LiteraryTraveler.net

When I read, in some travel blog or another, that Amsterdam has one of the most comfortable airports in the world — couches for napping during layovers, 2 Euro showers, stands selling Belgian waffles and peanut-butter-dipped fries — I stopped worrying about finding a hostel over Halloween weekend.  In fact, I wondered why people bothered to book hostels.  Some fellow literary nerds squeed over the possibility of staying overnight in Paris’s Shakespeare and Company Bookstore.  Despite the intensity of my Beauty-and-the-Beast-inspired library fantasies, dozing in a transportation hub took a close second.

So I was disappointed by the metal seats, the florescent lights, the loudspeaker announcements every five minutes, and, after 4:00 a.m., the airport guards who explained that, if I continued to occupy more than one seat, I could be charged with vagrancy.  In my youthful folly (ah, to be 19 again), I’d missed a crucial detail: the perks of air travel were limited to ticketholders.

This experience hasn’t diminished my dreams of airport occupation, though.  When there’s a weather emergency, or when I watch Independence Day for the millionth time, I remember Jeff, who confessed, during an Agnostic Club meeting in college, that he went to airports on Thanksgiving to people-watch, to imagine himself in their families, their communities.

Everyone traveling by airplane is in a state of transition in the terminal, separated from most of their possessions, acquaintances, and surroundings.  Unless they’re hiding out in the Red Carpet Club, they’re subject to the same sterilized, scrutinized, Starbucks-packed otherworld that I am.

Alain de Botton, a French philosophy student gone culture critic, knows what I’m talking about.  He chronicles the week he spent in London’s Heathrow Airport in his creatively-titled A Week At The Airport.  As the airport’s Writer-in-Residence, he had unfettered access to air traffic control towers, baggage handlers, and, yes, the first-class lounge.  Critics are calling it an essay collection, a meditation on a non-place.

I’m calling it the cheapest route to an extensive stay in one of my favorite places.

When I read Katy’s post about LT’s Dark New England theme, I thought of centuries-old stories set in a wilderness that no longer exists, Hawthorne’s characters tempted by the devil in the woods.

Then, last weekend, on the drive to his late godfather’s place in Maine, my boyfriend me told a story that hit a little closer to home.  His mother had recently stumbled across an old family Bible in the attic.  Inscribed in it was the name of a distant great aunt who was accused of committing withcraft in Marlborough, Massachusetts in the early 1700s.

More interesting, though, was a letter folded in the Bible, recounting the experience of another Marlborough aunt.  She started in an idyllic domestic setting, singing in the kitchen as a pie baked in the oven and her sister’s children made God’s Eyes on the floor.

Then the tomahawks came out, the arrows flew through the air, and, in a few minutes time, everyone but the singing aunt was slain where they stood.  Enraptured by the beauty of her song, the invading tribe decided to take her as a captive instead.  They brought her back to Marlborough four years later.

I haven’t heard many more details — I do know that she married her fiance when she came back to town — but until I get them, I like to hope that the letter is a concise, Quaker variation on Mary Rowlandson’s The Soverignty and Goodness of God, with sheet music of the melodies she dreamt up on the frontier.

I scoured the internet, just in case, but I couldn’t find any such music, or even an operatic captivity narrative.  (His mother’s a writer and his grandmother was an opera singer; I thought they might appreciate the connection.)  No such luck, but I did find a blogger/musician who wrote a song inspired by Rowlandson’s experiences.  Listen at your own risk.

I touched down in Guatemala yesterday afternoon.  Originally, I planned to go directly to Quetzaltenango, where a former high school classmate is launching his non-profit, weGuatemala.  But, anticipating the long weekend and my yen for ruined churches, I decided to spend the day in the deliberately old-school city of Antigua, and maybe try to see Lake Atitlan (a la Aldous Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay) on the way.  Good plan, it turns out.

Heavy rains on Thursday and Friday created mudslides on the routes to the west of Guatemala City, and a chicken bus (colorful second-class transportation) went under.  Last I read, there were 37 confirmed deaths, and 23 missing persons.  President Alvaro Colom declared it a national emergency, and la ruta Interamericana has been closed.

