Author: jn2619a

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Jack Albert Nusenow

Progym: Narrative

There is in Europe another popular snobbery, about the parochialism of America, the unsophistication of its taste, the limit of its inquiry. This, we’re told, is proved by “how few Americans travel abroad.” Apparently, so we’re told, only 35 percent of Americans have passports. Whenever I hear this, I always think, My good golly gosh, really? That many? Why would you go anywhere else? There is so much of America to wonder at. So much that is the miracle of a newly minted civilization. And anyway, European kids only get passports because they all want to go to New York.

Like most things I think, the truth is somewhere in the middle. A. A. Gill is right — America’s cultural contributions to the modern world have permeated every connected community around the globe. America’s infamy and pain reaches just as far. For all our pride, we should have just as much shame. On the international stage, we needn’t pay attention to the petty insults coming from old Europe that Gill describes. They still rely on us, which means that these insults, ultimately, are empty.

Spending any time at all on defending against these is simply wasted time, and romantic ode’s to America’s greatness often feel empty, like they leave out the deep shame of America’s past and present.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

The Selfie, New and Old Travel Writing

Progym: ekphrasis, argument

While it seems to be getting less and less stylish to take and share selfies, in actuality, my sense is that no one has slowed down. The first accusation in conversations about selfies is their vanity. Critiques of selfies is an artistic sense often rely on this quality as a means of attacking selfies’ potential to be rhetorical in some way. This extends to selfies as a form of travel writing. The first sentence in the introduction of Kylie Cardell & Kate Douglas’s essay on selfies as travel writing immediately brought to my mind a famous picture.

At 23, Beatles' lead guitarist George Harrison clicked an iconic selfie at the Taj Mahal during his 1966 India visit

George Harrison, at 23, standing in front of the calm, shallow pool that reflects the memorial’s figure feels anything but vain. The fisheye selfie features the Taj Mahal as the one point perspective with reverence, not vanity. It highlights Agra’s beautiful greenery and their vibrant blue sky. If travel writing’s “purpose” (if it has only one) is to spur curiosity and inspire travel, this picture, for me, is a perfect form of travel writing. It says more without words than most stories could, while leaving mystery to provoke a serious desire to visit the Taj Mahal.

If Cardell and Douglas are right, and selfies are indeed on the forefront of travel writing, they’re nothing new. They’ve only been made ubiquitous.

 

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Jack Albert Nusenow

From McAfee Knob

Progym – personification

I’ve held so many people. I photograph well, I am an outstanding overlook of the Grayson Highlands. Probably the best. I am a “must see” on the AT.

Thankfully, for as long as I remember, the landscape that I oversee hasn’t changed but for the seasons. From a sea of vibrant green to speckles of red, yellow, and orange, to grey and white, and back again. Over and over again the cycle continues, but I never grow tired of the view. People come and go. When they’re alone with me, they never seem lonely. Only other people seem capable of producing that feeling in visitors.

For me, and from me, there is always something new to look at. Whether people realize it or not, this is why they visit me. I hope they get what they came for.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

Pro/Am Travel Writing

Argument

Alacovska proceeds delicately through what is a very difficult and precarious rhetorical situation — that is, critiquing the shift that the travel writing industry is experiencing towards less experienced writers.

In the very beginning of the article Alacovska argues that the digitization of travel guidebook writing is a figurative “canary in the digital coalmine.” We’ve seen essays like this one pushed out plentifully by academics and creative professionals specifically in the last 15 years as the internet has become a mainstay of daily life. They range from truly credible and thoughtful critiques of changes in their field brought about by technology to outright gatekeeping from previously successful people in the space that just can’t keep up. Whether its meant to or not (and its probably not), Alacovska’s essay rhetorically evokes my frustration over the experience paradox every college student faces. I can’t get an job because I don’t have experience because I can’t get an job because I don’t have experience because I can’t get an job because I don’t have experience… So again, I wonder if this essay really is the well written, thoughtful critique of a shift to younger, less experienced, bright eyed aspiring travel writers that are in over their heads that I’m hopeful it is, or if it’s a mischaracterization of old-school travel writers’ troubles as fresh minds with new skill sets move into a space that was once theirs.

