travels
>Writing about the real Russia – whatever that is
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Kseniya Melnik considers the homeland of her imagination @ Granta.
Never return to the places where you’ve been happy, my father always said.
Ever since I started writing fiction, I’ve crafted not-always-happy stories about the country of my overwhelmingly happy childhood. It was no Utopia , of course, especially in the economic scramble after the fall of Soviet Union. And divorce, that common domestic beast, snarled at our doorstep too. But my family remained close and mostly functional, my parents fiercely protective of my sister’s innocence and mine. Our little universe was blurred by the sleep of childhood, the all-blinding drama of school life; steeped in fairy tales, literature, music and dance classes; and buried in the long, glittery winters. By the time I began reconstructing it through narrative, the Russia of my memories was largely imaginary – a cauldron of nostalgia-tinted material, which I calibrated with scrupulous research. After all, I wanted to write about the real Russia – whatever that is.
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Almost thirteen years after I’d emigrated as a teenager, I travelled back to Stavropol, my mother’s hometown in the South of Russia, to see my sick grandmother. I felt I was taking a creative risk: how would my writing change in the face of such a strong dose of reality?
>A city of ghosts and guests
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Jim Cocola on the visible and invisible in Venice @ n+1.
Not a letter from Venice, but a letter on Venice: for during the two months I passed in Venice, I never really felt like I was doing anything from Venice, though my sense of being on Venice never dissipated. On clear days, which proved exceedingly rare, I was struck by how closely the Alps hovered beyond the plains of the Veneto; on foggy days, which proved the rule, I was reminded that the city is nothing if not a series of loosely connected marshy berms soaking in the northern reaches of a fickle tidal lagoon.
Snow, already a quiet phenomenon in any setting, falls even more quietly in Venice. When it rains above a dry St. Mark’s Square, the stones echo with the sound of falling water, and when it rains above a flooded St. Mark’s Square, the floodwaters amplify the sound of the downpour. But when it snows there are no plows to be heard, and scarcely even a shovel. Reluctant schoolchildren in Venice do not pray to the god of snow: they pray to the god of fog. For snow has a minimal effect on the circulation of people on foot or by boat, whereas a sustained fog can alter or even shut down water traffic, confining the amphibious Venetians and their bewildered visitors to a most peculiar land habitat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Rather than living by the Rialto, or along some other stretch of the Grand Canal, I stayed in the far eastern end of the city, on the island of San Pietro di Castello, which was described to me as one of the few remaining instances of the real Venice. There were scare quotes placed around either “real” or “Venice”; I can’t remember which. The land route to San Pietro runs along Via Garibaldi, a wide swath of street—a filled-in canal, really—unlike anything else in the city. At one end of the street the vista opens to the Campanile of St. Mark’s Square, the Santa Maria della Salute, and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore; at the other end the canal re-commences with a picturesque vegetable boat. The narrow walk beyond leads to a wooden bridge for San Pietro, the seat of ecclesiastical authority in the city for many centuries, far removed from the temporal locus of power at the Ducal Palace.
>Life is unfolding exactly the way it is meant to
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| Ronald Ceuppens @ Paper Darts/ |
Scott Tucker recounts the everyday encounters in Guinea, West Africa @ Etude.
The sound of the boys crying out in pain is new. The other sounds are the same. The bat wings, quick and rubbery, flitting overhead in a haze of mango leaves and wood smoke. The old counterfeiter, sitting outside his front door, talking quietly with visitors in threadbare suits.
