As the train picks up speed, the view from the window seat hardly blurs, the
brilliant hues of autumn lazily parading by in a slow ride to nowhere in particular. The Great Smoky Mountain railroad is a tourist trap, and a damn good one. Vacationers are enticed by the “
old-timey”-ness of taking a train. The mountains make people want to get closer to nature, and trains are one step down from too-real cars. We can imagine the steam and coal coursing through the veins of this primordial metal beast, but in reality it’s run by far more modern means. The train’s open-air cars let in a cool breeze, occasionally misted by fog banks. There are no seat belts, just guardrails to keep passengers from falling off a bridge or from tumbling down a mountainside.
For just over $50,
you too can experience the slowest train ride ever through the most beautiful forested mountain land that American can offer. Leisurely country train rides cost more monetarily than city subways but save you in sanity. Stepping off the train after two hundred and ten minutes and fifty three miles is stepping back into the
real world.
This semester’s blog experience has been a great break from the more intense papers and in-class discussions. It’s been a perfect mix of creative and challenging, and I also enjoyed the flashbacks to my vacations. However, with each assignment my vacation and my setting (the Smoky Mountains) became less important than the idea or theme of the post. I frequently found myself letting my partner blogs’ ideas and themes overtake my posts. Most of my blog posts were greatly inspired by what another blog wrote about, with the mountains as the touchstone around which it circulated. To me, this connected strongly with Roland Barthes’ “Work to Text” article in which the “Text” never works alone; intertextuality became very evident through the blog project.
ReplyDeleteThe project also reminds me of the inspiration that street artists find in each others’ works, as we saw in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” One person says (or sprays/paints) something, and another picks up on that style or movement and makes it their own (arguably so for Guetta).
Another aspect of the blog experience that worked well was the anonymity; I could apply my own story to my classmates’ blogs without pre-determined bias from knowing or judging their identities. This made the blogs more personal, despite the separation of work from author, because I, as the reader, could put myself onto the blogger’s blank slate. I think that this is one of the reasons I drew so much from each assignment’s partner blog for my own posts (aside from the requirement to do so in the prompt).
Overall, I enjoyed this semester’s blog experience, although in hindsight my one regret is that I didn’t tie each of my blog posts together more. There is little transitioning or connection between topics, apart from the mountain setting. I think that this would have provided a smoother reading experience.