40 Winks
Heavy laden lids
gently flutter
Audible sighs
from parted lips
slowly stutter
Air intake
interrupted
Subconscious trek
unravels its fun
Today's nap
has begun
Space and time travel
initiated
Universe unfolds
unabated
Where shall we go today?
Seven minutes of horror
pain
or play?
Between these three
a molecular thin line,
the choice and decision
is in the mind
Travel near or travel far
You'll be exactly where
you imagine you are
Your reclining body
may be on the bed
but the rest of you
is in your head
Experiencing that
which you think is real,
and you could swear it is
by the way you feel
And who's to say
it's not . . .
For every element is present
proving beyond a doubt
you may be physically down
but you're never mentally out
So nap and dream
laugh or scream
for as your body rests,
in those minutes
your mind is busy
exploring its outer limits
Branch Isole poets from Hawaii. More of his writing can be found at www.manaopublishing.com. Danse Macabre welcomes him and all Five-O to our pages.
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DANSE MACABRE is edited, produced, and published online by Adam Henry Carriere / Volksrundfunk Productions GmbH - Copyright (c.) 2008. All rights reserved. Attributed works copyrighted by individual authors or in the public domain. Contributors retain all publication and serial rights. Viewpoints expressed by contributors, in quotations used, or suggested by displayed graphics may not necessarily reflect the opinions of this online journal. Images appearing in this journal are either in the public domain or the copyright of individuals who produced the image in question. It is believed that the non-profit use of scaled-down, low-resolution images taken from references throughout the world wide web which provide critical visual analysis to writings posted on this site qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of these images may be copyright infringement. Thus spake advocaten...
voyage
Inhalt von XIX
Buongiorno!
Join us in Vasto, Abruzzo , Italy, May 15-30, 2009 for Creative Writing Workshops in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, playwritings, translation, travel writing, lectures and readings with leading writers from around the world at our Summer Literary Seminars in Russia, Kenya, Italy, and Lithuania...
Behind SLS lies an exciting concept in literary seminars. Whereas in conventional writing retreats, writers isolate themselves from the world to find inspiration, SLS is built on the premise that one’s writing can and does often benefit considerably from the keen sense of displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular; that one’s removing oneself from the routine context of one’s life tends to provide for a strong creative jolt, and offer a wholly new perspective on one’s writing.
The underlying belief is that writers, regardless of their origins in the world, have more in common with each other than, frequently, their compatriots and fellow native speakers. It is this article of faith that has brought SLS into existence.
SLS was founded in 1998, in St. Petersburg , Russia , by Prof, Mikhail Iossel, published writer and professor of creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Over the years and in one of the world’s strangest, most fascinating, and most literary cities, SLS has brought together, with their Russian counterparts, the finest American, Canadian, European and African writers and literary scholars in a two, three and four-week flurry of intellectually stimulating activities. In 2001, SLS launched its sister program: SLS Kenya. The primary location of the now annual program is the capital of Nairobi and the ineffable medieval stone town of Lamu .
SLS Italy is the newest addition to the roster of programs, representing the broadening of the scope of SLS offerings, further implementing the idea of establishing a series of SLS programs in different parts of the world. These programs will all be premised on the belief of the commonality of writerly experience, thereby creating a larger and single literary space - to discover Italy, not as a tourist in a packaged tour, nor as a foreigner in a sea of other foreigners, but as a writer in a community of other writers immersed in literature, good food, wine, sun and sea in an idyllic corner of the Adriatic, Vasto, Abruzzo.
A similar program in Lithuania is in the works for July, 2009. Other programs are being considered beyond 2009.
SLS is affiliated with Concordia University in Montreal , the venerable Herzen University in St. Petersburg , and, in Kenya , with the remarkable dynamic and innovative Kwani? literary trust and journal.
The seminars engage the participants in workshops in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, playwritings, translation, travel writing, lectures and readings with leading writers from around the world, as well as include exploratory excursions of the surrounding areas. The itinerary is such:
Nairobi and Lamu Island , Kenya , Dec. 13-28, 2008
Vasto, Abruzzo , Italy , May 15-30, 2009
St. Petersburg , Russia , June 2009 - dates TBA
Lithuania, July 2009 – dates TBA
Registrations are now being taken for Kenya and Italy .
