User Submitted Blog Post: On the Road

The act of reading, as a general rule, isn't exactly action-packed. Much of my reading is done in pretty unexciting circumstances---usually sitting at home or sitting on the train. One reading experience flows into the other, so I'd have to think a little bit before I'd recall what book I was reading exactly two weeks ago.

But about three years ago, I clearly remember taking a Green Line train into downtown Chicago when the poor guy sitting directly across from me was senselessly punched in the head by a man getting off the train. The guy delivering the punches got away without being confronted, the guy who got punched was OK (though understandably stunned), and I remember exactly what I was reading there: Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu.

Until Bookslut tipped me off to it, I had no idea that Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based ad and design firm, has a series called Field-Tested Books, in which various authors are asked to write brief essays about their experiences reading a specific book in a specific place. This year's collection is filled with some excellent writers---among them Steve Almond (on Rick DeMarinis' The Voice of America), Andrei Codrescu (on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano), and Ben Greenman (Kathy Acker's Bodies of Work). It's fun to flip through online, but if you want to throw some money behind it, you'd be supporting a good cause: If you buy the book version of the essays, Coudal will make a donation to First Book, which donates books to underprivileged kids.

My favorite essay in the collection is by Joe Meno, a fine Chicago writer who wound up writing about two things that have had a strong influence on me growing up---Chicago's Red Line, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Meno summarizes the book's power beautifully:

The people on the Red Line could be pretty grotesque. Not ugly, not disgusting, but a little too real, a little too human. The old black man who ate cashews and spit the empty shells at his feet. The child with the white bandage over his right eye and a bruise on his cheek. The Latina woman, just about my mother's age, who handed me a Kleenex because my nose was running.

Once the El train doors parted, once I found an empty seat, checked to be sure there was no feces, human or otherwise, beneath it, and opened the dog-eared copy I had not bothered to return yet to the library, the clatter and clangor of the train jostling beneath the metropolis, beneath the skyscrapers and busy multitudes above suddenly faded away. What remained was a way of looking, a way of moving about the world, a way of seeing people, as frightening, as unfamiliar as they might seem, as both odd, necessary, and lovely.