Anasazi Inn
Note: Photo captions are time and place of WiFi connectivity.

May 26th
Nice to have a ‘day off’, so to speak.

I have a new favourite city - Santa Fe!  Truly amazing - lots of history, good food and scenic as hell. Spent the entire day walking the walk, talking the talk… well, the first part anyway.

The entire core is based around all these old (17th century Spanish old) buildings and green spaces.  Sure, they’re filled with trinket shops, and poster shops, and restaurants and bars.  But also you find quaint little romantic inns, churches and museums.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is one of the top three in the city, and probably the key reason I went.  Unfortunately, it was a bit of a let down.  It’s like travelling to Europe to see Vermeers or Rembrandts or van Goghs and realizing that all the best ones aren’t in museums. they’re in private collections.  Because O’Keeffe and her husband, the amazing photographer Alfred Stieglitz, sold so much of her output prior to WWII, what was left for the museum was her lesser work - that which she herself didn’t think was up to par.  Still and all, if you’re a fan, it’s amazing to stand that close to some of her work.

I also went to Nicholas Potter Bookseller to peruse the stacks.  This man single-handedly refuses to enter the 21st century, believing instead that word of mouth will win out over the Internet.  He has no online presence and no catalog - just the store.  [Since writing this, the store has begun construction of an online presence. - Ed.] A converted house stacked ceiling to floor with books of every stripe.  Although he is primarily a ‘used’ bookseller, he has his fair share of antiquarian and first editions.  Perhaps it’s this collection of books you could uncover in any flea market mixed in with the truly gifted ‘finds’.

I ‘found’ two books that completely surprised me, although I didn’t find the Henry Miller I was looking for:

“Roughing It” by Mark Twain.  Most people aren’t aware that other than his books on ‘Huck’ and ‘Tom’, it was as a travel writer that he made most of his money.  This book is a first edition about his experiences travelling in the American southwest (it’s a coincidence, trust me!).  Here’s a capsule review of the book, written in the late 19th century:

“The semi-autobiographical ‘Roughing It’ is Mark Twain’s somewhat fictional account of his real-life adventures in the 19th-century American West. He went west by stagecoach, to serve as his brother Orion’s personal secretary. Orion had secured the position of being Secretary of the Nevada Territory. In this exciting, adventure-filled book, Twain recounts his experiences as a frontier newspaper reporter, a prospector, and a writer. By reading this book, one gets a first-hand account from a great writer who was not only on hand to observe history-in-the-making but also helped to make that history. Of course, as is true of any of the books Twain wrote, ‘Roughing It’ is chock full of social commentary and hilarious observations about what he refers to elsewhere as “…the only animal that blushes - or needs to.”

The other book is a largely unknown tome written by James Joyce - also a first edition.  “Giacomo Joyce” was never meant to be a book at all.  It is a series of notes, poems, letters and diary entries written by Joyce as he was trying to come to terms with writing his masterpiece, “Ulysses”.  Some of the poetry is downright scatological; some, incredibly beautiful and insightful, especially considering the prose found in “Ulysses”.  What makes this book stand out is that it includes facsimiles of his actual writing, not just repurposed text.  Quite the find.

One more day to play, then north and west to Shiprock, Aztec, Four Corners and back into Arizona.

Reporting tonight from Santa Fe, New Mexico