If I’d taken my malaria meds, I’d be booking it for Tikal right now — ruins on a large scale, and far to the east.  As is, I’m grateful to be here, and I’ve developed an interest in traveling first-class.  Because–I can’t help but think this, erroneous as it is–throwing money at it might make the landscape less chaotic.

And, given recent events, I’m a little perplexed by my interest in the ruins of natural disasters.  I think every social science nerd geeks out over Pompeii, and I love me some scraps of ancient civilizations, but isn’t there something inhumane about my giddiness over churches ruined by volcanoes?  If the mud out here acts as a preservative (this isn’t an entirely crazy idea — I’m looking at you, mummifying air of Guanajuato), will a future student of the humanities go out of her way to study the chicken bus?

Probably not, since it’s a pretty small-scale disaster.  And while I am not alone in my fetishization of “ruined” civilizations (I’m looking at you, Romantics), I am uncomfortable with contemporary disaster tourism, even as I participate in it.  When Ground Zero was a stop on my marching band’s tour of New York, I cringed,  but I got off the bus.  When I went to New Orleans to knock down houses the spring after Katrina hit, I unabashedly took pictures of the broken dam, and admitted that I had gone down mainly out of curiosity.

The latter was shameless because I was doing what I could to help, even if I just came to gawk.  Maybe that’s the difference.

I just shared a positive anecdote about surrender in a culture shock situation, but it can also be a liability.  A traveler has to be willing to push boundaries, to grin and bear the uncomfortable situation.  However, especially during the early phases of adaptation, this flexibility makes her vulnerable, too.

The subtle culture shocks – tremors, as I called them – can define a culture in contrast.  You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.  And sometimes “it” is something as minor as a healthy selection of peanut butter.

Likewise, a person can be defined in contrast – you are marked by your limits, notable for what you do not do.  Let’s add a moral element to the food, and say that a vegetarian may identify as someone who does not bloody their mouth with the inhumane slaughter of animals.  But what if the vegetarian’s host family slaughters a goat in celebration of her arrival?  If she ate it, it would be a sign of respect to the family, and certainly reflects a willingness to push her boundaries.  But at what point does she violate her own beliefs?  And, if they are constantly in negotiation, how will she know?

I tended to know when the line is crossed – rampant sexism always gets my goat – but I had trouble knowing when to keep that goat as a pet, or when to slaughter it in public (I think this feeling of disgust means the metaphor is officially exhausted).

My question is:  How and when did you learn to set boundaries when you were traveling?  Which of your convictions – culturally transmitted, personal, religious, etc. – are nonnegotiable, and how do you react appropriately in situations where they are threatened?  Where, and how, do you draw the line?

I wrote about culture shock a few weeks back.  It hits everyone differently.  Katie was disoriented but liberated when she realized that she was no longer a member of the tourist majority in Mallorca.  My friend Ben started bobbling his head while people were speaking after he spent six months in India.  These moments of realignment – or, more frequently, the tremors of adjusted detail – give the traveler a new space in which to define herself.

Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram provides a literal example of this redefinition.  The novel’s protagonist leaves Australia with a forged passport bearing the moniker Lindsay; he becomes Lin-sang when his Bombay guide has trouble pronouncing his English name; he becomes Shantaram when the inhabitants of his guide’s home village decide to give him a Maharastrian name.  His name means “man of peace,” a contrast to his violent past, and the protagonist explicitly states that “the man I am was born in those moments.”

Shantaram is not a subtle work – two pages earlier, “Lindsay” commented, “My culture had taught me all the wrong things well.” – but it contains some excellent advice for travelers who venture out of their element.

When Lindsay confronts a particularly awkward situation – say, his host’s father insists that the visitor pat his prominent “tummies,” and repeated this request despite polite refusals – he notes, “Sometimes you have to surrender before you win.” He then asserts that “surrender is at the heart of the Indian experience.”  Surrender in some form – to circumstance, to strange-looking currency, to a radically new sleeping schedule, to communicating through a series of drawings – is at the heart of any travel experience.

My most vivid moment of surrender came on a Sunday during spring in Argentina.  I was supposed to be taking a walk with my friend, Sergio.  Most travelers – especially control freaks whose unfamiliar environment renders them powerless – build routines, fulfilled expectations, safe zones.  Sergio and I had a pattern.  I could relax with him, and his family, because they felt familiar.  I knew what to expect.

