MAIA's blog

Although the sun has only begun to set, in Sassinoro, Italy, the night has already begun. The young men are all gathered at Cafe Decisto, one out of two nightlife spots in the small village, talking and watching the television. In the background, some old men are playing cards, but everyone is drinking beer. Fabrizio is one of the vitelloni of Sassinoro. These men are the members of the community who go out and drink almost exclusively. They spend their days wandering around the plaza in the center of town, and spend their nights going to the club in town or in the neighboring towns. They are an important group in the community, just like the old men playing cards in the back of the cafe.
“So, what’s on the schedule for tonight?” Fabrizio asked.
“What else…the club!” Stefano replied, eliciting a hearty laugh in the rest of the men.
“I’m sick of the club. Same girls, same guys, same songs. I want something new!”
“Tough luck my friend, we’re in Sassinoro, not New York City!”
Fabrizio was quiet as he began to think. He looked over to the television, which was showing a soccer game. But before he could even see the score, the bartender changed the channel.
“Hey! Massimo! I was watching that!” One of the old men yelled from the back of the cafe.
“You can shut your mouth, this is my bar and my television set! I’ll put on what I damn please!” said Massimo, the owner of the bar who was notorious for his temper.
Fabrizio squinted his eyes to take a closer look at the set. Once he recognized the American reality show “Jersey Shore” he scooted his chair an inch closer to the television. He noticed most of the men around him did, too. Fabrizio watched his friends watching the show, completely enthralled. He finally understood this was the break he needed.
“What if we could go?” said Fabrizio.
“Go where?” asked Lucio.
“Shut up! We’re trying to watch here!” yelled the same old man from the darkness.
“The Jersey Shore. Maybe this is just the break we need! These guys sure know how to party, if we could go to Seaside Heights, imagine the fun we’d have! Real, American fun!”
“I guess you’re right,” Lucio said. “But going to America has been my dream for so long, it’s quite expensive you know!”
“Well, I’ve been working extra hours at the repair shop, maybe if we all threw our money together, shared hotel rooms… we could make it work! We could travel just like Sal Paradise.” Fabrizio said, the gears in his head turning.
By this time the first commercial break had started, and all the men at the table were listening.
“You mean from On The Road? Come on man, you actually read that?” asked Bernardo.
“You guys know how much I love America… I think I was the only one who didn’t sleep through English class!” said Fabrizio.
“You know, I have been saving up for a big splurge. This could be fun. We could go shopping, hit the beach, GTL just like the Jersey Shore guys!” said Lucio.
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go to a real American Eagle store!” said one of the men at the table.
“Or Ed Hardy!” said another.
“Alright… so who’s in?” asked Fabrizio, raising his almost-empty glass of beer. Before he could blink an eye, the rest of the beers at the table were raised, ready to clink.
“To the Jersey Shore!”
A week later, they had arrived on the shore. After dropping their things at the hotel room, they hit the boardwalk and started roaming. Outfitted in their most American apparel, dripping in Ed Hardy trucker hats and wife-beaters, the men start their shopping in a cheesy side-of-the-road t-shirt joint. Fabrizio leads the crew, cracking jokes at all the witty t-shirts and grenades they came across along the way. Just when he thought he was truly living the life of a Jersey Shore juicehead, he saw something that stopped him mid-step. It was the Situation, one of the most popular members of the Jersey Shore cast. Fabrizio perked up and tried to remember the minimal English he knew.
“Hey man, is it really you?” he asked.
“Hell yeah it’s me! The situation, in the flesh!” He picked up his shirt and flashed his signature six-pack abs, seeming to be excited about being recognized. “What’s your name? Where you from?”
“Fabrizio…Italy.”
“Italy? A real Italian stallion, born and bred, that’s what I like to see. You guys down to hit the clubs with us tonight? We’re a little bored of the same old crew.”
“Yeah man! Sounds good!”
The Situation wrote a number and an address on a piece of paper, handed it to Fabrizio, and he was off.
The night was a mess of Ron-Ron juice, beating up the beat, and girls being punched in the face. Each of the guys went home with a girl, but Ronnie, part of the Jersey Shore crew, insisted that one of them bring the grenade of the group home, so the rest of them could get the hot girls.
The next morning, Fabrizio woke up with a pounding headache. He was sure that he would never have a night like this again, and almost positive he would never even come back to America. He was disgusted by the slutty dancing, the revealing outfits, the lack of respect for women. At first it was fun, but after a certain point it became gratuitously gross. Italy might not be as fun as America, but at least it had some class. He vowed to take the first flight back to Sassinoro, and never watch the Jersey Shore again.
But somehow, that night, instead of taking a cab to Newark Airport, he was back the next night, beating up the beat provided by DJ Pauly D and smushing with Snooki. And again for the next night, and the next, until back in Sassinoro, Fabrizio was just a memory, a three second title shot on the Jersey Shore Season 3 promos.
 
