Review: The Great American Bus Ride
Mar. 24th, 2008 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebThe title intrigued me. So I pulled the book off the library shelf and learned it's about how a woman traveled all around the US (it looks like she went through 45 of the 50 states) on a Greyhound bus.
The front cover promised "a raffish, vital, unpredictable world" "armed only with the bare necessities for life on the road."
So, the sociologist in me likes learning things the easy way, and I thought I might also get some hints on riding the bus.
I enjoy Irma Kurtz's writing. "My first idea had been to travel America by train. When I was a kid, sturdy old pufferbellies still chugged into the boondocks whistling in the night to small-town poets. These days, however, little more than the rails remain. Nailed fast to earth at untold expense of human life, silently they track the immense western spaces. I soon discovered American trains would not take me anywhere obscure, or anywhere much at it seemed, unless I kept going to Chicago first."
Read-aloud writing. The sort of writing tomake my own seem a waste of time inspire me.
And I did learn a few things about riding a Greyhound bus. The front seats have the best view but are reserved for the elderly and disabled, otherwise it's first-come-first-served. The last seat, by the bathroom, is for the bad boys (just like in school buses). If you check your bag, it has a way of disappearing somehow. It's okay to eat on board, but most people don't.
It was fun to see what she'd say about the bus depot I know about. She said San Antonio is more like Old Spain than anyplace she's been, including Old Spain.
And it's fun to see how she wrote about the Florida Keys after I'd just done the same thing myself. "Highway 1 strings its Keys into a necklace of odd beads adrift between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Key Largo, Marathon Key, No Name Key, Duck Key, and all the others: a seductive voice sings out from their weather-beaten holiday charms lining the highway, but it is also rather doomful on the sly [because you can't help thinking about all the hurricanes that have passed through]."
Mostly I was disappointed. The poor woman almost never got off the bus other than to get a good night's sleep. She amused herself by looking out the windows and listening to the other passengers. She likes the stories, but they're mostly just hints of stories. She likes being on the road, but it seems such a waste to be so near so many things, and then just ride right by them. She would even see opportunities for adventures presenting themselves, but then ignore them.
She describes why she liked it, though, like this: "Only in American do things occasionally pan out as we imagine they will when we are young. There really are still cowboys to be found in a wildish west, and resident philosophers in North Dakota bookstores. Hollywood is full of movie stars. On Middle American farmlands, religious sects endure as nowhere else and against all time and reason. ..."
Maybe I'm just too close to the subject matter. The author had been living in England for a long time before deciding to come over and explore her roots.
Well, she's written other things. I may check them out.
**
In other news, remember how I got annoyed with my online savings account for always lagging behind the others, so I opened a new account with one of the more profitable companies? Well, my old company jumped out in front of my new company. Actually, my new company plummeted faster than my old one until now it's worse. Dang. But today I found a way to link the accounts directly so that money can be transferred directly between them instead of to my checking account first.
Also, I mailed in my tax returns. It's one thing to basically finish them, but another to have checked everything, made copies, weighed the envelope, and gotten it mailed.
Finally, yesterday I got one of those scary offers in the mail that they send people with bad credit: This a real $500 check that you can actually cash! And then you can pay 87% interest until you pay it back! So today I requested copies of my credit reports. As soon as you could start getting one free one per year, I decided I probably should, just to make sure everything's in order. But after that first time I never got around to it again until today. Everything's still fine.
The front cover promised "a raffish, vital, unpredictable world" "armed only with the bare necessities for life on the road."
So, the sociologist in me likes learning things the easy way, and I thought I might also get some hints on riding the bus.
I enjoy Irma Kurtz's writing. "My first idea had been to travel America by train. When I was a kid, sturdy old pufferbellies still chugged into the boondocks whistling in the night to small-town poets. These days, however, little more than the rails remain. Nailed fast to earth at untold expense of human life, silently they track the immense western spaces. I soon discovered American trains would not take me anywhere obscure, or anywhere much at it seemed, unless I kept going to Chicago first."
Read-aloud writing. The sort of writing to
And I did learn a few things about riding a Greyhound bus. The front seats have the best view but are reserved for the elderly and disabled, otherwise it's first-come-first-served. The last seat, by the bathroom, is for the bad boys (just like in school buses). If you check your bag, it has a way of disappearing somehow. It's okay to eat on board, but most people don't.
It was fun to see what she'd say about the bus depot I know about. She said San Antonio is more like Old Spain than anyplace she's been, including Old Spain.
And it's fun to see how she wrote about the Florida Keys after I'd just done the same thing myself. "Highway 1 strings its Keys into a necklace of odd beads adrift between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Key Largo, Marathon Key, No Name Key, Duck Key, and all the others: a seductive voice sings out from their weather-beaten holiday charms lining the highway, but it is also rather doomful on the sly [because you can't help thinking about all the hurricanes that have passed through]."
Mostly I was disappointed. The poor woman almost never got off the bus other than to get a good night's sleep. She amused herself by looking out the windows and listening to the other passengers. She likes the stories, but they're mostly just hints of stories. She likes being on the road, but it seems such a waste to be so near so many things, and then just ride right by them. She would even see opportunities for adventures presenting themselves, but then ignore them.
She describes why she liked it, though, like this: "Only in American do things occasionally pan out as we imagine they will when we are young. There really are still cowboys to be found in a wildish west, and resident philosophers in North Dakota bookstores. Hollywood is full of movie stars. On Middle American farmlands, religious sects endure as nowhere else and against all time and reason. ..."
Maybe I'm just too close to the subject matter. The author had been living in England for a long time before deciding to come over and explore her roots.
Well, she's written other things. I may check them out.
**
In other news, remember how I got annoyed with my online savings account for always lagging behind the others, so I opened a new account with one of the more profitable companies? Well, my old company jumped out in front of my new company. Actually, my new company plummeted faster than my old one until now it's worse. Dang. But today I found a way to link the accounts directly so that money can be transferred directly between them instead of to my checking account first.
Also, I mailed in my tax returns. It's one thing to basically finish them, but another to have checked everything, made copies, weighed the envelope, and gotten it mailed.
Finally, yesterday I got one of those scary offers in the mail that they send people with bad credit: This a real $500 check that you can actually cash! And then you can pay 87% interest until you pay it back! So today I requested copies of my credit reports. As soon as you could start getting one free one per year, I decided I probably should, just to make sure everything's in order. But after that first time I never got around to it again until today. Everything's still fine.