So apparently what it takes to get me something to blog about is leaving town. I’m traveling today, and am currently sitting in a Crown Room in Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. Sitting 100 feet due in front of me is John McCain.
For some reason, that has me very, very freaked out.
More once I’ve had a moment to collect my thoughts.
Also a beer.
I’m currently here, doing this. The return to the U.S. was only moderately painful (perhaps because mostly experienced in a state of denial and delirium). The return to Claremont promises to be a bit hairier (largely because I arrive Tuesday at 7.30 pm and teach for the first time on Wednesday at 1.15 pm). I’ll hope to have something of interest to discuss soon.
This has been a weird month. Weird enough that my last transatlantic flight seemed astonishingly easy. Heck, weird enough that I can use a phrase like “my last transatlantic flight.” Ça suffit.
(Not incidentally, somewhere along the line this became a travel blog. I’m not entirely thrilled with that, but it seems to be what I’m doing, so I may as well ride the wave for the moment.)
As I said somewhere buried in the comments on another post, the only difficult part of the trip from the MLA back to Paris was making sure that I didn’t sleep through the airport stop on the train. Somehow I managed it, got off the train where I ought to have, got on the little air-train to the EWR terminal, checked in, found my gate, and stood around waiting until we boarded. Got on the plane, ate a little, and… I don’t much remember the rest of the flight. And I was actually pretty functional when I got off of it. Which suggests to me that I actually slept, at least some, a pretty remarkable turn of events.
Here, however, is the major lesson learned from that particular crossing: planning to meet up with someone at CDG requires more than simply “I’ll meet you outside the international arrivals area in terminal 2A.” You need contingency plans, if-then statements, worst case scenarios. We had none of that, and managed to make it work, but only through sheer stubbornness, I think.
The story: R. flew in from Prague on the morning of the 30th, and was set to arrive at CDG at 11.50 am. My flight from EWR was expected to arrive at 11.20. My best guess was that, by the time my plane took the world’s longest taxi, and then I made it through passport control, baggage claim, and customs, R. could have made it over from terminal 2B to meet me outside arrivals in 2A, so that was the plan. The only contingency we added in, for good measure, was “if you’re not there, I’ll wait for you.”
More specificity would have been good. For instance: “if it turns out that my flight is significantly early, and yours is significantly late, rather than pointlessly waiting outside arrivals at 2A, I’ll make my way over to 2B and meet you there.” And, for that matter: “if you emerge from arrivals in 2B and I’m not there, make your way over to 2A. If for any reason we miss one another, make your way to the train station, and I’ll meet you outside the ticket office.”
But no. All we had was “I’ll meet you outside arrivals in 2A.” And, of course, my flight was 40 minutes early, and I was the first person through passport control, and my suitcase was about the tenth to appear on the conveyor belt, so I was through customs and outside arrivals well before my flight was even set to land. R.’s flight, by contrast, was slightly delayed, and then his baggage took forever to arrive. When I emerged from customs and saw that his flight wasn’t going to land for half an hour yet, I contemplated just heading over to 2B and waiting for him there, but we hadn’t made any of those contingency plans. There were no if-thens. There was only one go to. And the consequences of a failed deviation from the script—what if I go to 2B, and he doesn’t look for me, and I happen to be looking the wrong way, and he gets by me and goes to 2A, and I’m not there?—seemed worse than the tedium and anxiety of continuing to wait at 2A.
After an hour and 15 minutes, though, and after being repeatedly psyched out by every tall man with a shaved head and glasses (of whom there are more than you might expect), I finally decided to move toward 2B. I would go slowly and deliberately. I would scan the oncoming traffic relentlessly. I would be vigilant in the extreme, and make absolutely certain that he could not get by me. I would –
I took about twenty steps in that direction, rehearsing the improvisation (I know), and there he was.
I have almost never been happier to see him.