Interviewer: So Maia, when writing Italian Stallion, were you trying to say anything about American culture? Italian culture?
Maia: Yes, I actually was. Although I am very proud to be an American, I am very disappointed with the direction our culture is going. This instant-gratification, sleep around, be as BIG and loud as possible, whole thing… I just resent it. And to me, Jersey Shore exemplifies it. So I took the Jersey Shore as a metaphor or a microcosm of American culture, and used that to represent what our culture has become. Quite the wasteland if you ask me. I actually have never seen a full episode of the Jersey Shore, I had to research all the silly terms myself! But I did try to portray Italians in a good light, albeit slightly America-obsessed and simple-minded. That isn’t to say that all Italians are like that (nor is it to say all Americans are juice heads or guidettes!) it just made it easier to tell the story that way.
Interviewer: So what were the basic themes you were trying to portray?
Maia: Basically, what I was trying to portray is the stereotypes that Italians (or generally foreigners) have about Americans, and at the same time the stereotypes the Italian-Americans living here have about Italians, and how these stereotypes clash. Also, just the general tendency for travelers to become so wrapped up in the strange land they are placed into. In this story, although Fabrizio wakes up after the first club realizing he was wrong about his notions of American culture, he still was sucked into the club the next night and the night after that. Eventually, he even becomes a part of the Jersey Shore cast. This was basically to show that sometimes travelers can just be sucked into the new world they enter into, especially if they enter into it with a fantastical notion of it to boot.
Interviewer: Did you include any literary allusions in your writing?
Maia: It was a short space, but I did include one. I talked about On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and about how Fabrizio was the only one who read it. This was meant to imply that Fabrizio was so America-obsessed that he actually did all the reading in his English class in school, as opposed to all his friends who slacked off. I generally was attempting to apply that On the Road is essential American literature, more specifically American travel literature.
Interview: Anything you wanted the reader to come away with?
Maia: My negative portrayal of American culture wasn’t pointless. I want my readers to come away with a different view of our culture, maybe realizing that the Jersey Shore and similar mindless reality shows are not really worth our time. Sometimes it takes an outsiders view to see the state your culture is really in.
 
Jersey Shore Term Glossary:
GTL – the schedule of the cast of the jersey shore. Gym, Tan, Laundry
Grenade – ugly girl in a group of hot girls
Juicehead – muscular attractive male in the eyes of women on the Jersey Shore
Situation – your abs, more specifically the abs of one of the stars, Mike.
Ron-Ron Juice – a mixed alcoholic drink the cast drinks before going out
Beat up the beat – a dance move where they pump their fists to the beat of the song
Girls being punched in the face – reference to Snooki, one of the characters, being punched in the face at a club on the first season
Smush – hook up with, sleep with

Sputnik Sweetheart was an interesting choice to end travel fictions with. Although some books we read were weirder than others, this one definitely took the prize for strangest travel fiction. (Comfort of Strangers taking a close second, but it’s a different kind of weird, more shock-worthy instead of thought-provoking) In a way, although many of the themes we talked about on the first day of class were still present throughout the book (vacationing to an exotic place for an escape/break from the real world, finding yourself when vacationing, losing yourself when vacationing, being a foreigner vs. being a native, learning language…) this book was a whole different kind of travel fiction, and the real point of the book lay not in the classic clichés of travel writing but in the deeper metaphorical kind of travel. In Sputnik Sweetheart, although Miu and Sumire travel together to Greece and around Europe, and K eventually goes there as well, and Miu references trips she has made to France and other places, the real journey in this book is to the “great beyond”. Maybe this great beyond is heaven, maybe it’s hell, maybe it’s neither, and just some spiritual “place” that your soul can go without bringing your body. This isn’t a place you’d find on a map, it doesn’t have a language, or customs, or foods, or people… it’s a place you reach in your own mind. It’s where Miu went when she was stuck on that ferris wheel, its where Sumire went when she was lost all that time, and its where K went when he fainted when trying to follow the music in the middle of the night in Greece. Unfortunately, this blog post won’t contain a lot of insight, its comprised more of questions. But I think that when Murkami wrote this book, that’s what his goal was. He wasn’t trying to make some sort of spiritual point, but instead ask the questions that needed to be asked. Are the things in this book complete, utter, ridiculous fiction? Or could they actually happen to you? Could you really split into two people, watching your doppelganger through your window? Could you really feel such an extreme, tangible change in yourself overnight? Perhaps, instead of trying to answer a question, or make a point, like most authors try to do when writing (some would even say, that’s the only purpose of writing, to make some point) Murkami instead simply wants to raise our curiosity about traveling to a “spiritual” place instead of a tangible place. To me, it doesn’t seem that crazy—when we dream, we certainly enter a quite different and shocking world, where sometimes we are not ourselves… and there is no one correct scientific explanation for that. Although I myself am agnostic and don’t really believe in much of a spiritual world, this book definitely made me think twice.
By the way, sorry for the completely unorganized rant. I hope someone agrees with a couple of the points I made. Or maybe I didn't really make any.

