Little Rock

On the morning of the first day, I will drive from Austin to Little Rock, Arkansas. This leg of the trip will be approximately eight hours long. If I leave at, say, six in the morning, I’ll reach Little Rock by about two in the afternoon. Famished, I’ll head to the Arkansas Burger Company, apparently one of the most beloved burger joints in the state. 

http://www.arktimes.com/EatArkansas/archives/2011/05/26/burger-joint-of-the-week-arkansas-burger-company

The Clinton Presidential Center

http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/

"I cannot explain the value of such study and reflection any better than Franklin Roosevelt did at the dedication of his library in 1944. He said, “A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”

All that I have learned about the bridge we are building to that future is in this Center. May it help to instruct you, as it did me, and may you write the next chapters in the great story that is America."

-Bill Clinton

With a belly full of cow, I’ll make my way to the Clinton Presidential Center, the Presidential library of Bill Clinton. Styled as a center for research, learning, and progress, the Clinton Presidential Center will offer key insights into Southern modernity. Clinton speaks of the Center as a record of “the bridge we are building to the future.” What does that future look like? What must be given up in order to attain it, and what may we gain by it? Clinton’s bridge metaphor, which depends upon the notion of traveling, of the motion from past to future mirroring the motion from one point in space to another, evokes the narrative and symbolic conceit of As I Lay Dying (presumably not on purpose, but it would be kind of amazing if it were). What does such a journey entail?

Big Dam Bridge

 http://www.bigdambridge.com/facts.htm

After the sunset, before bedding down for the night, I’ll drive out to the Big Dam Bridge, an enormous pedestrian bridge that spans the Arkansas River. I’ll be visiting it in part for aesthetic reasons- I’m a sucker for well lit things at night, and for bodies of water, and for big concrete structures- and in part because, as a triumph of structural engineering, the bridge is a potent image of technological progress in the South, and a fine literalizing of President Clinton’s metaphor.

The Peabody Hotel

http://www.peabodylittlerock.com/

That night, I’ll grant myself the biggest indulgence of my trip and stay at The Peabody Hotel. A luxury establishment that promises elegant décor and fine cuisine, the Peabody seems profoundly and fascinatingly un-Southern. Do the hotel’s almost stereotypically Northeastern charms suggest that some loss of Southern identity is a necessary element of high culture and expensive comfort?