So when he asked if I’d like to go for a walk on Sunday morning, I said yes.  When he mentioned that his mother would be joining us, I was surprised, but affable.   When we worked our way out of his barrio onto the main street, I was concerned – his mother, Ophelia, was walking in the middle of a major road, which is particularly dangerous on the route to the truck-heavy campo.

Before I could ask Sergio what she was doing, we had turned the corner, and stepped into the middle of a large procession.  People filled the road for blocks behind me.  A quarter-mile ahead, a pick-up truck carried a statue of the Virgin Mary and blasted prayers over a loudspeaker.  I punched Sergio in the shoulder – this was a pattern, too – and considered my situation.  I hate crowds, loud noise upsets me, I’m not Catholic, I had no idea where we were going, and I had no escape plan.  I was, in a word, rattled.  Sergio gripped my arm, told me that we were walking to Toay, the next town over, and urged me to follow his mother, who was hand-shaking and elbowing her way up to the statue, laughing a Santa Maria.  I took a step forward and began to mouth the prayer, learning as I went along.

Back in the glory days, Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I disagree, unless “we” are identified as that ultimately solipsistic portion of the population that cannot feel engaged in life without constructing narratives. “We” need stories in order to process experience, to cope, to understand, to consolidate stray stimuli into graspable themes and get on with our lives. You’re one of “us” if your psychologist tells you to get out of your head. I’m happy to be placed in almost any grouping that places me alongside ole Joan, but I don’t delude myself: “we” are not everyone.

The nice thing about living in your head is that is makes books an extremely low-budget form of escapist travel. You could go the route of travel narratives, but that’s taking it a bit literally, and we favor the abstract. Period pieces can do the trick – they construct a complete, comprehensible reality. Or we can read books that take you out of your own angsty head, and visit someone who occupies a similar psychological space.

With this in mind, I’ve cast my eye on Melissa Milgram’s Still Life, Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, and a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories.

The narrator of Still Life began investigating the phenomenon of taxidermy from a journalist’s perspective, and ultimately ends up with her subjective hand all up in a drowned squirrel. A narrator who struggles with boundaries, who cannot feign distance between self and subject, is just the kind of head I can crawl into.

Likewise, German’s Eat When You Feel Sad chronicles that habituated loneliness that characterizes the life of a twenty-something. (Cough). Never mind that I’m totally bitter that this author has co-opted his ennui into a book deal even before he’s experienced its ambition-eroding properties full-force. Still, a stray paragraph from him novel proves that there is a mind – an entire population of adultolescents minds, I imagine – going through the same aimless motions, hoping a friend will connect to gchat, tossing away poignant, but predictable, independent clauses.

One’s twenties, in my experience, are a period of disappointment. This sense of disappointment is, no doubt, tied to delusions of grandeur, just as depression can be linked to narcissism. Woe is me, me, me, and I am the entire world.

Science fiction has explored this trope of speck-like human subjectivity, counterposed to a sublime, immense universe. Not to get too meta or self-contradictory, but I’m not sure if this is a bad thing. If we can acknowledge our speck-like perspective and use it as a means of appropriating some universal narrative, then we’re getting somewhere, even if it’s just more psychological wilderness.

Ballard’s Enormous Room is about a man whose refusal to leave a suburban house limits his perspective until he believes it is the universe. But this delusion of grandeur, this bloated perception, transforms the banal topography of the living room into a strange, new world, and the reader is awestruck, and temporary expanded, by the narrator’s lunatic explorations of his kitchen.

To the kitchen, then. I’m feeling sad.

I went to a college that I often compared to a boarding school, but boarding school graduates compared it to summer camp.  We were coddled, gently incubated to adulthood in a single-path Ohio village.  Our dining hall had a “continuous feed” policy.  Our health center offered support groups for socially isolated students.  Our professors regularly granted extensions for existential crises.  It was a place apart, with the remote location, Gothic architecture, and demographically limited population you’d expect in a period piece, a horror movie, or a combination of the two.