While reading The Concise Chinese English Dictionary For Lovers, what I found most striking was the incredible difference between Western culture and Eastern culture. Although every culture has differences that make them distinct from others, it seems that the differences between China and countries of the west are extremely great.

America and London, for example, have a lot in common. Many times I forgot that Z was even in London, and assumed she was living in America. I’m sure that if an American went to live in London for a year they would not have that much trouble getting by. Same goes for Italy, France, and other countries in Europe. But Z’s trip to London was extremely hard, and caused her to latch on to a man there to help her feel like she was in more of a “home”.

One of her main issues with moving to London was the language. She took classes to improve on her broken English, and ended up improving a lot by the end, as indicated by the compliments she received from the many foreigners she encountered when on her month long trip around Europe. But when she first learned it, she had a lot of problems with it. She had a dictionary, but many times it took more than just looking up a word to be understood. The grammar was completely different and she found it difficult to speak with the same flow that the English spoke with. Many qualities about the language she thought were unneeded, too much. Perhaps this is a reflection on our culture, especially in comparison to China’s more simple way of living. She gets very frustrated by trying to learn the language and wonders why study language at all. But I think its clear that by learning English, she was able to learn a lot more about the culture than if she had just gotten by with a few words here and there.

What I am really interested to hear in our class discussion is if people think this is true-to-life. The story almost seems a bit exaggerated at some points, in terms of the vast differences between the cultures and how uncomfortable this made her. I suppose only someone who has been in her shoes can understand.

Ian McEwan is an author that is famous for his use of gratuitous violence and sadomasochism in his books. If it were a trashy love novel, we might just consider it in there for shock value, not really anything important to analyze. But considering we're reading this book in a college seminar... it must go a little deeper than that. I assert that McEwan's use of violence and sadomasochism, especially in Comfort of Strangers is in there to elicit our own innate desires, and make us realize that although sadomasochism seems like a faraway desire, only for the freaks, we all have a little bit of it in ourselves, it just needs to be released.

McEwan introduces Mary and Colin as a normal couple with normal relationship problems. They are losing touch with one another, barely communicate, sometimes even fall asleep during sex. He does this to make them relatable. They take a trip, probably to try to add some excitement back into their relationship. We can also relate to this. Vacations do give us a break from the gloomy, dreary day to day. They constantly get lost on their way to dinner and feel the city is intentionally too labrynthian for any visitor to be able to find their way. All of these things make Mary and Colin the quintessential normal boring couple.

This makes it so when they fall victim to Robert and Caroline's sadomasochistic ways, it shocks you. You don't understand why they keep going back to Robert, even when they can tell how crazy it is, and you are shocked that they too get into this strange sexual fetish of inflicting and receiving pain and punishment. But because you are now used to comparing yourself to Mary and Colin, you ask yourself:  could I too fall victim to this way of thinking? Could this sexually arouse me, too, if I met the person who was just convincing enough? Who presented it in a way that made it not scary, but fascinating and new?

These questions are ones of self exploration. This is a quality not many books have. Although you can delve into the personality and life story of the characters, rarely are you given a chance to take a step back and reflect on how it relates to you. This gives the book a more universal meaning and significance, which I really appreciate. Although I'm still not into the whole sadomasochism thing, I now am more conscious of my personal predilection for violence and my desires in general. 

Paul Theroux writes of two people, living completely separate lives, but living quite similar realities. The two both start out with a jarring experience to take their trip to India in a direction they didn't think it would go. For Dwight, it was his first meeting with the girl. He hated India, but at the first sign of kindness, learned that there might be something to like about it. For Alice, it was the betrayal of Stella which made her reexamine her real reasons for taking the trip.

The next step was feeling comfortable. Both Dwight and Alice soon grew very comfortable in their new homes, and almost felt a part of the culture. Dwight sank into his daily routine of the monotonous meetings, then taking a taxi to meet Indru, while simultaneously Alice spent most of her day in Electric City working at InfoTech and then took a taxi back to the ashram at Sai Baba at night. These are what Dwight would call "indian surprises", what makes you realize that India is more than a business trip, more than a graduation trip, but something like a home. These are also extremely strong contrasts of the two sides of India, which take turns playing the dominant role in its image to the outside world. One is the industrial working world of India, where the lights never stop shining and labor is cheap. The other side is the spiritual side, the familial side, which Dwight and Alice both thought they fit into perfectly.

