Life goes on, or rather...

We tend to believe that things are replaceable. Our clothes last hardly a season or two, we throw away eternal lasting plastic dishes as soon as we quench our hunger. By tomorrow, everything we have will appear in a better, smaller, more perfect version. The only problem is that we slowly start to believe that people can be replaced much the same way. No doubt, our job could be certainly done equally well by many others. There are also those waiting in a line to jump into our lives, to love our lovers, take our kids to kindergartens, put their clothes into our closets.

Because whatever happens, life goes on… There are very few things so encouraging and yet so frightening as knowing that there is so much truth in a well-worn phrase that life goes on. Sometimes slowly and painfully, with hesitance, other times easily and energetically, without fear, but one stands up after falling down. And then what. We shake it off, count our loses and move on. We round off casualties to the nearest number (History rounds off skeletons to zero, a thousand and one is still only a thousand …). On anniversaries, we pay our respect, fix what’s broken and quickly put on the mask of normality. We hail the recovery as a sign of strength. Should a tear appear after some time, we’ll quickly wipe it away, secretly, with a feeling of uneasiness…

One can have a pleasant time in New Orleans oblivious of what happened here six years ago. The city has been given a makeover for tourists, it has put on a smile, opened its shops and restaurants, offering souvenirs, massage, sightseeing tours. New Orleans again gives what everyone has come for – a place of great and unlimited fun where one can smoke in bars, listen to the street music and be free. The Music Festival is on and the French Quarter is swarming with people. Old people dance passionately in front of the stage looking as if the faith in flower power has never died. A group of people are laughing under a small tree, talking shelter from the warm spring sun: they’re wearing cheerful red lobster hats on their heads. Beautiful students dressed up in a carefully careless way, moving their hips in the rhythm of the music. Life triumphs. There is no yesterday. We don’t look backwards.

This abundance of colors, aromas and sounds, a sunny day that always makes the world look more beautiful, all that fights against the gloomy thoughts and calls for oblivion. Amnesia is healing, it makes life easier. How else could we live. On a day like this, how would it feel to think about which one of those nice and hospitable people, a few years ago, was the first to make step towards bestiality, the first to pull the gun. And who was standing hopelessly on the roof, with no one to expect.

Blissful in our forgetfulness we taste gumbo, throw coins to street musicians, drink cocktails and expose our pale bodies to the warm sun for the first time this year. And everything is happening for the first time. It is the power of life that makes sprouts break through the earth in April which indeed is the cruelest month. The explosion of that magnificent cruelty is happening before our own eyes. All the way in the corner of the picture, a young mother with ample bust is feeding her baby on a lawn, they’re both unperturbed by the noisy clamor around them. Relentless and unstoppable, life goes on… The shivers going down the spine of a bystander may just be those of excitement over the power of nature and not of bewilderment and horror.

On the Realness of Places

Now this isn’t a paid advertisement – but I’ve always liked Hugh Ferrer. He is (I guess) one of our chaperones – one of the organizers of this trip through America. And his has always been a genuine pleasantness, never over-performed or disproportionately eager. Strange for an American. And his is an intellect that never patronizes, is always willing to engage and to push. So when he checks us into the hotel, and he asks the man at the desk, quite seriously, if there are places we should avoid – and the man at the desk, quite seriously, tells us we best not go anywhere in that direction (oooh no, you best avoid that area) and Hugh, who also used to live in New Orleans begs us to avoid wandering even a block over on the left, I know this isn’t an attempt to be over-protective or anything. And yet, I know myself. I know that in the morning, that’s exactly where I'll be heading.

The signs on the road that I decide to take seem designed to say, You're making a mistake, Kei. At your age, you should give up this kind of childish rebelliousness. In pairs, the signs tell me DO NOT ENTER, twice. Of course, I enter. One block, two blocks, three blocks in.

And no, nothing dangerous happened. I’m sure it could have. Someone could have snatched my camera or my bag. But it didn’t happen.

And no, nothing transcendent happened either. No one invited me up on the porch to eat some boiled crayfish and to tell me how they were so glad that a nice young man like me had come through, coz people mostly avoided the area.

The place was just a place in its own way. And the people were just people in their own way. And the houses were just houses in their own way.