Given that my college experience combined the odd and the infantilizing so frequently, when my study-abroad materials raised the possibility of “culture shock,” I considered it an overstated concern and a welcome diversion.  Junior year was the perfect time to go abroad – I had just begun to internalize the limitations of my campus, to reduce my worldview to a population excessively concerned with the social capital of obscure indie rock bands, or their ability to express the inherent inadequacy of language in a fourteen-line poem.

To prepare myself intellectually for my abroad experience, I took a course on 18^th century travel narratives.  We covered the requisite Boswell, Johnson, and Smollet, but also the landscape-mirroring-emotion letters of Mary Wollstonecraft.  In retrospect, I wish I’d devoted more attention to descriptions of more dramatic culture clashes – Passage to India, Wide Sargasso Sea—or the science-fiction narratives on my brother’s bookshelf.

Psychologists, literary scholars, and international studies counselors throw around the terms “defamiliarisation,” intercultural awareness,” and “negotiation phase,” but they are all talking about the newcomer’s confrontation with a novel environment.  The first shock of a “foreign” sensory experience – the dense scent of Bombay’s airport, the preemptory “sorry” in a crowded Dublin street, the first mouthful of French headcheese – has the makings of a vivid, and entirely individualized, description.  The writer’s vocabulary is drawn from the language and experience of the host culture.  Here’s an illustrative passage from Fred D’Aguiar’s “A Son in Shadow,” where a Guyanan bride encounters English weather:

The first morning I opened the door that autumn and shouted “Fire!” when I saw all the smoke, thinking the whole street was on fire, all the streets, London burning, and slammed the door and ran into his arms and his laughter, and he took me out into it in my nightdress, he in his pajamas, and all the time I followed him, not ashamed to be seen outside in my thin, flimsy nylon (if anyone could see through that blanket) because he was in his pajamas, the blue, striped ones, and his voice, his sweet drone, told me it was fine, this smoke without fire was fine, “This is fog.”

Travel literature produces these salient encounters – Sloane Crosley’s description of an encounter with Portuguese circus clowns in her latest essay collection is the first that comes to mind.  Specificity is not a handicap, either — Bill Bryson has made a career of highlighting the finer points of contrast between England and the United States.  Still, given the globalization of culture, the increased accessibility of international travel, and the propensity of memoirists to dash abroad, I am concerned that, just as expatriate communities live in their native tongue, just as the Grand Tour followed an itinerary, so today’s traveler/readers are losing their ability to cast off established frames of reference.  In other words, I fear that the contemporary writer has been limited to seeking food in Italy, prayer in India, and love in Indonesia.

If our planet has become overly familiar, then science fiction is an ideal platform, a means of approaching our world as alien.  The man-from-Mars trope is classic, but the graphic novel Black Hole, and, sigh, yes, even the Twilight series, lends a sparkle of originality to the well-worn terrain of lust in the American Northwest.

Of course, I may be underestimating today’s authors, just as I underestimated the unmooring I felt during my second month in Ireland.  Plenty of writers – Tolstoy foremost among them – have made the familiar strange without resorting to science fiction, surrealism, or writer-seeks-self narratives.  If you’re interested in estrangement of familiar, I recommend Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, or a viewing of PBS’s “Culture Shock” segment on Huckleberry Finn.

Do you enjoy reading descriptions of culture shock?  Do you think that a glut of travel narratives compromises a writer’s ability to be original?  What was your most shocking moment abroad?  I’ll be writing more on this next week, so let me know.

I had no quarrel with my roommates during our cross-country drive to Montana.  It was all novelty – blues bars in Chicago, the world’s largest hockey stick in Minnesota, fields of sunflowers turning their faces to the West in North Dakota, a Rastafarian family at a natural hot springs in Oregon, pitching a tent in the parking lot of a senior citizen’s center.  But when we finally arrived to our rented house, it occurred to me that they were doing everything wrong, especially in the kitchen.  Bowls go on the shelf below plates.  Cups go to the left cabinet.  Bread belongs in the refrigerator – the cupboard is for snacks!  But Dan wanted the bowls ON the plates, the garbage can beside hallway, canned goods in the cup cabinet.   We gaped at each other’s fundamental lack of understanding and, despite our conscious compromises, absentmindedly placed our kitchen supplies in the kitchens of our childhoods.

