Powells website (where I am a guest blogger next week, incidentally) has a nice Q&A feature. I liked this bit from Jeff Parker, in response to the question "Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?":
Every summer when I'm in Russia I go on a Dostoyevsky Walk, a little tour cooked up by my friend James Boobar. The creepiest part is at the end of the tour, where we trespass our way up the stairwell of this old apartment building to the top where sits the supposed door of the pawnbroker (there is controversy as to whether this would be exactly the door Dostoyevsky imagined). There's all this conflicting cheerleader graffiti up there, in twenty or so different languages, saying things like, "Don't do it, Raskolnikov" and "KIIl the bitch!" It's the only time in my life I ever felt a real slippage between an imagined fictional world and an actual place. It's creepy.
Has anybody here made a literary pilgrimage? I don't know that I have really. I guess going to Shakespeare and Co., and Cafe Deux Magots in Paris were pilgrimages. Whenever I go to Kayo Books in SF I'm conscious that I'm in Sam Spade's neighborhood (as well as McTeague's).
I've never been any place that was connected to an author that I really loved so they weren't pilgrimages really, but I've been to several author's homes. The best was Edgar Allan Poe's house in Philadelphia. The Parks Service runs it and during the tour they take you into his basement, turn off all the lights, and read a creepy short story of Poe's. (When I visited it was "The Masque of the Red Death.") It's a lot of fun.
When my father was posted to Moscow my mother joined him during the summers (her, not being crazy and all). When I went to visit I noticed that her Moscow residence library consisted
entirely
of post-Cold War Russian based spy thrillers, which made every jaunt a literary pilgrimage. It was really fascinating.
Visiting Bath was something of a Jane Austen pilgrimage for me. Actually, half of Britain was an, "I've read about this and now I'm HERE!" experience for me, but that was the strongest association.
When I was going to Paris I looked up the Rue de la Cerisaye (from the Lymond Chronicles) on the map, but we didn't go there.
Supposedly, the house where Edgar Allan Poe was born is on a famous drug corner.(I say it that way cause I haven't been there myself, but know from The Wire
"Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?"
"Yo, man, look around!"
I was going to say I had nothing first-hand to contribute, but I have driven past the Safeway where Mary Ann Singleton tried to pick up Mouse.
Being that Phoenix has no literary character, and I haven't traveled much, I'm counting it.
I visited Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner. My friend was working on her PhD at Ole Miss and we went to the house when I visited her. It was pretty cool. And a tad odd since his house now overlooks the baseball diamond at Ole Miss.
Supposedly, the house where Edgar Allan Poe was born is on a famous drug corner.(I say it that way cause I haven't been there myself, but know from The Wire "Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?"
Actually it's not where he was born but he spent some formative years there (it's where he lived with his cousin who became his child bride). But, yes, it's in a pretty sketchy part of town.
Poe fanciers and cornerboys, huh?
Well, considering his life, it's still sort of fitting.
When I was a little little kid, my mother drove us into Boston with a hardcover of
Make Way for Ducklings
by Robert McCloskey in hand, and we went to the Public Gardens, and found iron railings on the houses just like in the illustrations of the story. (The story is about a pair of ducks that nest on the river, and have to cross Storrow Drive to get to the duck pond in the Public Gardens, and most of the illos are true to life even now.)
