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In 1972-1973, my wife and I traveled to Europe for ten months and I kept a record of the trip in an old-fashioned, black-and-white-speckled “University” composition book. It combined an informal chronology of events and places, an occasional diary, various sketches of what I saw, and speculations about projects
I might work on in the future. All together it could be seen as an expression of my thinking at the time, as defined by varieties of description and speculation from day-to-day. Furthermore, if one has worked in a school composition book before, there is the expectation of an accumulation of notes, assignments, questions, answers, and, perhaps, if you think back far enough, a passing grade from the teacher. I had never been to Europe before, so visiting historic sites and museums, negotiating various languages and currencies, staying in small hotels and pensiones, and traveling by train, plane, bus, and hitchhiking were woven together with new kinds of food and cultural rituals.
This trip was the culmination of formative years in my life defined by Viet Nam, as avoiding the military draft was a central fact of that time if you were a young man opposed to the war. I was in an M.A. program at the University of Iowa in 1967-1968, when the graduate school deferment was eliminated. This led to my moving back to my hometown of Brooklyn, New York, to teach junior high school art in Queens for four years, an experience that fundamentally reshaped my understanding of teaching, learning, and communicating as an artist. This also coincided with the highly contentious 1968 teacher's strike as well as my joining a political group, Citizens for Local Democracy, and so becoming active in local politics. But in 1972, my draft issues resolved, we moved out of our Brookl