Jana Remy
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Jana Remy

  • Writing
    • Disability
    • Making History
    • Digital Humanities
      • dayofDH
    • Canoeing
    • Creative Nonfiction & Essays
    • Feminism
    • Bibliographies
      • Pacific Worlds Bibliography
    • Social Media
      • Mentions/Links
  • Scholarship
    • Awards/Fellowships
    • Conferences & Invited Talks
    • Collaboration
    • Workshops
    • Conference Planning
    • Technical Skills
  • Teaching
    • Blogposts About Teaching
Roll through my chant…
make me smilethings I likeworld

Roll through my chant…

written by Jana July 15, 2011

Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee[…]

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing
all!
~from Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter”

IMG_4952

One of the best parts of my trip was that I traveled (and traveled and traveled) by train. I took high-speed trains from Brussels to Avignon, from there to Paris, and also to London and back. I’ve said before that I try to make sure that every single journey I take includes a ride on a train, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint! Some of my train trips even included spontaneous cheese-bread-waffle picnics like this one:


(And because I fear that I’ve spoken far too much about my wine-bibbing on this trip already on my blog, the beverage in my glass will remain unmentioned…but were I to mention it, I might note just how strange it felt to be allowed to drink such stuff on public transport…)

And…as a further indulgence for my train fetish, I also had the opportunity to visit and photograph a few antique cars near an old railway-station-turned-coffeehouse. I’m rather embarrassed to admit just how much I enjoyed that part of my adventure…

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1 comment

my passion… | Jana Remy September 12, 2011 - 5:05 pm

[…] is crumbling and he’s renegotiating his life. What a perfect read for me, right now (and it even has trains–of course it has to have a few trains since this is Paul Theroux of The Great Railway Bazaar, […]

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About Me

About Me

Hi there friend, and welcome to my blog. I started writing on the internet more than fifteen years ago. Since then I've started and finished a PhD program, left the Mormon church and became a Quaker, got divorced, remarried, found full-time work in academia, took up rock climbing and outrigger canoeing, and traveled across the globe (China! Belgium! Italy! Chicago! Montana! Portland! Gettysburg! and oh-so-many points in-between). This blog is eclectic and random--it has poetry and cooking and books. And cats. And flowers. And the ocean (my ocean). But in that sense it's a good reflection of me and my wide-ranging, far-reaching, magpie curiosity.

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