And no, I didn’t feel as if I was suddenly seeing the REAL New Orleans. I’ve been suspicious of that particular discourse for a while. A friend recently asked me – ‘what is it like writing about Jamaica without having grown up in the real Jamaica?’ I stuttered. I told him I was sorry, but that before his question, I never knew my whole life was made-up. I grew up in a house in Jamaica, went to school and University in Jamaican, had Jamaican friends, still travel on a Jamaican passport, but somehow this was all made up – matrix-style.

Of course I knew what he meant – it’s that old compulsion to elevate the lives of the poor as actual lives. Here is a new beatitude for you: Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit reality. Everyone else is disinherited, even from their own countries.

In truth, every place in this world has so many concurrent realities happening at the same time. Even the touristy bits of New Orleans are their own realities. I spend the rest of the day walking through these bits – the beautiful ramshackle of the French Quarters. And later in the day I am on the set of the HBO post-Katrina series, Treme. How is that for walking in and out of reality?

All the shops in the French Quarter are of course trying to convince you of their realness. They offer real Cajun cuisine and authentic voodoo dolls rather than tourist trinkets. And that reminds me -- I’m probably doomed to a bit of bad luck I’m afraid. In one of these stores I accidentally touch a voodoo altar despite signs that expressively warned me not to. I hadn’t seen them. The woman behind the counter shouts at me, her voice like a whip. Don’t touch that, please! It’s real! It’s real.

-Kei Miller

The Imagined Community

From Baltimore, we have landed into the heat of New Orleans, into music, reconstruction, and the middle of a film set: Treme, David Simon's series set three months after Hurricane Katrina, now filming its second season.

For the first time on our journey, life elides into art. A New Orleans night club, The Blue Nile, plays itself. The gorgeous Wanda Rouzan is bluesing up the stage. Cameras roll, scenes are acted and then re-enacted, New Orleans is dismantled and then rebuilt as drama: Wendell Pierce waiting on the sidelines, speaks his lines to himself; Wendell Pierce metamorphosing into Antoine Batiste, strides up on stage, trombone in hand.

Later on, someone in our group makes an observation: behind the cameras on Treme, she says, is an all-white production team; meanwhile African American actors, musicians, and extras are directed like chess pieces across the set. This says something, she contends, about power structures, about who tells the story, and how the story gets told. Against my better judgment, I pick a fight. For me, Treme is a moving collaboration between an artistic vision, a city's reality, and a community's regeneration. The series is both a story and a city in progress, and music is its continuity. I make my argument (inchoately, most likely, thanks to the drink in my hand), and then we agree to disagree.

Collapsed in my drink, I think of Charlie Duff who yesterday led us on an intricate, profound, and troubling journey down both the gracious avenues and modern ruins of Baltimore City. Race relations in America, he said, do not bring out the best in anyone. What we need, he argued, is an "atmosphere of equality", we need to find a way beyond the current demarcations. In 1962, after black Americans had begun buying homes in white neighborhoods, Baltimore City bought a street and demolished the buildings. Why? To create a "fire break", to stop the "fire" from spreading. Crossing this demarcation, this boundary, was designed to be unpleasant.

Later on, we stand with David Simon on Decatur Street, where production crew, extras, residents and tourists move in nebulae along the pavement. He tells us how life has fed his art, how he went from being a newspaperman to a dramatist, how he found a route, via fiction, to talk about what matters to him. Treme, he tells us, is about how New Orleans is rebuilding itself, and how culture is one of the avenues by which it is traveling back. He tells us that The Wire and Treme are about ordinary people and that the stakes are human scale. "It sounds small compared to 24," he tells us, laughing. He says he intends to tell the story of what's there, what's here, but he does not expect it to change anything.

Back on the film set, a tall beauty in golden stilettos walks across The Blue Nile. A slender man dangles two bottles of beer by their necks. They do this over and over again, each time a little better, a little more perfectly themselves. When I look at Wendell Pierce, I can't help but see both Bunk Moreland and Antoine Batiste, Baltimore and New Orleans. Fiction has a value. If some vision of these two cities, past and future, doesn't exist in the imagination, human scale, will anyone fight to bring the cities back?

