woahhh its meagan's blog

Past and Present Band NerdsI was born in Lexington, South Carolina, and have lived there for the past eighteen years of my life. I grew up in a small town where the place to be on the Fourth of July was the Peach Festival and students in camouflage overalls drove to school in pickup trucks (the color of the vehicle indiscernible through the multiple layers of caked-on mud). In Lexington, you read the bible like your Momma and supported the Republicans like your Daddy. You went to Wildcat Hollow on Friday nights to watch high school football (or play their fight song like I did), to Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday to cheer on the Gamecocks, and sat at home on Sunday to watch professional football on Direct TV Sunday Ticket (after going to church, of course.)

In Lexington, everybody knew everybody else, and they were all content to keep it that way, therefore, I was never encouraged to leave the town I grew up in. Aside from a marching band trip to Hawaii in my junior year (which in spite of its tropical locale was still undeniably American), the furthest west I had been was Nashville, Tennessee, and I had never left the country. After falling in love with New York City during a trip with my eighth grade history class, I knew that was where I was meant to be. I began to feel stifled by my hometown, and worked hard throughout high school with the sole purpose of leaving it.

Fortune Cookie: cute, huh?"I think maybe I will never go back to England, the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman, the country where I also got injured, the country where I had my most confusing days and my greatest passion and my brief happiness and my quiet sadness."

Travel changes people. This book is a prime example. Z arrived in England a sheltered girl from the East, and grew into a woman; learning the language, culture, and people of the West while still holding onto her own culture. Although she expressed a dependence on her lover immediately, she still managed to grow as an individual, often at his urging. Her forced journey across Europe elicited much loneliness, but by being forced out of her comfort zone, she was able to discover more about herself as an individual, a concept that was not welcomed in Communist China. She saw the West as an "old capitalism country" in which "'self' means everything," whereas in China, "the 'self' is the enemy of the Communist party."

For me, The Evening of the Holiday seemed like more of a "love story" than a travel fiction. The presence of travel takes a backseat to Tancredi and Sophie's strange love affair, functioning simply as a reason as to why Sophie is in Italy, and (arguably) as a reason for her departure. For the first time in any of the books we have read, one of the main character's does not die as a result of going abroad, and perhaps that is why the book did not feel like a true travel fiction to me. However, it did share some similarities to other more travel based novels we have read this semester.

The Sun Also Rises - This is a pretty direct relation. In both novels there are festivals that seem to jump start or complicate relationships. The bullfight festival in The Sun Also Rises is the point where Brett falls in love with Romero the bullfighter, causing tension in her relationships with both Michael and Robert Cohn. Similarly, in The Evening of the Holiday there is an extremely lavish festival. Sophie and Tancredi's relationship shifts from cold and distant to open and passionate during the time in which the festival takes place. The tumult of the festival in contrast with the controlled holiday Sophie had been spending in Italy symbolizes the quick and dramatic way in which the two fall in love.

This novel definitely left me in a state of shock. It was perhaps one of the easiest/quickest reads we have had so far, and definitely one of the most haunting. There are so many aspects of the novel that are worth delving into, but one of the most intriguing and broad themes presented is that of gender and gender roles. Colin and Mary's open non-subservient relationship juxtaposed with Robert and Caroline's male-dominated masochistic relationship represent two extremes of the gender spectrum.

It is said in the book that sometimes Colin and Mary could hardly believe that they were two separate people. They joked about handcuffing themselves together and throwing away the key, and their closeness was eventually described as parasitic. Their conversations were balanced; neither person spoke more than the other. They were equally dependent on each other, very different from a male-dominated relationship. Colin was also often described as angelic, feminine, and even childlike. His "femininity" serves to completely throw out any semblance of subservience in their relationship. Mary was free to make her own decisions; she would leave the hotel on her own, and take part in her own activities (like yoga), which is completely different from Caroline's role in her relationship with Robert, or lack thereof.

Creeperrr...: he even has the mustache.Well, this book was by far my least favorite. Yes, the prose was beautiful sometimes, but I think the author got carried away with it and the book definitely went on for about 100 pages more than it needed to. I hated the lack of dialogue and action, and I really just didn't like the main character, who was the only person the reader is ever given any insight into. The fact that it was a fairly short book hardly makes up for the suffering I experienced while reading it. Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Now that that's taken care of, one interesting thing brought up by the book (perhaps the only interesting thing) was the portrayal of age through the perspective of the narrator. The reader is made aware of some of Aschenbach's thoughts on age, which conflict with his desire for a boy much younger than him and his thoughts on that desire. Toward the beginning of the book, when Aschenbach first leaves Munich, he recounts his shock and disgust at an old man who happens to be his fellow passenger. He is somewhat enraged by the fact that this man is acting like the youthful passengers around him, in dress and manner. The man is often drunk and crude, and wears clothes that the narrator deems only fit for young men. Although Aschenbach sees the man as a sore thumb among the people he associates with, those men have accepted him into their circle and seem to pay no attention to his age. Aschenbach is shocked at this, and views the man's behavior as inappropriate. This of course, is completely hypocritical of him.

