hextoyevsky's blog

Good timesIt takes three hours to travel the 1421 miles from Houston, Texas to New York City. A short trip, really, unless it's the first time you've left home by yourself, in which case it's three hours that you will inevitably spend dwelling on all of your hometown memories and all of the memories you hope to make in your new town, New York. Your New York town. The amount of anxiety I had about moving that hung in the air during my plane trip to New York in August (not a round-trip ticket, I noticed while waiting to board) was so palpable and suffocating, in fact, that just as the fire burst from the jets and the plane tilted back mid-air, I couldn't breathe. Stuffed in coach in between two complete strangers, struggling to swallow and inhaling as slowly and with as much control as possible, I thought I would die. Suddenly I felt a tap on the shoulder and opened my eyes to see the flight attendant. My dad got frequent flyer benefits and I could upgrade to first class if I wanted, she said - first class, where a big bottle of cold water and a warm face towel waited patiently for me and my panic attack. An angel? An epiphany? Maybe not, but it definitely put things in perspective. The difficult part of the journey is only as bad as you allow it to be, and almost never as bad as you fear. Someone mentioned in their blog post at the beginning of the year that coming to college was, in itself, a travel fiction for them because the environment of the city is so drastically different from the environment they had grown up in for the past eighteen years. This is true for me too, and reflecting on certain experiences I've had in the city, experiences that I'm sure I never would have been able to have at home, I know that my "pilgrimage" was not in vain.

Looking at the world with new eyesI noticed, before even flipping to the first chapter of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, that many of the editorial reviews describe it, in one way or another, as being funny, in large part due to its "childish" quality. Obviously the writing style in the beginning is very deliberately childish because Z is just starting to learn English and thus makes the same grammatical errors and asks the same questions about our (very weird, nuanced, idiomatic) language that a child would. But I think Guo is also trying to convey with her writing's childishness that moving to a new place renders you a child again in itself, just by dint of the fact that you really have to start from scratch and build a life again, one that can function in this new place amidst these new people and can be analyzed with this new language. It makes me wonder if that is actually one of the draws of travel; I wonder if some people travel because they want a way to go back to this early stage of life where everything is new and which could never be returned to ordinarily, at home. Traveling kind of gives you a clean slate and, if you can overcome the obstacles like language barriers and culture shocks, it is even more rewarding because you can approach the clean slate with experienced eyes - something children don't have. Being a foreigner who doesn't know the culture or the language not only affords you anonymity, but also an excuse to discover things at your own pace, without the pressures of society at home to be mature and reserved and constantly knowledgeable and accountable. You, as an adult, can look at something with awe and wonder and the worst that could happen would be for a local to call you a typical tourist.

Keats' InspirationKeats is probably one of the most relevant allusions I could think of to be included in The Evening of the Holiday. His poems always hint at how ephemeral beauty is, and how time can eventually undo its allure, and this novel is all about the ephemeral, the fleeting things in life: fleeting impressions (as evidenced by how quickly Sophie and Tandredi's initial impressions of each other change), fleeting love (often Sophie reflects upon moments that are so fleeting, like riding back from Florence, with sadness because she knows she will never get to experience them exactly the same way again), and of course fleeting life itself (the contrast between the extraordinary character and attitude Luisa brought to her life and the fact that, even despite this, she too was susceptible to weakness and death proves life's ephemeral nature and makes it seem almost arbitrarily fleeting). What the novel really explores is how the transience of all of these things is amplified by having them occur in a foreign place, particuarly in a relationship in a foreign place, just by dint of the idea that travel and the foreign experience must eventually come to an end. Of Keats' poems, Ode to A Nightingale especially represents this idea.

Adrienne Rich would not approve"How we dwelt in two worlds
The daughters and the mothers
In the kingdom of the sons"
- Adrienne Rich

Tadzio's likeness"The collar, though none too elegant a match for the rest of the outfit, showed off the boy's fair, blossoming head in its consummate charm, the head of an Eros with the creamy glaze of Parian marble..." (52).

