Airplanes!

Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28, 2008)

A totally random subject. 

I have a lifelong love of commercial airplanes--jumbo, large, medium, small, Airbus, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Embraer, you name it, I love it. And I love everything about commercial airplanes, from the shape of the engine all the way down to the seatback pockets, the fold-up tables, the little personal TV controllers, the air-conditioning nozzles, the no-smoking signs. 

Perhaps it's because I came to America on an airplane, a Pan Am Boeing 747, as a tot. (One of my earliest memories.) Perhaps it's because my childhood home was a seventh-floor apartment right underneath the flight path for LaGuardia. Perhaps it's because I've always associated commercial jets with going to visit my father; the somewhat dank, sterile odor of an aircraft cabin is a comfort smell for me, while overcooked brown-sauce-drenched "meatloaf" or "chicken" and undercooked couscous are my comfort foods.

This might sound kind of weird and irrational, but part of the reason I was drawn to working on "Layover" was that it tangentially sorta kinda maybe had something to do with airplanes. (The title, the fact that the characters are traveling from the Mainland to Honolulu and from Honolulu to Asia.)

I don't know.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Kwok

Best thing I've read today

From Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World:

A friend once heard Ginsberg lecture on prophecy; at the end of the talk a young man asked, "Mr. Ginsberg, how does one become a prophet?" Ginsberg replied, "Tell your secrets." Uncovering secrets is apocalyptic in the simple sense... in this case it lifts shame covers. It allows articulation to enter where silence once ruled. "Tell your secrets" is a practice for loosening the boundaries of the self, for opening up the ego. "The striving for the right to have secrets from which the parents are excluded is one of the most powerful factors in the formation of the ego," the psychoanalysts tell us, but once that right has been acquired, there you are inside the ego, which may well take its job too seriously...The teller of secrets I'm trying to describe hopes to create a more porous container to live in...

Vast territories of silence are opened up to articulation. The artist who is not always guarding his or her words has more materials available than one who must feed a troop of customs officials... Some ego structures stand in the way of creative plenitude and need to be suspended or punctured if the work is to proceed. The poet who is not wedded to the structures that secrecy engenders has a wealth of materials at hand. Speech bubbles up. The ready voice itself is part of what he has to profess.

Chris