Too Important

I know this isn’t a travel log, or that it isn’t supposed to be. But anything you write as you travel becomes just that --a kind of fragmented diary of the places you visit and the people you meet. Thinking comes later. Reflection comes later. Now you just travel while trying to keep your eyes open and your step firm and your coffee warmer than your clichés. You go to the battlefields of Gettysburg, and everything there --the trees, the monuments, the crowds of tourists, the t-shirt shops and ghost tours-- makes you feel like a cynic. You’ve been there before. Perhaps in a high-school field trip. Perhaps with your parents. Perhaps through history books. You’ve already seen those fields and monuments. You’ve already heard the stories of Lee, and Meade, and Pickett’s charge. But now, suddenly, through the smoke and noise of a theme park, you sense it. There it is. You can’t yet name it, but you know it’s there, and you decide to hide it away somewhere so you won’t have to sense it too much, or talk about it, or even think about it, and you drive down to Baltimore. You also know about Baltimore. You’ve been to Baltimore before. You start walking through the streets of west Baltimore. You see all the boarded-up houses: blocks and blocks of abandoned houses. You take a few snapshots. There’s no one there. You think of dead bodies decomposing. And there it is again. Unavoidable. Unmistakable. Now you have to see it. You have to write it down in your travel log. You have no choice. It’s too large, too ominous, too important.

Eduardo Halfon

The War Anew In Baltimore

I first travelled to Baltimore through the ‘The Wire’. This was a Baltimore, somewhat of the ‘popular’, safe from afar because of its mediated dangers and shared by hundreds who had never actually visited or will visit the city. It was a Baltimore of certain frames, T.V sets: the gritty docks, boarded-up street exteriors and corners, a canvas that became the larger inner city – universe of ‘The Wire’. So I ‘know’ the Wire’s battle-weary cynical but ever-intense cops, sociopathic well-rounded gang-banger ‘street outdoor’ types, aggressive bureaucrats, and slick-drawl politicians in heavily carpeted ‘jungle’ interiors.
I am lucky but more knowing – I will never see ‘The Wire’ only through the eye of a ‘crime reporter’s with a feeling for sociology' again now that I have been in the city over the last two days. I have walked on, been driven and talked through Baltimore’s other key landscapes beyond the ‘The Wire’s camera lens; the pretty chi-chi brick-paved Fell Point waterfront, the oldest Catholic cathedral in America (an uncanny life-like dove flutters in a ceiling reaching the heavens, the gentrified leafy swathes of brick-front Victorian apartments that retain a feel of a London without its grey and low skies.
About 150 years of Baltimore’s ages interlock; 1960’s modern apartments and State government blocks also stray into my mediated lens from The Wire; a Baltimore that is a much slower movie with less project-browns and concrete grays। Not unlike the D।C and New York’s Harlem and Brooklyn, cities that spilled over with immigrant ethnicities and African-Americans over the last hundred years, it is a History Channel whose drama is one of evident tensional temporalities। The Wire’s gritty pixels and brilliant characterization loses the spread of a wider map, the stretch and context of the City’s history.
Mapped and spread out, Baltimore is also the material manifestation of the tug of hundreds of years of capitalism spiked with white superiority till the Civil Rights movement with all its attendant exclusions and inclusions. There are bonsai exercises in aesthetic aspiration, miniature gardens, small parks, and squares just as there are grand continental squares from the City’s European historical roots. There is a 2-mile highway that leads and comes from nowhere, an ill-advised attempt to build escape routes into the suburbs in the 1950s for a white middle-class, with the promise of freedom from racial integration many years after the end of war that had fought for that same exact goal. The Battle Of Gettysburg is just an hour’s drive away – and the Baltimore suburbs are both its hinterland and also the city’s if for different reasons with connotations within America’s racial history. If blood was spilt for Lincoln’s grander multi-racial vision for America on those grand battlefields that include Gettysburg, the city’s center is partially what it is because of a racial hysteria and fleeing from the center by a white middle class between since the 1940s. The automobile also helped ruin Baltimore’s core just as its slow adaptation to a post-industrial world.
And so I came into Baltimore from Gettysburg where our guide into American Civil history had prepared a thick dossier of military maps that showed strategy, movement, thrust and parry, relative positions of combatant regiments and so on. The dossier also contained letters that have unique individual sketches of those 3 days that were fought there during the American Civil in the month of July 1863. And after I toured the Baltimore I describe, I felt that I required a 3-dimensional map like the Gettysburg military showcase with letters from Baltimore over time that would tell a bit more of the City’s history denoting things like land tenure and property ownership, inter-ethnic migration, micro-economic patterns within the blocks of the city and macro-economics relative to America’s East. This would help explain Linden Avenue, where 1500 houses were destroyed in 1962 to create a colour barrier, a fire-break as described in public record and that now separates Baltimore as a racial and economic divide. One requires that kind of map too to explain Lafayette Avenue, one of the main streets through the city, both kaleidoscope and vertebrae into all these various historical ages and economic present(s).
West Baltimore is ‘Wire’ territory, if not worse in some parts, the main black district thoroughfare and commercial street holds bailbond offices, cheque-cashing stalls and the odd T-shirt outlet with unrecognisable labels. East Baltimore though is on the up and where most of 'The Wire' was shot too and that says it all, mostly. Only that there are definitely more people on sets the ‘Wire’s streets, I saw only solitary figures float by out in West Baltimore. Years ago, a bargain ‘dollar’ sale was held not far from the West, crumbling houses were offered on auction, sold and restored into what is one of Batimore’s finest areas। I attended a neighborhood meeting in up-market residential Baltimore and the minutiae of household/street economies discussed showed glimpses into the process called ‘gentrification’ beyond such emergency interventions. What trashcans to use, how to handle dog-shit was discussed by home-owners amongst other macro-problems. But at the other end, trash is evidently the least of concerns for ‘slum-lords’ who I guess will stall any emergency bargain sales required to save West Baltimore. And so ‘gentrification’ and the slum lord fight over Baltimore in a new separatist war.
—Billy Kahora

