About Me

One of the most difficult parts about the blog assignment for ENG599 was the suggestion to tell my readers more about myself. I was quite happy to see that Blogger doesn't make that too easy--there's no field for self-blurbage, thus no requirement, right? By nature, I'm very reserved about the details of my life as a subject for public consumption, even when I'm gladiatorially certain that nobody but classmates will read it. I've nothing to hide as far as I can tell. There's no nasty social views lurking, no drug warrants pending, no secret shame of a hobby to defend. Yet, I hesitate in detailing what should be the easiest thing to write: "About me." Why? After five weeks, I still haven't figured it out. My effort this time around--possibly my last for the duration of the World Cup--is to open up and offer some actual information aside from stories of the old times about when I used to travel.

Along with my reticence in telling anyone "about me," is an even deeper desire to never let people know my plans. Fear of failure? Maybe. Probably. I've never laughed so hard as when a priest told me that if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

I live in Phoenix. I'll leave someday, but my parents may need me someday soon, so I'm staying. When I returned from Boston a decade ago, it was on the heels of several horrific years living in a place that was downright choking with provincialism. I'd gone there as a hopeful bookstore owner and wound up leaving as a decently skilled editor with a beautiful daughter and wife who was glad to be shot of her hometown. I'm an academic now, a decently reputable associate professor of ethics and technology and program lead with aspirations to teach somewhere that matters. Hence this degree. In all my former lives, I never thought I'd wind up here, cleaving through my 40s, spending my nights expiring by the warm glow of the TV, banging out homework comments by the dozens. Even more surprising is how much I like it. At 15, I'd have laughed at me. At 25, I'd have jumped off the cliff rather than  be this docile. At 35, I was praying for the security of 45. At 45, I think I'm ready to laugh at me again.      

So here is the plan: I'm going to leave the house.

The Southwest Valley was nearly destroyed with the housing bust a few years ago. Littering my end of town are some tough stretches of neighborhood that were abandoned in mid-build. They're called ghost towns. I'll start there by taking a tour of the ones around me. It's never been clear to me why, but large public spaces fascinate me, and abandoned ones are outright magnetic. It's an easy trip and might be a good start to keeping the blog going. (Is Recession Tourism a phrase? Depression Tourism? Maybe that's my thing.)

Without over-promising, I'll make it my first destination on what I hope will be a return to getting out and seeing the world. See you soon, I hope.

Upon Learning That Traveling and Writing Are Political Acts

Over the last few weeks, I've been involved in a course on the rhetoric of travel writing--not only the modes of travel narrative, but its meanings. So far, it's been mostly meanings: what is travel? What is it to write about one's travels? What are the duties and responsibilities of the travel writer in the postcolonial world? Can we ever just write about a journey without alienating the subject of our accounts?

These are profound questions that, given enough time, thought, and caffeine, can be answered. However, I’ve struggled with at least one of the course outcomes—creating a blog to critically account for my experiences as a traveler. This thing you’re reading, one of many modes of writing about travel, by the way, is causing me to have an existential crisis.

My difficulties with this medium have been many. At first, I resisted the idea that I was any sort of traveler at all. When I go somewhere, it’s to the store, work, or the rare visit with friends. “Absence from home” is my default definition of traveling, a tell if there ever was one, and far more accurate in describing me than one of those Facebook quizzes that reveals which 80’s punk band I am. Anything that involves a prolonged absence from home is also known as “going to California.” Yet, in recalling past journeys, I realize I was once a traveler. That’s sad, considering I have better means to travel now than ever, yet I don’t.

Another difficulty is the realization that, as socially conscious and ethical as I believe myself to be, I have never once acted on these impulses as a traveler. In writing the past few entries, I’ve come closer and closer to the realization that, rather than acting as an agent of positive change in the world, I’ve squandered opportunities to use travel as anything but leisure. I’ve surfed, climbed things, added money to coffers across all the kingdom, but it’s all been just for the fun of it, never with a thought that my impact is anything more or less than indifferent, and sort of blind to it willfully.  

