See Mexico City! Read a Novel!

“A brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of Mexico City stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes and early dusklights. Down to it we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard, straight toward the heart of town at Reforma. Kids played soccer in enormous sad fields and threw up dust. Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to know if we wanted girls. No, we didn’t want girls now. Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out on the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys. Soon night would come. Then the city roared in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and theaters and many lights. Newsboys yelled at us. Mechanics slouched by, barefoot, with wrenches and rags. Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut across us and surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic. The noise was incredible. No mufflers are used on Mexican cars. Horns are batted with glee continual. “Whee!” yelled Dean. “Look out!” He staggered the car through the traffic and played with everybody. He drove like an Indian. He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. “This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of! Everybody goes!” An ambulance came balling through. American ambulances dart and weave through traffic with siren blowing; the great world-wide Fellahin Indian ambulances merely come through at eighty miles and hour in the city streets, and everybody just has to get out of the way and they don’t pause for anybody or any circumstances and fly straight through. We saw it reeling out of sight on skittering wheels in the breaking –up moil of dense downtown traffic. The drivers were Indians. People, even old ladies, ran for buses that never stopped. Young Mexico City businessmen made bets and ran by squads for buses and athletically jumped them. The bus-drivers were barefoot, sneering and insane and sat low and squat in T-shirts at the low, enormous wheels. Ikons burned over them. The lights in the buses were greenish, and dark faces were lined on wooden benches.

“In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba—also wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce on newspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.”

— from On the Road , by Jack Kerouac

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

The Travel Narrative: Amateur Hour

Continuing our theme from yesterday I thought I’d add that my obsession with the travel narrative isn’t solely limited to great works of literature. As I’ve mentioned here, I’m a bit of a blog voyeur. And today I’m sharing a few of my past internet haunts to give you an idea what I’m talking about.

I’ve stumbled on many an expat blog, some great, some dull.  The worst kind are without a doubt the married couples- burned out consultants with money burning a hole in their pockets- who vow to take a year or two off to “recharge,” but who actually just give off an air of wanting to make their friends and families jealous. Boooor-ing. 

For some reason, the ones that really seem to hold my interest are the blogs of artists living abroad. Sadly, the lifespan of blogs both good and bad, are sometimes shorter than we’d like them to be. (I write that sentence… on a blog. Irony? Or foreshadowing?!!) Most of these have petered out, or have found new homes on Tumblr, but if you’re anything like I am you might just enjoy browsing the archives.

• Jed Sundwall was a friend of some friends. On his blog I had Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brazil and Argentina all at my fingertips. He’s still churning out great material on Tumblr, but you can visit his archives here for a look at his days abroad. It’s no exaggeration to say that everything I know about the Phrygian cap, I learned from Jed. 

• When I was planning my own trip to Buenos Aires, I happened upon Jimmy Danko, a mohawked expat artist who has since returned home to L.A. But watching him whip up some art or repurposingold Subte passes never gets old. Oh, he's still on Tumblr, too. 

• Camille Acey’s Adventuresin Wheelville will show you what it’s like to be black, female and foreign in Slovenia. Though my own wife is Slovene, she’s never introduced me to the glories of Slovene rap. 

• Camille’s blog roll led me to Madame K’s My So Called Life in France. From what I can tell she lives in Metz, which is sort of like the armpit of France, but she creates cool stuff and eats really well. 

• Others examples can be found at Vagablogging.net. They feature case studies on the vagabonding lifestyle and share other helpful tips for those who want to head out into the unknown on their own. Check them all out.

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?

See India! Read a Novel!

The summer travel season may be drawing to a close, but the literary  travel season doesn’t have to . Here are three books that will transport you to the subcontinent of India, a place I’ve always wanted to visit.

For the intrigue and excitement of The Great Game, you’ve always got  Kim,  by Rudyard Kipling.

 “The hot and crowded bazaars blazed with light as they made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned through it like a man in a dream. It was his first experience of a large city, and the sight of the crowded tram-car with its continually squealing brakes frightened him. Half pushed, half towed, he arrived at the high gate of the Kashmir Serai: that huge open square over against the railway station, surrounded with arched cloisters where the camel and horse caravans put up on their return from Central Asia. Here were all manner of Northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles; drawing water for the evening meal at the creaking well windlasses; piling grass before the shrieking, wild-eyed stallions; cuffing the surly caravan dogs; paying off camel drivers; taking on new grooms; swearing, shouting, arguing, and chaffering in the packed square. The cloisters, reached by three or four masonry steps, made a  haven of refuge around this turbulent sea. Most of them were rented to traders, as we rent the arches of a viaduct; the space between pillar and pillar being bricked or boarded off into rooms, which were guarded by heavy wooden doors and cumbrous native padlocks. Locked doors showed the owner was far away, and a few rude-sometimes very rude- chalk or paint scratches told where he had gone. Thus: ‘Lutuf Allah is gone to Kurdistan.’ Below, in coarse verse: ‘O Allah, who sufferest lice to live on the coat of a Kabuli, why hast thou allowed this louse Lutuf to live so long?’

