere.