This was an occasion for the two-minute hate session on Twitter the other day:
Why? Because it is important to trash the happy things - at least the happy things regarded as such by people who are irritatingly ordinary. The people who would not, for example, bed-rot. The people who, ugh, do things. Now, I don’t think that all of the people who are attracted to this ship are industrious go-getters who want five days of high-octane activities; maybe some are. Bring the kids. They’ll be amazed. Time of their life, even if they barely remember it. Others just want a spot on the deck, lots of food, a nice view, and some fun. A party atmosphere enlivens the vacation.
Thirty bars! Well that says it all! Yes, it does; that’s how the cruise line pays for this. But I’m sure it has a huge movie theater, evening shows, comedy clubs, a blues club, a nice little piano bar tucked away somewhere that’s sedate and civilized.
I've been on a similar-sized ship in this class. Behold the press and crush of humanity:
That's the aft park in the evening. Quiet cafe, trees.
Not everyone wants bulk. Some cruisers just want a spot by the window in the library to read; there are lines for them, but the happy-trashers hate those ships, too. PETRI DISHES / OLD PEOPLE / COOPED UP / LIVING HELL. And that’s fine! A matter of taste. If you’ve been on a really good cruise, with interesting ports and great excursions - say, you stop at a town, tour the downtown, see a style of city-dwelling you’ve never seen first hand, take a tour of a beautiful church, stop at the museum and examine their collection, then wander around the medieval ramparts until it’s time to go back to the ship for an excellent dinner, and you still hate it, then it’s not for you. But it does not mean you are right for everyone else.
It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.
To which you want to say, in a level voice, please do farg off all the way home. Oh - right - you’re already there. Well, find a place in the house where you haven’t been in a while, and farg off to there. If you have to break through a wall to farg off even farther, which we would prefer, we can lend a hammer.
Right away we learn that the author is lots of fun to chat with:
What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The next sentence had better by “Of course I am guilty of this as well.”
Nope
The opposition team is small but articulate. . . . The greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage: “I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.”
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it.
We’re really keen on those other people and what they’re doing, aren’t we?
Some “touristy” activities are fine. Going to the Eiffel Tower is touristy. Or the Louvre. Making sure you see Big Ben. Things you’ve heard about all your life and want to see for yourself, because pictures are never enough. Pompeii is touristy, especially if the tour makes you sit through the limoncello sales pitch. So?
One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens.
I don’t think about says you’re enlightened, but you often know a bit more than you did before, about a lot things.
Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?
Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.
About Pessoa: he seems to have been withdrawn and anti-social and self-obsessed, if brilliant. Also: “In 1925, Pessoa wrote in English a guidebook to Lisbon.”
To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.”
Oh for God’s sake
Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.
The author gives an example of going to a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi, as one does, and having a picture taken with a falcon. The author had no interest in falcons prior, or after, the event.
It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.
I don’t have a great interest in dolphins, but I enjoyed bobbing around with one for a while, inasmuch as it was more interesting than staying home and polishing the fridge door.
Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.
Teleportion being currently unavailable, one cannot say “I appeared in France,” although it would be technically true and might satisfy the author.
Paris is a fascinating city, and the Louvre is a remarkable place.
Something of wonder, everywhere you look.
The experience of just walking to it through the gardens where once royalty plays allows one to imagine in situ things, although of course you could stay home and watch a period movie about it where all the important characters are race-swapped and the plucky good girl queen is striving to combat inequities.
Should you see more than the Mona Lisa? Yes, and I expect that most people’s eyeballs do gather in other works, if only fleetingly, because I don’t think they spend all that money, go there, and leave. But it is snobbery to laugh and point at the people who go to see the Mona Lisa. I hereby give everyone permission to see the Mona Lisa. If only as a sociological experiment to see how everyone else is reacting, or not. And then spend the rest of the half hour with the other works in the room.
The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion.
Meaning, the author walked around a lot. I am expecting the author now to tell us that she did not value architecture or urban history or sculpture or the different commercial modalities of other cultures or the typography of Paris or the small gardens with obscure monuments commemorating a long-forgotten day in history, and that she did not aspire to value any of these things. But I suspect not.