For the era of Independence, there’s always Midnight’s Children,  by Salmon Rushdie

 “He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumors of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the center of the shikara, a gay affair of flower-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorized his boat with incense. The sight of Tai’s shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to Shalimar Gardens and the King’s Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief in the inevitability of change … a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.”

 And for the turmoil of the Emergency, how about A Fine Balance,  by Rohinton Mistry

 “The morning Express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The train’s brief deception jolted its riders. The bulge of humans hanging out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap bubble at its limit…

 “The southbound express slowed again. With a pneumatic hiss, the bogies clanked to a halt. The train was between stations. Its air brakes continued to exhale wheezily for a few moments before dying out.

 “Omprakash looked through the window to determine where they had stopped. Rough shacks stood beyond the railroad fence, alongside a ditch running with raw sewage. Children were playing a game with sticks and stones. An excited puppy danced around them, trying to join in. Nearby, a shirtless man was milking a cow. They could have been anywhere.”

See Buenos Aires! Read a Novel!

If you've got the heart of a world traveler, but the meager budget of a channel surfer, we're here to help. How does South America Sound? Let's look at a few cheap tickets to Buenos Aires, shall we?


For a taste of early post-colonial Buenos Aires, try Amalia,  by José Marmol, the precursor to an entire genre of Latin American Dictator Novels:

"The night was peaceful, illuminated by faint starlight, and a cool breeze from the south was a harbinger of the approaching winter cold.

 "In the dim starlight the Plata could be glimpsed, as wild and deserted as the pampas, and the sound of its waves, breaking softly and gently on the flat shoreline, seemed more like the natural breathing of that giant America whose back was weighted down by thirty French warships at the time the events that we are recounting were taking place.

 "Those who have ever dreamed of taking a stroll on a dark night along the shores of the Rio de la Plata, in the district known as “El Bajo” in Buenos Aires, will be familiar with how sad, how melancholy, and at the same time how imposing these surroundings are. A person’s gaze is lost in the vast space that the river occupies, and one can just barely make out in the distance the dim light of one boat or another in the roadstead. The city, one-half or three-quarters of a mile from the shore, looms up, shapeless, dark, immense. No human sound can be heard, and only the wild, monotonous sound of the waves lends a gloomy touch of life to that focal point of loneliness and sadness."

For a detective’s take on Argentina’s Dirty War, and a search for one of the Disappeared, pick up The Buenos Aires Quintet,  by Manuel Vasquez Montalban:

"For the first time he can get some impression of Buenos Aires, which seems too big for its own possibilities, as if it had grown too quickly or there hadn’t been enough money to preserve its grandeur.

"‘It all looks so promising but somehow rundown.’

 "‘Could be. Every neighborhood is different. Borges said that when you cross Rivadavia Avenue you cross the frontier into another world. Rivadavia runs from one end of Buenos Aires to the other and splits it in two.’

 "…Alma got the driver to go through the Palermo neighborhood- it doesn’t really exist, she said, Borges invented it, and the park in Palermo shows how the pre-Columbian idea of the noble savage has been reincarnated here in Buenos Aires as the ignoble one. ‘As soon as the sun comes up, they all strip off and head for the park to get a tan.’

 "It’s true. On the grass, under the trees of Argentina that to Carvalho seem as unbelievably large as the rivers of America, men and women are soaking up the sun, busily pretending they’re as free as birds in nature."

And just as no trip to B.A. would be complete without a day-trip out to the Pampas, so too will your literary journey be incomplete without the quintessential gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra,  by Ricardo Guiraldes:

"The morning never said a word. The cattle there in the lush fields had not yet come to life; only a few little birds dribbled their faint song like the drip of a faucet. A gray sky, wrinkled like the sands on that ill-omened coast, told of an approaching storm. And we could feel the storm in the limpness of straps, reins, and quirt, all drooping like a turkey’s wattles.

 "Just the same, we had rested well that night and it was good to be moving in the spacious air that tenderly enveloped our bodies.

 "On we went, following a trail or cutting across country behind our string of ponies, their ears erect to take in every bit of news along the road. After four days we came to a ranch we did not know- a new one. Young trees rose only a few yards from the ground; the brightly painted houses proudly displayed their imposing bay windows and their paths and flower beds as well tended as Sunday clothes." 