On Places That Vanish

Baltimore(Day 2)

Our guide, Charlie, is a nostalgic. Though saying it like that might give you the wrong impression. Yes, the man does love the city -- loves it with an incredible love; and yes, he remembers its past -- remembers it beyond his own memory. For when he tells you about Baltimore in 1862, it's as if he is talking about his childhood (oh this house used to be so wonderful then, the windows were draped in red, and it smelt of grandpa’s cigar). But Charlie’s nostalgia isn’t the kind that is content to just daydream. There is serious knowledge underpinning it; academic degrees too; and years of struggle that have been worthwhile, that have seen parts of the city change for the better. And also, behind the nostalgia is a pragmatism that doesn’t waste time being optimistic about the bits of the city that are slowly dying, and that cannot be stopped from dying. Though this is what fascinates me – just the fact of it - that sections of a city can die, and can begin to vanish.

I have seen places like Baltimore before – but they were never cities. Last summer I found myself driving around Jamaica and visiting villages tucked away, behind the red bauxite roads. The new industrial roads exposed them, but they had always been there, deep in the mountains of St. Ann. And some of these villages had fancy names like Alexandria or Thebes, as if they once had the ambition to be somewhere worth mentioning. But their names were a mockery, for I understood then that villages (just like people, and just like entire species of animals) die. To drive through the vanishing villages of Jamaica was almost the same as sitting by the bed of your uncle whose skin has turned grey, who is now on a high dose of morphine. The dying has already set in; you cannot stop it.

In those mountain villages in Jamaica, there were houses that no longer had people to live in them. Perfectly good houses -- but they were boarded up and had begun to rot. And this is what West Baltimore is like. Boarded up houses. Emptied. Dying. The statistics are staggering. 15,000 empty houses in the city. I thought before that the problem of urban centres was ALWAYS overcrowding. People living on top of people; everyone living on top of diseases. I never knew before that those people could just up and leave with no one else to move back in - the city, waiting on a population that is never coming.

I cannot think about Baltimore without thinking about the villages in Jamaica that so moved me – that made me nostalgic, that made me remember them beyond the thirty year limit of my memory. One day soon, I want to write a book about them – these villages that are not only tucked away in the mountains, but that will soon be buried there, to be discovered maybe a thousand years from now by a bright archaeologist. And I imagine in this future that someone will be surprised, just as those who walk around any excavated temple or palace is surprised, that entire places really do vanish, going deep down under the earth like the rest of the dead. I’m not asking for these villages to come back or be renewed or be gentrified (if villages, like rotting cities, can be gentrified). I just want to write a proper eulogy for them – and to say that the things that will be buried with them, those little bits of our culture – anansi stories, rolling calf stories, the recipe for dukkunu, a real nine-night service that doesn’t become a street-dance complete with tall loud-speakers stealing electricity from JPS – it isn’t foolish, or backward, or unhealthy to be a little sad that they are going the way of the villages.

