Highway Nocturne

I love driving alone on highways late at night (what that says about me I dunno, but there it is), and these days I don’t get a chance to do it nearly enough.

From Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays:

In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverley Hills), Maria drove the freeway.... Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverley Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fury 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.

From Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections:

Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99c Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

From the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”:

I’m in love with Massachusetts. And the neon when it’s cold outside. And the highway when it’s late at night. Got the radio on. I’m like a roadrunner. Alright. I’m in love with modern moonlight. 128 when it’s dark outside. I’m in love with Massachusetts. I’m in love with the radio on. It helps me from being alone late at night, helps me from being lonely late at night. I don’t feel so bad now in the car, don’t feel so alone with the radio on, like a roadrunner.

From Bruce Springsteen’s “Living on the Edge of the World”:

Early north Jersey industrial skyline, I’m an all-set cobra jet creeping through the nighttime. Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone. This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you’re all alone.... Radio, radio, hear my tale of heartbreak, New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape. Got a counter girl at the exit 24 HoJo, down past the refinery towers where the great black river flows.... Radio’s jammed with gospel stations, lost souls calling long-distance salvation. Hey mister DJ, gotta hear my last prayer – it’s a hey ho, rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere.

And this:

• NEU! “Hallogallo” (buy here)

And this:

• Rhys Chatham, “Guitar Trio” (buy here)