Don't Tell My Wife

Don't tell my wife, but I have a boyfriend.

I put James A. Reeves's Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir on my Amazon wish list a while back, alongside works including Bradley Garrett's Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and T.C. Boyle's Wild Child: And Other Stories. I don't recall where I heard about Reeves's book, but I suspect I read a review in the Boston Globe or perhaps Entertainment Weekly. A combination photography book and introspective look at time spent road-tripping across the good ol' US of A seemed right up my alley.

Published in August 2011, Road to Somewhere is just the latest book I've read that I wish I'd written. Others on this list include Joel Sternfeld's On This Site (see November 3, 2014, J. Crew: Inspiring Readers While Clothing the Moderately Well-Heeled), Bill See's 33 Days: Touring in a Van, Sleeping on Floors, Chasing a Dream and Greg Olear's Fathermucker.

I'm not done with Road to Somewhere, but it's a relatively quick read so I'll be looking for something new before too long. I just added Reeves's second book, The Manufactured History of Indianapolis, to my wish list.

I wouldn't cheat on Beth simply because I love Reeves's book, although I won't deny my attraction to his photos -- he knows of and exploits my weakness for old motels, junked cars by the side of the road, desert vistas and dive bars. And I love his writing -- crisp and evocative, and full of self-doubt and deep concern for the state of American affairs. He questions many times what it means to be a man (he's the first in four generations not to enlist in the military) and senses that he's wasting his time behind his computer (he teaches and does design work in addition to writing).

And, sure, Reeves is a decent looking guy in his mid 30s, who, in the few photos I've seen of him, has just the right amount of scruff, and loosens his skinny black tie in a rakish fashion. He's presented his work around the globe -- New York, Helsinki, New Orleans, Grenoble.

But what really sealed my man crush on James A. Reeves is his web site, and all that he does with that beautiful online abode.

The Notebook section of his entirely black-and-white site presents a "collection of sketches, essays, and broadsides from the past decade." Some he plans to use in future books, others stand on their own as fantastical exercises. Some pieces he uses in his teaching, and yet others present "evidence of struggling to understand our strange world."

Here's a short one that comes from Road to Somewhere:

Somewhere along the Utah and Nevada border, a fat man wearing no shirt and hospital pants grills some steaks on the back of his dinged-up Airstream Classic trailer. A few old missile casings and rusted fuselages sit in his backyard which is an endless desert thundering out towards the Sierra Nevada range.

I pull over and take another picture of the sinking sun. He calls out howdy and I shout hey, our voices bouncing off the hills. The air is dead silent except for the sizzle of the grill fifty yards into the weeds. A screen door bangs and he disappears and returns with more steaks. I scan the horizon, thinking I can almost see New York and then down to New Orleans and across to LA. This country is too damned big. A small panic rushes up. Who installed these power-lines way the hell out here? Or are they telephone cables? I don’t understand how anything works.

406 miles to go. My rental car sprays dust and the fat man waves as I push south towards Vegas.

There are more than 150 of these, all dolled-up with photos or drawings. I struggle to write a blog post once or twice a week, either here or at The Backside of America. I can do better.

Then, of course, there is the Photographs section. Reeves presents dozens of black-and-white photos, each with a funny, clever, insightful or depressing sentence or two. There are small sections of pictures devoted to Reeves's vinyl and book collections. I hope he adds to these.

The photos of motels, street scenes, gas stations, and oil refineries lit up at night are gorgeous. Again, I hope he adds to this section.

What sets Reeves's web site apart from other author sites I've perused over the years is the Broadcasts section, a "collection of reverberated songs, AM radio chatter, and looping vinyl crackle from the Big American Studio."

Reeves designs these playlists for specific experiences, i.e., "long drives, cheap motels, and late nights," or "killing time in airports, motel lobbies, and train stations." I love the concept, because I'm a playlist guy (and before that, a mix tape and mix CD guy). I make playlists on my iPod with names like "Music for Hayseeds," "Goin' Places" and "One From the Ladies."

