{"id":3177,"date":"2015-09-03T14:46:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T21:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3177"},"modified":"2015-09-03T14:46:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T21:46:18","slug":"diary-this-american-road-portland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3177","title":{"rendered":"Diary: This American Road, Portland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Portland<\/p>\n

As a wise friend once told me, “Powell’s is what Portland is\u00a0for.<\/em>” Since I seem to come to Portland about once a year these days, I’ve found plenty of other purposes\u00a0for the city \u2014 to provide pods and pods of food carts<\/a>, for instance \u2014 but that proposition holds basically\u00a0true: no trip to Portland, whether a dedicated visit\u00a0by air or a stop on a road trip like this one, feels complete without at least an hour spent exploring Powell’s City of Books, and at least another hour spent reading the fruits of that browsing at the Powell’s City of Books and watching the Actual City of Portland just beyond its\u00a0expansive windows.<\/p>\n

\"Portland<\/p>\n

Not wanting to load myself down with many more books just two months before moving to Korea (although I really don’t have as vast and unwieldy a library as some friends\u00a0expect), I decided I’d only buy something from Powell’s for myself if it seemed put on the shelf specifically for me. Lo and behold, in the “TRAVEL \u2014 ASIA” section (always an early stop) I found a crisp copy of Michael Stephens’\u00a0Lost in Seoul<\/em>, one of the few modern book-length, first-person narratives by a westerner in\u00a0Korea. It came out in 1990, two years after Simon Winchester’s cross-country foot journey\u00a0Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles<\/em>, four years before Clive Leatherdale’s Olympics-era travelogue\u00a0To Dream of Pigs<\/em>, and the same year as Michael Shapiro’s season-by-season chronicle of development and democratization\u00a0The Shadow in the Sun.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Lost<\/p>\n

I’ve enjoyed all these books, but\u00a0Lost in Seoul<\/em>, though long out of print and likely the least known of the bunch, stands out. Stephens writes not just a Korean travelogue, but the story of several different visits to the country over a period of years during which he comes to grips with not just life in another culture, but life among his Korean wife’s extended family. (“For Okhee,” reads his dedication page, “nae boo-in\u00a0kwa chin-goo<\/em>.”) He also has somewhat different professional interests than the average westerner writing on Asia. The copy I found at Powell’s contained a letter, written on Princeton stationery from Stephens himself, addressed to a certain Carolyn Kizer. “As the enclosed book, LOST IN SEOUL, is as much about language, and specifically about poetry, as it is about Korea,” he writes, “I thought it might interest you.” Kizer, I later found out<\/a>, became poetry famous herself by writing about the Pacific Northwest, and died October of last year. (The book’s price sticker says it had hit the shelf that May.)<\/p>\n

\"Portland<\/p>\n

With the Korean life coming up ourselves, we’ve\u00a0made this west coast road trip as part of a sort of American farewell tour. In Portland, we saw Garrison Keillor doing more or less the same thing, putting on one of the shows that makes up\u00a0A Prairie Home Companion<\/em>‘s “America the Beautiful” tour, Keillor’s last before finally passing along the mic and retiring from hosting duties. We actually structured our whole trip around this event, since I got Jae the ticket as a birthday present months ago. I’ve never followed\u00a0A Prairie Home Companion\u00a0<\/em>very closely, but I wanted a chance to see the show’s demographic up close and personally, and what more vivid way to do it than in a sold-out crowd in one of the four or five cities, as Keillor chided, “that actually believe Bernie Sanders could win?”<\/p>\n

\"Portland<\/p>\n

I get why a personality-driven variety show like\u00a0A Prairie Home Companion<\/em> would, after more than forty years (mostly) on the air, gain a fervent following. But how, I’ve always wondered, has it gained\u00a0such<\/em> a fervent following \u2014 and such a large one? It makes sense that some people enjoy bluegrass, some people enjoy gospel, some people enjoy long improvised monologues filled with jokes about the difference between Lutherans and Episcopalians, and some people enjoy nostalgic jingles for nonexistent products, but the very center of that Venn diagram has somehow turned Keillor’s project into an international phenomenon. More power to him, I guess, though he also has his haters. Relaxing in the Division Street Townshend’s Tea the day before the show, I came across a Q&A in\u00a0Willamette Week<\/em><\/a> with one of America’s foremost Keillor-haters, the man who launched the\u00a0\u00a0\u201cCancel Goddam Prairie Home Companion<\/em>\u201d<\/a>\u00a0petition on Change.org.<\/p>\n

\"Portland<\/p>\n

Personally, I hope Keillor devotes\u00a0his the time freed up by retiring from the show to writing more about Denmark. Those who prefer his singing about power milk biscuits might not know this, but the man has made quite an investment in Danish culture, going so far as to marry a Danish woman and move to Copenhagen\u00a0in the 1980s (which put A Prairie Home Companion\u00a0<\/em>on hiatus). He’s on the next wife now, but he maintains the affinity for Denmark<\/a>.\u00a0“Everybody ought to have Denmark as a possibility out there in the future somewhere,” he said just before making the move<\/a>, “wherever you think you might need it.” It makes me think of that Thomas Jefferson-attributed line, “Every man has two countries \u2014 his own and France.” It also makes me wonder whether\u00a0Michael Stephens has returned much to Korea over the past 25 years. And it makes me realize that, whenever I again\u00a0live in the United States, I’ll have two cities \u2014 my own and Portland.<\/p>\n

\"Portland<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a wise friend once told me, “Powell’s is what Portland is\u00a0for.” Since I seem to come to Portland about once a year these days, I’ve found plenty of other purposes\u00a0for the city \u2014 to provide pods and pods of food carts, for instance \u2014 but that proposition holds basically\u00a0true: no trip to Portland, whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3177"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3189,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3177\/revisions\/3189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}