My subconscious refusal to shelve cups alongside plates is not just passive-aggressive behavior – it’s a reflection of my cognitive map. According to Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s The Place You Love Is Gone, your brain forms a cognitive map when you first view a place, and, given the novelty and sensory intensity of a child’s early experiences, memories from your first six years of “home” have a fundamental impact on your inner map.  Pierson cites the Oliver-Sacks-esque case of A. Kirschman, a native of Germany’s Oberstein an der Nahe who was distressed by his perception that, in every place outside of his hometown, the sun set in the east, rather than the west.

Pierson beautifully reiterates the persistence and logistical impossibility of the human desire to rebuild our idyllic past; she also has a great deal to say about the psychological and biological basis of our bonds to a hometown, and the problematic notions of “wilderness” and “progress” in the American landscape.  But her book is rooted in the past, as she insists all individuals are, fundamentally.

I don’t deny my roots, nor my compulsive reiteration of my inner geography.  And, though I’m working on getting an interview with BU’s Center for Memory and the Brain, I don’t know enough about neuroscience to make this statement.  But metaphorically, at least, I insist on the brain’s ability to form integrated, adaptable maps through travel.  You know where I’m going with this.  Travel reintroduces novel experience, expands our sense of possibility, etc., etc.  Our sense of physical orientation, of the feng shui of home, is probably already set, but our sense of how the world can, should, or does work can always be modified.

Each time I leave my latest “home,” I expand my sense of possibility.  Some possibilities are ugly.  It is possible for a father to pimp out his twelve year old daughter for rent.  It is possible to speak five languages and still be mocked for your ignorance.  But it is also possible to base a career on German stick-fighting, to actively protect rainforest habitats, to dip one’s fries in peanut butter.  (Not to scale, admittedly, but a revelation, nonetheless). Two underpaid Irish metal workers I met in Amsterdam managed to budget an international excursion every two months; mummified corpses and a perpetuity tax in Guanajuato revealed a new face in the business of death; a former Israeli soldier wore high heels on our hike through Patagonia.  The world is strange.

Childhood is a time when it is easy to believe in the world’s raw potential, that anything is possible.  As a species, we are running out of physical frontiers –even Antarctica comes equipped with a gift shop – but psychological exploration, our ability to draw new cognitive maps, is infinite.  Adulthood is the time to make that potential kinetic, to broaden your knowledge of what is, what can be made.

The answer may not lie in physical wilderness.  Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately; as Pierson notes, “the woods” are shrinking, and even back-to-the-land literary movement is overpopulated.  So ignore the woods, ignore the example of Huckleberry Finn, who “lights out for the territory” that his creator knows will be “civ’lized” soon after he arrives.  You can’t go home again, so venture to the neighbor’s place instead.  Rezone your interior map.  You can bring a snack from your past – made the right way, of course – but, by all means, leave the kitchen.

“It is not a bad symbol of that long wandering, I thought again – the human hand that has been fin and scaly reptile foot and furry paw.  If a stone should fall (I cocked an eye at the leaning shelf above my head and waited, fatalistically) let the bones lie here with my message, for those who might decipher it, if they come down late among us from the stars.

Perhaps there is no meaning at all, the thought went inside me, save that of the journey itself, so far as man can see.  It has altered with the chances of life, and the chances brought us here; but it was a good journey – long, perhaps – but a good journey under a pleasant sun.  Do not look for the purpose.  Think of the way we came and be a little proud.  Think of this hand – the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.

Or consider its later wanderings.”

An excerpt from anthropologist/essayist Loren Eiseley’s “The Slit” in The Immense Journey.

Eiseley’s statement is a long way from the motivational poster’s “Success is a journey, not a destination,” but I hear a similar optimism for those of us who are still not “there,” there being wherever we thought we ought to be, socially, financially, intellectually – whatever criteria we choose to measure own inadequacies.  Eiseley had the advantage of a thousand years’ perspective, and, if I may, a tenure-track teaching position, which is a comfortable place from which to pontificate, but that does not exempt him from the anxiety of eventual death – he “waited, fatalistically”—nor the consideration that “perhaps there is no meaning at all.”