It’s this last point that is most distressing, so I’ve decided to make a change for the better, both in an effort to recover my past lust for life and to seek ways of renewing my relationship with the world that exists beyond my comfort zone. (There’s hope—joining a gym a few years ago was the result of a different existential crisis, and now I can’t imagine life without it.) 

To find out my next steps, stay tuned... 

Around Here

This week’s readings contained an intensely difficult chapter from a work by Homi Bhabha, a postcolonial theorist. This is a new field for me, and I found myself loathing Bhabha intensely in the same way I loathed Friedrich Hegel as an undergraduate: I can appreciate a complex idea, and I can even understand one on occasion with enough time to ruminate on it, but what I have difficulty with is when the complex idea is not to be found at the sentence level. It seems discourteous to me to communicate something meaningful in language that, if it were a plant, would be brambles grown compactly in tight layers around an enigma wrapped in another dimension called “I Told You It Was Too Complex For You.” I burned a Hegel book once, but I won’t—can’t—burn Bhabha because it’s a no-burn day in the neighborhood.

Not quite true. I disliked Hegel and did burn one of his books out of frustration but that was an error on my part. In time, I understood that I didn’t have enough experience of the world to really care about what Hegel knew. I still don’t, but he’s not to blame. Bhabha will survive, as will I, in part because my colleagues have helped translate his idea for me, and in that idea is something of merit. (He can still stand to be courteously clear, however. Time is money, sir.) As one of my colleagues wrote in her summation, “Bhahba defines cultural discourse as the ‘agency of a people’ to write their own history to include voices from the margins of the ‘culture’ through their experiential narratives. Basically, Bhahba suggests that by questioning the ideological belief of Western culture being a ‘people-as-one’ and a static construction based on tradition, a new picture of culture will emerge and a new historical narrative will be created.” I can work with this.

Bhabha’s concerns are to do with the postcolonial. Not being a Brit, I have a difficult time feeling guilty about colonialism since, if my sense of my own heritage is on target, I come from the colonized: French-Canadian, Scottish, Cornish. My blood is hot with being pushed around by the English. I’m not exactly India, but a lawyer might take my case.

I'm not naive either--my privilege is costing someone somewhere something. Sort of my point. Where Bhabha’s questioning resonates with me is in my own possible complicity in taking for granted the cultural discourse of the American Southwest. This was a narrative of my people—the suburban Arizonan—that laid claim to the narrative of another people—the bordertown Mexican. Growing up in Arizona, you learn early on that a time will come when you and your friends will travel to Mexico to live it up. It doesn't matter which one, precisely, since any border town will do, and the border towns are allegedly where the action is. Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez: these places, so the narrative goes, were created just for the party-bound youth of America on the hunt for cheap kicks.

Last week, I mentioned finding a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac in a Salvation Army store in Iowa. That was the end of one story but the beginning of another. When I finished the book, I decided I had exactly the same reasons for hitting the road as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (or whatever; I was bored) and so, goaded by Kerouac and a paycheck, I finally made my way south of the border on what promised to be a weekend to remember.

Sadly, Mexico, the Mount Everest of Teenage Iniquity, didn’t exist. Instead, I found Tijuana to be alot like Phoenix--a little unkempt in places, but nowhere near what I’d been led to believe. It was basically a Western urban center, a little more aromatic than Phoenix because of the many food carts, and teeming with Mexicans and Americanos doing a pretty fair amount of cash business—food, clothes, rugs, pharmaceuticals of all types, and, as one of my traveling companions claimed, plenty of pot.