At the very least, this essay demands two things: healthy skepticism and more research… two things that should also never stop being demanded from travel writers.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

I Hate Cruises

Progym: Narrative

Cruise ships are a shameless caricature of American capitalism and a working symbol of how dreadful life can be.

There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.

In what is easily my favorite section of the reading, Wallace sets up his transition from brochure style prose prodding you on the benefits and beauties of cruise life to sober but scathing criticism. And don’t get me wrong, I love American capitalism. I love standing in the cereal section of one of the six closest supermarkets to me, staring aimlessly at the fifty-odd options for empty calories. But I hate cruises. I’ve never been on a cruise, but I don’t have to to know. With deckhands and window cleaners and painters and their curated schedules, like Wallace talks about, cruises work as magicians toiling over their long form illusion. An illusion for which you pay generously, to be tricked into thinking that you’re sailing away from your worries and for a week, as you tour some exotic land, you get respite from your life. But what a cruise truly is is a more confining, more unpleasant, and more demanding version of everyday life that does more to remind you of your own mortality and insignificance than a near death experience can.

[the cruise] presents itself as being for my benefit. It manages my experiences and my interpretation of those experiences and takes care of them for me in advance.

I don’t hate cruises because I think I’m above them in some way. I see the appeal of being released from the shackles of decision making. Life as one of those people in Wall-E. It seems incredibly easy. But what I love most about vacation is getting lost, and cruises leave no room for getting lost in any enjoyable way.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

Cultural Reduction

Progym: Argument

Every culture that we believe to be easily recognizable and identifiable is surely more complex than we can ever grasp. I mostly agree with Cullen when he says that tourism “reveals difficulties of appreciating otherness except through signifying structures that mark and reduce it.” My addition of mostly stems from his inclusion of the word reduce. Ironically, we need a semiotic approach to evaluate what he means by this. Like his early example of the Eiffel tower, world wonders lend themselves well to Cullen’s idea of tourists and signs, but this I think is too generous to tourists. When we talk about tourist attractions, we have to examine who these sites actually serve. In essays and articles about tourism, its easy to slip into the routine of describing these sites merely as attractions or monuments that exist to serve foreigners, but doing this ignores the cultural relevance that citizens inherit from their own homes. A Parisian would rebuke the idea that the Eiffel tower or the catacombs reduce in any way French and Parisian culture, just as a New Yorker would with the Empire State Building, or an Egyptian would with the Pyramids. But I think all would agree, semiotically, that these attractions signify their cultures. And while the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building, and the Pyramids aren’t accurate signs or descriptors of the cultures that produced them, they are all, undoubtedly, uniquely of their culture.

The distinction is almost semantic, but there’s an important case for why cultures’ greatest creations aren’t reductionary. Rather, important and relatively immortal cultural and historical markers for us as we exist in a globalist world.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

Romanticizing Foreignness

Progym: Narrative

Urry places an emphasis on the visual arm of capitalist tourism advertising as he weaves his arguments together. We have come a long way since Petrarch, and though our history is riddled with colonialism, I don’t believe our reasons for traveling are simply to subject those foreign settings we visit to our own visual interpretation.

I found value in Urry’s breakdown of the different types of the Tourist Gaze and especially related to the idea of the romantic gaze.

In 2015 I visited Rome. While there, I visited all of the places Urry would say that I was told to, but my love and lasting memories of that trip can’t be found in the Colosseum or even any of the pictures I took.

