Corey FrostMy Own Devices: Airport Version
Conundrum Press
October 2006
ISBN 10: 1-894994-18-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-894994-18-7
New Format Reprint
Travel / Short Stories
5.5x7.75 inches · 224 pages
My Own Devices is a collection of travel tales from the always-interesting Conundrum Press. Originally published in 2002, this new edition is a kind of literary remix that includes 8 new pieces and has been re-released as the “airport version”.
Immediately on picking up the book I knew it was going to be fun. There are odd diagrams and timelines (one intersperses the lives of those two fallen Coreys, Feldman and Haim), photos (most by Frost himself), and some re-evaluations of the older stories.
This book is both portable installation and homeopathic jet-lag cure. It immerses the reader in the giddy pandemonium of disorientation—the narrator is an uneasy rider, obsessing on take-off over an envelope that may or may not be in his packed luggage, having hapless near-miss encounters with inscrutable females, and wrestling with local bureaucracies on several continents.
Frost’s travelogues are filled with strange convergences, random meetings and ruminations that segue into surrealistic poetry. He captures perfectly the dreamlike insanity of landing in a city several time zones away only to find things off kilter in humourous and terrifying ways. A change of audio channels on a flight from Japan to Russia morphs the flight attendants from smiling anglophiles to surly Russians and back again, cartoon characters suddenly appear on a ferry from Calais to Dover, and the Mount of Temptation gives way to the Buffet of Temptation.
My Own Devices is a suitable Rx for boring airports or lone diner-dinners anywhere.
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