This is the first trip I’ve done in a while whence I did not take an actual computer. Based on experiences this time I think I will bring a computer next time, and not try to rely on smart phone and tablet with Bluetooth mice and keyboards. Just too dodgy and lame.
This was a perfect trip, complete with cuts and bruises and war stories to share. Providence is a beautiful town. History (as far as America has any) is everywhere, with houses built in 1700 still standing and revolutionary artifacts justt sittin’ around.
Sometimes I see the end of America. I see its end in its beginnings. The magnificent mansions and pompous university campuses will be looked back on as excesses and decadence in the ghost town of America.
I think Brown is the first Ivy League campus on which I have ever set foot. I never had reason to enter Columbia (which I forgot was Ivy League) and I did not audition for Yale back in the halcyon days of naively imagining college would be a defining and life-altering experience. The Brown campus is sunny and idyllic, with gawky youths on their way to relevance in some esteemed discipline.
I was fanboi happy to spot Ben Katchor’s latest book at the Symposium Bookstore (not the Brown Bookstore). I preordered it and it should be waiting for me at the 181. There are passages in color, which I don’t think he’s done in his books before. In the newspapers yes but I don’t think he’s done color in the books.
We brought along a magnificent 64-ounce jumbo flask filled two-thirds with Smirnoff, with a bag of limes and a steak knife and a juicer to cut and squeeze them. That’s travelling in style, and damn good planning. Now we sip wine on the Amtrak back to New York.
I was attacked by a ping pong table, S was attacked by a combination of my Samsonite luggage and the metal rail on the train’s overhead luggage bin. War stories.war stories.
The ride up was picuresque magnificence, as far as I could tell. I don’t think I have been on a long train ride through snowy countryside, and it really was beautiful. The weather in Providence for the weekend just happened to be perfect. Ace.
A walk out to the North Burial Ground revealed what was to me a depressing, arid plain of silence, at least on the early part of the trek. This is what some people dislike about burial grounds, and I start to see why. NYC grounds are relatively active and “covered” by taphophiliacs with blogs. It doesn’t seem to be so true in Providence. We uncovered a burial yard on Main Street and could find precious little info on it on the Intertubes, but I guess we were just searching wrong, googling askew.
Cemeteries are for the living, for appreciation of the memorilization and funereal art. The old section of North Burial Ground simply felt dead.
All the food was good. French, Seafood, locally-sourced donuts. The pubs were good, if predictably douchey for a weekend college crowd. The daylight savings time thing didn’t zap me too hard, but I was dead tired the night before and slept like a sinking ship on the king sized bed with aluminum-sounding sheets (yeah, they were loud sheets).
The buildings were splendid, too many to recount, and the town seemed empty.Except for the bustling joy of Brown’s artificial-reality campus town there just didn’t seem to be any people in Providence.
RISD was pretty cool, too. The museum had a faculty exhibit, a lot of which I liked. The RISD museum is like a mini-Met, way bigger and varied than you might expect.