Then, the both of them had an unfortunate realization. For Dwight, it was the day on the beach when his secret was revealed. And for Alice, it was the series of events with Amitabh, leading in her being raped. Both of these climactic moments lead to a serious reevaluation on how much either character truly "belonged" in India. Before, race was never an issue either of them had considered. But now, they both felt a racial and cultural divide in everything they did. They realized they couldn't pretend to be part of such a tight knit family as the culture of India that doesn't trust easily. Dwight felt "wisible" while Alice felt the extreme divide on the train with the women and their children. 

Finally, the two characters both had a spiritual experience at the end which reaffirmed the entire situation for them. It put things in perspective for both of them and, thankfully, made it so both trips had a positive end. For Dwight, he finally was free of his bad cravings and only wanted to live life, sort of like the Jain philosophy. For Alice, she was finally freed of her pain she felt from being raped when she released her spiritual guide, the elephant, freeing him and freeing her soul as he also stomped away all of the pain that was brought to her in this terrible time.
 

The greatest part of these parallel stories is that Theroux implies that these two people are just two of the millions of American travelers that think they can assimilate into Indian culture. Every day, he seems to say, there could be another that falls victim to the confrontational family that is India. But in the end, he hopes, they will come out of it better, more spiritual, more thoughtful, more caring, or anything. India will effect you one way or another, and you just have to stay long enough so that it is a positive effect.

In reading Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, I was immediately struck by the romantic relationship and center of the book, which is Aschenbach’s love for a little boy, Tadzio. At first I thought the love was strange, bizarre even. When delving father into the novel, though, I started to appreciate this love in several different way and saw it as less of a shocking NAMBLA endorsement and a more respectable story. First of all, the love between an older man and a younger boy is commonly seen in ancient Greek mythology and is, at least on some level, an allusion to that. However there are many other points that redeem this love in my eyes.

I think Mann tries to portray Aschenbach’s love for Tadzio in a perverse, erotic way to shock the reader when in actuality the love is much more subdued than he makes it out to be. I believe that Aschenbach’s love for Tadzio is basically just an extreme admiration. Aschenbach’s wanderlust and many other aspects of his personality indicate that he is growing old and probably finding it hard to come to terms with his age. At this time in ones life, one feels nostalgic about years past. Aschenbach is probably jealous of Tadzio for all the things he has in his youth that Aschenbach lacks: smooth skin, a quick brain, a sharp memory. If the relationship is considered in this way it seems far less creepy.

Another way to consider Aschenbach’s love for Tadzio is by thinking about the strength of his love. It is quite respectable when you think about the fact that he truly will do anything for love, despite its societal consequences. Aschenbach is willing to sit for hours staring at Tadzio, and whatever deep underlying reasons he has for this, it still shows the boundless nature of love. In a way, Aschenbach is a hero in the classic sense of the word. The ability to do anything in the name of love is a true characteristic of a hero, one we can all respect.

When Mann wrote Death In Venice, he must have known he was being controversial. He obviously knew that people would not look highly upon the relationship between a man and a boy. And he obviously knew he would throw people off by not inserting any of his own moral judgment about the matter. He doesn’t make it clear whether he believes Aschenbach is right or wrong in the situation, he purely tells the story and allows the reader to make their own judgments, which I appreciate in a book.

Home is typically defined as “a nurturing shelter… where we can openly and comfortably admit our frailty and our bodily needs… the pivot of a daily routine.” (Tuan) While typically many travel fictions, especially those read in our class, present fantastical stories of travel that can sometimes be difficult to identify with, home is an idea that we are all familiar with. If we think about our lives through a geographical lens, we can organize all of our experiences into places. The place we were first born, the place we spend time with our friends, the place we get our education, the place we always go on vacation—the one common denominator here is the place we spend the most of our time, the place we return to in times of need, or simply to catch a wink of sleep. This place is home. Along with this idea of a “return” to home, home is typically considered a “refuge”, somewhere we go when we need order and authenticity—something we typically lack in everyday life. Yi-Fu Tuan attempts to describe the home in his piece “Place: An Experiential Perspective”, calling it a “center of meaning”. All of these things are well and true—for most people. But in the case of many of the characters we read about in our stories of wild travels around the world, country, or continent, we see the idea of home as a center of meaning start to be confused. In a number of our readings, our characters, for one reason or another, can’t find or remember where their home really is. But interestingly enough, they are not looking for it. Two main examples of this phenomenon can be seen in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. In both of these novels based on true life, the characters experience confusion of where their home truly is, or if they have one at all. But because home is such a central “place” in the lives of most people, a party must have a very strong reason as to why they choose to disassociate themselves from such a place. Possibly due to their basis in reality, both of the stories do have very legitimate reasons for leaving home. This might show the real truth of the necessity having a “home” as a center of meaning: for people who are innocent, home is an easy and safe place to always fall back on. But once you’ve seen that things at home are disturbingly inauthentic, or have seen things more “authentic” than home itself, you feel no need to continue to possess home as a center of meaning.