Visit http://www.sumlitsem.org/ where three very different and distinctive worlds await you to discover and make your own.
Behind SLS lies an exciting concept in literary seminars. Whereas in conventional writing retreats, writers isolate themselves from the world to find inspiration, SLS is built on the premise that one’s writing can and does often benefit considerably from the keen sense of displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular; that one’s removing oneself from the routine context of one’s life tends to provide for a strong creative jolt, and offer a wholly new perspective on one’s writing.
The underlying belief is that writers, regardless of their origins in the world, have more in common with each other than, frequently, their compatriots and fellow native speakers. It is this article of faith that has brought SLS into existence.
SLS was founded in 1998, in St. Petersburg , Russia , by Prof, Mikhail Iossel, published writer and professor of creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Over the years and in one of the world’s strangest, most fascinating, and most literary cities, SLS has brought together, with their Russian counterparts, the finest American, Canadian, European and African writers and literary scholars in a two, three and four-week flurry of intellectually stimulating activities. In 2001, SLS launched its sister program: SLS Kenya. The primary location of the now annual program is the capital of Nairobi and the ineffable medieval stone town of Lamu .
SLS Italy is the newest addition to the roster of programs, representing the broadening of the scope of SLS offerings, further implementing the idea of establishing a series of SLS programs in different parts of the world. These programs will all be premised on the belief of the commonality of writerly experience, thereby creating a larger and single literary space - to discover Italy, not as a tourist in a packaged tour, nor as a foreigner in a sea of other foreigners, but as a writer in a community of other writers immersed in literature, good food, wine, sun and sea in an idyllic corner of the Adriatic, Vasto, Abruzzo.
A similar program in Lithuania is in the works for July, 2009. Other programs are being considered beyond 2009.
SLS is affiliated with Concordia University in Montreal , the venerable Herzen University in St. Petersburg , and, in Kenya , with the remarkable dynamic and innovative Kwani? literary trust and journal.
The seminars engage the participants in workshops in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, playwritings, translation, travel writing, lectures and readings with leading writers from around the world, as well as include exploratory excursions of the surrounding areas. The itinerary is such:
Nairobi and Lamu Island , Kenya , Dec. 13-28, 2008
Vasto, Abruzzo , Italy , May 15-30, 2009
St. Petersburg , Russia , June 2009 - dates TBA
Lithuania, July 2009 – dates TBA
Registrations are now being taken for Kenya and Italy .
Visit http://www.sumlitsem.org/ where three very different and distinctive worlds await you to discover and make your own.
See It First: A Travel Tactic
Travel, I suggest, requires a "strategy". As is true of all other important and/or major actions any person ever undertakes, travel's successful completion demands prioritizing the essentials which need to be identified first and then consulted, utilized and achieved within one's execution of some "plan". "Hanging loose", "staying flexible" and "putting up with whatever eventuates", for these reasons, do not qualify as 'strategies', not in any important sense of the term.
Yes, I admit they may be tactics for the long-suffering, tactics for the adventurous (poor--planning sort) who throws the guide book away and relies on minor gods such as Adventitious the Unreliable, Meander the Dyspeptic or Nervous the Perspirer. But for those who prefer a modicum of stability, a decent return for the money they've invested and predictable happiness (as the result of their wanderings over Earth's surface), I am about to suggest a different mode of approach to "the trip". One that should work for you, regardless of your trip's exact locale in longitude, latitude and/or its time-interval-to-be-spent.
I first called this Theoria "See It First" when I created it, in the year 1973. By that watershed date in my life, I was 31 years of age. And while I had visited Canada, Mexico and crossed the United States by automobile six times as well as having taken more than a dozen other extensive domestic trips, the creation of this categorical strategy was more an act of self-defense against the waste of scarce 'resources' than the outgrowth of my equally-scarce personal experiences.
In words of one syllable, my Theory began as an hypo-thesis. But, now, thirty five years later, I am able to nominate it a proven concept. And it is simple enough, I claim, to be applied to any trip of whatever length, and easy to perform; so much so that it requires nothing of the potential traveler except ordinary effort, a normal amount of choice making and pre-planning, and no physical practice whatever.
