Travel Notes
1967
First Published
3.85
Average Rating
162
Number of Pages
Fiction. Originally published in 1967, TRAVEL NOTES is a hallucinogenic dream journey thru the incomparable mind that subsequently brought us Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, then dropped off the grid to become a garlic farmer in New Mexico. TRAVEL NOTES could indeed read like Stanley Crawford's private travelogue, yet no real-world places or people are explicitly mentioned. Instead we're taken on a rompish tromp thru wild and often absurd landscapes—in a bus that gets dismantled & reassembled to get around a broken-down car, in a biplane that only flies in the mind of the naked pilot, or on the back of a white elephant named Unable with untranslatable obscenities tattooed to his underbelly—the traveller ever self-aware of the nagging fragility of routine customs, ever on the verge of having the magic carpet pulled out from beneath your feet if you stop to think. This mind-jarring comedy of errors shares campy common ground with Brautigan in its carefree wackiness, with Robbe-Grillet in its disciplined lunacy and obsessive- compulsive attention to detail, with Márquez in its magical realism (though Crawford, in exile on Crete, was at the time unaware of One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in the same year) and with a healthy dose of subversive angst thrown in for good measure. By the end, TRAVEL NOTES becomes a boot-strapping map to your own brain, projecting psychotherapeutic color on the otherwise gray matter of real-world events.
Avg Rating
3.85
Number of Ratings
26
5 STARS
38%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
12%
goodreads
Author
Stanley Crawford
Author · 10 books
Crawford is the author of "Gascoyne," "Petroleum Man," "Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine," "A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm," "Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico," "The River in Winter," and "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of their Childhood." He lives in new Mexico with his wife, RoseMary, where they own and run a garlic farm.