I’m glad that Charlie is here to be sad for Baltimore -(not wailing in sackcloth and ashes, not histrionic or anything, just a little bit sad) - for the parts of this city that are vanishing. I am glad that he is here to mourn the crumbling Victorian architecture, the cornices, the high windows. I want to be sad for it too, but I can’t really. Because these bits of concrete suddenly seem to me, no more real than the other things I’m thinking about – the bits of peasant culture that we let die every day. Part of me feels that cities ought not to protest their deaths, for the life of every city has caused the death of a hundred or so villages. And that’s just the way of things, goddammit. Places die. They vanish. Everything that rises, falls.

-Kei Miller

Memorials, grieving, transcendence

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania -- Spring hasn't quite arrived here, so the trees stand bare, the sky is more gray than blue, and a biting wind whips across the fields as we visit significant sites in the Battle of Gettysburg. It's Monday, and Gettysburg National Military Park is quiet and uncrowded. Our guide, the historian Peter Carmichael of Gettysburg College, is energetic and emphatic, helping us to locate our positions on maps of the battle and to visualize troop and artillery movements across a landscape of gently rolling knolls and ridges just starting to return to their usual green. Occasionally we stop to read from the correspondence of Civil War soldiers and their families, reconstructing the stories of individual men who experienced the gruesome battle. We are suddenly brought down from the god's-eye perspective of history into smoke, dust, and blood.

The battlefield is peppered with memorials commemorating soldiers, divisions of infantry, and important events. Statues stand in heroic poses -- charging, standing ready, or gazing at the terrain -- already contributing to a narrative of glory and redemption. The serenity of the park belies the political wrangling that determines what is to be memorialized, how, and where. There is much talk of the "presentation" of history, the official master narrative versus the smaller and quieter individual narratives of the war.

In the afternoon conversation with Peter and his colleague Kent Gramm, a question arises: Is redemption, the quest for transcendence, a typically American impulse that underlies the memorialization of catastrophe? This leads to a discussion of how history is often beautified to facilitate understanding and transcendence. History's eventual form is mythology, and myths are notoriously difficult to revise once they have acquired an authoritative, definitive patina.

There is a need to articulate pain, to speak it, to tell its story, as a way of making sense of inchoate tragedy. At a wake for a loved one, the bereaved are compelled to tell the story of the death to visitor after visitor in a key part of the grieving process. Then the grieving ends, becomes memory, and the story starts its slow hardening into myth. Peter's project seems to be to slow down the process to speckle, streak, and texture the narrative before it sets. He understands that it might already be too late, and that his lone voice might be just that -- an echo across a quiet field whose horrors have already been laid to reluctant rest.

--Vicente Garcia Groyon

Meanings & Monuments

The thing about being cynical, or at least performing cynicism for whatever reasons we perform it (I think for me it is an attempt to balance out what, at heart, is a desperate optimism) is that it has a way of coming back to bite you – and very quickly too. Like karma on crack. So when I watched all the reports of the last disaster to hit my little corner of the world, and I watched artist after artist rushing to the Caribbean, to Haiti specifically, and tweeting and facebooking and blogging about their breaking hearts, I admit it now -- I rolled my eyes. I said to myself then, affecting the utmost contempt: I guess this is some new kind of industry -- ‘disaster tourism’. I know too well, as an artist, that we are all so full of elegies. We are almost constipated with them. And so we wait for the next event, the next tragedy that will so move us that we can pour our elegies into. You won't catch me doing that, I had thought smugly.

How could I guess then that a few months later I would be invited here, on this two-week tour of Gettysburg and Baltimore and New Orleans and Birmingham, Alabama and Washington DC. The stated remit? To consider how places have faced disasters and how they have tried to bring themselves back from it.

Of course, of course, I’ll try to justify my own excursion, however weakly. I will say, this isn’t a messiah mission at all; it's not promoting, in equal measure, the desperation of the survivor and the heroism of the rescuer. And neither is this a tour into a landscape full of rubble and news-cameras (Hey! Get a picture of me writing a poem on the stone of a crumbled building! Hey! Get a picture of me crying over a body just pulled from the ashes! Come, get this on film, my artistic heart breaking beautifully). No. There are no fresh bodies here. The cameras are gone. Some of these disasters that we will be looking at happened more than a hundred years ago. Still the land tries to recover, or even tries to forget. And yes, still artists try to re-imagine and make sense of it all.

