Steinbeck heads for the Connecticut River:
It is very strange that when you set a goal for yourself, it is hard not to hold toward it even if it is inconvenient and not even desirable.
This is very true. Human beings are SO confused.
Tag: travel books
-
I’ve seen many migrant crop-picking people about the country: Hindus, Filipinos, Mexicans, Okies away from their states. Here in Maine a great many were French Canadians who came over the border for the harvest season. It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
-
Steinbeck has very interesting things to say about Deer Isle.
Digression: Self always wanted to visit Maine, because there is a teacher there — in Bates College — who has taught her story “Lenox Hill, December 1991” in self’s collection Mayor of the Roses, for decades.
pp. 41 – 42:
- Maine speech is very like that in West Country England, the double vowels pronounced as they are in Anglo-Saxon, but the resemblance is doubly strong in Deer Isle. And the coastal people below the Bristol Channel are secret people, and perhaps magic people. There’s aught behind their eyes, hidden away so deep that perhaps even they do not know they have it. To put it plainly, this Isle is like Avalon; it must disappear when you are not there.
It sounds a little like California’s northern coast. Self always begins writing fables when she’s in Mendocino. Must be the craggy cliffs, the deep forests, the crashing ocean. During her latest trip to Mendocino, early this year, this sentence occurred to her as she was driving through redwoods: They chased daylight into a gloomy forest.
Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, April 2018 Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
-
Travels with Charley, p. 31:
Very early I conceived a love for Joseph Addison which I have never lost . . . I remember so well loving Addison’s use of capital letters for nouns.
An example of Addison’s writing:
I have observed that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or fair man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Bachelor, with other Particulars of the like Nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author.
Self confesses that she never heard of Joseph Addison before. Who knew that Steinbeck would admire Addison for stylistic Flourishes like the Use of Capital Letters for Nouns (Do you see what Self did just there, Dear Blog Reader? Lol)? She’d like to try that device (using capital letters for nouns) in her 18th century historical novel. At the very least, it would make for an interesting tone.
Stay tuned, Dear Blog Readers. Stay tuned.
-
Self has been reading blazing fast, ever since she began Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, vol. 1 of The Book of Dust, in late March. The last week of March, and through April and May, she was on such a tear. After La Belle Sauvage, she read all of His Dark Materials, then moved on to childhood classics like Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Tove Jansson’s exquisite The Summer Book, two first novels (As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis and Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes, both excellent), and two books by Tim O’Brien (In the Lake of the Woods gutted her. In fact, she can’t stop thinking about it)
Since beginning Travels with Charley, however, she’s been moving at a glacial pace. It took her forever just to get through the Jay Parini introduction, and she’s just on p. 17.
She almost put the book aside last night, because it suddenly struck her that the kind of problems a man might encounter while traveling alone through America are very different from the kind of problems self experiences when she travels alone — self has traveled through not just America, but through Asia and Europe — and she is usually alone. It gets harder with every passing year. Security seems more suspicious (so many stamps on her passport!), people are less kind (or maybe self has just become more paranoid), and she’s definitely become more impatient. For one thing, she hates delays of any sort, and she hates flying because it’s so dehumanizing.
On p. 17, Steinbeck shares one of his underlying reasons for undertaking this trip, and she understands:
- A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the household becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.
Travel is one way to resist the gravitational pull of age. It’s like being young again because everything is new, and you can still be surprised, on a daily basis.
(Note: Self was taken aback that Steinbeck viewed himself as a kind of Ernest Hemingway manly man. She’s always thought of him as ‘gentle.’ He might even be insulted by that description.)
Onward!
Self can’t believe summer is officially here. Time moves so fast. Soon, she’ll have a harvest of figs and plums from her backyard:
Stay tuned.
-
There was a year when all self did was read travel books. She might have missed Travels with Charley. She remembers reading so many others that year, books that brought her to Africa, to the Arctic and the Antarctic, to Turkey and Eastern Europe, to Burma. She might have skipped Travels with Charley because it was only about travel in America. How foolish!
Steinbeck’s journey lasts eleven weeks. Reading Travels with Charley during the Trump presidency is a very fraught experience. “Beneath its surface” is “a sense of disenchantment that turns, eventually, into anger.”
Steinbeck does deal with “the naked face of racism,” which fills him with a “weary nausea.” In Texas, he describes a group of women — white “mothers” — who “gathered each day to jeer at the black children as they entered or left” recently desegregated schools.
Oh. And here self thought that nothing in U.S. history could have been as bad as the present.
Jay Parini in his Introduction:
The idea that objectivity is inevitably tainted by mere expression — and by the fact that a single human being has but a single viewpoint — permeates this travelogue, making all of Steinbeck’s conclusions tentative, as they should be.
Stay tuned.
-
Finished In the Lake of the Woods in the wee hours. Got back past 11 p.m. from the City, resumed reading and just could not put it down until she knew what became of the missing wife.
She then turned to the next book on her reading list, Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck. She’s still on the Introduction, by Jay Parini:
- East of the Mississippi, the conversations he overheard usually revolved around baseball; west of the Mississippi, the topic was hunting. Even though this was the autumn of an election year — Kennedy versus Nixon — there was no rigorous political debate to be heard anywhere.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
-
Going ashore in Alexandria is like walking the plank for instantly you feel, not only the plangently Greek city rising before you, but its backcloth of deserts stretching away into the heart of Africa. It is a place for dramatic partings, irrevocable decisions, last thoughts; everyone feels pushed to the extreme, to the end of his bent. People become monks or nuns or voluptuaries or solitaries without a word of warning. As many people simply disappear as overtly die here. The city does nothing.
— Lawrence Durrell in An Alexandria Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries, edited by Michael Haag (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press)
-
This memoir is like Jack Kerouac, but much much more enthralling. The author and his buddy, Bryan, go all around the world, living hand-to-mouth, and experiencing culture from the bottom. Only young Americans would be so laissez faire.
But, enough of digressions. Below, an excerpt from p. 289:
We pushed on, always edging west. We caught a ship from Malaysia to India, sleeping on the deck. We rented a little house in the jungle in southwest Sri Lanka, paying twenty-nine dollars a month . . . I resumed work on my novel. We got Chinese bicycles, and each morning I rode mine, board under arm, down a trail to the beach, where a decent wave broke most days. We had no electricity and drew our water from a well. Monkeys stole unguarded fruit . . . A madwoman lived across the way. She roared and howled day and night. The insects — mosquitoes, ants, centipedes, flies — were relentless.
Night descends on a Philippine Sea. Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
-
My fears were unnecessary. Nothing too heavy came. Instead, I caught and rode so many waves, through four or five distinct phases of the day, that I felt absolutely saturated with good fortune . . .
— William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Albion, California Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 