2902 Pearl Street, Austin, TX (MY HOUSE) to 555 Lamar Street, Dallas, TX (OMNI DALLAS HOTEL) (BlackSwan Saloon)
194 miles, 3.23 hours
July 6th (TO JACKSON, I MEAN OXFORD)
555 Lamar Street, Dallas, TX (OMNI DALLAS HOTEL) to 400 North Lamar Boulevard, Oxford, MS (DOWNTOWN OXFORD INN)
536 miles 8.32 hours
July 12th
400 North Lamar Boulevard, Oxford, MS (DOWNTOWN OXFORD INN) to 2318 Blackoak Bend, San Antonio, TX (PARENTS HOUSE)
807 miles 13.3 hours
Expected total cost: $1243.86
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The first destination on my trip will be to the Omni Hotel in Dallas, Texas. The hotel has 23 stories and 1001 rooms. The hotel was $500 million dollars to make and is owned by the city of Dallas. The Omni opened in 2011 and has many restaurants and bars clearly illustrating the new age of the South, the South that I now know of as big money in big cities. The downtown location is ideal for not only seeing the South in context of the capitalistic endeavors of the twenty first century but to also explore the bar scene in Dallas which contains much of the main entertainment for the more reckless and therefore probably more mentally diseased of the new South. The bar I will be going to on the night of July 5th will be the Black Swan Saloon. The next day I will continue on to Oxford, for the Yoknapatawpha Conference (Fifty Years After Faulkner) where I will embrace the ways of Oxford. That is take in the international intrigue that Oxford garners after being host to Faulkner as he wrote, while still remembering that I am very much so still in the South. The details for what lectures and tours I will take part of depends upon when the speakers get their actual lecture times and I will for the most part attend all that the conference has to offer, which is detailed further on their website which I have embedded in the blog for you. The main point for attending the conference, which is from July 7th to the 11h, besides the obvious connection with Faulkner, the part that As I Lay Dying seems to illustrate as well, is that Oxford is hosting this huge event in which scholars from all around the world are attending, each making their own trip into Jackson to bury the dead and make way for the progressive and intellectually strong community of Oxford to flourish. Along with the conference I will be visiting the Yocona River Bridge which is likely a place that inspired Faulkner to write the section where the Bundrens meet the madness of the natural world, and where Darl has some of his most insanely beautiful commentary on the force of which is but one in many that beat down upon the Bundrens. I will visit the mental ward at Baptist Memorial Hospital, and hope to interview doctors and psychiatrists about the kind of things that they here from manic-depressive and bipolar patients. The idea is to get a good image of the kind of conflicting values and customs that in the story plagues Darl and is the source of his manic episode where he burned down the barn, but that now in the present day manifest themselves in many sociologically driven episodes of extreme bursts of creative thought and world breaking change. The trip to the hospital is in a way, an attempt to find the soul of Darl, who by no choice of his own was placed into an institution where the world is basically attempting to rope you back into reality. Based on research, what seems to happen in the mind of the bipolar patients is extreme clarity of the sociological situations around them, so for my own trip into the madness that is modernity for the South capturing a more clear image of this makes perfect sense to really find what was troubling Darl (who was both a Bundren and a poet, impossible I know). I will end my journey, supplementing the events of the conference, the trip to the river and the hospital, with a tour of Rowan Oak; hoping to get in the mind of a brilliant writer who wrote not only a story of the Bundrens but a story of Oxford, Mississippi, or the South, or you could even say the entire world. I will be home in San Antonio at my parents house July 12th.
*
Expected total cost: $1243.86
*
The first destination on my trip will be to the Omni Hotel in Dallas, Texas. The hotel has 23 stories and 1001 rooms. The hotel was $500 million dollars to make and is owned by the city of Dallas. The Omni opened in 2011 and has many restaurants and bars clearly illustrating the new age of the South, the South that I now know of as big money in big cities. The downtown location is ideal for not only seeing the South in context of the capitalistic endeavors of the twenty first century but to also explore the bar scene in Dallas which contains much of the main entertainment for the more reckless and therefore probably more mentally diseased of the new South. The bar I will be going to on the night of July 5th will be the Black Swan Saloon. The next day I will continue on to Oxford, for the Yoknapatawpha Conference (Fifty Years After Faulkner) where I will embrace the ways of Oxford. That is take in the international intrigue that Oxford garners after being host to Faulkner as he wrote, while still remembering that I am very much so still in the South. The details for what lectures and tours I will take part of depends upon when the speakers get their actual lecture times and I will for the most part attend all that the conference has to offer, which is detailed further on their website which I have embedded in the blog for you. The main point for attending the conference, which is from July 7th to the 11h, besides the obvious connection with Faulkner, the part that As I Lay Dying seems to illustrate as well, is that Oxford is hosting this huge event in which scholars from all around the world are attending, each making their own trip into Jackson to bury the dead and make way for the progressive and intellectually strong community of Oxford to flourish. Along with the conference I will be visiting the Yocona River Bridge which is likely a place that inspired Faulkner to write the section where the Bundrens meet the madness of the natural world, and where Darl has some of his most insanely beautiful commentary on the force of which is but one in many that beat down upon the Bundrens. I will visit the mental ward at Baptist Memorial Hospital, and hope to interview doctors and psychiatrists about the kind of things that they here from manic-depressive and bipolar patients. The idea is to get a good image of the kind of conflicting values and customs that in the story plagues Darl and is the source of his manic episode where he burned down the barn, but that now in the present day manifest themselves in many sociologically driven episodes of extreme bursts of creative thought and world breaking change. The trip to the hospital is in a way, an attempt to find the soul of Darl, who by no choice of his own was placed into an institution where the world is basically attempting to rope you back into reality. Based on research, what seems to happen in the mind of the bipolar patients is extreme clarity of the sociological situations around them, so for my own trip into the madness that is modernity for the South capturing a more clear image of this makes perfect sense to really find what was troubling Darl (who was both a Bundren and a poet, impossible I know). I will end my journey, supplementing the events of the conference, the trip to the river and the hospital, with a tour of Rowan Oak; hoping to get in the mind of a brilliant writer who wrote not only a story of the Bundrens but a story of Oxford, Mississippi, or the South, or you could even say the entire world. I will be home in San Antonio at my parents house July 12th.
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