Here is Where

reading the paper this morning I came across an article about this project, which is cool, I think...

principles of uncertainty

I'm so glad you and jess got something from the maira kalman. Here's a link to the most recent book of hers, which I love a lot... (I think she is currently working on a book about American democracy of which the jefferson essay is one section: if you look on the times website there are links to others in that series...)

maira kalman

It's beautiful! And Jess thinks so too. She says: are there any books that Maira K. has done in that style? There are, I think, but are there any you recommend?

time wastes too fast

nothing to do with the River Trip or Archives of Exile directly, but what a piece of work Maira Kalman did here (you remember I showed you some of her work when we met in the winter?)

wow. somehow I want you to have this, richard...

Where do I live?

I read your post on the River Project blog and I found it moving - a perfectly economical account of your motives in undertaking the journey. A few thoughts, not organised and offered just as they occur to me:

• There is a beautiful paradox in the idea that to find out where you live you have to leave home. This seems to me entirely true and yet strangely riddle-like.


• The statement that we live in 'a land of road markers and guide posts' through which 'every man must still find his own way' expresses a tension that I also think is powerfully real.


• When I join you for the first part of the journey, I won't exactly be finding out where I live because I will come to the US as a foreigner. (Unless one thinks in terms of living in the world or the west, but that isn't quite the point, I think.) What is interesting, though, is that in Doing Documentary Work Robert Coles consistently connects James Agee - one of the archetypal American figures in the documentary tradition as he conceives it - with George Orwell. And I find it difficult to think of anyone more British than Orwell. This is an interesting idea to me. I think I'm going to read The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London in the next few days.

from Made Flesh

(not related to the river for a change!) but reading this I thought of your photos in istanbul and of the posters in different languages in the train station:

Here on the last puzzle-piece of wall
the plaster's molded in designs
of knots and tangles like the graffiti tags
scribbled in quick unbroken strokes
across bridges and subway cars
They are your heart stutters to see
the letters of another alphabet
a vast lace of calligraphy
a hundred thousand characters of praise

When you look up the wind has changed
as sudden as the twisting of a lens
back into focus everywhere you look
seems otherwise you no longer
see yourself over your own shoulder
in the second person you have snapped
back into your body

Oh my god
where have I been To pay the world
so much attention Where have I been
To be your own puppet Where
have I been To fall and let yourself
be caught Where have I been To god and back

Craig Arnold
from Mistral, from Made Flesh, p. 42

it doesn't start here

This is from the beginning of Lake Wobegon Days and it made me smile:

The lake is 678.2 acres, a little more than a section, fed by cold springs and drained from the southeast by a creek, the Lake Wobegon River, which flows to the Sauk, which joins the Mississippi. In 1836, an Italian count waded up the creek, towing his canoe, and camped on the lake shore, where he imagined for a moment that he was the hero who had found the true headwaters of the Mississippi. Then something about the place made him decide he was wrong. He was right, we're not the headwaters, but what made him jump to that conclusion? What has made so many others look at us and think, It doesn't start here!?

Actually, there's something about this that I *really* like. I'll have to find some way to use it :o)