Travel Notes

<p>Originally published in 1967 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 & 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 M��rquez 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. </p>