Literature
I've often joked about wanting somehow to acquire an abandoned airport and convert it into an art gallery?or just capture it as a tremendous art piece, really, everything around the normal operations of flight left undisturbed. Another idea: take an old airport and reclaim it as a liberal arts college campus. I like the thought of holding seminars in the departure lounges, and having studio art classes around old luggage carrousels. Intact aircraft scattered around the tarmac would serve as dorms, and the control tower? Just think of the possibilities...
I suppose these fantasies are related to my fascination with "airplane boneyards": those places in arid geographic locations where aircraft go to hibernate, die, or be salvaged. I can rove over the Google satellite views of these ghostly landscapes for hours. Here's a snapshot of the boneyard outside of Tucson, Arizona:
There's something chilling yet captivating about seeing all these planes lined up, some cockeyed or askew, all types of military planes returned from who knows what far flung missions and campaigns. Look at that swing-wing fighter jet with one wing akimbo and the other wing gone; or the one missing both wings and sitting off alone, as if multiply abject.
It may be that I have just finished rereading Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and it has put me in the mindset of ruins and remains. McCarthy himself did not miss the chance to conjoin twentieth-century flight lore and post-apocalyptic survival; in one memorable image he describes wandering refugees "wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators."
This topic makes me want to return to Don DeLillo's Underworld, to mull over those scenes where one character has begun a massive endeavor to turn a boneyard into a vast three-dimensional canvas of sorts: "We can paint their deactivated aircraft."
Perhaps at my airport liberal arts college I'll finally teach a course on "airport studies," which will take into account the various weird ways that air travel lends itself to creative re-purposing, philosophical speculation, and perceptual shifts away from flight per se. "Airport studies" is also the title of one of my book chapters that wanders and wonders down this path a bit. (My book, by the way, now appears on the Continuum site in its paperback edition, for an appealing $24.95!)
- 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...
- Critical Air Studies
Two Flights This is one of the exciting things I've been working on: I'm now accepting submissions for a special issue of Criticism shaped around the topic 'Critical Air Studies'. From the poetics of airborne perspectives to...
- Airport Reading, Airplane Reading: Definitions & Distinctions
Airport reading, airplane reading. What's the difference? These two phrases often are conflated or used interchangeably. I use these phrases in fairly distinct ways, which I want to delineate briefly here. Airport reading can mean just the trashy...
- 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...
- Pam Houston, Airplane Reader
It was in late 2003 or early 2004 when I first met Pam Houston. We were on an early morning airport run from Davis, CA to the Sacramento airport. To get from Davis to the airport, you have to hurtle across a spindly causeway that spans the swollen lowlands...
Literature
Airport Studies
I've often joked about wanting somehow to acquire an abandoned airport and convert it into an art gallery?or just capture it as a tremendous art piece, really, everything around the normal operations of flight left undisturbed. Another idea: take an old airport and reclaim it as a liberal arts college campus. I like the thought of holding seminars in the departure lounges, and having studio art classes around old luggage carrousels. Intact aircraft scattered around the tarmac would serve as dorms, and the control tower? Just think of the possibilities...
I suppose these fantasies are related to my fascination with "airplane boneyards": those places in arid geographic locations where aircraft go to hibernate, die, or be salvaged. I can rove over the Google satellite views of these ghostly landscapes for hours. Here's a snapshot of the boneyard outside of Tucson, Arizona:
There's something chilling yet captivating about seeing all these planes lined up, some cockeyed or askew, all types of military planes returned from who knows what far flung missions and campaigns. Look at that swing-wing fighter jet with one wing akimbo and the other wing gone; or the one missing both wings and sitting off alone, as if multiply abject.
It may be that I have just finished rereading Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and it has put me in the mindset of ruins and remains. McCarthy himself did not miss the chance to conjoin twentieth-century flight lore and post-apocalyptic survival; in one memorable image he describes wandering refugees "wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators."
This topic makes me want to return to Don DeLillo's Underworld, to mull over those scenes where one character has begun a massive endeavor to turn a boneyard into a vast three-dimensional canvas of sorts: "We can paint their deactivated aircraft."
Perhaps at my airport liberal arts college I'll finally teach a course on "airport studies," which will take into account the various weird ways that air travel lends itself to creative re-purposing, philosophical speculation, and perceptual shifts away from flight per se. "Airport studies" is also the title of one of my book chapters that wanders and wonders down this path a bit. (My book, by the way, now appears on the Continuum site in its paperback edition, for an appealing $24.95!)
- 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...
- Critical Air Studies
Two Flights This is one of the exciting things I've been working on: I'm now accepting submissions for a special issue of Criticism shaped around the topic 'Critical Air Studies'. From the poetics of airborne perspectives to...
- Airport Reading, Airplane Reading: Definitions & Distinctions
Airport reading, airplane reading. What's the difference? These two phrases often are conflated or used interchangeably. I use these phrases in fairly distinct ways, which I want to delineate briefly here. Airport reading can mean just the trashy...
- 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...
- Pam Houston, Airplane Reader
It was in late 2003 or early 2004 when I first met Pam Houston. We were on an early morning airport run from Davis, CA to the Sacramento airport. To get from Davis to the airport, you have to hurtle across a spindly causeway that spans the swollen lowlands...