May 20th hitting the road

This is probably the least exciting blog moment. Apart from a strange 'usual suspects' mugshot of Jonathan, Viv and the key to the women's 'bathrooms' from the Travel-Lodge our day was spectacularly uneventful. We left Chicago this morning and travelled south down route 57 through Illinois in two hired cars to Urbana Champaign. Once out of Chicago, the American mid-west has to be some of the most spectacularly boring scenery that I have come across in the world, just hundreds and hundreds of miles of flat farmland ....apparently nothing left unploughed...interspersed with rural industrial plants.

Jonathan, Ying Lin, Viv and I were in one car..and Ken, Bronwyn, Tami and Artemi in the other

And then just as you think you'll never see another human being again this vast university campus arises out of the flatness to dominate the landscape (presumably economically as well as geographically). The campus is huge with an intake of over 40,000 students, whereas the two small towns that the university nests between -Urbana and Champaign - have a population of just over 100,000 between them, most of whom are directly or indirectly employed by the university.
It took us about three hours to get there, quite fun in a way as Viv, Ken and others had made a series of CDs of American road trip music ( American Pie- Don McLean, Chicago, Chicago-my kind of town- Sinatra, All gone to look for America- Simon and Garfunkel, Route 66- Chuck Berry, etc etc), but I realised that I had much preferred going in the little plane as I have done in previous years. In this way, when you look down on the pattern of the huge fields below you - you somehow get a different sense of the expanse of fields, the vastness of each one and the relentless symmetry of it all. every now and then there is a tree or a river breaking up the pattern.
The road trip, on the other hand involves driving along a thin industrial ribbon that runs along 'route 57'. If CeNTraL is going to continue to come to QI, which I imagine we are, I think I'm going to try the train next time. I quite like the idea of going on one of those humungous 'Amtrak' trains.
We got there just an hour before Ken and Jon and Tami were to meet up with their writing group...so the others quickly checked into the Illini Union, where they are staying (and also where the conference is held).

It is a lovely building, opened by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939 and full of sweeping staircases and even though we are not strictly speaking in the 'south' here....These staircases really lend themselves to 'Scarlett O Hara' impersonations (pity I didn't bring a floor length red silk dress or two...I knew there was something else I forgot to pack). I Digress.
Except that I don't , since all the way here we have been talking in terms of the cinematic and television images we have all imbibed since we were children (whether we were living in USA, Greece, Taiwan, Australia or UK).
When we stopped for lunch for instance, we saw a whole fleet of school buses that then began moving out as we left and we were immediately in an episode of 'the Simpsons'; the road trip has been littered with references to Thelma and Louise and other road movies. As huge trucks sped past us we found ourselves talking about 'Duel' (Spielberg's first full length movie)..I could go on, but perhaps we'll come back to that incredibly effective and almost subluminal process of colonisation that took place when we were all children, but still continues, later in this blog. We have certainly been talking about it a great deal.

We went to find the room we are giving our plenary in, which I have to admit was something of a disappointment because there has been a last minute switch of the timetable that has ended up with us in a much smaller room with the chairs in seried ranks....which is going to make it difficult for some of the more performative aspects of our presentation...Anyhow there are plenty of white walls for our pictures and filmed sequences and we had a quick run through. (I realised later that Cindy, Ying Lin and I-the techy crew- are going to have to go back tomorrow and check where all the power sockets are, especially as Cindy did not bring an extension cable with her - but I daresay we can buy one of those somewhere if we need to tomorrow).

There are a couple of very brief musical moments in one of our presentations, so even though we were all a bit pooped we practiced our 'be-bop-a-loo-la' jam session which was easy to busk. Orlando Gibbon's 17th century (1612) madrigal 'the silver swan' was more problematic, however, as we have never all been in the same room at the same time to practice this.
Nonetheless Artemi coached us through the first line, which was sounding okay-ish after half an hour. To our delight we have discovered that our co-chair Tami is not only a great performer, she also has a beautiful singing voice. We will meet again tomorrow afternoon...maybe we'll even manage two lines, who knows? Eventually, after all these antics, I got to my B and B up the road (the Akademika- recommended) - a lovely old house beautifully restored, amazing Argentinian breakfasts and a really interesting family running it- its a great place to stay and their critical South American take on life in North America is thoughtful and informative . I've stayed here before, so its a bit like coming home for me!

Jane Speedy, May 20th, about midnight US time.