Layover in Charlotte

A nice, small airport they’ve got here. I’m enjoying free WiFi and a really nice office chair courtesy of Bank of America, whose services we’ve just decided to abandon back in Atlanta. Maybe if they offered me free WiFi and a comfy office chair at Hartsfield-Jackson, I’d think about staying on as their customer.

I’m en route to Columbus for Origins, where I am a Guest of Honor this year. It’s my first time as a Guest of Anything, much less Honor. Here’s hoping they can’t sense my lack of honor when I arrive.

I barely got here. Not because the flight was rough, or because I almost missed my flight from Atlanta (though I did almost miss my flight from Atlanta), but because I almost didn’t wake up on the plane. If not for a nice guy waiting to disembark, who tapped me on the shoulder (either out of neighborly helpfulness or fear that I was a corpse), I might’ve just kept sleeping until noon, when the plane landed in Omaha or something after taking on more passengers.

Instead of sleeping last night, I got in a quick RPG session (from, I don’t know, 9pm to 1am?) and then rushed, panicking, through packing and preparations for the trip. Meaning, you understand, that Sara did the packing while I gathered together USB cables and charges, then took a nap with the dog. So I’m on about an hour of sleep, plus the hour I got the plane, plus the hour I expect to get on the next plane. I’ll be dizzy, stumbling, mumbling and nonsensical by this afternoon, when usually I don’t get like that until the second or third day of the convention.

Seriously, I expect this to be a quieter Origins for me. For one, I really want to get a chance to converse with some people that I seldom see, and the heavy drinking sometimes makes that hard. For another thing, a coworker and I have plans to make this a fact-finding and opinion-gathering expedition. This year I’m more interested in picking the brains of smart people than seeing what the inside of my own skull looks like.

That, and saving my per-diem pennies for the flight of rare Madeiras at dinner on Saturday.

Loot

When I travel, I shop. Instead of food, I buy books, CDs and DVDs. Things bought from used bookstores and record stores in other cities are somehow better than the things I could buy at home. As it stands, I now know more used book stores in Philadelphia than I do in Atlanta. I was there for two days, I’ve been here for two years. This is because I was visiting Philly but I’ve never visited Atlanta. I moved here. Hence, I buy new books here and more interesting, used books there (wherever “there” is).

This is not a philosophical thing or a statement of intent. It’s just a thing I do.

The last week or so I’ve been in Chicago and Philadelphia. Here’s what I got (most of it used):

Yesterday, a Korean sci-fi action thriller starring Kim Yun-Jin, who plays Sun on Lost.

Night Stalker, the complete series on DVD, not because it was good but because I liked it.

Memento, soundtrack by David Julyan and various artists. I thought this was a little more exotic than it turned out to be, but it’s proven to be fine sounds for working.

28 Days Later, soundtrack by John Murphy and various artists. I’m still hoping there’ll be some kind of soundtrack release for the sequel, also scored by John Murphy.

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut. One of those Vonnegut books I’ve never read. From the look of the nation’s book stores, the time to stock up on an author’s ouevre seems to be when he dies.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, by Franz Wright. “The world is filled with people who have never died.”

Travel in the Ancient World, by Lionel Casson, expands on the revision of the historical notion that ancient people seldom got around. It’s got chapters on ancient inns and restaurants, Roman roads, and forgotten museums — purchased not just for gaming purposes, but yes, for gaming purposes.

The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret, by Scott Olsen. This is a silly pop-mysticism bon-bon I picked up at the magnificent Prairie Avenue Bookstore down by Printer’s Row, in Chicago’s Loop. I’d never been in there before, and it’s excellent; the kind of place filled with 200-page, $50 paperback theses like Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, which I’ll be saving my pennies for.

Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design, by Kristen Cullen. This is the other book I bought at Prairie Avenue, the one of substance. I bought this one because I should be better informed than I am.

The Packaging and Design Templates Sourcebook, compiled by Luke Herriott, published by RotoVision. This is actually Sara’s book, purchased from Prairie Avenue, which she’ll be using as a guide for future handmade books, boxes and other craft projects that fall under her “hackbooking” hobby.

Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind, by JB Rhine and JG Pratt. The title page describes this as “A survey of the field, the methods, and the facts of ESP and PK research.” It was published in 1957, and I seem to have a first edition.

Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture by Robert Blair St. George. I could not quite figure this dense thing out in the store, and I was desperate for some kind of early American occultism, so I took it home. From the back cover: “By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor.”

Life on the English Manor, by HS Bennett, is a rundown on peasant living conditions between 1150 and 1400, as it looked from the modern day of 1937. (My copy was printed in 1962.) Why I am fascinated by outdated history books, I can’t tell you. But I’m sure it’s meta.

Duruy’s Middle Ages, by Victor Duruy, is a condensed history of the Middle Ages with a copyright date of “1898 and 1900.” I can’t tell when my copy was printed, but it’s not a young book. Still, it looks like all of its little folded maps are still here, tucked between pages. The first chapter of this book is, “The Barbarian World in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries.”