Colonial controversyAfter our discussion in class about Conrad's portrayal of the natives in Heart of Darkness, the way in which Paul Theroux described the Hondurans (the "savages", to quote Allie Fox) really caught my attention. The debate still rages about whether Conrad was manifesting his own racist views in writing when he described the Africans as less than human, or whether it was Marlowe's views used as a commentary on the prevailing colonial sentiment at that particular time. And in Conrad's case, either way, while maybe not excusable, is at least a little understandable considering Europeans' lack of exposure to other cultures and their ignorance during the period just prior to the turn of the century. Relative to the "civilized" people of today, those of the postcolonial era were still very backwards in their worldview and so when Conrad makes his protagonist compare an encounter with a native African to watching a costumed dog on its hind legs, the bigotry is in keeping with the environment. Theroux cannot use that excuse. He writes from a completely modern place in time wherein racism still exists but is no longer accepted by the majority, by the "civilized", who would now presumably be those living in developed countries. We are to believe his Allie Fox to be a genius, a rejecter of all things poisonous about Western culture's superficiality, and yet he judges the Hondurans that live and work near his house on very superficial, albeit apparently affectionate, terms: he takes his son Charlie to see their decrepit home as if taking him to see a museum exhibit and leaves his ice box as a charity offering for people he calls "savages".

To be a tourist in today's world, particularly an American tourist, is intimidating. There are, of course, the tourists completely oblivious to how they are perceived by their peers and the cultures they visit, but for many a fear always nags that their search for what Erik Cohen, in his article "A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences", would call "recreation" is considered superficial, that in their recreational trips they are somehow encroaching upon the lives and experiences of both the natives and those elite few worldly enough to be called "travelers". However, Cohen poses an interesting argument when he suggests that the people operating within the first mode of touristic experiences, the recreational tourists, are not so simple - in fact, they are often the ones who get the most out of their travel, or rather, "get what they really want" (184). What they really want is presumably a break from the mechanized system in which their modern world forces them to participate, and what places them at the basest mode of tourism is the fact that they will eventually return to this world, and they understand this, going into the harsh Sahara or hitting up the bar scene in Paris or hopping from Levittown to Levittown, USA as self-proclaimed outsiders. What happens, then, when a tourist doesn't have this understanding? Will they ever get what they really want?

Much prettier in personIn high school, my English teacher told us that the part of college she missed the most was being able to learn for the sake of learning, at your own pace, which to her meant being able to sit with a book in a library or coffee shop, drifting back and forth between reading it and staring out the window. Reading about the first leg of Sal's travels in Washington Square Park, I stopped a few times to people watch and began to wonder how many of these New Yorkers (these "city folk") had ever had the experience of actually seeing the rest of America, beyond the city. I wondered how many of them had stuck their feet in red Georgia clay, or ran through the backwoods of Mississippi, or made the trip - my favorite - from Houston to Austin and understood what it looks like to find the flat land suddenly rolling until finally you drive over a big one and there, sprawled out in front of you for miles and miles of green, is the seemingly endless Hill Country - the kind of view that makes me fall in love with Texas all over again every time. At night it's really perfect; you can see the stars. In this class we've read about Americans' encounters with the foreign, which generally has meant their encounters abroad, but in many ways I think America is still foreign to Americans themselves.

The perfect thing to pack for a trip to Africa"'I want it neat.' She slipped into a backless gown of pale blue satin and went to make up in the mirror that hung on the back of the door. He decided that she should be humored; in any case it amused him to watch her building her pathetic little fortress of Western culture in the middle of the wilderness'" (pg 156).
I really loved The Sheltering Sky. After the first chapter I put down my highlighter and pencil and decided to enjoy it without the pain of focusing too hard on "annotating." It's a good novel to sit back with and let soak in. When I came to this quote, though, I got up to rummage through my drawer because I knew I needed to highlight it, underline it, and put a big asterisk off to the side of the page: this quote says so much about the issue of West vs. East.