JOURNAL ENTRIES—MAY 1O&14 and JUNE 3, 2007
       Story and Travel: Thoughts and Reflections Before the Journey*      
                                    Steven Jay Weinberg

TH. May 10, 2007
The Travels and Travails of Memory
(Even as I look back at this on the 29th, I’m unsure whether I thought this would be a story or the title for a book.)

MON. May 14, 2007—10:22 a.m.
A short story—every short story—is a glimmer of a novel, if not of an ongoing serial novel.

A story is one of Jack’s magic beans.

A story is a nano-jackhammer tearing up consciousness to reveal the rich soil below.

Stories originate at the ocean’s greatest depths, a place we still have yet to discover and define.

Stories travel to the surface in bellies of eels returning from the Sargasso Sea.

In order to receive a story, you must take off your glasses, remove shoes and socks, shave Walt Whitman’s beard, and pull every tooth from your mouth. Then, and only then, will your ears interpret the mumbling manatees sunning themselves on the shores of your shame.

A story never begins and never ends.

Sunday/June 3, 2007—11:19 a.m.
While making a deluxe frittata to celebrate Fathers Day, I listened to Leonard Cohen’s first Greatest Hits collection, and it occurred to me that I should write him a letter. Not that he needs to hear from me, but I sometimes do regard Hugh Kenner’s talks about poets visiting their elder poet guides. Kenner made his way as a literary critic by going to see the writers he wished to write about: Pound, Williams, Moore, Oppen, many of the Modernists of his time, and others. His type of rigorous personal scholarship, and the creative sort that his friend and peer Guy Davenport employed, is somewhere in lit heaven. And I missed writing to those folks, though I fully expect I’d have received no answer, and certainly would have, if they had answered, only enjoyed the slightest knowledge that they’d received my thanks and might have read whatever I would have sent of my own scrawlings. Too late now.

So, as I listened to Leonard Cohen, I reflected upon the years of meaningful listening I’d enjoyed and thought that I should write him. It came to me that I should write something called Letters to the Immortals. It had a Chinese ring to it. I don’t want to wait until it’s too late to contact the great ones of my time. There are so many letters to write, though, and I am such a pipsqueak when compared to the universe of the immortals. It feels like a grandiose bunch of bullshit that I should think my words mean crap to anybody, much less to folks who receive anonymous mail from geeks and freaks on a daily basis. If I do it, it has to be for me, recognizing those people who have mattered, and I will not really expect answers.
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Who are some of the living immortals I want to write to? Leonard Cohen. Steve Reich. Wim Wenders. Peter Handke. Haruki Murakami. Grace Paley. Garcia Marquez. Phillip Roth. Thomas Pynchon. David Lynch. Agnes Varda. And others—writers, composers, musicians, visual artists, intellectuals, and clowns. There are other immortals I don’t need to write to; and there are so many dead immortals—touchstones in the dark, useless hours of resignation, and in the heat of vital creativity.

And then there are just the people I would like to send spoken/written work to—Ira Glass, Garrison Keilor, others—because they might think my recorded work of some slight interest or value.

Before I head to Argentina, I should try to contact English/American bookstores where I might read, and it would be a kick to write publishers there. Though it is their summer vacation, I might try to make arrangements to read at a university—University of Buenos Aires? Perhaps in Uruguay? Such pie-in-the-sky thoughts…but they’re a counterbalance to the muck of my mood, and I’ll take them. [I did none of this. I realized how few people actually speak English there. It was difficult enough just finding any bookstores with a worthwhile collection of books in English.//SJW 20 June 2008]

What do those in the lower rungs of hell daydream about? The fresher air of the upper rungs and the sweet breezes of heaven.
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What is all this business about immortals, hell, and heaven? Really.
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(Sunday/June 3, 2007)
Yesterday’s jots by hand in the little black journal:

Thoughts about CDs Kenny and I could put together:
#1. Collections of Wordjam podcasts entire
#2. Double CD package of stories. One of them might be three or four of the longer ones.
#3. Wordjam Anthology—mixed CD of word pieces and Kenny’s music.
I should talk to Kenny about these thoughts.

Then I was thinking about Charles and I beginning our email exchange immediately and wrote the following memoir/bio dither about travel while sitting at a table in the covered area by the espresso drinkers:

To travel is to imagine another place, another reality, and another self. Most of my life I have imagined travel but have stayed in the United States—born and raised on the east coast, then aged in the northwest corner of the continent.

The idea of travel, for me, has inspired writing about places real and imagined that have grown on the page uninhibited by too much reality or experience. I have crossed North America several times, and by many means—car, bus, train, and magic thumb (extensive hitchhiking)—in the United States and some in Canada, with many journeys up and down the west coast (primarily between Olympia or Seattle and the Bay Area).

The one exception to unreal/imaginary travel outside the U.S. was my two-week journey to Spain—a heartwarming gift from my brothers and sister for my 50th birthday in 2000.

Now I contemplate four months in Argentina for a sabbatical from teaching writing and public speaking to commercial-art students at a private college that has accommodated my strangeness for nearly ten years.

What will happen in South America is just an invitation to the multitude of universal forces searching for a dupe with longing in his heart for adventure and the unknown.

I know little Spanish, and how my way opened to Argentina is equally a product of what happens when choice meets desire.

Recently, as I scanned travel books gathered from the library, I came across a comparison that struck me. Someone wrote that the difference between Brazil and Argentina is that in Brazil they take their clothes off, while in Argentina they put their clothes on. If this is so, I am heading to a culture that dresses up, complies with formalities. (No doubt, in Buenos Aires the Italian influence and sense of style is a factor.)

Yet, a traveler, in my limited experience and more extensive imaginings, is a naked creature. A traveler is exposed, no matter how dressed, and in this willingness to stand naked, while attempting to blend in, becomes someone new.

Travel is renewal or it is nothing.
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  Steven Jay Weinberg
Copied from journal on 31 June 2008

*NOTE: The above entries were jotted as I expectantly awaited my travels to Argentina—departure December 16, 2007, return on May 6, 2008. As entries unfolded before me, they expressed some of my deepest notions concerning the entanglements/relationships between story/writing and travel..//SJW 20 June 2008