In any case, there were minor adventures getting on the train (ticket machines that hate my credit cards), minor adventures getting to a taxi (three flights of up, including two non-functional escalators and one very heavy rolly bag), minor adventures getting to the hotel (in which I managed to pull the name of the street our hotel is on completely out of my ass), but none of it mattered. I was completely suffused with the ecstasy of having successfully made a connection that should in no way have worked.
And once we arrived at our hotel—a smallish, funky, thirties-inspired place with the most attentive staff ever, who I’m not sure realize yet that I’m never leaving again—well, what could be better?
Paris is great. Life is great. Thus far, 2007 is great. I’ve resisted posting until now in no small part because of the way each post both requires a removal from the flow of things and marks the passage of time. I’m working very, very hard on lingering in the moment and not allowing any anxiety about the ticking of the clock to creep in and undermine things.
It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email, and got a phone call from a former student who’s here interviewing. I wanted a drink and something to eat before bed, and so went down to meet him in the lobby bar.
At some point during our conversation, I did the math, and figured out that as I’d awoken at 3.30 am in Prague, that meant that I’d gotten up at 9.30 pm the night before, local time-wise. And I was clearly not at my sharpest, because while I had a fantastic time over what turned out to be two drinks with the former student, I somehow forgot to eat, and hadn’t eaten anything since the second plane. But, I figured, I’m so tired now that I don’t even feel like eating.
Not the best decision, I don’t think. I went up to my room, completely crashed, and woke up three hours later, ravenous and unable to go back to sleep. I drank a bunch of water, read a bit, turned the light back out, turned the light back on, read a bit more, made another assay on sleep, and then finally just gave up and sat at the computer, hoping to get some work done.
And, in fact, I did! But I did it the very, very hard way. My intent was to use yesterday morning to record the audio track for a video presentation of one of the talks I’ve given this fall. I’d planned on using ProfCast, which records both your audio and the content and transitions between your slides as you play them. The problem is, however, that I need to see the notes from my slides in order to record the audio, and thus I need either to print out the paper and read from that, or I need to be hooked up to an external monitor so that Keynote will default to the “rehearsal” view on my own screen. And as I am without printer or external monitor, that wasn’t going to work. So I recorded the audio track in Audacity, imported it into iMovie, exported my slides to jpeg, imported them into iMovie, stretched them out to meet the appropriate transitions in the talk, et voilà!
Except. When I compress in iMovie 5, the sync between audio and video slips. The more compression, the more slippage. So a “reasonably sized” (i.e., only ridiculously large 10MB) .mov file plays fine for the first couple of minutes, but then the slides start refusing to change, even as the audio marches ruthlessly on. I’ve exported a “full quality” (i.e., 87 MB) .mp4 file, which is perfect. Now I just have to (a) figure out how to compress it enough to have any hope of a reasonable web distribution for it, or (b) find a way to print my paper and do the stupid thing over again in ProfCast.
In any case, that little morning adventure, pleasant though it was, apparently took every bit of energy I had for the day. I’d room-serviced a huge breakfast, and so thought that despite jet lag and lack of sleep I’d be fine. I met my friend Cyrus for lunch, though, and about halfway through, it suddenly became really, super evident that I was Not Fine. I somewhat hastily excused myself, went back to my room, and spent the next three hours attempting fruitlessly to take a nap. (Can someone explain that to me? How is it that you can get yourself to the point of nervous collapse from exhaustion and then find yourself unable to fall asleep?)
Finally, after a room-serviced hamburger, I took one of my big-gun sleeping pills, and completely crashed. Slept through until 6 am. Which I think is the first full night’s sleep I’ve gotten since leaving California.
And thus ends my first day at the MLA!
Today promises to be more conferency, all the way around. My schedule:
8.30 - 9.45 am:
Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities
Liberty Ballroom Salon C, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke University
–Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
–Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
–Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
–Douglas Thomas, University of Southern California
12.00 noon - 1.15 pm:
Textual Materialities
Grand Ballroom Salon I, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Save As: Textual Studies and the Challenges of Born-Digital Literature,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Picture Criticism: Textual Studies and the Image,” Kari M. Kraus, University of Rochester
–“Textual Studies and the Book,” Peter Bigland Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania
1.30 pm: lunch with editor and co-editor.