In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.
One suspects that the target market for the piece, being in the New Yorker, is not made up of people who usually avoid museums.
But let’s say you usually avoid museums in the sense that you live someplace where there isn’t one. Or it’s very small and narrowly focused, and you’ve been there. Here, finally, you can indulge, and enjoy - but no, you’re the wrong sort of person who wants to go to “many great cities,” because you, the locomotor, doesn’t know what to make of the paintings.
There’s more on this theme, and then the author tumbles onto the existence of something we call “The round-trip ticket.”
The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
. . . cast your mind to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?
“Once in a lifetime” is not the same as transformative. But what sort of difference would make the experience more justified in the writer’s mind? “I spent two weeks in the Balkans seeing a part of the world I’d never seen, and it was beautiful beyond compare, relaxing, and fascinating. Also, after spending a lot of time in bars talking to some opinions men, I’m now an ethnic nationalist, and I changed religions!"
I'd argue that adding to your stored sum of experiences does transform you, inasmuch as you are more than you were before, if only in recollections of what you did. I was not transformed by walking around the Coliseum, but I had a flash of an understanding of the mad peril you’d experience going down those steps in a mob. Without handrails!
Of course, I could have bed-rotted and read about it. Or read a tweet about it.
Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.
Yep, that’s what I think every time I go to Expedia.
Actually, I think about connecting with a slightly different variant of myself I have assembled over the years of going to Walberswick. But the author would say: if you don’t usually walk through the woods and fields, what are you going to make of the landscape? You might as well be in a room full of paintings.
And (travel) does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.
Oh, you and your photos. You and your trinkets.
Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.
That, and think-pieces in the New Yorker.
It’s 1949.
If there’s an African-American on the front page above the fold in a feature shot, there’s a good chance it’s an African-American paper. And it is: the Chicago World, “The Paper with a Universal Appeal.” Interesting choice of slogans, no? It’s telling the audience that Black news is everyone’s news.
Rose Murphy (April 28, 1913 – November 16, 1989) was an American jazz singer, famous for the song "Busy Line" and unique singing style.
She was born in Xenia, Ohio, United States. Described by AllMusic's Scott Yanow as having "a unique place in music history", Murphy was known as "the chee chee girl" because of her habit of singing "chee chee" in many of her numbers. She was also known as "the girl with the pale pink voice”.
Her top song:
Nothing on Wikipedia for this gentleman . . .
. . . but a search for the name produces a picture of a tavern owner. “There'll be no more ‘shrinkage’ and no more drinks on the house in Lausayle Brown's Chicago tavern.” And it’s him. Other searches reveal that he was the General Manager of the paper, so: writer, businessman, saloon keeper. Wish I knew more.
Breaking: take a walk in the park!
Well
Imagine a story like that in the paper today. Speaks volumes about everything, it seems.
Knock on Any Door is a 1949 American courtroom trial film noir directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart. The picture gave actor John Derek his breakthrough role, and was based on the 1947 novel of the same name by Willard Motley.
According to the citation statement for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame awards, "Motley was criticized in his life for being a black man writing about white characters, a middle-class man writing about the lower class, and a closeted homosexual writing about heterosexual urges. But those more kindly disposed to his work, and there were plenty, admired his grit and heart....Chicago was more complicated than just its racial or sexual tensions, and as a writer his exploration was expansive…."
Since 1929, Chicago has had a parade named after Motley’s newspaper pen name, Bud Billiken. He didn’t start the column, and others wrote it after him. The name came from “a charm doll created by an American art teacher and illustrator, Florence Pretz of Kansas City, Missouri, who is said to have seen the mysterious figure in a dream.”
The Billiken sprang from the height of the "Mind-Cure" craze in the United States at the start of the twentieth century. It represented the "no worry" ideal, and was a huge hit. Variations appeared, such as the "Teddy-Billiken Doll" and the Billycan/Billycant pair (to drive petty problems away). The Billiken helped touch off the doll craze of the era.
