Intro Numero Uno (Road Trip Lit)

Hello.  I’m Will Entrekin.  Pleased to see ya, as it were.

My esteemed colleague and hopefully classmate-soon-to-be, the illustrious Mister Fox, asked me a little bit ago if I would contribute to his blog while he is in warmer climes.  Though, technically, John and I are both in and around Los Angeles at this point, because we are both attending the same writing program at the University of Southern California, and as climes go, they don’t get much warmer than LA right about now.

That serves as relatively good introduction; the best are brief.  I’m studying fiction and screenwriting.  Anything further you’d like to know about me, you can find here, on my MySpace page. In addition, you can find some of my other writing here, at my Lulu storefront.

I moved to Hollywood last year from New Jersey, where I was born and subsequently lived for 28 years.  Just after my 28th, my sister and I loaded up an old, beat-to-Hell Mazda and zoomzoomzoomed straight across the country to California.

Neither of us had ever been there before.

It took us four days.  During those days, we did nothing but listen to my sister’s eclectic selection of CDs (Blonde Redhead, Interpol, Tori Amos, etc.) and several books on tape.

When John asked me about writing, he mentioned that BookFox usually doesn’t cover commercial fiction.  The books my sister and I listened to over those four days medicine online illustrate why that made me hesitate.

We started with America: The Book, by Jon Stewart et al. from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; We discovered very quickly that it didn’t really translate to audio.  After that, we moved on to Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut.  I don’t believe we made it past the first essay.

The books we actually spent time listening to were Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Anansi Boys; I’m fairly certain we finished both in their entirety.

And did not at all tire of either.  Anansi Boys, in particular, was a joy to listen to.

It’s a rare book that can audibly hold one’s attention that long without interruption.  On Saturday, Naropa University in Boulder hosted a marathon reading of Kerouac’s On the Road.  MSNBC notes that about 150 people listened to the 12-hour reading.

I wonder if it was the same person reading, all that time.  MSNBC remains vague on the matter.

It reminds me of Kaufman’s marathon reading of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; I kind of wish I’d been in the audience for that one.

Though not the recent Kerouac reading.  I tried reading On the Road after landing in West Hollywood, mindful of my trip and wanting, in some small way, to vicariously relive it.

To make a road trip analogy, if reading it were comparable to my trip across the country, I never would have made it past Virginia.