Posted by kluster on September 24, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
I have not kept my promise, issued on this blog three weeks ago, to supply Kluster with regular updates on the progress of my 8000-mile book tour of the States with the poet Annie La Ganga, and, even though it is generally agreed among the semi-civilized and the sporadically ethical that spouting excuses for the breaking of oaths merely makes one look like a self-serving tenderhead, I’m going to do it anyway. (In fact, I am a self-serving tenderhead.)
Possibly the single largest obstacle was the surprising countrywide paucity of telecommunications technology. Even though Annie and I have an iPhone (given to us by my sisters specifically for sending distress signals while on tour), and even a dashboard-lighter-socket inverter for on-the-go recharging, it was largely useless because our itinerary took us through those swaths of the United States least concerned with communicating with the outside world: West Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of square miles undotted with cell towers, wi-fi zones, or internet cafés. (Lots of cafés, though---my favorite was the Chat ‘n’ Chew, in (I think) Nevada. Didn’t go in---it looked like the sort of place where the chatting is about how to kill and eat, or enslave and auction, city slickers who happen upon the premises.) From such arrant geographies few communiqués ever escape, [except maybe via “mail” (like, with stamps) or smoke signals. (With the latter, punctuation gets all fucked up.)]
But even when 3G wireless or other conduits became available, I found it difficult to compose on the iPhone’s nanoQWERTY. Especially trying was when travel took us through rougher territory, where roads seemed more like gravel pits, or through the high plains and heavily-wooded areas, where the risk of meeting at 80 mph (130km/h) a large beast loitering in the road. Even fauna as small as juvenile white-tail deer can, by not getting out of your way, or you out of theirs, collapse an ordinary sedan, and likewise its occupants.
Early one morning, while traveling a high-speed two-lane blacktop on a vast mesa somewhere in southern Utah, Annie and I came across a half-dozen or so vultures* idly pecking at the road. There was no carcass to be seen. As we got closer, the vultures flew away, and we realized they had been at work on a bloodstain.** A big one; covering at least 20 meters of both lanes and both shoulders. Fresh, still glossy. To leave such a stain, there should’ve been evidence of a maybe a Hummer and a buffalo, but there was nothing. Conclusion: There HAD been such a collision, but huge desert necrovores that also eat smithereens of steel and rubber had been there, perhaps moments before, and licked the place clean. After that, iPhone composition became impossible---both Annie and I had to keep our eyes on the road, on the lookout for displaced creatures.
At other times, when internet connections were available, and grisly collisions unlikely, a priority uncontrollably higher than writing took hold: sleep. Our driving itinerary was rigorous enough where non-driving hours were whiled in positively cataleptic slumber. Most of these hours occurred in our hosts’ homes (we took advantage of couchsurf.com and imposed on friends, but we also slept in the car, and, once, splurged for a cheap motel that was so loud and crime-ridden even we had trouble sleeping). Our hosts - without exception generous and openly welcoming - even the clerk at the Felony Motor Lodge - appeared eager for Annie and me to get a night’s - or often, just a few hours’ - sleep before getting back on the road. I have never been able to write while asleep, although I have been told that my prose often seems the product of a dormant person.
And my last and best reason for not supplying Kluster with the promised tour updates? Deep, reflexive procrastination. O, please be kind!
Bill Cotter
*Spurious collective noun: colony [of vultures]
**Afterward, we nominated such stains ‘buffalo smears'
bill cotter