My job came to an unacrimonious end last month, so I have time on my hands, and I’m thinking about visiting the US and Canada. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but have repeatedly put out of mind.

I’d like to see places, meet people, understand the culture(s) better (ideally replacing my 15-year-old self’s foggy observations of it), capture ideas and references for my art, and (I hope) break down a little of my own timidity and reclusiveness. (Putting off the inevitable job-hunt is purely incidental.)

The route is currently a bit blurry in my mind, but I’m thinking to start in New York, go around south-eastern Canada through Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, and continue into the Midwest.** Beyond that I don’t know. I would love to make it all the way to the north-west coast, but I don’t know whether the time allotted (90 days without special permission, I believe) or my money will last that long.

To add to the fun, I don’t drive (working on it, but I won’t be a candidate for car hire for at least a year), so I’d be trying to do this by train and bus, staying in hostels and B&Bs.

I’m trying not to leave it too late (as I understand the winters there can be a bit parky). Having got a couple of weddings out of the way, I could be going by late September.

Americans and Canadians among you: does this sound at all feasible? Have you ever done something similar? Is there anything you’d recommend I should see or do (or warn me not to see or do)?

* Gruff Rhys’ American Interior is well worth seeing, BTW: a musical road trip where he follows a distant ancestor. I don’t think I will try to map the Missouri, be jailed as a spy, fail to find a tribe of Welsh-speaking Americans or die of malaria (but I’ll leave my options open).

** If that route holds and the timing's right, there is also the (fun/scary) potentiality that I could attend this year’s Midwest Furfest. My history with furry cons is brief and anxiety-sodden, but it’s so tempting, and I hope I’m more resilient now than I was then.

This week I watched (on two consecutive commutes, but I think it'd be better taken in one draught) Adam Curtis' new film Bitter Lake. (iPlayer; YouTube, for now.) It's rather extraordinary, and although I'm in two minds about Curtis' method, I do recommend it.

Its premise is that our global powers' over-simplified master narrative of good versus evil has allowed corruption, destruction and fanaticism to snowball in the Middle East. Please understand that I'm not at all keen to fight for that premise. I can credit it, but only, I think, because I'm disposed to dislike any simple moral scheme of things, and to doubt our ability as humans to fix any complicated problem. If I were a hawk, a patriot or a moralist, I doubt this film would convince me otherwise.

But I think to expect to be convinced is to misunderstand what Curtis does. He never really argues a case and backs it up with evidence. He just offers up a scenario, radical but worryingly plausible, and presents it with the highest editor's art. His sense of how to choose, cut and soundtrack found footage is never less than astonishing - immersive and mesmerising. So many images here I have never seen before (and some I hope not to again). And that's what I really appreciated about it. As the film ended and I got off the train, the world of small-town England around me looked very strange, and I felt like a stranger in it. I can't recall many films that have done that.

Whether a political film should be immersive and mesmerising - whether it doesn't stoop to the level of propaganda when it plays so much to the senses and the emotions rather than the mind - is doubtful. But then I'm doubtful whether film is the medium for reasoned argument. (Perhaps the book and the journal still have that sewn up.)

I read B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates from end to end today. I can recommend it. Johnson was known for formal conceits, like cutting holes in pages to give you glimpses of future pages, or telling the same events repeatedly in page-for-page ‘real time’ from several characters' perspectives. This is a memoir-novel consisting of twenty-seven unbound sections in a box; to be read, apart from the first and last, in random order. It's a gimmick, but not gimmicky. I first came to Johnson for his formal strategies, but I've come to appreciate how (unlike many modernist authors) they grow unobtrusively out of their content. Here, Johnson is passing time in Nottingham as he waits for the football match he's covering for the Observer to begin, sifting as he does his memories of the place, particularly those of a close friend from there lost to cancer. The arbitrary order of the prose fragments gives the sense of stumbling across things when wandering a town, and of memories bubbling up unwontedly. And his idiosyncratic punctuation gives the rhythm of a mind in grief, with gaps on the page as he pauses blankly, and sentences that fall silent without a full stop. He strove for candour above all else (‘fuck all this LYING’, as one memorable outburst puts it), to the point that most of his so-called fiction is strictly autobiographical. I think many would find it self-absorbed, but to me it rings true.

(As an aside, I wonder what formal innovations are possible in fiction now that we read so much on portable electronic devices. (A box of loose sections is definitely not portable!) I would like to think that, when a book can be an app, the sky is the limit. Randomisation would be trivial. How about books that are aware of your surroundings as you read? Books that update according to current events? A revival of honest-to-goodness interactive fiction? But I doubt there's enough appetite to justify the development costs. Perhaps it shows what heady times the sixties and seventies were that Johnson's work was published.)