We didn’t spend the night in Tijuana, but we did drink the night away. It began on a rooftop bar around noon. They had drink specials and a volleyball court, so we felt right at home. For most of the afternoon, we played in an ad-hoc tournament against other tourists, but around dinnertime, some local kids showed up and challenged us to play. At night, the place turned into a disco, and so we stayed and made many new friends. Around midnight, things changed drastically when a local crew—unnamed but very clearly the owners of this particular spot—showed up and stared at us until we got the picture and left. Just as well—we were out of money anyway. As we drove off for San Diego, the feeling was the same as if we'd overstayed our welcome in a locals-only surf spot across the border. No hard feelings, and thanks for being so accommodating.

The takeaway, as you can imagine, isn’t an awesome story about getting wasted in Mexico, nor is it about a North American's sudden appreciation for a marginalized people. It’s this: I know these places better than I think. Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad de Juarez--these places are more my country than anywhere north of here. I'm desert through and through. Where I’m from, the narrative of the border towns of Mexico is sorely misunderstood as only a story of vice and want. Since 9/11, the story has been revised to include the ongoing drug war and increased ultraviolence, neither of which helps, but neither do they alter the moral of the story. Border towns are places where they have brothels and drug wars. Life is cheap in a border town. You can die in a border town. That’s what we say around here, anyway, and some of it may be true. But it's a little too easy to say these things if we reduce all of the negative traits to necessary conditions of some imaginary, inherent bordertownness. No place can survive a beating like that. If even one person calls it their home, it deserves something more complex, a reinstatement back into the world as more than a fiction.

Bhabha’s ideas have made me consider what would happen if I reimagined the border space and points just north and south as something else, neither U.S.A. nor Mexico, maybe more like Kurdistan, which exists in all senses but the one that matters--autonomy. Geographically and culturally, and to an extent economically, Sonorans, Chihuahans, and Bajans have far more in common with each other than we do with, say, people on the East Coast or in Mexico City. We live in the same place, we eat the same food, swat at the same terrifying desert insects. For me (and maybe it is only me), there is an untold narrative here, an opportunity to reconstitute a meaning based on the fact that we are in-betweeners, people who know the national discourse that points south and says “Great place to get drunk, but totally violent” is false. We can have a different story if we want it.

For now, these are just thoughts, things I can’t do much with. They’re also poor shadows of what academics have been doing with border studies for awhile now, but the academics weren’t around the last time I went south. Maybe next time I’ll bring Bhabha and see what he thinks. I know a great bar in Tijuana.

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes...

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes. I bargained for salvation, she gave me a lethal dose. I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.

--Bob Dylan

Mapping a territory according to its history is something I’ve learned to do over time. Growing up, a typical vacation with my family involved a trip to Southern California by car, with my father driving just under the speed limit. What made the time pass painlessly was his running narrative about the history of the California he grew up in during the 1940s and 1950s. I would never have known it then, but his stories created California for me—the way I see it now is still as a place of desert eccentrics, migrant laborers, Okies, and the odd farmer selling oranges from the back of a car on dirt roads off the highway. It is the place where fathers and sons build homes together and the boys run off to join the Marines, where they fight about Nixon and take color pictures of each other standing in front of cars.     

It is his California, constructed around the world as he knew it. When it comes to Riverside, Los Angeles, and Orange County, I understand them not as a megalopolis but a network of small towns stitched together loosely with thin roads, then then braided together for keeps with a highway. Everything is anchored to greater L.A. (As I get older, I realize it is not just his, it is also the California of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West.) The bedroom communities that sprang up in service of the larger urban centers—the wealthy neighborhoods plastered along the hills off the highway, the places created because the beach towns were getting too rich—basically don’t exist for me even now since they are outside the history I learned as a child. I know they are there, of course, but they don't really exist.

For me, California is a place in time. Many years removed from those trips with the family, I’m convinced that I have a type of synesthesia that forces spatial-chronological associations in my mind. In other words, history is a place. If you say “1978” to me, there is a box of 1978 in my head and inside are Reggie Jackson, punk rock, Pope John Paul I, and Battlestar Galactica, all things I put there that year. I’m wondering if this is how I map territory as well.         

