Word: planes
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...Coop turns into a gambler. Ondaatje has a talent for mixing highbrow writing with lowbrow material, for serving caviar as street food; references to Kipling and Matisse sit alongside descriptions of hustlers, hookers and high rollers. Coop learns from a gambler who lives in the desert in an abandoned plane, pulls off a fabulous score, has a romance with a duplicitous drug addict, and gets beaten up. This is when he meets Claire. Delirious from his beating, he mistakes her for Anna. It is a kind of wish fulfillment for Claire; she takes him back to meet her father...
Admirers of Ondaatje's spare, yet poetical prose will find much to enjoy. Describing two people who make love robustly in a grounded plane, he writes: "Their sex takes place in the late afternoons, and shortly afterwards they emerge from the Airstream like humbled dormice." Ondaatje has a gift for capturing music and landscape in words, and there are gorgeous descriptions of strumming guitars, running horses and swooping hawks. But the second part of the book is a letdown; the descriptions in France are often too contrived, too literary. We want less about Segura's art, more about Coop...
...current air traffic control system in the U.S. uses radar technology from the 1950s that makes for inefficient routes and dangerous conditions during storms. Planes must fly a specific flight path so that they can be guided by air traffic control centers stationed on the ground. One cross-country flight, for example, could pass over two dozen air traffic control centers. Radar also takes up to 36 seconds to get an accurate read on a plane's position...
Lyndon Johnson was obsessed with his own mortality. "He was always a little bit scared of death," Graham said, and thus wanted a preacher handy--like the time he talked Graham into flying to a convention with him because the weather was so bad, he thought the plane might crash. Having entered office in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination, Johnson was conscious of how a President's death can shatter a country. Long before his Administration collapsed and he announced that he would not seek a second term in 1968, Johnson privately told Graham what he was thinking...
...seems to be to read the novels of Haruki Murakami, which feel like the mellifluous sound of Muzak heard during jet lag, with their floating characters situated in Japan but living in the America or Italy of their heads. Just to make my disorientation complete, I get off a plane in Sydney because we are going to take on passengers from another (canceled) flight, then I get onto it again, because it turns out that if the passengers from the canceled flight are put on our plane, our flight will be so delayed that it, too, will have...