[Luke Oak's latest artwork, which he tells me is a "camel".]

My youngest nephew, Luke Oak Van Tassel, is not quite old enough to be as verbal as his big brother Cedar — but he has taken quite a shine to drawing pictures. Above is a recent piece (no doubt influenced by the Dada movement of the early 20th century) that Luke Oak has entitled “Camel”.

[Many thanks, bu the way, to all of you who sent postcards to Cedar on his birthday. Notes arrived from as far away as Japan, and Cedar loved them!]

A reader at the Vagabonding.net Q&A writes: “I was inspired by your book and I am planning a trip to Europe for a few months. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, however, by how much it all might cost. Any advice for a budget oriented college student dying to see new and wondrous things?”

College students, I told her, have many great advantages in Europe. Your student card alone should save you lots of money on museums and historical sights around the continent. You should also check and see if your campus has a student travel office with information on travel discounts and overseas work opportunities. The Student Travel Association, for example, is a great resource for saving money and generating travel ideas for the road. Student Traveler magazine is another great resource worth checking out. Also, as a student, you

“Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn’t involve any destinations. It was going to the going’s sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.”
–Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (1981)

[No, that's not New York: A shot of the sunset in northern Baja, where Rolf was holed up for the last week.]

After a little over a week of working on writing projects amidst the gorgeous deserts of northern Baja (and some down-time in San Diego), I’m now headed to New York to see friends and talk to some publishing folks. With any luck, I’ll have new word about my next book within a month or so!

I’ll be back and blogging by late next week…

Voting is underway for the best snapshot submitted in the last year to Doug Lansky

“In a culture where the possibility of wealth and the acquisition of things is so defining of success, we end up pursuing things that, even if we are successful, can never deliver what we envisioned they would. The reason riches become such a snare is because we end up evaluating life in mercenary terms and being seen by others in such terms, and life is just not so.”
–Ravi Zacharias, Recapture the Wonder (2003)

I

“I don

I

“It is hard to notice age in those who dream.”
–Charles Plymell, “In Memory of My Father” (1977)

Note: Though a minor figure among Beat writers, Charles Plymell is the reigning counterculture poet to hail from Wichita, where I grew up. His book The Last of the Moccasins, a fictional recounting of Wichita fringe culture in the fifties, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights books in 1971.

About ten years ago, when I was still writing short stories, I lifted a few of Plymell’s lines about Clark Kent from Forever Wider to help set the motif for a Wichita tale of my own, entitled Jane Room Superman, which was published a few years later in Ecelectica (and remains one of the few public proofs of the fiction writing I did in my early twenties). Though self-consciously hard-boiled at times (I think I was trying to emulate Denis Johnson), I still enjoy going back to read “Jane Room Superman” — a tale that is not all that far-removed from the reality of a completely different period of my life.

After the piece was published in Ecelectica, I tracked Plymell down and sent him an email, confessing that I’d stolen a line of his for my short story. His reply was fairly complimentary of the story, but he was mostly interested in talking about Delta 88s (a car that features in the story). He even offered to send me a photo of a Delta 88 he had recently restored. Last I heard Plymell was living in upstate New York.