Travel Notes

by Stanley Crawford

Travel Notes is a hallucinogenic dream journey thru the incomparable mind that subsequently brought us Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, then dropped off the grid to become a garlic farmer in New Mexico. Travel Notes could indeed read like Stanley Crawford's private travelogue, yet no real-world places or people are explicitly mentioned. Instead we're taken on a rompish tromp thru wild and often absurd landscapes—in a bus that gets dismantled and reassembled to get around a broken-down car, in a biplane that only flies in the mind of the naked pilot, or on the back of a white elephant named Unable with untranslatable obscenities tattooed to his underbelly—the traveller ever self-aware of the nagging fragility of routine customs, ever on the verge of having the magic carpet pulled out from beneath your feet if you stop to think.

This mind-jarring comedy of errors shares campy common ground with Brautigan in its carefree wackiness, with Robbe-Grillet in its disciplined lunacy and obsessive- compulsive attention to detail, with Márquez in its magical realism (though Crawford, in exile on Crete, was at the time unaware of One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in the same year) and with a healthy dose of subversive angst thrown in for good measure.

By the end, Travel Notes becomes a boot-strapping map to your own brain, projecting psychotherapeutic color on the otherwise gray matter of real-world events.

Genres: Fiction

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Crawford is the author of "Gascoyne," "Petroleum Man," "Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine," "A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm," "Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico," "The River in Winter," and "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of their Childhood." He lives in new Mexico with his wife, RoseMary, where they own and run a garlic farm.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Stanley Crawford's second novel is a disjointed affair composed of three mostly disparate sections, though loosely connected by the inexplicable repetition of certain details and the presence of a recurring character, the Painted Woman, who in most cases is headed in the opposite direction of the narrator (with one notable exception). Occasionally passages in one section will prefigure events in future sections, though not in a clearly significant way. The text is, as the title indicates, a travelogue of sorts, describing in a detached tone the experiences of a seasoned traveler wandering aimlessly through unnamed underdeveloped countries, whose terrain and inhabitants often bear striking similarities to one another. Descriptions of events range from the darkly absurd to the esoteric, characterized by hermetic details that refuse parsing, at times taking deep existential dives that felt out of place, even in a text as random as this. As the publisher's description for the reprint edition quite accurately suggests, the style reads like a curious blend of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Richard Brautigan. Flat, precise descriptions of objects and their arrangements intermingle with bizarre non sequiturs and surrealist flights of fancy. Ultimately, though, while it has its moments, the novel lacks both the continuity and the pathos that elevated Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (which shares a similar lunacy) to a higher plane. Still, there is much to enjoy here...

This air transfixes. The window is open. The city mutters through the room upon a breeze from a sky of hazy brown air which almost blots out the distant range of mountains, yet a breeze that is only scented of the city, not clogged, as it flows past me to rustle the papers on this twenty-times-waxed table. I have been sitting here all morning watching a parallelogram of sunlight creep across the carpet towards my foot, fabricating laments for all time that I have known, conversing with each fragrance as it drifts in the window, a single strand of cobweb, and around the room to be sucked out, so suddenly, through the crack under the door. No, it is not a day for moving around, it is a day which of itself unfolds, a flower—to be cut.

[Craig Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is is an eccentric travelogue to exotic and strange locales? Is it a geo-political examination of anthropological obervations? Is it a murder mystery, or an international art theft?
Whatever it is, I give it 3.5 of 5 stars, rounded to 4.
An odd-ball collection of events from her to there and not really back again.

I encountered this author in his interview as part of a NetFlix documentary series "Rotten", in an episode about garlic. He is a garlic farmer, after having been a novelist earlier in his life, and he was shown in the episode reading from his non-fiction book about his experiences in the garlic endeavor.

Interestingly I had already read one of his novels "Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Ungwentine" which I purchased when I was about 13 or 14 from a bin in a store called "Unclaimed Freight". I remember the novel, and the location from which I purchased it for all these years (I'm now 57).

[Adrian K. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really excited for this, but it just reads like an unfunny, lesser Pynchon. I read a review that called it juvenalia, which I think is accurate. I wanted to like this, but I did not. A shame. But I still have hope for his other books though, like Log of the SS. Urgentine.

[Adam Neufeld · Rating 4 out of 5]

a plethora of hilariously bewildering non-sequiturs

endlessly entertaining, intriguing

[Full Stop]

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/03/r...

Travel Notes (From here — to there) – Stanley Crawford

by Michael Jauchen

[Calamari; 2014]

Most people, Stanley Crawford included, would say that 1972’s Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine is Stanley Crawford’s best book. A surreal novella about a gigantic barge wandering the ocean and the unraveling marriage of the couple who pilot it, Unguentine is stylistically revelatory, funny, inventive, and sad, a novel that reorients us in the best ways to what fiction, and the sentence, can do.

Part of Unguentine’s continued visibility can be attributed to Gordon Lish, who championed the novel when it first appeared; these days the Lish imprimatur goes a long way toward ensuring a book maintains a healthy readership. Crawford’s other work, though it has its vocal devotees — Ben Marcus and Deb Olin Unferth among them — has tended to reach fewer readers, even to the point of falling out of print.

Travel Notes (From here — to there), Crawford’s second novel, went through only one printing when Simon and Schuster published it in 1967. Luckily, Calamari Press is reissuing it this spring, doing the great service of reviving a lesser-known work by one of America’s singular contemporary prose stylists. Perhaps more importantly, though, the reemergence of Travel Notes is notable because it’s the novel Crawford wrote right before Unguentine, and in it we see hints of the masterpiece that would arrive five years later.

Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/03/r...

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow, i'm the first one to rate this book?! amazing read, i go on about it at length here:
http://5cense.com/10/travel_notes.htm

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review: forthcoming.