We walked through Gettysburg park today, that massive, sprawling battlefield of the civil war. The park seemed to me an incredible achievement, just as much a constructed work of art as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Both try to structure and make sense of the same awful event. And this park, while holding so many monuments, obelisks and equestrian statues, is itself its own gigantic, many-acred, monument. But I was completely taken by an argument that our guide, an eminent historian, didn’t himself share but was kind enough to share with us. So consider this: here at Gettysburg Park is a landscape that has begun to change. The changes are natural. New trees, especially, have been growing. The land is doing this by itself. The land itself is trying to move on. These new trees usher the park into another future; but they distort the park as ‘monument’ – as reminder of disaster. So they’ve begun to cut back the trees. To preserve it as shrine. Our guide is in agreement with this. But I think I am on the side of the trees who don't want to die as uselessly as the soldiers.

Perhaps it’s my cynicism come back again, but it all seems a terrific metaphor – for writers and their books are always destroying trees to memorialize something or the other. So here is one of my early questions: by throwing metaphor, and meaning, and monuments towards the suffering landscape, as if to structure it, do we help it to move on from its tragedy, or do we trap it in its mourning?

Kei Miller

Gettysburg

Tour of the Battlefield

The writers listen as Peter Carmichael discusses how soldiers fought side by side. Were they fighting as bonded brothers or was this just a great tactic of battle?





Reanactments

If so many civil-war buffs are reenacting the scenes from this war, has America fully recovered from this historical event? Is our continuing struggle with race relations tied to the nostalgia of this war?

America and I, two lovers in an out-of-town motel

It's always good to take a step back. To take a step back from one's life, like from a canvas, just a step or two to see the whole. The result is always surprising.

The moment I walk through the passport control at my hometown airport, I'm already gone. I sit behind a glass wall, still able to see those who saw me off, but I'm gone. All focused on experiences ahead of me. Because I’ve set off on a journey.

America and I have a gentle love affair, like two people who meet in an out-of-town motel, without any long-term expectations, but inevitably bringing out the passion in each other. I'm excited about coming again. There are so many familiar things about it, but again so many surprisingly new. The first couple of hours after arrival I feel like I've entered my avatar who's not fully functioning yet. Words fail me. Unknown things disturb me. I'm confused by proverbial American talkativeness, small talk at the airport, in restaurants, on the street. I look aside, quietly passing by people, not addressing anyone unless I have to, wearing dark glasses. You look so European, my American friends tease me sometimes.

This time I'm first greeted by a friend from Sarajevo, Dada. My country, and its people are devastated by war, and the only good thing that came out of this cataclysm is that today I have friends and relatives living all around the world. That's why I feel at home even in a small Philadelphia studio apartment I enter for the first time, designed in an industrial chic style, as I unpack my bag to take out the Bosnian gifts: music, cookies from our childhood, books in mother tongue…

America has once again surprised me with its well-known enormousness. The kitchen sink is as big as a baby tub or a shower bath in a small Mediterranean town. A parking lot I see from the train is huge, vast, the massiveness of the scene reminds of reality multiplied by special effects. Coffee mugs are so big I have to hold them with both hands, food packaging and the fridge are so big that I see myself as Alice who has taken the magic mushroom and suddenly become small.

The distances here are also huge. My friend says that something is within walking distance, and then we go walking for two hours. By the end of the day we've spent so much time walking through parks, cafes and museums that I feel tired in American proportions. Enormously. I say, If I had spent so much time walking back at home, I would have reached the end of the state, and I would certainly need to have a passport on me.

I'm looking forward to meeting other writers that I'll set off on a journey today. Socializing with writers always makes me happy as it is a kind of a membership in a club for eccentrics: I'm excited about a possibility of sharing thoughts with people who look on the world somewhat askew. We speak different languages, we have different physiognomies, our lives back home are completely different, but when we meet together the magic usually works and we recognize one another’s similarities.

