we saw hotel rwanda tonight. it hurts to watch, of course.
the problem is that all of us ought to know that already. we've had gourevitch's we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families and anne aghion's in rwanda we say... the family that does not speak dies for a few years, now.
i remember finishing the gourevitch book and feeling bottomed out by the sin--a word i do not use--of the genocide. then i rememember seeing the aghion documentary and being upset by the fact that this horror wasn't really haunting the world the way it ought to be. again, seeing hotel rwanda, the same thing.
i don't think it's western guilt or romantic hopelessness. instead, the book, the documentary, and the film begin to override the emotion of the individual and point to the absurdity of the human. that is to say, when i finish the book or walk out of the film, i want to give up the glamorous life of the grad student and sell my soul to human rights watch, to go to law school and work for unesco, to backtrack ten years and join the peace corps, to fuck all and go do something.
and then, two days later, even if i can easily articulate a three point memo on what-i-think-about-the-war-in-drc, it becomes background noise.
"what can i do?" what a ridiculous futile overwhelming question. if we have to ask...
for the record: darfur.
My feelings about airplanes and what they do and what happens when we get on them are overdetermined. My family never really flew anywhere. I rode on my first airplane as an infant and wasn't on another until my junior year in high school. No more flights until my first year after college. Add to my unfamiliarity with Mach .8 at 35,000 feet a more general unease with heights - no roller coasters for me, thanks - as well as what might diplomatically be called an anxious disposition. The result, of course, is a sometimes acute fear of flying. A good friend of a good friend, who flies for a regional subsidiary of a major American carrier once lifted his eyebrows when I expressed my fear of flight and, wielding more power than he could imagine, asked, "Oh, don't like to go up in the steel tube of death, eh?" (He has since more than made up for it.)
Marrying someone who has flown regularly all her life, someone whose parents "fall asleep as soon as the plane backs away from the terminal and don't wake up until parking at the next one," someone who flies to subsaharan Africa relatively often, has gone a long way towards alleviating my panic on planes. As I repeat pretty regularly, I've flown from Frankfurt to Johannesburg, a distance few are lucky enough to travel. That helped. As of a few weeks ago, I've been on three common commuter planes, the Canadair RJ *, the Dash-8, and the ATR 72. I've flown across the Atlantic on the Triple-Seven and the A340. I stretched my legs w-a-y out in the emergency exit row of a Lufthansa 747, as it zoomed along between Frankfurt and Jo'burg.
Probably all three of my kind readers have been on most, if not all, of the same planes. My curse is that, as a flyer who used to go into panic attacks at take-off, suffer a thoroughgoing sense of dread during much of a flight's cruising, and sigh only when the reverse-thrust began to slow us down on the runway, I get off on plane minutiae (nb: that's a pretty ridiculous term, here, as many of an aircraft's details are the "minutiae" that keep it in flight). Natalie calls it plane p.0rn and suffers through my routines in airports and on planes... "Hey, did you know that this plane has winglets. Look, those little vertical extensions at the wing's end. They make flight more efficient. I saw a documentary on Discovery Wings about them. The 747's are, like, eight feet tall. Speaking of which, did you know that the A319 we rode to San Fransisco is, like, totally going to replace the 737, which some refer to as 'the workhorse of American commercial aviation'? Oh, yeah, totally. All those new JetBlues are Airbuses. Except Airtran's fleet is going to be all 717s..." This goes on until we make the final turn for departure. Then I shut up and look out the window. In the old days, hyperventilation kicked in. Now, I just breathe deeply and shiver at how fundamentally astonishing it is that we can take a seat in this big thing that roars along up into the sky.
Look, if the alternatives are an obsessively Romantic epistemology of air travel or tachycardia and nausea at the thought of flying... Besides, I'm with Patrick Smith **, the psuedonymous "Ask the Pilot" columnist/author, who, while sympathetic to the ugliness of the WalMart-ization of American airlines, insists that we take too lightly the fact that one can look out a window and see the expanse of a landscape, as one casually zips from continent to continent. Even if it blows to sit between smelly obnoxious tourist families who think the whole plane needs to know how they feel about the French, even if it blows to pay $500 for a late and bumpy flight, even if it blows to wait two days for misplaced luggage, you still get to see the Mississippi River from 38,000 feet, something too few flyers appreciate. You still get to fly from BWI to Nashville for less than $100 and in less than two hours. You still get the feeling of powerful lift as you and several tons of airplane first float off the runway.
