So, I have not been keeping up with my updates lately like a good girl, so here goes:
I have driven back and forth across the midwest several times in the past month, both as a passenger and a driver, helping my friend to ferry his many vehicles and plethora of work equipment to his new house in Kentucky, where we were staying in between jaunts, although for the first few weeks we were actually living in his travel trailer parked next to the house, as the house had been empty for a year and was not habitable. I have been to Houston, Texarkana, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Davenport, Iowa, as well as all of the rural spaces in between. I have slept in a trailer parked in various locations (next to a house, in rv parks, at truck stops and rest stops and once in a Walmart parking lot for a few hours), houses, cheap motels and nicer hotels. I helped my friend make his house livable, turning an uninhabited space into a place–a home. I drove a gigantic pickup truck, pulling a gigantic travel trailer from Texarkana to a tiny town in western Kentucky, and then from the tiny town in Kentucky to a tiny town in Michigan, which is where I am now and should be for the next couple weeks, until I get back to Olympia in time for the week 10 presentations.
While riding around the country as a passenger, waiting in the truck in various pipeyards and mechanic shops, at truck stops, late at night in hotels and motels, and in my “office” on J’s front porch in Kentucky, I have done a lot of reading on space and place, including The Eyes of the Skin (really great book, I’ve read it through three times), the Poetics of Space, Place and Experience (available through Evergreen’s e-brary), the Body and the City, and lots and lots of poetry. I have found that, strangely, I get more work done when I am in places not generally conducive to schoolwork. I even had a minor breakthrough on what to do for my research paper at a truckstop somewhere in Ohio, where we had stopped for a few hours so J could make some repairs to his work truck, and several truckers came by my table in the cafe/lounge to see what I was doing behind my stack of books and papers, feverishly typing on my laptop. (I had been planning on doing another Holdrege-style paper, but now I am working on something more in the vein of The Midnight, which fits in much more with Anais Nin’s style in House of Incest, which is something I have been playing with lately.)
Oh, and I think my accent has gotten thicker, but hopefully it will fade pretty quickly when I get back to Oly–my accent has always been very fluid, changing depending on who I’m talking to and where I am.
Log of hours:
4-29-13: 2 Poetics of Space, 2 Body & City, 1/2 morning pages, 1/2 yoga at hotel
4-30-13: 1 truck stop free writing
5-1-13: 1 reading seminar passes, 2 wordpress, 2 moodle readings, 2 HOI reading and writing
5-2-13: 1/2 morning pages, 1/2 tai ji, 5 wordpress, 1 poetry observed, 2 “Writing Poetry” wb
5-3-13: 1/2 morning pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 4 wordpress, 1 self-eval, 2 Poetics of Space
5-4-13: 1/2 morning pages, 1 photos for gallery, 2 trailer park poetry, 1.5 nature hike/meditation
5-5-13: 3 Perloff, 3 Neuro, 1 sem pass, 1 NKN (not knowing notebook)
Total: 43 hours
The locals all think we’re wild gypsies