3 pm: coffee with scholar I’m very excited about meeting!
7ish pm: drink with former colleague.
8.45 pm: blogger meetup. Assuming I can stay awake that late.
I’ll hope to see some of you there!
I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose—my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wondering if I were going to fall asleep and miss the alarm. R. walked me downstairs around 5.15, and I got on the shuttle to the airport. He’s staying on in Prague until the 30th; I, on the other hand, am going to the MLA.
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I’m now completely convinced that this place really is the capital of Christmaslandia. And I mean that in a good way. All week, we’ve wandered out in the evenings to see the families and the friends enjoying the Christmas market, with its festival foods and its hot wine and its small local performances.
Last night, Christmas Eve, we went to our favorite local restaurant for a fabulous dinner, and then sat in a bar and drank a couple of beers, waiting for what was for us, the main event: a performance in the square by singers from the Czech national opera. The music was all unfamiliar, both to me and to R., who knows way more about classical music than I ever will. Parts of it sounded German, and parts of it sounded Russian, which makes me think that it may have been Czech all the way around (and given that the only Czech composer whose work I know is Smetana
After the performance ended, and bows were taken, the ensemble launched into one last song, which I can only assume was a very familiar Christmas carol. The orchestra played the opening bars, and as the conductor raised her arms to bring in the chorus, she turned to the assembled audience in the square, and brought them in as well. And several hundred people sang along.
At that moment, more than any I’ve had since I’ve been here, I really, really wished I understood Czech.
This is what I want from Christmas from now on: no malls, no sales, no holiday specials on television, no forced gatherings, no ridiculous overflow of presents. No pressure. Just being exactly where you want to be, with exactly whom you want to be, hearing the music and knowing that everyone around you is having, collectively, their own variant of the same private experience.
Merry Christmas to all of you who are celebrating it today. May your experience of the day be as personal and as communal as ours in the square last night.
Our first full day in Prague was spent in a state of mild to moderate delirium. After we finally arrived at the hotel on the evening of the 18th, R. and I found some food, drank a couple of beers, wandered briefly through the Christmas market in the Staromìstské námìstí, and tumbled into bed around 10.30 pm, expecting to remain unconscious until at least 7 am. Instead, we both woke up around 2 am, and not in a temporary sort of way. So about 2.30 am, we got up, pulled out our laptops, found power outlets, and sat down to see what would happen if we tried to do a bit of work.
For my part, I dug out my previously seized-up iPod, was pleased to see that it had finally run its battery out and shut itself off, and hooked it up to my computer. After a couple of moments of recharging (in which the screen dimly read “very low battery… please wait”), it rebooted, and the computer found it, and all appeared to be normal. I haven’t tried to play that video file again yet, but will soon, just to see if I can recreate the crash.
In any case, we sat around tinkering until about 4 am, and then decided to try sleeping again—and wound up sleeping like the dead until about 8 am. We got dressed, had a fabulous breakfast, and went to work—R. working on his novel, and me writing my annual professional activities report and putting together the last post.
This held us until about 1 pm, after which we headed out to wander around some and find some lunch. And thus began the next phase of the day: the desperate struggle to stay awake until 9 pm, which we considered the first acceptable moment at which we could go to sleep. R. suffered most in the early afternoon, and then seemed to snap back around 4 pm. My struggle began just as his let up, and continued through the evening.
