\t\t\t\tThis 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Cemeteries are for the living, for appreciation of the memorilization and funereal art. The old section of North Burial Ground simply felt dead. <\/p>\n
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). <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-RR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}