Before I define the "See-It-First" Theory for you, the reader, by supplying a single compound sentence that spells out its basic idea, allow me to state what it does not do. It doesn't waste your time; nor does it make extreme demands upon the will. It simply recognizes that by means of scientific pre-planning, one can establish a "road map for success", in the form of "landmarks of progress" (as you begin your first and hopefully your very-memorable visit to any foreign land or target city, site, physical feature or experience) within any country whatever.
The reason one should perform this planning, according to me, is simple: "Subjective time is not the same as real time". The man who follows an elaborate set of directions supplied by Aunt Sadie, Arthur Frommer, H.V. Morton or anyone else is going to experience time while he's seeking some new target site as passing about four or five times more slowly than the same journey will seem to him to be taking when it is followed in reverse, on theway home again.
So, my idea, conceived before I became a world traveler, was to attach such seemingly-longer time not to seeking but rather to contemplating, anticipating then experiencing the most valuable moments and hours of travel: that time spent in enjoying the most important, essential and desirable of places, encounters, discoveries.
My reasoning when I created the Theory was this simple: to make the drudgery, needed travel, and concretes of GETTING SOMEWHERE seem to take as little time and mental involvement as possible--and to make the EXPERIENCING OF SOMETHING WONDERFUL seem to take as long as one could manage to make it-- subjectively-- in playing out.
So, my world-shaking travel strategy turned out to be one simple idea: "As soon as you can manage it upon arriving in any city, country of theatre-of-operations, go to see one of your very most important, anticipated, studied, researched and personally-desired sites; in other words, have some experience, view place or natural feature that you can reach without too much trouble".
By "seeing it first", I suggest you will be assuring yourself that you'll avoid the fate that has befallen unprepared, unrealistic, lazy-minded, hubristically-overconfident--or merely luckless, accident-prone or decidedly-clumsy sojournerfor millennia. In fact, ever since Ook the inept Neanderthaler decided impulsively one morning to view the Big Meadow he had always heard talked about by his pal Trog. He, of course, drowned in the medium-sized swamp that guarded that lovely lea against intrusions by unwary, ill-rehearsed or otherwise improvident bumblers.
So, let me regale you now, immodestly or not, with some of my most successfully applications of the Theory. Rememeber: the reasons for the success of my strategy could not be long practice, vast experience nor personal skills at traveling--because I had never managed to go farther from the U.S. than the across-the-border town of Nogales Sonora in Mexico in thirty years of massively-underfunded and wistfully-desperate trying. I also claim that my victories in using the Theory had to be due to the simplicity of my idea, and also to the foolproof nature of its parameters:
I. to only do what can be done essily;
II. to prepare sufficiently for tsome great first day's action, so that the route and one's experience will be generally anticipated and mentally-rehearsed and
III. to do the action early within a particular visit, so that one can avoid accident, illness, ill-luck, rebellion, physical breakdown, labor disputes and all the other vagaries that threaten the peripatetic mover and shaker's with potential woes.
So: "Examples for the traveler to contemplate!"
You arrive as I did, say, in London. You have been working up to walking a little more than usual, for months, sleeping at a later hour than usual, in order to prepare for Europe's time zones, and eating the sorts of food you are expecting to encounter. Armed with a Baedekers', a Frommer's, a portable map and knowledge of the London Underground, what you do the first night (or perhaps morning) is: take the Underground to the Thames River and view the storied Houses of Parliament. And, Fortune favoring the practical man, look up over your right shoulder after strolling along the Thames for a brief ways; what you will see is Big Ben, smiling in welcome, beaming down on the Man Who Came to Visit.
By now, the reader should realize that what I am going to be recounting will be an unbroken chariot-course of triumphs, which only a massive sort of betrayal by angry state workers, unforeseeably-rotten kismet or my own far-from-inevitable stupidity could have derailed. Maybe I boast a bit--it has required a bit of happenstance I admit; but in 35 years, the "See If First" paradigm has never yet failed yours truly.
If the first day is derailed--do what you'd planned as soon as you can...
But--back to the Continent... After the first victory, I did not, I must truthfully report, become overconfident. There were still four countries and four more applications of the Theoria to be carried out.