And as a place, history can be mapped. In preparation for this week, I tried to remember a trip taken through the Midwest that was never completed as planned. Struggling to remember the details of place, I could only come up with an impressionistic map of the Midwest that looks like this:

Spencer, Iowa. Day one of the mission. Arriving in Spencer, Iowa, with a cheap little suitcase stuffed with two suits, a pair of shiny black shoes, three changes of underwear, and a bible tote. I use a picture of a girl for a bookmark. They tell me I’ll be there for at least two months but that first night I calculate how long it will take to walk home. At least two months, probably.

Little town in South Dakota. A Saturday night in late October, somewhere even smaller than Spencer. There is a family on stage and they are large people, the mother in ruffles and a long black dress encircled by three teenagers, all singing hymns in a high lonesome with their eyes closed. My companion giggles because he thinks it’s off-key. It’s not. It’s beautiful. The next family tells “Jokes from the Bible” using homemade puppets and sign language. They get a few laughs.

Inside the infernal apartment. Halloween evening sitting inside, afraid some kids will knock at the door. My companion tells stories about his girl. She looks like the girl in my bible.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota. With the car heater on full blast and a diabetic behind the wheel, I almost die in a Ford Fairmount. Luckily, I know how to steer a car from the passenger seat. Learned that playing highway games on I-10.

Salvation Army store, Spencer, Iowa. Laundry day, two months in. At the back of the Salvation Army store, they sell books. On the Road costs fifty cents. While my companion looks at shoes, I put a dollar on the counter and put the book in my coat. It’s cold outside. The coat is a gift from my best friend to keep me warm in the Midwestern winter. His grandfather’s coat, It kept him warm on his return to Germany from Russia in 1944. Probably not the only German coat in Iowa. That night, I bring the new book with me into the bathroom—the only room I can be alone in. Reading the first chapter, I realize my mistake and leave for home two days later.  

That was 26 years ago. Those places are still there on the map. I guarantee it.

The Beautiful Game Mapped, or How the World Looks to a Soccer Fan

In Portugal today, as I type, the culmination of a season-long struggle between the best teams in European soccer has been played between two teams from Madrid, Spain. The best player in the game—perhaps in all of soccer today—is from Portugal. A valued teammate is Croatian. Another is Welsh. Their manager is Italian, while the opposing manager is Argentine. In order to be at this tournament, these teams had to beat the best teams from England, Germany, Italy, Turkey, France, Greece, and Russia. When they took the field, the teams from Madrid wore shirts bearing the names of their sponsors, one a Dubai-based airline, the other the entire country of Azerbaijan. The map of this space has no capital city. 

It’s difficult to translate for a non-soccer-watching audience the importance of this game for a fan of European soccer. The first thing you need to understand is it’s not really about Spanish soccer (although increasingly these days, it really is about Spanish soccer, but that’s another story). The only way to truly bring this into focus is by analogy. Therefore, imagine this: each NFL season lasts 38 weeks instead of 16. Also imagine that every country in the Western Hemisphere has a football team, with some as well-funded, exciting, and contentious as the NFL. Each year the three or four best NFL teams play their international counterparts in a Final Four-like bracket structure that takes the teams all over the hemisphere to play mid-week games while still playing their regular season weekend games—for example, the New England Patriots might play a game in New York this Sunday, then another one in Mexico City on Wednesday, and then return to Massachusetts for another game next weekend.

Finally—and here’s the kicker—imagine that the NFL teams only win this tournament occasionally, certainly not every year, but maybe two or three times every decade, if at all. In fact, in this imaginary world, NFL fans might go decades or eons without seeing their team play at this level of football.

No matter who wins today, Regardless of Real Madrid's victory today, the outcome of this game will soon be forgotten in favor of an even bigger event, the 2014 World Cup, which begins next month in Brazil and lasts for an entire month, twice the length of the Olympic Games. To understand how big this tournament is, an analogy really won’t do it, so I’ll have to describe it the way it happens: Aside from playing in their regular leagues, such as the English Premier League or Italian Serie A, the best soccer players from around the world also play for their national teams, and for many this is the honor of a lifetime. For these players, every four years marks not just the culmination of their best personal efforts but perhaps even the best performances of their careers. Legends can be made with just one ball kicked to the back of the net.