In The Mosquito Coast, Allie uses travel as a means for escape. However, this attempt backfires when he realizes that the problems he faced back in America also manifest themselves in the strange new country they move to. Allie's overtly cynical views on America's "downward spiral" which lead him to search for means of escape forces his family into the roles of outsiders. By using Charlie as the narrator, the author portrays this view of the family as outsiders and utilizes a more objective lens through which to examine Allie's motives and decisions. Because the family is kept in the dark most of the time, the inquisitive perspective of Allie's 13 year old son reflects the family's misgivings as a whole, and keeps the reader at a distance as well. Allie is so stubborn about his decision to relocate that he can not see/ refuses to see the dangers and downsides of the move. His family on the other hand, sees the consequences of Allie's decision constantly: in the dingy and dangerous La Cieba (where they first arrive), in the roads that lead to nowhere, and the dead animals that litter these roads.

Allie's stubbornness proves to be his downfall. Because he fails to realize that travel is not a permanent means of escape, he becomes oblivious to the dangers he is subjecting his family to. Because the reader experiences the story through the eyes of Charlie however, the reader is made aware of the impending danger, and this narrative perspective serves as a sort of foreshadowing effect.

The way the natives were portrayed in Heart of Darkness can be considered malleable when examining the text. The natives were shown as both powerful and powerless at different times within the story. Because the Europeans were traveling deep into the interior of a country they were very unfamiliar with, the natives held an air of mystery about them; however, this mystery often did not elicit respect, as it usually does. The natives were treated very poorly, and forced into service, overworked and poorly treated. Even the fact that the natives in the service of the ship were cannibals did not make the Europeans wary of their treatment of the natives. Although the fear associated with cannibalism did not serve to alleviate the suffering of the natives on the ship (and therefore deemed them powerless), there were instances in which the natives used fear to bring them power, although subconsciously and usually to little or no avail. At one point the ship comes under attack, and it becomes necessary to scare the natives away with the ship's horn. Upon hearing native drums or spotting a native village on their voyage, the pilgrims would be worked into a frenzy. The unfamiliarity of the landscape they were in and the people they encountered served to make everyone anxious, and that anxiety escalated through the book.

In Dean MacCannell’s article, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” the author analyzes the difference between “front regions” and “back regions” as they pertain to tourism and the touristic search for authenticity. He shows the difference between the two regions by discussing a restaurant analogy: the front region is where the performance takes place (waiters and servers put on an inauthentic display for the restaurant patrons), and the back region is where these performers “retire between performances,” and true authenticity takes place (590). Although this is presented as a structural separation in the analogy, this division is meant to be examined as a social divide. Because it is intended to be analyzed from a social standpoint, there are some ambiguities that are automatically brought to the front-back distinction. The front region and the back region are discussed as poles, not exclusive categories, therefore authenticity is even harder to find within a touristic experience. These ambiguities are also deepened by other societal factors; the effect of war on travel is one of many.

"...and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everyone goes 'Awww!'"
I can relate.

In analyzing The Sheltering Sky, I realized that it would be best to look to outside sources for inspiration when the time came to blog. So I read Paul Bowles and Edgar Allen Poe: The Disintegration of the Personality, which illustrated a relationship between the two authors that I found interesting. The article discusses Poe's influence on Bowles' work, and the similarities between the subject matter they choose, and the theme of the "disintegration of personality" that can be found in their works. The article states that Poe was the first to develop this idea, but was only barely able to grasp it since he too was a victim of this disintegration. Bowles also pursues this idea, but relates it to geography in a way. Bowles, "uses landscape to externalize states of being, a central strategy of his fiction." The fact that the characters are constantly changing locations and the landscape is contantly shifting reflects their own ambiguities when it comes to personality. The article also claims that, "The destruction of the ego has always seemed an important thing... it's the stripping away of all things that differentiate one person from another person. By stripping them away one arrives at a basic working truth which will help one to go on." In The Sheltering Sky, the reader is given a limited view into the personalities of these characters. The fact that the story is told from third person point of view contributes to this fact, but is not the only factor.