And, next on the program was Greece.
This was the one country I had wanted most to visit, and had been reading about for years and anticipating with the most fervent hopes. Just seeing the Greek Isles through bubble-masses of clouds looming far below our plane was a huge and unexpected positive. Then, after we'd landed at the Athens airport, and seen the Mediterranean (since the airport is located next to Piraeus, the port for Athens), we headed immediately to The Acropolis Hill, for an unforgettable first sight of the ancient High City and its famous buildings (from the Temple of Nike to the Parthenon).
The next venue on our tour was Rome. Once arrived by plane, and settled into our hotel, we did not falter. The very first evening, we essayed the garlic-scented local buses, rolled triumphantly past the Castel San Angelo, the Pope's main storehouse, and enjoyed a drink on the Piazza Navona beneath an amber-colored evening before dining in Lucullan splendor beside a statued fountain and being serenaded by a world-class trumpet virtuoso.
I must admit to some fortune, during the next planned ventures. A side trip to Firenze, also called Florence, happened to take us directly to the Uffizi Gallery--exactly as a booked side trip in Athens had previously taken our busload of planning geniuses to the Corinth Canal, Mycenae's hill and its monuments, and Epidaurus's lovely hillside Theater. Our visit to St, Peter's the next morning in Rome, planned with the detail of a military campaign, allowed us sights of Michelangelo's statuary, his frescoes such as the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, and the main piazza itself which needs no elaboration from me.
But, I must confess, we came within four minutes of missing our next main target--the lovely vision of Lake Como (promised in the Guide Book), which, by the time we arrived by train we to admire it, was blue--the lake, the sky, the buildings all blue--with the gold lights strung like upright torches propped on poles along its shore in the evening's very last light. Flushed with the success of my then-new strategy, I still didn't permit myself overconfidence. We were scheduled for a late arrival in Switzerland, in fact at at Lucerne on its Lake. But to our joy, when we arrived by night, a storm was about to begin. So, we dined that evening in front of a huge rectangular glass-paned window within which was framed the dark Lake, powerboats bobbing at anchor, dpurple brooding mountains in the distance, and the magnificent lightning storm we had narrowly avoided being particpants within. So remembering to bet on our good fortune, the next day we enjoyed a long-ago-planned morning tour of the Lion Bridge and the city, as the cooperative rain barely acknowledged our presence.
The last capital on our tour's itinerary was Paris. The drive proved to be uneventful. Buoyed by our previous magnificent experiences, we headed directly past a statue of Charlemagne the Conqueror. A light rain was falling on Paris as we arrived that afternoon; so, we took the Metro--fortunately not then suffering from a work stoppage which later might have derailed the express train of our hopes...and we followed my trusty map and found ourselves a brief walk from the Eiffel Tower--which we already knew would be open at that hour, on that day, at that season. Voila! Another beautiful action successfully completed--not merely effortlessly- earned, but with time enough for us to be enabled to savor and remember it, forever.
I could add details of this method of mine, that I later applied to such cities as Phoenix, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Budapest, Rosarita, Prague, Bratislava, New York (more than once), San Diego, Richmond, Brasov, the Amish country of Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. The same method, moira permitting, I claim must work for other days of any tour, sojourn, visit or planned engagement as well.
Having had a grand profit and memory the first day or first full day any trip, why shouldn't the second or third or any other day (if not interfered with by elements, fanatics or mechanical failures) be able to be approached using the same plan? Consider: if the first day in New York, you decide as I did to go up the Empire State Building before doing anything else and then collect landmarks from an extensive pre-planned list as desired, why on another day couldn't one see the show at the Hayden Planetarium and eat lunch on Central Park South? Or on another day, visit Chinatown to eat, see the Brooklyn Bridge and then Greenwich Village? Etetera, etcetera, etcetera.
"See It First", I suggest. Learn the transport system before you do anything else; never travel the same route twice unless you desire to do so, in any direction. Anticipate; prepare your mind for priorities and for those experiences that you evaluate as most being the important; then check your map--and start collecting memories that will last a lifetime....
But always do something 'first'--do it first, so you will have a fine reminiscence to savor, no matter what else happens to you on your journey.
