Stanley Crawford: Travel Writer as Edgelord

I came across this book recently, Travel Notes, by Stanley Crawford (writer, farmer), republished in 2014 by Calamari Press, but originally published in 1967, the year of my birth.

Calamari Press, now Calamari Archive Ink., was founded and is run by Derek White, who also posts on 5cense, which he describes as:

“ ≠ a Substack nor part of a blog cir¢ul... it'5 free + there'5 no ads > we have n0 ulterior motives hear xcept knowledge 4 th sake of knowledge, language 4 th sake of language + 2 do¢ument R Xistence w/ tXt, img + sound > if u dig 5tuff disↄussed herein plz 5upport th artists + Ↄalamari Arↄhive) > thx 4 reading”

The manuscript review and publication process of the Press is just as idiosyncratic as the blog. Instead of a traditional “author submission” section, they have a “Submission Guidelines/Manifesto” that reads more like a journal entry from Trash Robot than anything. It is less a statement of acceptable style than it is a full on re-visioning of the publication process:

“Undoing the wrongs of copyright The 1 amendment to our new manifest is that going forward Calamari Archive will no longer publish copyrighted works. © is a cancerous snake that bites intellectual property in the foot. As it stands, we can no longer live w/ ourselves being part of such a corrosive + antiquated system that restricts the ability of a work of art to freely copy itself + propagate. At most we will insert the ɔopyleft symbol in books: (ɔ), all rites reversed. As we've said before. To publish should mean to set free, not restrict.”

In fact, Calamari even takes issue with the word “manifesto,” or the idea of having a masthead at all, and only upon repeatedly being asked did they create this page, even as they changed the name from “Press” to “Archive.”:

“«Any statement or manifesto about the press is contained in the summation of its books at this time.»”

“the summation of its books at this time.” That’s quite a statement when you actually come to read Travel Notes and realize how absolutely un-summarizable it is, how resistant to logic, how damnably unsettling. I’ve read weird fiction and this is not that, nor is it slipstream Reading it is like that first 20 seconds after you wake from a lucid dream that makes perfect sense until you try and explain it to someone. The words eat the dream alive.

The book begins with the narrator having arrived at an airport terminal, his destination, from some undisclosed place of origin. He immediately hires a car and a translator because he doesn’t know where to go or how to communicate. They convince him that he HAS to see the Famôus Lake, and so they set out along a desolate road. Three hours outside the city, the car breaks down as does the plot. The driver informs him (through the translator) that the only thing for him to do is to completely disassemble the car. The man agrees and goes out foraging. This disassembly takes some time and is done in the middle of the road.

At one point a bus approaches going in the opposite direction and is unable to get past the disassembled car. After some back and forth the bus driver and passengers decide to disassemble the bus, move the pieces one by one to the other side, and re-assemble it there so they can be on their way.

There is much more and much less that happens, but I’m not going to try to re-assemble the plot right here. You need to find another way around. Futile gestures.