After the horrors of World War I, many of the youth were disillusioned by all of the violence that had just overtaken the world. Indicated by its primary title as the “first” world war, it was the first for many things, especially the shocking amount of violence. Those who were in the war were especially scarred by the violence, so much so that their generation was coined as the “Lost Generation”. One of the members of this lost generation was Ernest Hemingway, who became an expatriate after finding a disturbing lack of greater meaning in American society. He wrote about his trials and tribulations as an American expatriate in Europe in his book, The Sun Also Rises. This book was very closely based on real events, changing things only as tangible as names of people and places. This writing style reflects upon Hemingway’s greater search for authenticity that is reflected in the main character’s (based on Hemingway himself) personal quest throughout the book. Simply in its definition, expatriatism reflects the act of denouncing one’s home, not necessarily to replace it with someplace else, just to get away from the home one is used to that suddenly means so little to them in the circumstances of the time. To the characters of The Sun Also Rises, Europe held a certain authenticity, a certain meaning that the United States lacked. The United States is barely mentioned in the book, except to discuss how little identification the men hold with it. However, despite their lack of identification with it, Hemingway tries to show the underlying pull of the home to even these men who are strong and disillusioned to most emotion. At the end of the book, Jake sits in a French café (his current “home”) and buys a copy of the New York Herald. This presents a very interesting contrast between his current home and his traditional childhood home. Even though Jake hates America for many reasons, it’s still comfortable and safe, and those two things are really what makes a home.

Similarly in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the main character, Sal, is directly based on Jack Kerouac himself. This basis in reality makes for an authentic experience, one that the reader can believe in and not have to take with a grain of salt. Although some of Sal’s experiences are outlandish and peculiar by today’s standards, the context of the time in which he lived must be taken into consideration when reading the book. Sal and his friends (or Jack and his friends) basically started the Beat Generation. Also known as the beat movement, the cohort was mainly made up of a group of writers and poets, Jack Kerouac being one of the main ones, and his book On The Road becoming the essential bible of the beat generation. The basic idea of the beats was to liberate culture and break down the many walls that had existed before the 1950’s, in the realms of literature, art, sex, and music. They basically rejected the prevailing American middle-class values and felt a need to protest. For the beat generation to start there had to be some catalyst, some realization that something was wrong in the world. This catalyst is exactly what made Kerouac hit the road in the first place. Like many of our travelers, Sal traveled to search for authenticity, because he could not find any at his home. Because his home lacked authenticity, one of the main defining characteristics of home as a place, to him it held little meaning as a central place, and therefore he hardly identified with it as he grew into his adolescent and young adult years. Typically, when one renounces their original home, they adopt another second-rate home to replace it, because everyone does need some sort of reliability of a home, even if it is not the classic four walls with a mailbox and a driveway. For Sal, his new home was the road. He references it many times throughout the story, and it makes perfect sense when you consider the definition of home. To Sal, the road is where authenticity exists. Where real people have real goals, even if their goal is to just get to work or visit their sweetheart across the border. The road was where there were possibilities, not like in Paterson, New Jersey where everyone’s fate was pretty much set from birth. In On The Road, we continually see an arc of Sal’s excitement about a certain place. He goes from anticipation to excitement to one climactic event, which afterwards deflates him and readies him to get back on the road and start the cycle over. Surprisingly, Sal’s favorite part of the arc is the anticipation. Not even the excitement or the climactic event can get him as happy as having his thumb out on the road, his mind brewing with what he will do at the next place he goes. A third quality of the road is that it makes him feel safe and, simultaneously, makes him feel alive. If he is just sitting in a room somewhere, all he’s doing is getting minutes closer to death. But on the road, he is truly alive. He is experiencing new things and life itself. And if the road can give him authenticity, happiness, and an ultimate security in his life, then why shouldn’t it be considered a home?

Although it is shocking in itself to imagine people renouncing their homes, it is almost impossible to imagine people renouncing the entire idea of home. Because as we can see in these two readings, the men in these stories try to act like they have renounced home altogether, and can’t barely remember where they’re from or which way is home. However, every man needs a home somewhere. Even the homeless men you see on the streets of New York City: their name implies a renouncement (intentional or not) of home, yet they probably still settle down each night to the place that, on their scale, gives them happiness, authenticity, and security. Because perhaps this is one of the defining characteristics of man, or possibly all beings: the need for a refuge, a shelter, or a place they can always come back to.

Yi-Fu Tuan describes a place as a center of meaning for a people or a person. A place can be anything, something as obvious as a country or something more abstract. In On The Road, Sal and Dean have a place that is the center of meaning to them, but this place is certainly more abstract than any name of a place that would in an atlas. This place is the approach, the entry into a new place.