And I hope you will heed my advice: never feel fearful nor guilty about traveling as a scientist does. You will enjoy any trip planned as a military exercise in strategy many times more than the unprepared tourist will ever enjoy any days of an haphazard surernder to fatalism.
And, when the fruits of victory have fallen into your mental souvenir basket--both those planned and those frankly unlooked-for--don't feel guilty about these attainments either. Because you will know that you've earned them, just as I always have. From first to last...
Bon voyage!
...by Robert David Michael Cerello
Yes, I admit they may be tactics for the long-suffering, tactics for the adventurous (poor--planning sort) who throws the guide book away and relies on minor gods such as Adventitious the Unreliable, Meander the Dyspeptic or Nervous the Perspirer. But for those who prefer a modicum of stability, a decent return for the money they've invested and predictable happiness (as the result of their wanderings over Earth's surface), I am about to suggest a different mode of approach to "the trip". One that should work for you, regardless of your trip's exact locale in longitude, latitude and/or its time-interval-to-be-spent.
I first called this Theoria "See It First" when I created it, in the year 1973. By that watershed date in my life, I was 31 years of age. And while I had visited Canada, Mexico and crossed the United States by automobile six times as well as having taken more than a dozen other extensive domestic trips, the creation of this categorical strategy was more an act of self-defense against the waste of scarce 'resources' than the outgrowth of my equally-scarce personal experiences.
In words of one syllable, my Theory began as an hypo-thesis. But, now, thirty five years later, I am able to nominate it a proven concept. And it is simple enough, I claim, to be applied to any trip of whatever length, and easy to perform; so much so that it requires nothing of the potential traveler except ordinary effort, a normal amount of choice making and pre-planning, and no physical practice whatever.
Before I define the "See-It-First" Theory for you, the reader, by supplying a single compound sentence that spells out its basic idea, allow me to state what it does not do. It doesn't waste your time; nor does it make extreme demands upon the will. It simply recognizes that by means of scientific pre-planning, one can establish a "road map for success", in the form of "landmarks of progress" (as you begin your first and hopefully your very-memorable visit to any foreign land or target city, site, physical feature or experience) within any country whatever.
The reason one should perform this planning, according to me, is simple: "Subjective time is not the same as real time". The man who follows an elaborate set of directions supplied by Aunt Sadie, Arthur Frommer, H.V. Morton or anyone else is going to experience time while he's seeking some new target site as passing about four or five times more slowly than the same journey will seem to him to be taking when it is followed in reverse, on theway home again.
So, my idea, conceived before I became a world traveler, was to attach such seemingly-longer time not to seeking but rather to contemplating, anticipating then experiencing the most valuable moments and hours of travel: that time spent in enjoying the most important, essential and desirable of places, encounters, discoveries.
My reasoning when I created the Theory was this simple: to make the drudgery, needed travel, and concretes of GETTING SOMEWHERE seem to take as little time and mental involvement as possible--and to make the EXPERIENCING OF SOMETHING WONDERFUL seem to take as long as one could manage to make it-- subjectively-- in playing out.
So, my world-shaking travel strategy turned out to be one simple idea: "As soon as you can manage it upon arriving in any city, country of theatre-of-operations, go to see one of your very most important, anticipated, studied, researched and personally-desired sites; in other words, have some experience, view place or natural feature that you can reach without too much trouble".
By "seeing it first", I suggest you will be assuring yourself that you'll avoid the fate that has befallen unprepared, unrealistic, lazy-minded, hubristically-overconfident--or merely luckless, accident-prone or decidedly-clumsy sojournerfor millennia. In fact, ever since Ook the inept Neanderthaler decided impulsively one morning to view the Big Meadow he had always heard talked about by his pal Trog. He, of course, drowned in the medium-sized swamp that guarded that lovely lea against intrusions by unwary, ill-rehearsed or otherwise improvident bumblers.
