Entries tagged with travel

March 19, 2022

Event 93: We Saw (Northern California)

After the Louisville Conference, with COVID numbers in decline, Carla and I headed west for a week on the coast. The trip was not simply restorative but repurposing, reconnecting with friends and family in real time, face to face. And so we saw them, in each instance redefining both time and events that have come between. These friends and family, of long standing and more recent acquaintance, are prime numbers, so to speak, in a series that has many twists and turns. Life histories and practices of art coincide with them, for which they are primes. As we know, a coastline is a fractal, as in the thumbnail sketches below:

Monday, February 28
Delta DTW > SFO
> San Francisco/Stinson Beach

Megan Adams/Camille Roy

Our first stop after arrival at SFO was with New Narrative author Megan Adams/Camille Roy, celebrating her just published collection of stories Honey Mine. We admired the art, light, rooms, and overgrown garden of her working-class mansion across from the thronged Daniel Webster School playground, where I first taught Poetry in the Schools. We then walked the streets of Potrero Hill, with its monuments to the history of Language writing still preserved at 235 Missouri Street, 326 Connecticut Street, and the public gym and soccer field at the top of the hill, where the competitive drives of young poets were at play. Just so, New Narrative and Language writing conjoin.

> Stinson Beach

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July 4, 2014

Entry 20: Shanghai Notes

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Soong Ching-ling’s Soviet sedan. Photo: BW

From 24 June to 2 July 2014, I was in Shanghai, attending an academic/arts conference and seeing as much of the city as possible when not otherwise engaged. The meetings took place at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; jiao tong means “transportation” but is the equivalent of “polytechnic.” Many of the early technical universities in China were concerned with various forms of transportation. In the case of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the major focus was maritime engineering; there is a massive rusted iron anchor in a courtyard between classroom buildings where there might be the statue of a humanist or political figure in another context. Shanghai, of course, is built on maritime traffic on the Yangtze River, the scale of which was evident in the massive materiality of the anchor. There were many such confrontations with massive scale in Shanghai, from its population of 23 million to the waves of public housing and corporate building that extend outward in all directions to its burgeoning infrastructure, particularly elevated highways and metro system. Jiao tong seems to have been an important concept. Now, it is being reinterpreted to include more liberal forms of scholarship, as witness the arts and humanities program that was our host. A canny citation of Confucian scripture permits this broader, more inclusive reading.

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