The children sing a school song in French outside in the dark, then start up a game of “de donc/dernier,” Simon Says, jumping forward and backward over a circle drawn in the dirt. They cheer noisily out of habit when the electricity comes on, although they continue playing the same games electricity or not. There are no vehicles again tonight on the main road, due to a military curfew that’s been in place since the near-assassination of President Dadis Camara more than a month ago. A dundunba party carries on, however, past 11 p.m. in a neighbor’s yard, with drumming and dancing and excited announcements coming over a microphone. C’est normal. C’est Conakry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I have come to Guinea, West Africa, at a time when the U.S. embassy is closed and all Americans have been urged to leave the country. I have left the comforts of Seattle, Washington for this, to remind myself that there is power in ordinary people, even the world’s poorest people, going about living their daily lives. These people can save a nation. They can make a nation worth saving. They can turn around your thinking. I know only one person “on the ground,” Karim Koumbassa, my drum and dance teacher in Seattle, and a native of Guinea. He is, like most men in Conakry, strong and pliant from years of physical labor in the equatorial heat. He is 33 years old, best guess, although age is happily unimportant here. Dates of birth are routinely invented on official paperwork.
>A world that was both familiar and strange
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Paul Wilson explores the life and landscapes of Stieg Larsson @ The Walrus.
I was late coming to Stieg Larsson and his wildly popular Millennium Trilogy. Last spring, when I started reading the first volume, some 20 million people had already beaten me to it. By August, when I finished the third, that figure had almost doubled. Numbers that big — phenomenal even beside such recent literary juggernauts as Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code — almost always result from word of mouth. But the buzz over Larsson’s books began even before they were published.
It started shortly after he submitted the manuscripts of all three novels to his Swedish publisher, Norstedts, in April 2004. Word spread quickly, and when the Frankfurt Book Fair rolled around that October publishers from all over the world were clamouring for a look. Translations were commissioned shortly after the first book appeared in Stockholm in early 2005, under the title Men Who Hate Women, and from there the groundswell grew, country by country. By the time it reached North America in 2008, as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, not even a bad review in the New York Times could stop it.
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I’m a fan of crime and espionage fiction, but the Millennium books were different. There was something mysterious about how, despite their obvious flaws, they drew you relentlessly into a world that was both familiar and strange. Instead of seeing that world from the perspective of a police force, detective agency, or newsroom, you saw it through a small magazine with big ambitions. Like his main character, Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson had been a journalist and a magazine editor, and I wondered how much of his own life had gone into his books? Or was I simply fascinated with Larsson’s Sweden, a country I’d always dismissed as being pretty much like Canada, only with more blondes, fitter grandmothers, and a better sense of design? His books made me want to know more.
>Would I like to see them again?
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| Sandra Dieckman @ Paper Darts/ |
Jeffrey Tayler revisits his first travel journal and all that has been lost over time @ WorldHum.
Every now and then I sort through my belongings and cull the superfluous. This habit started with my first trip overseas (to Greece, in 1982) and the challenge I faced then in fitting all I needed into my rucksack. Though I’ve been living in one country (Russia) for the past 17 years, and in the same Moscow apartment since 2000, I keep on culling, figuring that my most significant “possessions” are immaterial ones: memories, if often logged into journals, battered notebooks with blue or green cardboard covers and dog-eared pages. As far as other things go—be they books, clothes, whatever—I’ve always thought it best to own as little as possible. It’s more important to be, not to have. Or so I tell myself.
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So, the other day, during a routine culling, I pulled out of the closet one of the suitcases I’d brought with me when I first moved to Moscow, and popped it open. I use it to store things, so I began rummaging to see what I could toss. Out from one of the case’s side pockets tumbled an address book, forest-green, the size of a playing card, with ADDRESSES TELEPHONES embossed in gold on the cover. I had forgotten about this booklet. Seeing it evoked an inexplicable pang of grief, and then a poignant nostalgia verging on the bereft, and then curiosity. I had bought it the year before going to Greece, while still at university in upstate New York. It was one of the few items I’d packed” in my rucksack that would link me with friends and family of my “old life” in the U.S. during my senior year abroad. I remembered carrying it aboard the long, lonely charter flight from JFK to Athens in July of 1982, to what I hoped would be a new life; it had accompanied me that autumn on my first forays, made from Italy, into countries of the socialist bloc; and it had dwelled in my pocket the next year on a seven-month ramble from Czechoslovakia through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, all then “people’s republics” that seemed like political Rocks of Gibraltar, repressive, iron-walled and eternal, not shaky shams that would be gone within a decade; and, in the case of Yugoslavia, burn with the fires of war.
