I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there are few better things in life than having someone you love pick you up at the airport.
So when you find your cute parents at the baggage carousel, mom in snowman earmuffs and dad in a Dr. Seuss-style Santa hat with a red velvet tornado spring on top, you know this holiday visit is looking good.
I’ve lived far from home for several years now, so I know to bring some good reading for at least a couple of flights.
I’m pretty new to the universe of twitter, but I was delighted to run across the online journal Airplane Reading, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich. The graphic above is one of the covers of Yakich’s two-sided Checking In/ Checking Out. (Professor Yakich, are you reading this? If you send me a copy, I’d be happy to review it. Ditto, Professor Schaberg, with your fancy book The Textual Life of Airports).
As for the purpose of this nonfiction “online anthology,” Schaberg and Yakich explain that “[b]eyond throwaway entertainment or mere distraction, we see airplane reading as a kind of storytelling that can animate, reflect on, and rejuvenate the experience of flight.”
The pieces are short (up to 1000 words), lively, and varied. Even the tags, or “Points of Departure,” are pretty cool proto-poems: “food / freaks / frequent fliers” or “hijinks / home / humiliation / in-flight.” These tags are a ticker of air travel zeitgiest (flightgeist? Oh readers, I’m so sorry! Your fearless correspondent is a bit jet- and coffee-lagged!).
And have I mentioned that the writing in Airplane Reading is delicious?
Take, for example, the haiku punch of “Before we see land, we feel it. The Boeing sews earth and sky together like a zipper” (from “Landing at Moisant Field” by Louis Gallo).
Consider the hook of Meagan Simmons’ “Negative Spaces”: “I am on a plane en route to the Virgin Islands with my mother, and my father’s body is undergoing an autopsy, and my senior year is starting without me….In each of the airports, I am surrounded by people whose lives did not change last week. They are the stoic laptop carriers in line for coffee at Starbucks, with Powerbars sticking out of side briefcase pockets. They are the troops of excited families just on the start of a vacation, and the tangle-haired, weary families on their way back. I walk by coffee stands and whirring espresso machines, and then past McDonald’s counters where food timers are constantly beeping and cups are being filled with tumbling ice and fountain soda, and I am part of none of it.”
Dang if Airplane Reading doesn’t make the SkyMall catalog seem so, well, pedestrian.