So, let me regale you now, immodestly or not, with some of my most successfully applications of the Theory. Rememeber: the reasons for the success of my strategy could not be long practice, vast experience nor personal skills at traveling--because I had never managed to go farther from the U.S. than the across-the-border town of Nogales Sonora in Mexico in thirty years of massively-underfunded and wistfully-desperate trying. I also claim that my victories in using the Theory had to be due to the simplicity of my idea, and also to the foolproof nature of its parameters:
I. to only do what can be done essily;
II. to prepare sufficiently for tsome great first day's action, so that the route and one's experience will be generally anticipated and mentally-rehearsed and
III. to do the action early within a particular visit, so that one can avoid accident, illness, ill-luck, rebellion, physical breakdown, labor disputes and all the other vagaries that threaten the peripatetic mover and shaker's with potential woes.
So: "Examples for the traveler to contemplate!"
You arrive as I did, say, in London. You have been working up to walking a little more than usual, for months, sleeping at a later hour than usual, in order to prepare for Europe's time zones, and eating the sorts of food you are expecting to encounter. Armed with a Baedekers', a Frommer's, a portable map and knowledge of the London Underground, what you do the first night (or perhaps morning) is: take the Underground to the Thames River and view the storied Houses of Parliament. And, Fortune favoring the practical man, look up over your right shoulder after strolling along the Thames for a brief ways; what you will see is Big Ben, smiling in welcome, beaming down on the Man Who Came to Visit.
By now, the reader should realize that what I am going to be recounting will be an unbroken chariot-course of triumphs, which only a massive sort of betrayal by angry state workers, unforeseeably-rotten kismet or my own far-from-inevitable stupidity could have derailed. Maybe I boast a bit--it has required a bit of happenstance I admit; but in 35 years, the "See If First" paradigm has never yet failed yours truly.
If the first day is derailed--do what you'd planned as soon as you can...
But--back to the Continent... After the first victory, I did not, I must truthfully report, become overconfident. There were still four countries and four more applications of the Theoria to be carried out.
And, next on the program was Greece.
This was the one country I had wanted most to visit, and had been reading about for years and anticipating with the most fervent hopes. Just seeing the Greek Isles through bubble-masses of clouds looming far below our plane was a huge and unexpected positive. Then, after we'd landed at the Athens airport, and seen the Mediterranean (since the airport is located next to Piraeus, the port for Athens), we headed immediately to The Acropolis Hill, for an unforgettable first sight of the ancient High City and its famous buildings (from the Temple of Nike to the Parthenon).
The next venue on our tour was Rome. Once arrived by plane, and settled into our hotel, we did not falter. The very first evening, we essayed the garlic-scented local buses, rolled triumphantly past the Castel San Angelo, the Pope's main storehouse, and enjoyed a drink on the Piazza Navona beneath an amber-colored evening before dining in Lucullan splendor beside a statued fountain and being serenaded by a world-class trumpet virtuoso.
I must admit to some fortune, during the next planned ventures. A side trip to Firenze, also called Florence, happened to take us directly to the Uffizi Gallery--exactly as a booked side trip in Athens had previously taken our busload of planning geniuses to the Corinth Canal, Mycenae's hill and its monuments, and Epidaurus's lovely hillside Theater. Our visit to St, Peter's the next morning in Rome, planned with the detail of a military campaign, allowed us sights of Michelangelo's statuary, his frescoes such as the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, and the main piazza itself which needs no elaboration from me.
But, I must confess, we came within four minutes of missing our next main target--the lovely vision of Lake Como (promised in the Guide Book), which, by the time we arrived by train we to admire it, was blue--the lake, the sky, the buildings all blue--with the gold lights strung like upright torches propped on poles along its shore in the evening's very last light. Flushed with the success of my then-new strategy, I still didn't permit myself overconfidence. We were scheduled for a late arrival in Switzerland, in fact at at Lucerne on its Lake. But to our joy, when we arrived by night, a storm was about to begin. So, we dined that evening in front of a huge rectangular glass-paned window within which was framed the dark Lake, powerboats bobbing at anchor, dpurple brooding mountains in the distance, and the magnificent lightning storm we had narrowly avoided being particpants within. So remembering to bet on our good fortune, the next day we enjoyed a long-ago-planned morning tour of the Lion Bridge and the city, as the cooperative rain barely acknowledged our presence.