Here are the things I noticed during my recent marathon of flight:
1. United lets passengers listen to Air Traffic Control on Channel 9. I love that. Love is probably not a strong enough word. When I hear "United Nine-Zero-Three Heavy, make your heading one-eight-zero," and I feel the plane turn, or when I hear, "United Nine-Zero-Two requesting flight level three-eight-zero"..."United Nine-Zero-Two, make your flight level three-eight-zero," feel the plane climb, and realize that our pilot's request for a less bumpy ride has been accomodated, I am pleased. I don't pretend to understand everything I hear, but a lot of it is pretty intuitive ("ride reports" from aircraft to determine relative turbulence at varying altitudes, etc.), and some of it is just plain nice. I love it when my plane's pilot is able to be polite to the different controllers with whom he or she communicates. Sounds absurd, I imagine, but, again, to the nervous flyer, all signs of calm and normalcy are good.
2. For each of our flights on regional-communter aircraft, we had to walk across tarmacs. I was like an eight year old (as is probably obvious, all of this makes me sound like an eight-year old). The sensation of walking around down there with the planes was great. Smelled like jet fuel (I have no way of knowing whether or not that's what I was actually smelling, but it was certainly fuel-ish, and there were certainly jets around) and sounded loud. And we saw planes at eye level at all kinds of airports. Washington National's matter-of-fact button-down D.C-ish-ness in the midst of high-volume and hurried travel (got to see them constituents, after all). Atlanta Hartsfield's crazy mix of cosmopolitan rush-rush-rush, "we're the busiest airport in the country" pride (O'Hare disagrees), and southern mannerism. Munich's oh-so-German precision - those planes were lined up straight, dammit. Chattanooga's quiet, hosting only two visible commercial planes, one belonging to each of the airlines we used to fly in and out at Christmas and the week after (USAir Express and ASA-Delta Connection, respectively). Charles De Gaulle's patchwork of liveries from all over the world... That post-Aeroflot Tupolev with the Cyrillic text down the fuselage really did just come in from far Eastern Russia, and that 747 really did just come in from Sydney, and that A340 really did just come in from Nairobi.
3. If you want empirical evidence of suburban sprawl, fly on a turboprop (lower altitude) out of a major metropolitan area, say, Atlanta, at night. The lights never end. That city needs to be reigned in.
All of this, and the A380 just got its formal debut today. The 7E7 hasn't even been made yet...
All of this, and I'm still an uncomfortable flyer...
* For all linked images, I've tried to locate photos of aircraft arriving, departing, or taxi-ing at the airports into or out of which I've been on said aircraft. The appropriate airlines are aso represented. As the most casual viewer will see, Airliners.net is a captivating site; it's gotten away with many of my hours.
** I've also been known to refer to him as "my therapist."
This entry aspires to catalogue, not to reflect. Its descriptions are haphazard and secondary, but they'll have their way with the story, I imagine.
Christmas was what Christmas has always been for me, the happiest of occasions to ignore the inevitability of work-like things and to revel with family. And Natalie's family revels well. Even though sister- and brother-in-law Alia and Brandus were tossed about by the frivolity of travel gods and arrived from Colorado halfway through Christmas dinner, and even though a relation had found him- or herself involuntarily obliged to the state's judicial system for an as-yet-to-be-determined length of time, and even though I still have trouble keeping up when twenty or so people from the same family are seated for a meal, I loved my Christmas in Dalton.
And yet... Natalie's grandmother had been hospitalized just before the holiday, and, sadly, we learned that she had been suffering from an ovarian cancer that had metastasized aggressively. She was unable to leave the surgical ICU, and her absence at Christmas was marked.
Almost immediately after returning to D.C., I rode up to Philadelphia with Ryan for the MLA meetings. I should note at this point that the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Years were travel intensive. That will be more than clear soon, but part of the matter, here, is what remains a general anxiety about flying. The good news, though, is twofold: again, I spent enough hours on planes to feel cured (we've seen that fade before), and the several flights we took on Canadair Regional Jets, something that had me worried, were actually just fine. In fact, the RJ doesn't feel much smaller than the mid-range MD88s, depending on where you're seated. The back row, between the aft-mounted engines, is less than elysian, but row 8 isn't bad.
Anyway...
I have absolutely nothing to say about MLA that hasn't been repeated by the legions already. I recommend attending before going on the market, though, as the pressure is primarily to take it all in, instead of running to elevators and tweaking the fine points of interview presentations between hotel rooms. I felt edified by most of the sessions I attended (and I went to a lot). A few times, I regretted not submitting proposals to a panel.
Philadelphia was nice, at least the ten blocks of center city I walked. Good to see a few friends who've moved along.
The celebrated interview sort of gets beyond my efforts to say anything about it. I repeated my silly assertion that this is "where I do naïve and reckless things," at least twice. Not surprisingly, I left the room (announcing stupidly that "there are apparently these discipline-specific cash bars, and I really need to go to one") feeling a little tingle of regret. It was very good to meet Chuck, Miriam, and Nick; always good to see ...Zombie and Matt. We were very pleasant, generally, even when asked to announce whether or not we read each others' blogs. Somehow, I got out of answering that.
