I’m still recovering from my trip through Detroit, which makes New Orleans’ Ninth Ward look like Salzburg. It’s been especially striking to travel around Milwaukee the past few days, as Milwaukee, while not a shining city on the hill, seems so livable, well cared-for, and humane by comparison. For a great sense of the experience, […]
Category Archives: Travels
Detroit Safari, Part 2
04-Aug-09Dearborn, Michigan.
04-Aug-09I dropped off a friend at the Detroit airport a few days ago and couldn’t resist taking a spin over to see Dearborn, one of the unique American places, as it is, proportionally, the most Arab and most Muslim city in America. It is also the birthplace of Henry Ford and the location of the […]
Detroit Safari.
29-Jul-09One of the yearly events at the Hillbilly Underground is a trip through the ruins of Detroit, which astonished me, though I am a student of ruins and desolation. Detroit is the most intense urban desolation I have ever seen, anywhere. I will provide more links to this, as I digest it, but more or […]
Especially in Michigan.
26-Jul-09Rusticatione facta, I’m headed off to Michigan to be a part of an artists’ colony called The Hillbilly Underground. Hopefully I will do some writing, though it’d be a lie to say I wanted to do much other than socialize.
At Antietam.
19-Jul-09“When I think of the battle of Antietam, it seems so strange. Who permits it? To see or feel that a power is in existence that can and will hurl masses of men against each other in deadly conflict – slaying each other by the thousands, mangling and deforming their fellow men – is almost […]
Packing up the truck this morning to head to Virginia, I came out to find the rear tire outrageously flat, which it was not the night before. My first flat – I’ve never even had one on a bicycle before. Of course, changing it ended up being difficult, because the metal frame holding the spare […]
Stage Five: Washington to New York.
14-May-09I arrived in Washington in the afternoon. I stayed with a friend from junior high school, whom I had last seen while in college. She lived just off Pennsylvania Avenue, in a nice neighborhood where Foggy Bottom meets Georgetown meets Dupont Circle. We parked the truck and went for an afternoon walk, first to Rock […]
Stage Four: Charlottesville to D.C.
14-May-09I spent two nights in Charlottesville, enjoying the delightful conversation of my hostess as well as the cultured atmosphere of the town. Here there is a flourishing pedestrian culture – Market Street having been entirely converted to a pedestrian mall – as well as bookshops, pizzerias, and the like. I admired the spring gardens and […]
I woke up early – one of the perks of camping – and hit the road immediately. I wanted to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I was wary of paying in order to get my nature-fix, but I figured that the National Park designation meant that I would see real, undisturbed forest. It was […]
Edward Said’s Last Tin of Tobacco.
04-Aug-09Some oddities from the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. They had a case of relics from the life of Edward Said, the famous scholar whose fame has perhaps not done much good (for my essay on Orientalism see here). Why in the world we should be interested in his last tin of tobacco I […]