If you happen to watch the World Cup next month, you will experience what scholar and critic Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone,” or a “social [space] where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4). In the contact zone of the World Cup, there is a continuously moving balance of power, one that still has traces of a "European 'planetary consciousness'" (9) but which also contains "copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (7). In this world, concepts like copresence and asymmetrical power relationships play out at regular intervals in ways most American sports fans can only imagine.

The World Cup, without too much stretching, also exemplifies Pratt's notion of transculturation. "While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own" (6). The worldwide diffusion of soccer ever since the first British traveler dropped a basket of soccer balls in a colonial outpost—and there were many baskets of balls dropped worldwide in the late 19th century—is one of the great stories of globalization. Beginning with the Scottish, and moving south to Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and eventually the rest of the world, what was once known as the British game (the thing emanating from the dominant culture) became a global game that dwarfed any other cultural export. However—and this is the key to making a connection with Pratt’s concepts—wherever the balls landed, the cultures absorbing the game (some subjugated, some not except by extension of the power of Great Britain) chose for themselves the “correct” way to play the game. The game itself has a shared set of rules worldwide, yet the English definition of excellence might run to, as soccer writer Jonathan Wilson states, blunt pragmatism, while some Latin Americans might say that excellence lies within the beautiful individual style of the artists on the field. The Dutch might disagree with both. In this world, there is no dominant culture of soccer anymore, something the British will be the first to admit, as witnessed by the large numbers of non-English playing in England at the highest level of the game.

To be an American soccer fan of the international game is to accept that there are limits to cultural imperialism. On the World Cup soccer map, Brazil, Italy, and Germany are the superpowers, with second-tier status going to the Netherlands, Argentina, and Uruguay (and perhaps Spain, but we'll see). Great Britain, France, and Russia are still in development, while the United States, China, and Japan have yet to be discovered. On what other map is this reality? In this forum, the contact zone is a postmodern spectacle, and the map is ever-changing. 

Work Cited

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Introduction: Criticism in the contact zone." Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-11. Print.

Topic the First: Ethnography

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

--Samuel Johnson

Ethnography is a new word for me, but I’ve received a crash course this week in some of its dimensions. Ethnography, according to Oxford Dictionaries is “[t]he scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.” This definition seems simple enough on its face—it doesn’t take much of a leap to understand it as the fruits of a field study, the knowledge gathered when one was out there that is communicated back to the rest of us in here. It is qualitative data, and we can do with it what we care to do, whatever that is.  It is information.

But that’s on its face. It is also a troublesome thing if done for purposes of mistranslating a culture or justifying one of the varieties of imperialism (cultural, political, military, etc.) or colonialism, and the end result—the thing to be read, which informs about what is out there—is false or falsified. Ethnography is a natural companion to travel writing, according to Joan Pau Rubies: “Ethnography is central to some forms, clearly secondary to others, and often entirely absent” (244). When it is present, it is subject to ethical scrutiny for the very simple reason that whatever I see and report back on in my studies will educate those who seek that information, whether expedition planners, missionaries, colonial or domestic administrators, historians, cultural advisors, other ethnographers and anthropologists, and anybody else who might benefit from, as Johnson said, “regulat[ing] imagination by reality.”

Because of its potential for harm and its association with traveling, this new phrase has clouded my judgment of travel writing. I hadn’t thought of my Rebecca Wests, my Martha Gellhorns, or even my Bill Brysons (et tu, Bill?) as complicit in any type of imperialist or colonialist enterprise before, yet now I am asking whether or not they have wittingly or unwittingly been complicit in something dark and untoward. If I’m to believe Edward Said’s complaints about the hazards of Westerners attempting to translate the Not-West (as synthesized in Steve Clark’s “Travel Writing and Empire” and possibly misunderstood by me), or James Clifford’s criticism of the bourgeois mentality underlying much travel writing, then I will be forced to consider if I really understand the world as it is or as the storytellers wish me to see it. If I was a travel writer, would I be a tool in the service of dissembling the real world?