As we know, the characters of On the Road love traveling. The idea of home as the most significant place is widely accepted. But for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the road is home. They feel more at home with their thumb out on the side of the highway than they do living with their aunt or living in New York City. And the place that they find the most appealing, even more appealing than their home on the road, is approaching a new place. There are many examples in the book of times that the approach new places and the excitement they feel at these moments.  They love feeling the “beyond”, like when they look ahead to Mexico and all Dean can say is “Whee!” “Yes!” “Whoo!” “Let’s move!” or even when he first got to San Francisco and described the city in the most cliché romanticized terms. But the pattern seems to be that whenever they get to these places and settle down for a second, they don’t seem to enjoy it as much or take the same pleasure out of it.

For Sal, his favorite place is not Denver, not San Francisco, not Mexico. Although he loved them all at some point, there was one commonality that spanned over the three places, and that was his place: the approach, the entryway.

Similarly, in contrast, the leaving of a place is the worst experience. Even if he hated it there, he still hates the feeling of driving away, of seeing everything turn into a speck. As George Eliot said, “In every parting there is an image of death.” And for Sal, that is the scariest feeling he can have. He is utterly frightened of death and will do anything to prevent his mortality. If parting brings images of death, then entering must produce images of life, living, immortality. And that’s all Sal and Dean really want.

In Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, there are many details about our main character, Sal Paradise, that are made abundantly clear throughout the story. The first of these traits is his impulsivity and immaturity, most likely meant to exaggerate his young age. There are many points in the book where Sal acts completely idiotically, not thinking about the future at all; wasting a dollar on a joint, spending all his money on a bus halfway to his destination and saying he’ll “figure it out when he gets there”, meeting a woman he knows is married with a son and becoming romantically involved with her no sooner than five minutes after meeting her. There are many times where Sal is totally excited about the current leg of his journey, and a few pages later, he is cursing life and can’t wait to leave. However, these all could be tactics to convince the reader of Sal’s character as an innocent young man just trying to find some meaning in life.

However, is this really Sal’s mission in traveling? We don’t know for sure, but I have a few ideas. First being that he was just bored, and is traveling recreationally. He is a writer (like almost all of our traveling characters have been) and is kind of sick of the daily grind of New York life, and needs to get away. He does what everyone tries to do—get as far away as possible (within reach), which for him means hitchhiking to the other side of the country. There doesn’t seem to be much depth to his reason to traveling if you only look at it at this level.

More depth can be found if you look deeper into his actions. Perhaps Sal is a diversionary tourist, who feels deeply dissatisfied with his life in New York, and because of his recent breakup, is just looking for things to distract him. This would make sense and explain some of his impulsive actions: he is just trying to do anything he can to escape, and not feel the pain he felt when his wife left him.

A slightly less optimistic view of Sal is that he is just following the bandwagon. There is a part where he even says that the reason he left was because its what everyone was doing, so he figured it was what he should do as well. This type of tourist was left off of Cohen’s list of tourists, and for good reason. This is the worst type of tourist, and the worst type of person—a follower. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are for leaving, as long as they are your reasons.

A final explanation for why Sal travels is that he isn't "going to get somewhere", he is "just going". This explanation fits perfectly with his impulsivity and immaturity, but is a little shallow: usually people say they're going "just to go", but in reality there is more behind it.

Perhaps the only right explanation is that Sal is a mix of types. There is no one word that can describe him or why he travels, and I also think we aren’t supposed to fully understand the reasons for his traveling, possibly until the end of the book, possibly never. But reading the book will give us a better idea on why Sal truly decided to hit the road.

When Erik Cohen writes about the five different types of tourists, he probably thinks he is defining the five most different types of people you could ever imagine. However, the definitions actually turn out to combine together to create exactly the characters Bowles created in The Sheltering Sky.

The first is the only exception to this rule, as Port and Kit are truly not recreational tourists at all. This view is exactly the one they look down upon, and they do so for a reason. It is not traveling at all, because you still have a center somewhere else. Port says in multiple instances throughout the book that he feels like he has no real home anymore, because he has switched so many times. This definition fits the diversionary tourist, who does not search for a new center or new meaning, but just accepts there is no meaning and just wants something to entertain himself. Port definitely fits into this, he definitely is trying to escape the malaise of lack of culture that is spreading all over the world. The one thing he doesn't realize, however, is that this malaise is being spread by people like him, who feel that they must leave their center and find something better. 

The diversionary tourist isn't the only thing that describes Port. He also can be related to the experiential tourist, who tries to find fulfillment in someone else's center. Bowles never makes it totally clear about Port's motives, so all we can do is speculate on exactly what Port is looking for. What makes it even more confusing is that Port doesn't even seem entirely sure himself. This is why all of the types of tourists, in one way or another, manage to fit Port's personality.