My most valuable memory is sitting in a restaurant whose name I still haven’t forgotten. Cafe Belsiana is tucked away on a small street conveniently called Via Belsiana. As I sat eating bread and pasta, from the very moment I had sat down, I watched an old man drink his espresso, read a magazine, and walk out happy. This memory is what drives my persistent want to travel, but I couldn’t help but feel defensive when I read Urry’s essay. Would he describe this experience as visual appropriation? In my mind, I was captivated by the romantic gaze. But does this make me a tourist in that restaurant inherently? I’ve looked at people in American bars drinking cocktails in the same way. Is this gaze, this moment, really colonizing as Urry says it is? Or is it the inescapable colonialist history that is present wherever we travel?

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Jack Albert Nusenow

The Art of Travel: A Sorting Machine

Diegema

Airports, the beautifully industrial purgatory that we spend so little time in yet seem to understand so well. When you spend any time in an airport, and possibly this is only true in a post 9/11 world, you exist under an unwritten social contract. The rules aren’t written anywhere… but you know them. You couldn’t conceive of yourself saying “bomb” out loud. You know how early to arrive, what to have with you, which of your grooming products and drinks will inevitably be stolen from you by security.

You know not to bother anybody. Arrive, security, gate. Maybe food, maybe $25 headphones. Flight, land, maybe bathroom. Walk to baggage claim like your bags will be there when you get there, but they never are. Then leave. If you’re not home that’s good, but where Botton is wrong in my opinion is that returning home is drab and depressing.

I was inspired to describe airport experiences in this way after Botton’s scene about flying. It feels importantly to evaluate the processes that we navigate that sandwich such a powerful experience like flying.

My favorite part of airports is how we enter almost into a hivemind there. Everyone is in an airport for the same reason. There’s a collective understanding that breeds humility. Everyone wants to get where they’re going, and fortunately, that stops everyone from impeding eachother.

 

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Jack Albert Nusenow

American Vacation

To me, at least in an abstract sense, the American vacation signifies an almost cocky rebuke of biology. Ultimately, we’re all still animals. Highly intelligent and social animals living in a complex modern society, but still animals. We live in an interesting (and very privileged) environment when we’re able to shift our daily concerns from abject survival to cuisine choices, clothing shopping, and desk jobs. And so, when we need refuge from these pains and stresses of everyday modern life, many of us in America venture back into nature, a place with no concern for our survival or enjoyment.

In the Smithsonian article, a grad student named Nina Caruso working at one of the remaining great camps, Santatoni, is quoted saying:

You get a bit of your soul back when you come up here.

And I believe her. I love the wilderness, and part of me feels more real, more aware, in nature. But there’s also the humor in reaching a point in our evolution as a species where we find clarity and quietude in nature, outside of our habitats.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

Home and The Foreign Spell

Progym: Encomium, Ekphrasis

When I was 2 years old, my parents moved me from southern California, where I was born, to New Orleans. They had visited once and fell in love with the city. They had no connections and no plan. All they knew was that they had grown to hate how vapid orange county was.

But in a place I’m just visiting—in the local paintings you see all over Bali, it’s impossible to see where the trees end and the humans begin—I can’t make out where the boundaries are demarcated.

Pico Iyer puts into words a thought I’ve had about New Orleans ever since I was a kid. There’s an indescribable aura around people who are from there. You get the sense that most people never leave, and they don’t. If they do you can always count on them to come back. Only slightly more than 20% of Louisianans even have passports. You can see the roots that people have in New Orleans than tether them to the city. They casually and comfortably move without a worry of making it anywhere on time. Honking is forbidden and work ends at 2pm on Fridays. Time for the party to start.

I have no memories of living in California. I’m from New Orleans. I call it home. I can pass as a native – well, too – but I’ve always had a sense that I’m a foreigner and I’m pretty sure I’m right. I have a small family and at home that makes me an outlier. I don’t have cousins I see every day. I don’t have a last name that ends in -eaux. But I say yes ma’am and I can make a roux.

I feel lucky to be a foreigner because, like Pico Iyer, my foreignness, in whatever amount it exists, allows my home to “unsettle and surprise me, forever.”