Out of the Drawing Room and Into the Jungle

(Ummm...I forgot to post the beginning of my paper, but here it is!)

My head is now packed full of warring images associated with Mary Kingsley. At any given moment, I may call to mind plush Victorian costumes, or the African jungle (or both, at the same time). I see a devoted daughter caring for her parents, and a fearless explorer. I see a wit and a serious ethnographer. The cover of the 1988 reprinting of Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa offers no help in reconciling any of these pictures. A fuzzy painting of native Africans is the dominating image, showing dark natives in loincloths perched atop the blinding white of an enormous rock. The rock stands between two drastically different environments: the impenetrable African jungle and a placid beach. Obscuring the corner of the painting is a thumbnail photograph of Mary Kingsley: with her own whiteness, she too provides a sharp contrast to the dark-skinned natives. Her clothing reflects the traditions of her Victorian upbringing: the collar of her dress alone seems to have more fabric than all the natives’ clothing put together; it looks stifling, crawling up her neck and finally pausing for rest at the base of her chin. Rendered in black and white, she looks every bit the serious minded-ethnographer, poised and ready to comment upon these frolicking natives who have taken up residence on her book’s cover. As a reader, it would be easy to anticipate that Kingsley’s writing would be a reflection of this cover. It would be reasonable to assume that this woman, this black and white, serious-minded Kingsley that calmly surveys the bathing natives on the cover of her book would suck the color out of the natives she observed. It would only be natural to imagine that happening. But then you open the book.

what I wrote for Larry

For me, this course has been about finding things. Certainly it's been about finding new places, people and species, but above all that it has been about finding truth. Beautiful, simple truth: something we can hold on to, touch, make real. Something that gives us a foundation, a horizon ahead of us, or something to come home to.

I believe in the stunning, excruciating simplicity of truth. I believe that nothing holds more power than something honest, real - good. Some people turn to science. Some people turn to God. I turn to words. When I find them - the ones that have magic - their value is almost always impossible to define. I can find no common thread to help me find the other words that are waiting somewhere for me. I have only one way to recognize them - it's a feeling in the pit of my stomach. My stomach jerks and squirms, as if it has registered the presence of some unadulterated piece of greatness. And so I write the words down, saving them to a bit of scrap paper and making them real and tangible. I secretly wait for my office to turn into Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. I imagine one day these words, all these scraps of paper, will swirl around, shuffle and reorganize and become an answer to the big bad world with its confusion and complexity. It hasn't happened yet. Until it does, I'm happy with my bits of paper.

Presentation Comments

Julie: "America's ready for a party, not an empire." I love it. Why can't we be ready for both? I know that a voice like that, all opinionated like, might compromise the scientific integrity, but still I love it. It seems so...deliciously human. I've gotten all free-love, hippie, embrace-the-world-for-all-its-faults-ish recently (a side effect of too much time with good literature, perhaps?), but I can recognize the problem with subjectivity. But for now, I don't know, I'm just choosing to ignore it in favor of embracing the beautiful flaws that come with being human. Ok. Sorry. I'll stop typing now and go and make a daisy chain or something.

Jerry: Wow. Where to start? I guess, barring any intrigue, I'll talk about the "motives of curiosity" of which you spoke. You know, back when we thought this was a straightforward story. I couldn't get over the idea that the text was written on behalf of the captain, rather than by the captain. I wonder what we can say about someone who has boundless curiosity, but not the will to share it. I can't decide how I feel about it. I mean, I'm all talk-talk-talk. I can't help by share my discoveries. Since our course has been so focused on travel narrative, it seems we wouldn't think much of someone who travels without writing it down. But should we feel compelled to share, if the results could help someone out? Seems unfair.
Of course, I don't know what anything means now, because it was all fake James Bond-y stuff. So...put another layer on my existential crisis.

Hillary: Obviously, Hill, your presentation was particularly interesting to me because Arctic travel has been such a big part of my life (not that I personally have been cruising around on ice floes or anything). I never, ever stopped to consider how dangerous my father's work was, or the people who came before him that made his career possible. It's interesting to me also the attitude that some people (the ones who spend time there) have with the Arctic/Antarctic: it's an exclusive environment, and it takes a special breed of person to go up/down there. My dad took my mum to the Antarctic last year, and he was piloting the ship through the ice while they were there. My mum said she was scared out of her mind because he'd go down these dangerous, tiny little channels. My dad just shrugged and said his time in the area gave him a different perspective on what was possible and how far he could go. For him, it was a question of paying your respects to the area; once you acclimate, he says, it doesn't seem so harsh. It seems to me there would always be a balance though. Creating a relationship with a place like that must be like taming a wild tiger and keeping it for a house pet. It's beautiful, and you perhaps can get away with doing things that others can't, but the question remains: will you eventually push your luck too far, and get bitten? It seems Parry was aware of this balance when he made the decision to abort the journey.