>Incomprehensible monuments of otherness
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Rob Horning considers the experience of travel as a way out of consumer culture @ The New Inquiry.
It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct. This new global city has no particular prototype; it derives from no universally embraced ideal of what cities should be but instead derives from a capitalist logic of distributing novelties so that they can be conveniently consumed. Cities become a consistent pap of jumbled motifs imported from everywhere else. Culture shock becomes nostalgic.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )If we want it, a cocoon of familiarity and convenience awaits us wherever we go. So when I travel, I have various rationalizations to distract me from it and from the inescapable truth that I am a tourist on vacation. One of these is to adopt the Situationist strategy of the dérive, which reconceives aimless walks as what Debord, in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, labeled psychogeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
>Notice your life
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| Nathalie Daoust @ Fringe |
Jonathan Johnson recounts his trip to Paris and imagines what the dead mean to the living on the anniversary of his mother’s death @ Ascent.
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“The other day, when you told me it was coming up on five years, for a minute I thought that couldn’t be right,” Amy said as she packed our toiletries, passports and her camera into her day pack.
Gray light of morning was coming up over the North Sea out the window beyond my desk at the foot of our bed. I slid a fresh yellow legal pad and a couple extra pens into one of the two small suitcases we’d packed last night.
It’s February 7. The date on the end of my mother’s life. The date that waited on the calendar, all those years, like a pebble on a forest path, waiting for her foot, without intention, without malice, but waiting just the same. Just one sharp little pyramid of a pebble, not even an inch high, which stuck to the sole of her sneaker. And which, because she’d lost most of the feeling in her feet to diabetes, burrowed its way in with every step she took, until it was deep into the flesh of her foot, ending her walking days forever. And beginning the years of amputations and infections which ended only with the last of her days. February 7.
Today. On the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death, we were going to Paris.
>I also became, for the first time in my life, a feminist
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Sarah Menkedick on her own Mexican revolution @ WorldHum.
I was walking back from the grocery store, loaded down with bags, when a man came up the sidewalk. I looked down and away. He leaned towards me and whispered, “F**k me.”
The insistent pressure exploded. I lost it. “F**k YOU!” I shouted, and then continued, calling him a dog, a monkey, an animal, a barbarian, and any other disagreeable creature I could think of in Spanish.
He laughed.
I put my grocery bags down, picked up an orange that had fallen from a nearby tree, and threw it at his head. I missed. He laughed again. I walked up and spit in his face.
He punched me.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )A highly informative exercise in futility ensued. I called the police; they came, the man threatened to kill me, the police shrugged, scuffed their boots, looked bored, said they could do nothing, and left. An old woman in the street told me to stop causing problems, shut up, and go home.
“Callate, pendeja,” she said.
That was all I could hear for weeks afterward, everywhere: Callate, pendeja. Shut up, bitch. Shut up and go home. I saw it in the faces of people selling vegetables at the market, in the apathetic stares of passengers on the bus, in anyone I passed in the street. A whole society saying, “shut up, bitch.”
Everything around me started to seem as if it were rotting on the inside, part of some persistent disease that was devouring what I loved about Mexico.
>A lovely Medusa
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Elizabeth Pandolfi on the pleasures and dangers of a town made of tea @ Anderbo.
Munnar. A town in Kerala, the only Communist state in India. Indians call Kerala “God’s Own Country”; if this is true, then Munnar is a new kind of Eden. You will find it high in Kerala’s mountains, an unending, undulating expanse of green, leafy vastness. This town so close to the sky is a world of soil and air, grown up into tea plantations. When the sun shines, the millions and millions of tea leaves smolder and glow with a cool, ancient radiance; but when the sky turns gray and white, when clouds descend onto the mountaintops in wisps and puffs of fog, that is when the leaves betray their hidden selves. In the soft gloom, you see them for what they truly are: ghosts; conjurers of forgetting, of delicious, tempting, loss.