The life writing cash bar was, as a matter of fact, very much worthwhile. Got to talk for a bit with a few notables in the field without feeling network-y.
So, furiosly swimming out of the MLA whirlpool, took Amtrak (a first for me) from Philly to D.C., unpacked, repacked, pet the cat, and got to Dulles within a few hours to catch our flight to Munich, where we were to catch a quick flight (see above, "Canadair Regional Jet") (God, I love Lufthansa) to Paris. The flight over was nicely uneventful. The Munich airport less cool than Frankfurt, which has great steel girding and rigging everywhere. MUN felt like Ikea. The quick flight to Charles De Gaulle (see above, "back row") went well, but was mostly subsumed by the glee of arrival). As most of you reading this very likely know already, CDG's escalator/moving floor system may well be the best use of the space age aesthetic in a public space. I could be wrong, here, but the image of all these people in glass tunnels riding across an atrium from level to level just looked so Alphaville.
We took the RER into the city, having purchased Metro cards, and lost some purchasing power by making dollars into Euros. Lots of trash.
The city met and exceeded expectations. My recommendation is to arrive cynically, ready to be let down by this place everyone's been telling you is so wonderful since you were a high-school freshman in French I. And so I did. And so Paris won.
My introduction, as it should be, was rushed and metropolitan. New Year's Eve on the Metro, rushing along sidewalks to get to the cafe below Katherine's apartment, where she and Amy would meet us. When we showed up, under the sound navigation of Natalie, whose ability to get around and to communicate in the language laid the foundation for my happy visit, all was perfect. A good reunion with college friends on a Paris sidewalk... Katherine the hostess was sublime. A welcoming friend with an apartment overlooking a park in the sixth arrondissment cannot be over-appreciated.
I saw the places one sees when one hasn't been to Paris. Notre Dame gave me chills. Shakespeare & Co. was sold out of copies of A Moveable Feast (I actually had to whisper to the clerk, dreading her response. She made it clear that, no, six copies had been sold in the last couple of hours, so, sorry, we're out.). The Eiffel Tower is much higher than you think. If you're not certain whether or not your fear of heights lingers, this is not the place to learn. The first level was plenty high for me. This was the vantage point for the new image in the (dave e) header. New Year's Eve dinner still makes me drool. Our dessert course arrived around 12:30. Mmmmmmmmm.
We left on the second, having learned late on New Year's Day that Natalie's grandmother, who had seemed to be improving before we left, had passed away. We were up all night on New Year's Day, trying to book flights all the way to Chattanooga, the closest airport. In the morning, Natalie had an interesting back-and-forth with our Parisian cab driver, who insisted on the feasability of [t]he [a]merican [d]ream until Natalie asked for an example. After a good many hesistant starts, he managed to describe Will Smith, whose name Natalie offered... He knew we were from Washington, and as we arrived at CDG and worked out the tip, he observed, tu es politique! oui, monsieur... bein sur. c'est vrais. nous sommes politiques. Four flights in twenty-four hours. My notebook entry for January 2nd: "CDG - MUN - IAD - ATL - CHA."
Our funeral week in Dalton was hard on Natalie and her family though the comfort of a large family's gathering made things better, as it always will. Jimmie Bailey spent her life in a small-ish town and was a sort of town matriarch. I was astonished but unsurprised by the number and the feeling of the crowd who attended the visitation and the funeral. Many will miss her.
We made it home, much to our cat's relief, last Wednesday.
wednesday, 22 december - fly from dca to chattanooga (usair express crj 100) for christmas with natalie's family in dalton, ga.
saturday, 25 december - christmas.
sunday, 26 december - fly from chattanooga to dca (usair express crj 100)
sunday, 26 december to tuesday, 28 december - usair attempts to transport luggage from chattanooga to our home.
monday, 27 december - travel with ryan to philadephia for mla.
monday, 27 december to thursday, 30 december - mla.
thursday, 30 december - amtrak from philadelphia to d.c.
thursday, 30 december - fly from iad to munich (united 777). two hours laid over.
friday, 31 december - fly from munich to paris (cdg) (lufthansa crj 70).
friday, 31 december - new year's eve dinner at alcazar, 62, rue mazarine (6eme arr.).
saturday, 1 january - slept very late. notre dame, shakespeare & co. (sold out of copies of a moveable feast), eiffel tower.
sunday, 2 january - fly from cdg to munich (lufthansa crj 70). fly from munich to iad (united 777). fly from iad to atl (delta 737). fly from atl to chattanooga (asa aerospatiale 72).
sunday, 2 january to wednesday, 5 january - dalton, ga.
wednesday, 5 january - fly from chattanooga to atl (asa aerospatiale 72). fly from atl to iad (delta md-88).
details will very likely be forthcoming.
we returned early from our new year's trip to paris to be with family after natalie's grandmother passed away on new year's day.