It's 7:13 am. The polls have been open for thirteen minutes here in Maryland, and Casey is downstairs in the kitchen of E, a senior staffer for a statewide campaign. C and E are frosting cupcakes.

We got to Maryland on Saturday evening and ate pasta and hung out. On Sunday we went out door-knocking with a bunch of literature and a list of addresses of voters who are registered Democrats but have voted only once in the last three elections. The idea is to target folks who are likely to vote either for our guy or not at all. We caught a bunch of them at home, and got a mostly positive response. That night we stayed in and L, our other host, taught Casey how to play chess. It went scarily well. I'm going to have to get on that.

L teaches fifth grade in the Baltimore city schools, and he asked me to go speak to his class yesterday morning. He's really emphasizing writing with them, and figured they'd appreciate hearing from a "real writer" on the subject.

It went really well. He's doing great work with the kids --- at ten, they're doing third and fourth and fifth drafts of their pieces, and really paying attention to the mechanics of writing. We made photocopies of a couple of pages from a marked-up copy of chapter three of my dissertation, and passed them around to show that editing isn't just a make-work exercise --- it's how writing gets done, at every level. I talked a bit about my editing strategies, and met with about half the kids one-on-one to read and discuss their work. It was a fun morning.

When we got to campaign HQ at lunchtime, some volunteers waiting for orders were clumped by the side of a big road, holding signs and waving for honks. C2 decided she liked door-knocking better, and so when we got the chance we did that. Not so many people around on a Monday afternoon, but the Democrats we met were in good spirits and the one Republican we stumbled across was surly and itching for a fight. I choose to take that as a good sign.

Last night there was an election-eve campaign rally up on top of Federal Hill. Casey got bedecked with schwag in short order --- stickers, union pins, light sticks, a clapper thing from the NAACP. She slowly got into the whole cheering thing, and was more-or-less transfixed when our own candidates O'Malley and Brown took the stage. ("and Brown!" she's been saying, every time someone encourages someone to vote for O'Malley.)

Plus there were swings.

So. Election day is here. Yee-hah! Get out there and do that thing.

Update: I thought I'd mentioned this trip before, but I guess not.

I met E&L about half a dozen years ago, when they were undergrad student activists and I was advising some groups they were in. They had me come to their campus to give a workshop and do some consulting, and we became friends. Two years ago, E was managing a state legislative campaign, and I took Casey down to help her out in the last weekend before the election --- it gave us something to do to help push back against the GOP, and introduced the not-quite-two-years-old C2 to grass-roots electoral work. This year, we got an invite to come down again --- E's working on a bigger campaign now, and L is teaching, but it went so well last time that we all thought it'd be a good idea to make it a tradition. So here we are.

Tags: casey, politics, travel

So notgruntled replied to my post about the upcoming New Orleans trip with this:

I'd recommend Fritzel's, one of the few real traditional jazz clubs left on Bourbon (at 733 Bourbon), but I can't find out whether they're still there.

Which prompts me to ask: Where do you go when you go to New Orleans?

I love following friends' recommendations when I travel. There's something so intimate and strange about it. Something about travelling thousands of miles to stand in a spot that a friend has stood before. And just finding the place often turns up something serendipitous.

And of course now, as notgruntled suggests, some of the places may have changed, or may have gone. Which is yet more reason to go visit.

We'll be making the rounds of my favorite used bookstores on this trip, and visiting friends, and getting a muffaletta at Central. I want to stop in at the main branch of the public library, and visit some of the campuses. We'll trek up to Fred's Lounge in Mamou on Saturday morning.

But enough about me. Where would you be going, if you were going?

Tags: travel

On top of --- intermingled with --- my worry and sadness about the lives and homes that are likely to be lost in Texas and Louisiana in the coming days, there's another set of fears that seem small by comparison but which are hard to shake.

When C1 and I spent the summer driving around the US in the summer of 1993, we visited dozens of weird little local sites. I did a bunch of research that spring, and we planned our route around odd museums, regionally famous restaurants, cool state parks and so on and on. We fell in love with a lot of those places, and have been back to visit more than a few since then.

You can see where this is going.

The Orange Show in Houston is, alongside the Watts Towers and Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens, one of the country's great idiosyncratic creations. It's a handmade tribute to the healing powers of the orange and to the various other obsessions of its creator, postal worker Jeff McKissack. Like the Watts Towers, the Orange Show is now an arts center serving disadvantaged kids. Like the Watts Towers, the Orange Show is fragile and exposed to the weather. The Orange Show is just one of many art houses in Houston, all of them at grave risk from the storm.

As of now, it's looking like Rita's eye will make landfall about seventy-five miles east of Houston, at Port Arthur, Texas. Port Arthur is where Janis Joplin grew up, and the last time C&I were there, the public library had a display of posters and dioramas that Janis did for the library when she was a geeky little book-nerd in the late fifties. There's a gulf coast museum in Port Arthur that has a bunch of Janis juvenalia, too.

The next town inland from Port Arthur is Beaumont, which is the home of the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum, an earnest little love song in brick and mortar to America's greatest female athlete.

And if you drive east from Beaumont, over the Texas-Louisiana border, you'll hit Lake Charles in about an hour.

Tags: new orleans, politics, pop culture, travel

When I'm travelling outside of the States, I often find myself weirdly, palpably, conscious of the roundness of the earth. I'll be standing in --- to pick last night's example --- the plaza abutting Victoria Station in London, and get the most peculiar sensation of vertigo, like the buildings around me are the baobab tree from that garage-sized planet in The Little Prince.

Just thought I'd share.

( Jump! )

Tags: travel, weirdness