The next type of tourist that Cohen talks about is the one that might work the most well with Port's journey throughout the Sheltering Sky. This type of tourist is known as the experimental tourist is someone who has come to terms with the fact that they will never find an authentic experience and instead are content to witness others having authentic experiences. Port's character definitely progresses through these types of tourists throughout the book but I think this is the one he identifies with the most. He first goes abroad as a diversionary/experiential tourist, but eventually he is so desensitized when he realizes that even when he goes deep within the depths of the Sahara, he can't escape himself and the inauthenticity within himself. And this is the true problem within Port, which he can only reconcile with death.

The final type of tourist Cohen talks about is like Port in name but not so much in description. Although we do classify the Sheltering Sky as a "existentialist" book with "existentialist" views, I don't think this is the kind of tourist that Port most identifies with. Although there are aspects of this tourist that are very Port, like that he doesn't really want a new center, but just one that is de-central to his own native center, the fact that this tourist is searching for authenticity makes him different from Port. This tourist hopes to go "from meaninglessness to authentic experience", which is initially Port's intention. But by the end of the book Port has accepted there is no authenticity, and the only true authenticity or higher power can be found in death. 

When I started reading the Sheltering Sky, I was very turned off to Port, the main character. For some reason, the first scene of him evaluating his dream seemed phony, and I sort of took Kit’s side and thought that his map obsession was a bit dull, and that no one really does care about his dreams. And, within the first few pages, it says that he believes “he was not a tourist, but instead a traveler,” (6) Which I find to be a very arrogant judgment to make about yourself. If you believe you are a traveler instead of a tourist, you are thinking too much about it, and are still as unauthentic as a tourist.  I was also pretty disgusted by the way he handled the situation with Smail. First, he was completely turned off to a new experience, so much so that he was physically trying to get away from the man at all costs. During their conversation, he thinks that he “wanted at all costs to keep up the pretense of being familiar with the town” (21) to seem knowledgeable to the man. This is the definition of a tourist (or a inauthentic traveler) to me, someone who just becomes familiar with a place to seem clever to others. Once he finally was there, he still did not take it in. He was bored by the fable he told and was only interested by the prospect of sex with the woman he brought. With each of his actions, he seemed less like a traveler and more like an arrogant, dumb tourist. Things didn’t change when he got back to the hotel, where his inner monologue contrasted from his nice outer demeanor to Eric Lyle’s endless rant about the best place to exchange money in the area. At a point, he thinks to himself that he “hoped he was the only traveler.” What a selfish, egotistical way to think.

However, as the story went on, Port’s character became more likable. Perhaps it was in comparison to the other morally unsound characters, like his wife Kit and friend Tunner (interpreting the words wife and friend very loosely) and Eric Lyle and his dreadful mother, but as the book went on Port’s character seemed to grow in depth. The trip to Boussif with the Lyle’s perhaps is the most stark contrast—all Mrs. Lyle can do is talk about all the things she hates, and Port’s inner monologue shows how much he hates her intolerance. Once in Boussif, his view on traveling seems different than it was in the first port city they were in (which is unclear… I chose this picture of Oman, because that’s what one of the critics said it was). He says that traveling is going when you feel like going and staying when you feel like staying, which is a much more appropriate definition of traveling, not “as opposed to tourism”. Also, when in Boussif and when compared to Kit’s paranoid nature, Port’s deep thought seems much more intelligent. I liked the detail of him going back to Boussif at night without Kit to watch the land. It seemed like a very authentic, not touristy thing to do. But we will see how Port’s character develops in the rest of the book.

The Sun Also Rises is a book that focuses greatly on the complexity of personal relationships in the greater backdrop of post World War I society. The implications of the time frame factor in greatly not only to the relationships the characters share with one another, but in the places they travel and their reasons for traveling.

The “gang”, which includes Jake, Brett, Bill, Mike, and Cohn, is mainly composed of war veterans, which explains why they chose to be expatriates. Like many war veterans, the gang felt disillusioned by the violence they had seen in war, especially Jake who experienced violence for himself. They, like many others, sought to escape this violence and the memories of violence that perpetuated in the United States by going abroad and living there indefinitely.  In fact, Ernest Hemingway himself was one of these expatriates who went abroad to Paris, seeking a more freethinking and accepting society for him to write in. Becoming an expatriate is a form of travel, albeit an unconventional one. It doesn’t go along with many of our preconceptions of travel, because it is semi-permanent. However, it is still for an escape, and still to experience something different than the land you are used to. It was very interesting to think about travel through the eyes of these ex-pats.
All of the gang shares the same characteristic of experiencing the war first hand, except Cohn. This alienates him from the crew in a very obvious way, first expressed by racial slurs and backhanded remarks, and then resulting in intense physical violence. It was like no one took Cohn seriously because he had not experienced what they had experienced, making all of his feelings less legitimate and somewhat of a joke. While they are in Paris because they need to be away from the United States, it seems like Cohn is just there for fun. Right at the beginning of the book, Cohn has a crisis about needing to get out, and says how he is “sick of Paris” and “sick of the Quarter” (19)