In the days to follow, America and I will show each other our vulnerable sides, we'll talk about the things that hurt. I hope we'll also share stories of fall and recovery. A song from my childhood comes to my mind: Someone dreams of having a horse/Someone has a horse/Someone dreams of riding a horse/Someone rides a horse/Someone dreams of falling off a horse/Someone falls off a horse/Someone wakes up on falling/Someone gets up and rides again.

Beginnings

I'm in transit now, somewhere over northeastern United States. Arrival in Baltimore is still up ahead, as is New Orleans and the Atchafalaya Basin, and Birmingham, which held such sway and sadness over my imagination when I was a teenager studying the American civil rights movement.

I'm hoping to find "the things which no chart can tell us," as James Baldwin so beautifully wrote. For me, a Canadian, America arrives like a step-brother, a worldly-wise, belligerent young man with Harvard dreams, who calls you late at night and speaks wistfully of all that is slipping from his grasp but, in the morning, forgets to wish you happy birthday. We know him like our own (he sends a great many letters, his certificates hang on our walls) and yet he isn't. But that hasn't stopped us from reinventing his late night stories, and being proud of the home we've made which is also free, also grand. Like Vicente, I, too, find my thoughts pulled away to events in Japan and Libya, and I know those images and histories will continue to impose themselves on the places we experience over the next two weeks. It's Baldwin, I think, who is my beginning guide, who understood that "we must find the terms of our connection, without which we will perish." Through fiction and the imagination, he tried to examine the lives of others, and through this examination, this proximity, express something about the meaning of what we are living.

Full of words

Two things get me mentally ready for a trip: deciding what to pack, and reading about the places I’ll be traveling to. I’m still not sure what things to pack for the next two weeks --from university readings in Gettysburg, to formal dinners in Washington D.C., to visits to the old Jim Crow districts of Birmingham, to muddy strolls through the Louisiana rivers and swamps. In fact, the only packing decision I’ve made so far is this: no computer, just pen and notepad. The readings, on the other hand, have for a while now been taking my mind to Ford’s theatre, and to the Birmingham jail, and to the Lower Ninth Ward levees that, in August of 2005, gave way to what is perhaps the country’s greatest human catastrophe. It seems as though I’m leaving on this trip full of history and images. Full of words. What will I bring back with me, I wonder, in two weeks time? Earlier today, while reading a brilliant story by John Biguenet --a New Orleans writer we’ll soon be meeting--, I happened upon this line: “When one makes a trip, he comes home with stories.”

Eduardo Halfon

Three things before I start to move

Manila, Philippines -- Three more nights before I board the plane that will take me again to the United States. The schedule up ahead looks grueling: seven cities in two weeks to get up close and personal with America filtered through the theme "Fall and Recovery." Like many other non-Americans, much of what I know about the U.S. comes from the mass media, and this tour promises more of the behind-the-curtain revelations of my IWP residency two years ago.

In the last three weeks, my mind has been turned constantly towards Japan and the continuing devastation wrought by earthquake and tsunami. I have no doubt that this will color my experience of the study tour ahead, providing contrast and context. The images of whole towns and cities obliterated by a giant black wave remind me again that history is littered with the remains of once-thriving civilizations laid low by disasters both natural and social. In a bit of serendipity, a recent news story about the rediscovery of "Atlantis" references both Japan and New Orleans in the same breath with lost civilizations like Pompeii, Babylon, Ayutthaya, and Petra.

My first taste of America was New Orleans, in 1997. Perhaps it wasn't the best introduction to America, as its culture and ambience set it drastically apart from the rest of the country. But I found it memorably, rapturously alive, with an appealing darkness and danger about its edges. I'm not sure how my memories of Crescent City will be revised by this post-Katrina encounter. Our itinerary promises an in-depth look at the circumstances of the disaster and the subsequent recovery efforts, and I look forward to the education.

I've also been going through the material provided by the IWP as background for the tour, and I'm quite frankly amazed to discover that an attitude that I've sensed or intuited hazily about America actually has a name: exceptionalism. Given my ignorance of this philosophy, as well as my cultural background, I'm approaching the subject a little warily, although the more I learn about it, the more it seems to illuminate the things that puzzle most about America. I think this will drive much of the discussion in the days to come.

-- Vicente Garcia Groyon

Hello

Hello everyone, What a relief, setting this up was easier than I thought. I look forward to meeting you all in a couple of days' time! Natasa, this sign in has worked for me! Alice