Literature
This week I'm flying to Vancouver to give a paper entitled "The Elimination of Speed: Air Travel and Dead Time." The conference is for the American Comparative Literature Association, and the panel I'm on is called "Defining the Post-contemporary."
Here is the first paragraph of my paper:
...and here's the two-sided handout I'll be referring to:
- Revisiting Bozeman
I've just returned to Michigan from Bozeman, Montana, where I revisited the airport I worked at over ten years ago. So much was the same, and yet there were also innumerable differences everywhere. I was there to observe and write, and I spent several...
- What Is "airport Reading"?
Dominique Browning has a fascinating piece in the New York Times today called "Learning to Love Airport Lit." The article is a persuasive (and also humorous) take on the most effective kinds of airport reading. In Browning's words, the ideal airport...
- The Only Space That Matters Is Yours
She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is?apparently?flying Korean Air. The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in...
- On Airport Food
I'm quoted in an article on airport food in The New York Times this week. When Joe Sharkey originally asked me the two questions?1. Do you have a strategy for dining in airports? and 2. From your perspective how has the airport dining experience changed...
- Strange Plane Events
My colleague Mark Yakich and I have posted several excerpts from our current book project on flight. The book is a collaborative travel memoir of sorts that moves between two narratives: Mark's fear of flying, and my experiences working at an airport...
Literature
Airport Seating, or Sitting in the Post-contemporary
This week I'm flying to Vancouver to give a paper entitled "The Elimination of Speed: Air Travel and Dead Time." The conference is for the American Comparative Literature Association, and the panel I'm on is called "Defining the Post-contemporary."
Here is the first paragraph of my paper:
In this paper I will suggest that the history of air travel has been caught in a representational bind around the functions and figurations of appropriate seating. This bind has to do with how air travelers experience time and space, and how these sensations are strategically enhanced or elided. Specifically, I wish to analyze literary and philosophical explorations of air travel, and I will also examine some material and visual culture of flight. My paper takes its cue in part from the media theorist Gillian Fuller, who argues that airports have become frames through which we visualize modern life. As Fuller writes, ?The airport is, among many other things, a perceptual machine.? It matters not just what we see, but how we see (in) airports. What follows are notes toward a post-contemporary definition of air travel...
...and here's the two-sided handout I'll be referring to:
- Revisiting Bozeman
I've just returned to Michigan from Bozeman, Montana, where I revisited the airport I worked at over ten years ago. So much was the same, and yet there were also innumerable differences everywhere. I was there to observe and write, and I spent several...
- What Is "airport Reading"?
Dominique Browning has a fascinating piece in the New York Times today called "Learning to Love Airport Lit." The article is a persuasive (and also humorous) take on the most effective kinds of airport reading. In Browning's words, the ideal airport...
- The Only Space That Matters Is Yours
She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is?apparently?flying Korean Air. The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in...
- On Airport Food
I'm quoted in an article on airport food in The New York Times this week. When Joe Sharkey originally asked me the two questions?1. Do you have a strategy for dining in airports? and 2. From your perspective how has the airport dining experience changed...
- Strange Plane Events
My colleague Mark Yakich and I have posted several excerpts from our current book project on flight. The book is a collaborative travel memoir of sorts that moves between two narratives: Mark's fear of flying, and my experiences working at an airport...