Kellan: I think Debbie made a really good point when she noticed the differing tones in our texts. Both our authors consume their area, but in different ways. Your author was concerned with turning a profit, and mine was concerned with...how stupid he looked on a donkey. Ok, mine was concerned with more than that, but you get my point. I realize that Edward Dicey's account of Egypt was that of a consumer, and yet I still think that my text had more warmth. Yours was filled with objective information, but as you presented, I couldn't help thinking that it seemed a bit cold. So perhaps The Morning Land is too filled with the human - warts and subjectivity and all - but I wonder if your text went too far in ignoring the human in favor of the fish or the ram. Maybe our authors should get together for a collaborative effort? I'm sure Edward Dicey would look equally ridiculous on a ram as he did on a jackass:).

I'll update with the paper section of this prompt -- promise!

an immoveable feast

My whole life has been about being “half and half". This distinction makes more sense when you hear my mum say the first “half” in her plummy British accent, and the second “half” in what she thinks is an American accent. I don’t know if there are Americans in the world who speak in my mum’s American accent, but if there are, they must be a fearsome thing to behold – that accent is horrendous. At any rate, the P.O.M.E* side of the family likes to be represented; I think they feel they’ve somehow betrayed the Mother Land if I start sounding “too American”. I’ve never quite determined what “too American” means, but I know that my grandmother is sorely disappointed (and legitimately surprised, oddly enough) that I speak with an American accent. My grandmother’s relationship with my accent could take up a whole separate blog post.

Anyway, the point of all this is that because I’ve spent a lot of time there, and because I’m allowed to be there without a visa, I feel very much at home in Europe. I hate writing things like that, because I realize they can sound spoiled or snotty, so I should be clear: I am really grateful that I’ve gotten to spend so much time there and I do appreciate my time there…just in a slightly different way. So anyway: I mapped Europe.

When I think about Europe (and last year in particular) words – random words, flashes of memory – crowd into my head. Usually these things are completely inappropriate for say, a Rick Steves book*. Monuments and museums are usually only secondary thoughts – I think of the people I met and the things I lived on and the quirks about the place. I think about the things that surround you when you’re constructing a place as a home. Since I can’t read maps anyway*, I decided to map these places out as I understand them. As Cher from Clueless would say, these maps are “a full-on Monet…From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess.” From far away they could be maps of Europe, France, and the British Isles. (At least, my parents both assured me they look like real maps from far away. But they both wear glasses.) But when you get up close, they’re just border-constrained explosions of words and memory. They’re messy and non-linear. They’re not in chronological order; I wrote them in the order they came to mind. They are song lyrics, stray thoughts, faces and jokes and experiences. They, more than the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge and Mannheim Piss, are my Europe, my France, and my British Isles. They are my life through travel.

I committed these maps to a piece of furniture because I wanted it to be solid and difficult to move. I wanted it to be something that couldn’t fit in my dad’s green backpack. I earned the words on the maps by moving around every couple of months. A lot of Western Europe was mapped on the back of a one-month interrail pass. I have flashes of words because I saw these places in flashes of time. The experience was fleeting, but the effect was permanent.

(There are real maps on the inside of the chest to represent the contrast between my representation and the common representation)

(I do realize this is kind of ginormous...I can bring the whole piece in if anyone wants to look at it more closely. I'll try to get some more pictures up soon as well.)

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* Prisoner of Mother England
* Also, I love Rick Steves with the fire of a thousand suns. Seriously. If loving Rick Steves is wrong, I don’t want to be right. He’s so adorably dorky.
* Technically, I can read maps. I just usually choose not to. They seem very math-ish to me.

Welcome to...wait...where?

Approximately no one will be surprised to learn that I accidentally flew into the wrong airport.
Except, I was a little surprised. First I was impressed that the Burbank airport got so much larger. Also I was a tiny bit confused about the big sign that said WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES. I thought, Hmmm, a sign like that would be more appropriate for LAX...

Apparently I became a one-woman security threat to Southwest Airlines a few minutes after we (re)took off in San Jose. I would like to point out, in my own defense, that at Sea-Tac the gate attendant took both of my boarding passes and then told me to stay on the plane instead of switching in San Jose. You know their tag line (you are now free to move about the country)? They must take that whole thing really seriously, because no one bothered to a) check my ticket on the second leg of the flight or b) inform me that I was in fact on the wrong plane. Which means I could have taken that plane all the way to Reno and no one would have cared (except me, maybe).

Possible conclusions to draw from this experience:

1. Nobody really cares about airport security, even though I now always have to pack in ziplocs and take my shoes off when I go through the detector.