Honestly, I’m not sure what we did after lunch. I seem to recall some more wandering around, making our way out to the Charles bridge, looking around for internet cafes or coffee houses with wi-fi. They’re much less plentiful than they were when we were here in 2003; I suspect that the comparative ease of obtaining broadband access at home is killing off public internet services. Indeed, our hotel, which in 2003 only had one computer in the business center and one in the club lounge wired for net access (and pretty creaky net access at that) now has wired internet access in every guest room and wireless in most public spaces. Of course, they’re charging about $30 per day for that access, which is way more than we wanted to spend; thus the hunt for the public facilities. (We finally wound up cutting a deal with the hotel’s manager for a package of several days of service at a bit of a discount, which is how this managed to get posted.)
At some point mid-afternoon, we wandered back to the hotel, showered and dressed, went down to the hotel bar for a beer (about the point at which R. began springing back to life and I began working really, really hard not to fall off my barstool), and then headed out in search of dinner. R. guided us along, wandering in a different direction than our usual well-trodden path toward the Staromìstské námìstí, and we began looking at menus along the way. I was far too delirious to judge, by this point, and so found myself looking only at prices. The Czechs are still using the kroner, and will do so until 2010, apparently, and so we’ve had to expend a bit of brain activity on thinking through price conversions. Finally, we just settled on a rough average of 20 kroner to the dollar, and let it go at that. So as we’re looking at menus, all I could think was, well, at this one, the numbers are all three digits and the average first digit is a 5, meaning that we’re looking at mains in the $18-20 range. When we found a place that had average first digits of 2, I suggested we give it a shot.
And the meal turned out to be amazing—I had a mixed grill that was just to die for, with a side of potato pancakes, and R. had a grilled sirloin that was just lovely. And the beer was both big and cheap. At some point during the meal, I looked at R. and said “this restaurant is really good. We need to figure out where it is.” He only looked at me oddly for a second, to his eternal credit.
By the time we were finished eating, I figured it was about 8 pm, and that we only had another hour of misery before we could fall into bed. Unfortunately, it was actually only 6 pm, so we wandered into the square to see what was going on in the Christmas market. And I’m happy as can be that we did, because what we found on the small stage at the edge of the market was a Christmas dance recital, in which small Czech girls ranging in age from 4 to perhaps 12 performed a series of dances ranging from the cute and bouncy to the unnervingly pre-teen erotic. All of them, though, were utterly unself-conscious, just having fun and not worrying at all about whether they missed a step, and the whole thing—the girls, the picture-taking parents, the other folks standing around watching in the cold—was utterly, utterly charming. As tired as I was, I was even more happy not to have missed it, and in fact got enough of a charge out of it as to wake up enough to make it to 9 pm.
We did crash at 9, though—and promptly woke up at 11, after what my body was convinced was a nice afternoon nap. This, unfortunately, has been the pattern ever since—I wake up after about three or four hours of sleep, and the only chance of getting back to sleep involves drugs. Today, I woke up at 3, lay in bed until 4, and finally just gave up. It’s now 6 am here, and I’m likely to crash sometime in the next few hours, but I’m hoping that if I tough it out, I might be able to sleep through the night tonight.
And I keep hoping for the possibility of more little dancing Czech kids. That’s worth staying awake for.
[This post was written on 19 December; internet access has been a bit non-ideal, so things are coming on a bit of a time delay.]
I hate to admit it, but Meg’s right: I’m clearly cursed. I want very much to say that I make an exceedingly good travel companion—good organizational skills, excellent sense of direction, very flexible and relaxed attitude, a good eye for pubs—but things have now hit a point at which I’ve got to begin looking a little deeper. Perhaps it’s just more of that post-Catholic guilt, or perhaps it’s life in a post-Dr. Phil age, but there comes a point when enough bad things have happened to you that you’ve got to start wondering what you’re doing to bring it on.
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one of those moments where I’m just not sure how everything that needs to be done between now and then will actually get done.
CUPERTINO, California—November 14, 2006—Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power and charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.
Wow. This will be a fabulous thing for international flights. I’m very enthusiastic about this development, enough that I’m able to squelch my queasiness with the fact that the announcement later refers to “the iPod ecosystem,” and in an approving tone, at that.
