On the weekend of September 3rd, Wifely Kate, sis-in-law Emily, and I visited the Durham Farmers’ Market in North Carolina. According to its website, Durham Farmers’ Market is an all-local, producer-only market with 64 vendors. It’s held in the Pavilion at Durham Central Park (501 Foster Street), Saturdays (8am – noon) and Wednesdays (3:30 – 6:30pm), rain or shine.
Part of the Pavilion
We were very impressed by the market’s park location, with its inviting lawns and protective pavilion. The location gave the sense that Durham values its local farmers and food. I really wish Fort Worth’s wonderful Cowtown Farmers Market could get a nicer spot.
The Starlite String Band gave the Durham Farmers’ Market some soundtrack. The Missoula farmers markets had musicians, too. Music really adds to the experience, I think; hearing it is one of my favorite parts of going to farmers markets.
In my experience, farmers markets are fun, positive places. Wifely and I’ll continue to visit them when we travel. Thanks again to Emily for hosting us in North Carolina!
Last weekend Wifely Kate and I visited her sister Emily in Durham, North Carolina, where Emily’s attending graduate school at Duke. All three of us really like Durham; it struck me as a very genuine place, organic in development and a bit gritty — in a good way; the definition of “gritty” that means “tough; showing courage, resolve.”
Durham seemed as if it’s been there a long time, memories spread through and nurturing, and as if it will remain there a long time, sturdy.
Main Street. Public domain photo; others by me
As of 2008, Durham has a population of around 230,000, says Wikipedia. The area’s quite educated, and we were glad to see a lot of signs for cultural events — music performances, lectures, gatherings — as well as indie bookshops such as The Regulator (I mentioned it in an earlier blog post) and also nicely named bars:
Red bricks make up many of Durham’s buildings. The sky was very blue and beautiful. As we walked past the former Lucky Strike plant, Emily suggested this shot:
And of course the Camp sisters made the trip all the more fun:
Dangerous Duo
I’ll try to post about the Durham Farmers Market soon.
Wifely and I are visiting her sister in North Carolina. In Durham, at 720 Ninth Street (ZIP 27705), there’s an independent bookstore called The Regulator Bookshop (Twitter; Blog). We only checked it out for a bit, but long enough for me to snap two photos that in my mind establish The Regulator’s coolness beyond doubt.
No History Here, Zip, Nada!
Yah, that’s a poster for William Gibson‘s (Twitter; Wikipedia) new novel Zero History. Gibson’s probably most famous for leading science fiction’s cyberpunk subgenre (“high tech and low life”) and for his debut, game-changing novel Neuromancer (1984); he’s also known for coining the term “cyberspace,” for writing the short story on which the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) is based, and for his most recent set of related-but-standalone mainstream novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and now Zero History. It must have been something, reading back in the eighties, to parse neologistic sentences about characters “jacking in” to “cyberspace” and using “microsofts” … If you think science fiction is irrelevant, that it’s about aliens with creases in their foreheads, you aren’t reading Gibson. From Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988):
There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or any way he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything by getting unconscious and just staying jacked in… people jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you can cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.
This afternoon, while the sisters went out a-sistering, I parked at Mad Hatter Bakeshop & Cafe to finish some work toward a schoolteaching certificate, my copy of Spook Country on the table. Another customer turned out to be a serious Gibson fan, eagerly awaiting Gibson’s Duke book-tour stop, and we talked science fiction for a while. Whenever I meet another fan of serious science fiction, I feel like we’re sharing a vast secret, as if we’ve been studying the same grimoires: we might not understand what’s going on with this crazy future-present, but at least we know that something’s going on — something on the order of the creation of cities, as Gibson once put it. We acknowledge the present with a realism it seems others don’t. It seems like so much contemporary lit-fic (literary fiction) hides in notional 1970s Raymond Carver settings that don’t confront our world of today.
Random Gibson infos:
My foodie wife and I are asking writers about their food preferences; in answer, Gibson tweeted: “@douglaslucas Japanese, Japa Dog, Lebanese street, Hainanese chicken rice, Montreal smoked meat on rosemary and rocksalt bagel…” (Here’s Susan Orlean’s answer; Peter Straub’s.)
There in Seattle I asked Gibson two questions; if I get the chance to go see his Austin book-tour stop this month, I actually don’t know what question to ask! I’ll come up with something interesting, no worries. But I feel comforted to know that at this point I don’t particularly have pressing questions to ask an awesome artist; I feel quite confident with my own knowledge right now.
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