As you can imagine, this study of travel writing is causing me to hyperbolize in ways I usually mock, so for now, I will stay further comment on these themes until my next entry. I’ll leave with an experience I had looking over reviews of The Best American Travel Writing 2012, edited by Jason Wilson and William T. Vollmann. I noticed that the customer reviews, which are usually 3-5 stars for the series, were evenly sorted between 1 and 5 stars for this edition. Now, Vollmann can be divisive for some (he is the darkness when he wants to be), so it wasn’t surprising, but really, it’s just a travel anthology, so what could the reasons be? Freda didn’t like it because it contained stories about places she wouldn’t travel to, Janie HS felt it lacked the sense of excitement and adventure she expected, and several others were miffed that accounts of travels to Northern Ireland and the garbage fields of Calcutta were included. As one reviewer noted, these are about culture not travel, so what gives?

Indeed.   

What We Talk About When We Talk About Travel Writing

I used to read quite a bit of travel writing. Once, years ago, after sailing from San Diego to Avalon and then back again, my travel companion, the ship's captain, handed over his ratty paperback of Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and told me I needed to read it since it would inspire me to travel more. Skeptical about the value of travel writing—after all, you go somewhere, and either you die, in which case someone writes about you, or you come back and you get to be the storyteller—I humored my new friend and promised I’d give it a read. After all, I didn’t want to read about traveling, I just wanted to travel. Not sure the connection you’re trying to make there, friend…

I didn’t read it, not then or even soon afterward. I came across it again two years later as I dug through a closet looking for that windbreaker I wore that time I went sailing and that guy gave me a book to read, which I ignored and, oh there it is again. But this time, I not only read the back of the jacket but even made my way through the endorsement blurbs and a few sentences into the first chapter.

It actually looked appealing this time, probably because it was about Latin America, my new favorite place in all the world. Of course, it wasn’t Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I was a magical realist that week) or even John Reed (I thought I was a communist, too) but it was about Latin America.

Well, not really about Latin America, but going to Latin America. Or something to do with Latin America, at least. Then I read this line and recognized Theroux for what he was (and remains)—a poet and philosopher of the human condition who speaks travel the way Lou Reed once spoke heroin: “Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion." By the next page, Theroux was off and running, talking about the measliness of travel writing and the purposelessness of writing about it, and how these things drove him to do it differently, to do it backwards by ending his book where most travel books begin—at the far end of the journey. Well, now that’s an interesting way to view the world, I thought. Might make a nice approach to writing about travel writing someday.

So by now, it’s been many years since Paul Theroux introduced me to Bruce Chatwin, and Bruce introduced me to Peter Matthiessen, and Peter introduced me to all the rest of the party, many of whom I'll mention in coming weeks. As reading habits go, travel writing and British crime fiction constitute my list of go-to, not-sure-what-I’m-in-the-mood-to-read, sure things. It’s been awhile since I’ve read much travel narrative (there are lots of Inspector Rebus books, after all), but as a result of a class in the rhetoric of travel writing, I’m back in the travel writing mode—reading it and pondering who I’d be as a travel writer and answering questions that will make up the first few blog posts here. By the end of it all, I hope to be in Patagonia, or sailing to Avalon, or coming down from a U.S.A. World Cup 2014 victory (I also like fantasy sometimes) or somewhere else, not here necessarily. 

But blogging, always blogging.

Works Cited

Clark, Steve. "Introduction." Clark, Steve. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. New York: Zed Books, 1999. 1-28. Print.

Clifford, James. "Traveling Cultures." Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 17-46. Print.

Rubies, Joan Pau. "Travel writing and ethnography." The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 242-260. Print.

Next topic: Ethnography