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.