Seven years ago I started writing a novel during National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). I go back to it once in a while, with the idea in mind that someday I'll finish it, along with a companion concept album (the book actually grew out of the concept album, which is about UFO's, which won't surprise anybody.)

Alright, alright, that's enough. Go check out Reeves's web site, or buy his book.

Review -- The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

Reading a memoir about traveling across America, while simultaneously working on the same type of book, can be dangerous, especially when that memoir is written by Bill Bryson, who, in addition to being a best-selling author, is the chancellor of England's Durham University.

The book -- The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America -- is the second of Bryson's I've read, the first being A Walk In the Woods: Rediscovering America On the Appalachian Trail. I really liked the Appalachian Trail book, in which Bryson walked long stretches of the at-times grueling, world-famous trail that runs for approximately 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine (I wrote a little about the book, and my childhood spent playing amid the trees last year; see February 13, 2012, "Woods").

In A Walk In the Woods, Bryson spins a great tale of traveling with an out-of-shape friend, who provides comic relief. Bryson's descriptions of the wonderment, hardship and fear they faced during their adventure are terrific, as are his portraits of the landscapes through which they pass.

There are times when he gets a bit grumpy about things, understandably so given the challenge he set out for himself. And he gets a bit self-righteous about preservation at times. But overall, I really enjoyed the book.

So I had high hopes for The Lost Continent.

And I was somewhat let down. Sure, Bryson's trademark wit and self-deprecation are there. And his descriptions of the places he visits and travels past, and of people whom he meets, are vivid and funny. But there's a meanness to this book that I wasn't expecting.

Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. After dropping out of college and traveling a bit through Europe, he moved to England in 1973. He got married, and he and his wife briefly moved to the States. But in 1977, he moved back to the UK. In 1995, he, his wife and kids moved stateside, to New Hampshire. Then, in 2003, he went back across the pond.

He wrote The Lost Continent during two trips across the States in 1987 and 1988. At that point, he'd been in England for a decade, and was obviously used to the people, the culture, the history, the food, the states of entertainment, retail and travel in the Old Country.

So it's understandable that he'd compare things between the New World and Europe. In the book, he rarely makes direct comparisons between the two worlds, but his harsh statements about how fat and boring he finds most people in the States, and how disappointing he finds many of the points of interest that he visits make it plain that he believes his native land comes up short when held against England, et al.

American are fat. They're stupid. They don't care about real history, only about fake representations at sites designed only to separate you from your money. There's too much landscape in between towns out West. Southern people speak too slowly. On and on he goes.

I'm not gonna lie to you: when I traveled across the country in a van with three friends in 1988 I made many of these same observations. But I expect a world-class writer to do a better job, to get off his high horse and engage with people, and find the stories behind the facades.

Still, I found enjoyment in the book. Bryson's a great writer, funny and observant and quite capable of tying his road trip experiences to moments from his childhood. In fact, the comparisons he draws between trips he took with his parents and siblings to some of the same locations he revisits as an adult, are some of the funniest and most poignant in the book.

Evidently, he returned to Iowa after his father died, and then took the road trip before flying back to England. It makes sense that the stories about his father and family trips are so well done.

I found myself wishing I could travel to some of the places Bryson visited, as well as to revisit some of the spots that I'm writing about in my memoir.

Unlike Bryson, when I traveled from Connecticut down to Florida, across to New Orleans, up to Memphis and out to New Mexico, I wasn't planning on writing a book. Sure, I kept a very basic journal and recorded some conversations on cassette tape, but 25 years after the fact, those sources aren't as complete as I wanted them to be.

In reading Bryson's cross-country tale, I'm jealous of the detail he includes, and the seeming ease with which he makes me laugh. Honestly, though, I'm doing a better job than I ever could have imagined with my memoir. I've spent 11 months on the book, and have arrived at a fairly complete picture of the trip I took, and how I felt about things while on the road. I've also managed to tie in other events from my childhood and from high school and college into the whole affair.

So, I recommend the book, but with the above caveats. And I look forward to reading I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes On Returning to America After 20 Years Away, Bryson's book about returning to the U.S. with his family in the mid-'90s.