Munnar is a beautiful and dangerous place, a lovely Medusa: one look, and I froze into stone.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The mountains. If you have never seen tea, imagine fresh-picked tobacco. Tea is just as green and just as thick, but on a smaller scale. Tea plants come up to your thigh or waist, with leaves about half the size of a young girl’s palm. They grow on mountainsides, steep and rocky. The plants are dense, dark chlorophyll green, with leaves that look like they’re breathing. Those leaves are so numerous that they seem to be multiplying: growing before your eyes. When you walk along the roads that lead into or out of the tea plantations, they might reach out to surprise you out of your stone-stupor, to call you back to life and breathe some of theirs into you. You would come home from your walk smelling like rain and soil, slightly green on your fingers and toes. You would notice an increased sensitivity to sunlight. Washing your hands with clean, cold water would be a sensual experience, one that required several slow minutes now, instead of the usual quick seconds. When you got undressed for bed that night, you would see the green climbing up your legs, and in the morning there would be little of you left. What could you do except go back to the tea fields, leave the path this time, wander through the knee-high forest feeling how silky those leaves were, until finally you lay down to sleep. You wouldn’t wake up; wouldn’t return.
>Walking the trail of the Berlin Wall
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Millay Hyatt writes of the journey along the fallen wall in 13 parts @ Design Observer.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )I. Early last year, I made a pilgrimage. I’d been thinking about something none of us in Berlin, where I’ve lived for a decade, thinks much about any more, until an anniversary comes along anyway: the fact that half of us were once enclosed by a wall that kept the other half out. Motivated less by the background noise of cultural commemoration than by an impasse in my personal life, I wanted to test myself against the Berlin Wall. Breathe some fresh air, feel in my calves and the balls of my feet the great curving length of that two-way trap that held millions of people in its grip for 28 years. Impasse indeed. The Berlin Wall Trail marks both the historical path of something as preposterous as a wall dividing a city as well as the astounding fact of its bloodless demolition. Something worth paying homage to; and perhaps performing the ritual of walking it would give me some creative ideas for how to get rid of my own little Berlin Wall. So, on a crisp February morning, my 36th birthday, I packed my map and a thermos of water and set off.
II. Carving its way through urban center and periphery for just under 100 miles, the Berlin Wall created a host of unlikely enclaves, exclaves, cul-de-sacs and impossible conundrums. It kept apart friends and lovers, doctors and patients, libraries and overdue books. (Peter Schneider tells a wonderful story in The German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall, of an East Berliner who borrowed books from a West Berlin library the day before construction of the Wall started on August 13, 1961, and returned them the first chance he got: November 10, 1989.) On one side covered with snide and sweet graffiti, on the other sternly blank, the wall not only divided Berlin; it seemed also to take semiotic hostage of the city, which became a symbol of the hard division — the iron curtain, as Churchill called it — between the warring interests of East and West.
But then, twenty years ago, it “fell,” as if it were an old man or an autumn leaf. The two cities melded together again and the chunks of the Wall still standing, like smudges the eraser missed, are there for tourists to photograph and locals to hurry past. I cross its former path many times a week, often several times a day, without thinking about it. My neighborhood was one of those odd protrusions that gave the Wall its lumpy, upside-down-Christmas Tree shape. It used to encase this section of Kreuzberg, in what was once West Berlin, on three sides — West and East being ideological terms in Cold War Berlin more than geographical ones: if you were to head southeast, northeast, north, or northwest from my apartment, you would be on your way to “the East,” or at least to the barrier that marked where the East once began. This made for a certain coziness, or so those who lived here then like to tell it: punks, squatters, draft dodgers and mainly Turkish immigrants left to fend for themselves in a parallel, anti-bourgeois universe unthinkable in most parts of West (or East, for that matter) Germany. Before the party ended — or began, depending on your point of view — in November 1989, they used to picnic on Schlesische Strasse, today a noisy thoroughfare, then an asphalt playground blocked by the Wall at its eastern end and the river Spree to the north. My walk officially begins where the Landwehrkanal (which translates as defensive canal; a defensiveness, however, that predates the Wall) crosses under Schlesische Strasse and empties into the Spree.
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