As we made our way back across “the land of Lincoln” from South Bend to Hannibal, Missouri, we decided it would be appropriate to listen to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. Vowell writes about the tourist industry surrounding presidential assassinations, starting with a long chapter on Lincoln. If it can be said that someone “has a face for radio,” Vowell unquestionably has a voice for written prose. It’s a strange combination of high, whiny, and nasal that takes some getting used to (or, in Emily’s case, it would take more miles than we are driving on this trip to push down the irritation). The writing is light and interesting, though, and a passable middle ground between our two other recent authors, Malcolm Gladwell and David Foster Wallace. Where David Foster Wallace is obsessed with minutia, often abstract, and mordantly funny, Malcolm Gladwell is overly general, straightforward to a fault, and earnest. Gladwell seems to have found the niche of trade publishing in which he distills contemporary movements in psychology or sociology into easy examples that seem both mildly surprising and to confirm common sense. Perhaps Blink was meant to be read in short stretches (in the bathroom, perhaps?), but in long doses in the car, with little distraction, the experience is something like this: “And now you have learned yet another example of thin slicing, the way that we all make snap decisions that are surprisingly correct and insightful. Now let me loop back to every other example I have offered in the book thus far, especially dwelling on the Kouros scenario I discussed for 45 minutes in the introduction.” Nevertheless, we’ve listened to five hours out of seven so far.
Hannibal, MO, reminds me of a line Sam once offered when giving directions to the Ethiopian district on Fairfax in LA: “They aren’t coy about what they’re famous for.” In Hannibal we ate “Mark Twain Fried Chicken” at the Mark Twain dinette, one block up from the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum and the Becky Thatcher House. From there we headed along the Great River Road to St. Louis where we’ll sleep in a hotel room literally in the shadow of the arch and enjoy Ted Drewe’s custard, another hotly anticipated stop.