The last time I felt that way, I freaked out and moved to Mexico.  I was twenty at the time, and I was just beginning to face the possibility that my emotional reactions to the “utter pain” of my undergraduate existence had less to do with teenage angst and more to do with duller, broader words like “anxiety” or “dysthymia.”  In an effort to get away from some recriminating self-talk – “Why didn’t you get that internship?”  “What did you do to drive him away?”  “When will you pull yourself together?” – I got out of my country, and, more importantly, my language.

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I have a special, guilty place in my heart for James Joyce’s Ulysses.  I tried to read it on the shores of Lake Michigan when I was 17, and powered through 20 pages before I realized I had no idea what was happening.  I had a similar experience with the Cliff Notes (shame) on the shores of Lake Erie.  I built up my Joyce muscle during Irish Lit courses in college, and, in a fit of substitution, took to sleeping with a Spanish-language edition of the novel when my relationship with an Argentine named Ulises turned sour.  But, like many a straw man English major, I haven’t actually read the book.

My literary pretense outweighs my shame, so I felt entitled, nay, obligated, to geek out over yesterday’s observation of Bloomsday.  In my defense, at least I’d absorbed the very basic information — the main characters are Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the setting is Dublin, June 16, the frequent allusions to Homer — that cushions my ignorance.

I usually opt for marathon readings, though I should admit I’m the sort of person who lets the diehards work their way through the first seventeen episodes, unaccompanied, and then swoop in for the “yes oh yes I will yes” leg and grab a commemorative T-shirt.  In lieu of hopping a plane to the mean streets of Dublin, or completing this oldie-but-goodie Bloomsday Boston itinerary, I winnowed my way through Bloomsday commentary, looking for books to add to my ever-growing “to read” list.  James Cohen’s Daily Beast article on recent novels that have been described as the [insert culture/ nationality/ ethnicity here] Ulysses is a good start, though I’m going to steer clear of the Argentine model.

If you’re still interested on reading more about Ulysses, feel free to check out our feature article, A ‘Moral Pub’ Crawl Through James Joyce’s Dublin.

You might have already heard the assertion that we — Americans, specifically — choose to spend most of our leisure time “participating in experiences we know are not real.”  (I read it here, in Paul Bloom’s essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education.)  Reading is part of that, but movies, video games, and daydreaming are included as well.  Still, the author insists, these various media indicate an addiction to fiction, a pleasure in “playing pretend” that extends well beyond our childhood years.  Bloom offers three reasons that people may find imaginative experiences more pleasurable or moving than than real ones — the ability to acquaint oneself with a colorful range of characters, the distillation of experience, and the “technologies of the imagination” — the ability to rapidly shift in time, or read another person’s thoughts — that stimulate the mind in a way that is impossible in reality.

Even our fictional characters crave fiction.  Other Lives, a graphic novel recently reviewed in The Boston Globe, explores this dynamic by following several characters — among them, a conspiracy theorist specializing in web surveillance — as they mingle and sort out their real personalities and Second Life alter egos.  The protagonist of 45, another graphic novel, interviews forty-five people who, like his future son possess the “Super S-gene,” in an effort to anticipate — or vicariously experience? — his future experiences.

The appeal of fiction is both speculative and defensive.  We use it to explore strange, new worlds in a safe environment — and, as I mentioned to a frustrated, creative friend the other day, every modern invention was a “fiction” until someone made it tangible — but it also keeps chaos, amorality, and the ennui that feeds anxiety, man’s “quiet desperation” at bay.  Narrative, specifically, lets us believe that there is a structure, a direction, and a message, a significance, to the stimuli that we find on the page, and in the world.

If the “everything is [existentially] fine” mantra becomes attached to a real world object, we risk having to address the narrative, and the experience, in all of its complexity.  Consider Meghan Daum, author of Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House. She wrote, “I knew it wasn’t just a house I was after but, rather, proof of my existence. The house was . . . an ID badge for adulthood, for personhood, even. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human.”  When she finds a house — not the house, which is, like the job or the One, a fiction — “a peculiar darkness” sets in.  “It was as if my mood had been goaded away from situational discontentedness into a dysthymia that seemed now to be heading into full-fledged depression,” she wrote.