2. Am far less capable/intelligent than I look to the outside world (or flight attendants, at least).

3. I would make a good spy (and was therefore justified in keeping Walt Disney on my list).

Paper Musings

Somewhere in my room I have a notebook with all my beginning of the semester scribblings. Things from orientation. Things from first meetings. Things from almost any gathering we had during that first week. I'm not sure why I bothered to write them down. Was I trying to translate graduate school into something easily contained in a marbled composition notebook? Did I think I could put it into instruction manual rhetoric? The method behind my madness is unclear (as per usual). Maybe I just needed something to do with my hands. Anyway, there's a list in there - acquired during a first meeting of a reading group - of Early Modern journals. Ones to read. Ones in which to be published. "You can feel smug while you're sitting on an airplane reading these," we were told. "At the very least you'll feel smarter than the people reading Harry Potter."

Interesting. So people do in fact notice stuff. Particularly, they notice other people wandering around in shared spaces. I suppose that should make me a little more self-conscious about sitting in 24F with US weekly or Cosmo or the latest in the Jackie Collins canon*.

We're not talking about airplane culture in class, but we are talking about travelers. What if we view travel literature not as literature written about travel, but rather the literature consumed during travel? We would no longer be talking about national, cultural or scientific development. Instead, we would be dealing with personal development. Marilyn Monroe once said (ok fine, it was in a movie) "it's a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd." I think it's true that we feel alone when we're in huge crowds, but it's a false sense of security. The fact of the matter is that other people are looking around; they see us. Impressions are made. That's the whole point of people-watching. So what do the books we read (particularly the ones we read in public, when traveling) say about us?

This is particularly interesting in our class time period(s). Trevor has been collecting yellowbacks from the 19th Century - the books people bought before boarding the train. It's filled with advertisements, and the stories are easy to read. They're made for consumers, not critics. And they were made during an age of some incredible canonical works. So why were these books so popular? And what does that say about British culture? (The books were published in London.) What were people looking for in a book? An escape? An adventure?

Also, I'd like to do some research into train technology and (maybe) commuter culture.



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*Please note, I don't actually read Jackie Collins. But she did have some impressive hair, back in the day.

I am sitting in the cell phone waiting area of the Spokane airport, casually staring at the other drivers waiting for their phone call and wondering whose number will come up (or be dialed) first. Parking lot purgatory.

From the tinny speakers in my little red phone, Peter Gabriel announces he'd like to be my Sledgehammer. I'm up.

Sarah is waiting too, under the Southwest arrivals sign, scanning the road for the car her friend used to drive to frosty morning practices in upstate New York. Same car, different podunk. "I could tell it was you," she tells me when she finally settles into the wrinkled grey leather of my passenger seat, "you were driving like you were looking for me but had no map to find me. Like you'd zoom right past me if you got too sure of yourself and accelerated." I smile because she's right; I was terrified I'd miss her, as if passing her by (even just once) would make her disappear - poof! - back to LA. So I had to be careful, because I so desperately wanted to see someone who knew me.

The strange thing about living life as a wandering academic is you're always doing the first days. Hi my name is. I'm from. Wanna sit together at lunch? I love and hate these days. I love sitting amongst my friends-to-be and knowing some will become precious to me. I hate wondering how long it'll be until we get there. I'm something of an open book, but still, there are a lot of pages. It takes a little while to really know me (or anyone), I think. Sarah's a speed-reader, though - she knows and has always known my story. I don't remember going out of my way to make friends with her; it was a recollection rather than a creation.

IhadacrappydayandIcan'tfigureoutwhy one of us will say. Ineedtomove-stayput-makesomething-usemyhands-getdirty-writewritewrite-breathe, you know what I mean? And the other person will say Yes. I know exactly what you mean. I get it. Here's what to do.

Back in the Volvo, I am still a little worried, because I don't know how to make this visit a vacation for her. Even knowing that she's here to see me, I still don't know how to make Pullman Worth the Plane Ticket. I'm pondering this, and measuring the potential excitement value of a can of Cougar Gold, when Sarah squeals and presses her hands up against the chilled glass of her window.

"You've got HILLS here" she coos. And I know she'll get along with Pullman just fine.

Sarah constructs Pullman as a tourist, whereas I construct it as a home. She looks and sees everything LA can't give her - there are conversations to be had in coffee shops, the football game this weekend is the most important thing on the list and people smile with unaltered faces. I realize I've been taking for granted how easily I can breathe here. I look for grocery stores and bus routes. She looks for the greengreengreen she's be craving. What will I be on the lookout for, when I go to LA? What will I gloss over, because I see it every day on my way to school? What has Pullman done for me lately? I should take a moment to figure it out.