However, we are not here to analyze character relationships, we are here to talk about travel! And this book focused on a very interesting kind of travel. The story causes you to question what makes a native, what makes a tourist, and what makes a traveler. Even though Jake was born in the United States, he holds no identification with the country at this present time, and is probably trying to disassociate himself from it. But still, at the end of the book he bought a copy of the New York Herald, and sat in a French café to read it. A strange contrast, probably intentional by Hemingway to show the contrast between where Jake is “from”, to where his “home” is. It was also interesting to see the way the gang conducted themselves abroad—sometimes they blended right in, speaking the language, fraternizing with the locals, and other times they acted like utter tourists, not knowing the ins and outs of a bull fight and being drunk idiots all around the city.

Hemingway definitely compares all of these conventions to show that just because you’re born somewhere, doesn’t mean you must stay there. Sometimes, your home country can betray you. And he wants to tell the reader, it’s okay to explore.

Daisy Miller by Henry James, though technically under the category of “travel fiction” is more a story of a free spirited girl whose actions cause her to be criticized by her peers. The story is set in a town called Vevey, Switzerland, which is home to many American tourists. An American man, Winterbourne, is introduced to an untraditional, but beautiful girl, named Daisy Miller. This girl is not like most of the other girls of the time. She is independent and free-thinking, which causes Winterbourne to be fascinated by her. He promises to take her to meet his aunt, but his aunt refuses to be introduced to Daisy Miller because of the reputation she has about town. This conversation presents the central conflict in Daisy Miller—whether Winterbourne should respect Daisy for flouting social conventions, or whether he should detest her like the rest of his peers do for being different.

The interesting part of Daisy Miller, when thought about through the lens of travel fiction, is that it takes place on vacation. The same story could have been set in America (most of the characters are American) but the fact that it is set in a foreign setting gives it a whole other dimension through which it can be analyzed. The irony of the book is that Daisy is an American tourist, and all the people who criticize her are American tourists as well. Not one of her adversaries is Italian, or Swiss, but yet they are all worried that Daisy is marring the reputation of all Americans with her free spirited behavior. The reputation that they are concerned about keeping is that they are cultured, polite, and educated—just like their European counterparts. If anything, Daisy actually represents the typical stereotypical American of the time: free thinking, naïve, and looking down upon convention. This would explain why Giovanelli, the one authentic foreign character, is so attracted to her: she exemplifies the mysterious American woman he has never seen in Rome. Because what’s interesting about someone who, despite their country of origin, tries to be just like someone from your country who you see every day? It’s interesting that this contrast is so clear to the reader, yet the women like Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker still look down upon Daisy so flagrantly.

This contrast goes back to one of the topics we talked about the most in class—the distinction between a traveler and a tourist, and the distinction between an authentic experience and an inauthentic one. Mrs. Costello probably thought that Daisy Miller was the lowest common denominator of a tourist, someone with no class or social conventions. But at the same time, these two distinctions made Mr. Giovanelli believe she was the most authentic sort of traveler, and caused him to be infatuated with her. Perhaps no one can judge a visitor to a foreign country, it simply depends on the eyes through which you look. 

Although most people would associate the word travel with exotic places, food, languages, and cultures, my family vacations of my childhood were of a more simple variety. As a young child, I frequently visited Akumal, Mexico, a small town about an hour south of Cancun, the spring break haven. We would usually stay with family friends of ours who had a house they lived in during the winter months. My family took a liking to the area and its comfortable, low stress vibe, so naturally when the house next door to the one we frequented went on sale, we made the investment and bought the house.

From then on, we went to that house every break we had from school, and sometimes even during summers. And even though it was right on the Caribbean, one of the most beautiful places in the world, some of the best moments I had there were spent sitting around the kitchen table with my family, eating Zucaritas (the Spanish version of Frosted Flakes.) Although the walls were painted with traditional Mexican art, and we were forced to store our food in the oven to avoid them being corroded with the salty ocean air, Akumal really felt like home. My sisters and I were able to look past our petty fights and actually be friends, and the beautiful sunrises got me up at hours I would scoff at waking up at back at home.  Those hours of the morning allowed me to spend some quality time with my parents that I never had time for at home with my busy schedule. It was comfortable like home, but beautiful, different, and relaxing like a vacation should be. We knew all the restaurants in the area, always went to the same convenience store, and the same beaches. The routine eventually became quite familiar, much more habitual than you’d ever expect a vacation to feel.

So when people say that traveling is like a love affair, I would have to agree. But my love affair with Akumal is like the love affair you have with the girl next door you’ve known all your life. It’s easy, its simple, and it works. It might be the exact opposite of everything you’ve ever known to be true about travel: wild, dangerous, mysterious, awe-inspiring. But what I had in Akumal was a home away from home. And to me, that’s the best kind of vacation.