Category: 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.

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.

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?

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.