The house didn’t get her through that.  The story, at least, helps the reader out.

Though it’s not literary on the face, and the genre has yet to make a celebrated entrance into the academy (though U Kansas has a Ph.D. in science fiction and fantasy literature), a genre lens can make even the most inane production take on layered significance.  Take, for example, io9′s review of Sex and the City 2: “When viewed as a rom-com, Sex and the City 2 is terrible and crappy and a horrific inversion of everything the show once was. But when viewed as a science fiction film, SATC2 is subversive, stylish and chilling. as  SATC2 is subversive, stylish and chilling.”

The blogger identifies The City as Carrie’s “deathless necropolis” based on the following information:

1.) The City can control time.
2.) The City can control their personalities.
3.) Nothing exists outside of The City.
4.) The City keeps tabs on Carrie via shoes.

Funny, and reposted frequently, but glancing on a larger point.  I’ve been reading Forbidden Acts: Pioneering Gay and Lesbian Plays of the Twentieth Century this week, and I’ve noticed that every play, from the 1926 production of Bourdet’s The Captive to Crowley’s 1968 Boys in the Band to Hoffman’s 1985 AIDS-themed As Is, takes place in one or two intimate rooms.  This could be a given of the genre — my experience with theater has largely been in the orchestra pit of high school musicals, and I only wandered into the drama section because a man fixing tax returns was blocking the essays — or a function of the stories themselves — they all involve confrontation with a family member, or a constructed family — but I wondered whether they were also evidence of the playwright’s attempt to construct a closet, a stifling environment for the audience. Certainly, in The Captive, where the protagonist cannot even name her “affliction,” this observation is relevant.

For a contemporary overanalysis of “queer space,” see this blog entry entitled Locker rooms: on exterior interiority.

I am now inspired to go back and read old Tennessee Williams plays with a queer-theory lens.

I admit it: I caught wind of Herzog’s Turn Left at the Trojan Horse far from the copies of Tin House, Utne, or The New Yorker that I pile alongside my desk when I want to pretend I’m contemporary and literary.  My pretense drop when I’m on an airplane.  I’m a voracious reader but a clumsy packer.

So I read an airline magazine, and I enjoyed the excerpt I read.  Herzog is having a “who am I/ what have I done” moment on the way to his college reunion, and his wife suggests that he take a long drive to figure it out.  He takes that to mean exploring a hero’s odyssey, so he imposes Greek mythology over a cross-country road trip, from Olympia, Washington to Ithaca, New York.  Charmed.

A quick entry, and I’m in the middle of A quick entry, as I’m in the middle of room-cleaning/ article-writing/ wedding-preparation:

I’m a few years behind on this (The Village Voice picked it up years ago), but Circus Amok , a NYC based circus whose performances focus on social justice issues,with shows like”Sub-Prime Sublime” and “Quality of Life.”

I’m trying to get an interview with bearded lady Jennifer Miller to talk about this year’s performance, but even a cursory analysis of the circus piques my interest — itinerant artists taking on broader social issues?  Sign me up, or, alternatively, come hang out in my backyard.

Since high school, when my enthusiasm for Emily Dickinson, George O’Keefe, and Eastern philosophy merged in a watercolor of a pink flower bearing the calligraphy, “I dwell in possibility,” I have marked my bedroom as an Emily-inspired zone.  She’s an icon, so my fascination is no distinction, and I’m sure many an introverted English major broached the shut-in/ “Wild Nights” dynamic in a therapy session.  Still, I was pleased with Holland Cotter’s unabashed hero worship, and NYT take, on Dickinson’s dwelling place.

I was two paragraphs into this Boston Globe review when I realized that I would read Mark Amis’s The Pregnant Widow.  The review makes it sound not-entirely-dazzling, but I am a sucker for coming-of-age novels, self-conscious writing, and Italy, and this is a story about a literature major who spends a summer in an Italian castle and tries to manipulate the present in order to maximize the nostalgic potential of his relationship with a beautiful Scheherazade.  This is an impulse-read, and, like my cash register purchase of the mint-flavored Three Musketeers, I expect novel enjoyment, but no enduring satisfaction.