Chrisopther Schaberg

Book preview: Checking In/Checking Out

It’s always nice to discover that you’re not alone. So when I stumbled across the work of Christopher Schaberg, an assistant professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, whose book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight is due out in November, 2011, I made a note of it here on StuckatTheAirport.com.

Now comes word that Schaberg has rolled out two other airport and air travel-related projects:

The first is a small, sweet, two-sided, reversible book he wrote with poet and Loyola University colleague Mark Yakich titled Checking In/Checking Out.

The book arrived, appropriately enough, on a day I’d spent listening to industry insiders discuss the “passenger experience,” and when I get on the bus to go back to the conference tomorrow I look forward to reading Schaberg’s stories about working at Gallatin Field Airport outside Bozeman, Montana (the Checking In part) and Yakich’s tales of trying to cure his fear of flying (the Checking Out part).

The co-authors have also launched a website called Airplane Reading, dedicated, says Schaberg, “to people’s ordinary and extraordinary stories of air travel.”