The last capital on our tour's itinerary was Paris. The drive proved to be uneventful. Buoyed by our previous magnificent experiences, we headed directly past a statue of Charlemagne the Conqueror. A light rain was falling on Paris as we arrived that afternoon; so, we took the Metro--fortunately not then suffering from a work stoppage which later might have derailed the express train of our hopes...and we followed my trusty map and found ourselves a brief walk from the Eiffel Tower--which we already knew would be open at that hour, on that day, at that season. Voila! Another beautiful action successfully completed--not merely effortlessly- earned, but with time enough for us to be enabled to savor and remember it, forever.
I could add details of this method of mine, that I later applied to such cities as Phoenix, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Budapest, Rosarita, Prague, Bratislava, New York (more than once), San Diego, Richmond, Brasov, the Amish country of Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. The same method, moira permitting, I claim must work for other days of any tour, sojourn, visit or planned engagement as well.
Having had a grand profit and memory the first day or first full day any trip, why shouldn't the second or third or any other day (if not interfered with by elements, fanatics or mechanical failures) be able to be approached using the same plan? Consider: if the first day in New York, you decide as I did to go up the Empire State Building before doing anything else and then collect landmarks from an extensive pre-planned list as desired, why on another day couldn't one see the show at the Hayden Planetarium and eat lunch on Central Park South? Or on another day, visit Chinatown to eat, see the Brooklyn Bridge and then Greenwich Village? Etetera, etcetera, etcetera.
"See It First", I suggest. Learn the transport system before you do anything else; never travel the same route twice unless you desire to do so, in any direction. Anticipate; prepare your mind for priorities and for those experiences that you evaluate as most being the important; then check your map--and start collecting memories that will last a lifetime....
But always do something 'first'--do it first, so you will have a fine reminiscence to savor, no matter what else happens to you on your journey.
And I hope you will heed my advice: never feel fearful nor guilty about traveling as a scientist does. You will enjoy any trip planned as a military exercise in strategy many times more than the unprepared tourist will ever enjoy any days of an haphazard surernder to fatalism.
And, when the fruits of victory have fallen into your mental souvenir basket--both those planned and those frankly unlooked-for--don't feel guilty about these attainments either. Because you will know that you've earned them, just as I always have. From first to last...
Bon voyage!
...by Robert David Michael Cerello
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Submit!
If fanciful matters, out-of-the-ordinary places of mind, body & soul, not to mention coloratura ideas appeal to the composer in you, Danse Macabre invites you to submit for future editions of this online journal. * Edited & published by Adam Henry Carriere, winner of the Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Danse Macabre seeks to further expand the imaginative landscape of the literary web and encourages submissions from one and all. * Danse Macabre welcomes all forms of poetry (limit 3 per submission); flash, short-short, short, and plain old fiction; narratives, humour, and creative non-fiction; book & music reviews; and the occasional scholarly take on literary matters consistent with our narrative flavours. * E-mail your submissions as text in the body of your message with a short bio telling us about yourself & your writing. Though we may not be able to offer you comments on your work, we do promise to read everything you send with care and consideration, and to respond as soon as we can to your work. You will be notified if your work(s) is selected for posting. Our submissions address is dansemacabreonline(at)yahoo(dot)com. * Danse Macabre welcomes your thoughts, your work, your future readership, and your enjoyment!
We now accept submissions year round...
Issue 20 - Deadline: 20 Oct 2008
We now accept submissions year round...
Issue 20 - Deadline: 20 Oct 2008
Autumn 2008 Volume Three, Number Five by Adam Henry Carriere. Copyright (c.) 2008. All Rights Reserved.
DANSE MACABRE is edited, produced, and published online by Adam Henry Carriere / Volksrundfunk Productions GmbH - Copyright (c.) 2008. All rights reserved. Attributed works copyrighted by individual authors or in the public domain. Contributors retain all publication and serial rights. Viewpoints expressed by contributors, in quotations used, or suggested by displayed graphics may not necessarily reflect the opinions of this online journal. Images appearing in this journal are either in the public domain or the copyright of individuals who produced the image in question. It is believed that the non-profit use of scaled-down, low-resolution images taken from references throughout the world wide web which provide critical visual analysis to writings posted on this site qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of these images may be copyright infringement. Thus spake advocaten...