See Africa! Read a Novel!

It’s been a little while since our last "See The World" post (previous entries can be found here and here), and with winter finally coming to a close, we’ve probably all got a touch of cabin fever. In my case, it’s a full-blown case of stage 4 Wanderlust. To set us free I thought we’d kick off the shackles of cities and towns, and strike out into the wilds of East Africa, present-day Kenya and Tanzania. Here are three great books that will take you there:

Out of Africa, by Isak Denisen (pen name for Karen Blixen.) Published in 1937, but set in 1920’s colonial British East Africa (Kenya), this is a book Hemingway called the best he’s read on Africa (fine praise from someone who’s written some great books on Africa himself.) You’ll probably recognize the first line from the 1985 film of the same name:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.  

“In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.  

“The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway- Or Under Kilimanjaro, by the same author. Both were published posthumously, and both were born out of the same 1950s-era manuscript that he had left unpublished:

“It was a clear and beautiful morning as we drove out across the plain with the Mountain and the trees of the camp behind us. There were many Thomson’s gazelle ahead on the green plain switching their tails as they fed. There were herds of wildebeests and Grant’s gazelle feeding close to the patches of bush. We reached the airstrip we had made in a long open meadow by running the car and the truck up and down through the new short grass and grubbing out the stumps and roots of a patch of brush at one end. The tall pole of a cut sapling drooped from the heavy wind of the night before and the wind sock, homemade from a flour sack, hung limp. We stopped the car and I got out and felt the pole. It was solid although bent and the sock would fly once the breeze roze. There were wind clouds high in the sky and it was beautiful looking across the green meadow at the Mountain looking so huge and wide from here.”

Weep Not, Child, by James Ngugi (early pen name for Ngugi wa Thiong’o). This 1964 book is the first English novel to be written by an East African. You can imagine that its point-of view (native African) and its subject matter (the Mau Mau Uprising) provide a pretty interesting contrast to the two books above:

“There was only one road that ran right across the land. It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on  hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little farther ahead. Some people called them the devil’s waters because they deceived you and made you more thirsty if your throat was already dry. And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin. Only if you followed it it would take you to the big city and leave you there while it went beyond to the unknown, perhaps joining the sea.”

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See Los Angeles! Read a Novel!

If Levar Burton has taught me anything, it's that when I pick up a book, "I can go anywhere." If you're an intrepid mental traveler like me, you probably enjoy trotting across the globe with our See The World series. It’s been a little while since we took you to Venice. So, in honor of the upcoming Oscars weekend, we thought we’d pass along three great tickets to the City of Angels:

Ask the Dust, by John Fante for a taste of the by-gone, Depression-Era LA:

“And so I was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before… …Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I come to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy for a hard-boiled, 1940s, noir police detective tale :

"Warrants was local celebrity as a cop. Warrants was plain-clothes with a coat and tie, romance and a mileage per diem on your civilian car. Warrants was going after the real bad guys and not rousting winos and wienie wagers in front of the Midnight Mission. Warrants was working in the DA’s office with one foot in the Detective Bureau, and late dinners with Mayor Bowron when he was waxing effusive and wanted to hear war stories. 

"Thinking about it started to hurt. I went down to the garage and hit the speed bag until my arms cramped. 

"Over the next few weeks I worked a radio car beat near the northern border of the division. I was breaking in a fat-mouthed rookie named Sidwell, a kid just off a three-year MP stint in the Canal Zone. He hung on my every word with the slavish tenacity of a lapdog, and was so enamored of civilian police work that he took to sticking around the station after our end of tour, bulshitting with the jailers, snapping towels at the wanted posters in the locker room, generally creating a nuisance until someone told him to go home."

Lightning Field, by Dana Spiotta for a look at modern-day LA:

"For the past two hours she had done the unthinkable, the violate: she walked. First through the Vista Del Mar neighborhood of old tiny 1920s bungalows, sort of Spanish colonial with odd Moorish and Eastern flourishes, stuccoes and surrounded by palm trees, so arranged and modern they seemed carved in Bakelite. Car-free, in summer ballet flats, the only thing besides gardeners and children, Mina walked along curbs and looked through interior-lit windows, the fading dusk light affording anonymity, the TVs and stereos and nearly audible conversations providing a schizoid soundtrack- strange juxtapositions of familiar radio sounds with other people’s lives at an audio glance. Sometimes just a name, spoken and unanswered, hung in the air, or whole arguments at high volume. She could pause and listen for hours to fragments of conversations about dinner or car keys or mail.

"She had walked the long way from Max’s apartment in the Hills, then headed down Gower past Sunset and Santa Monica. The streets had already thickened with homebound cars, five o’clock sliding into six o’clock, a special segue time that was once called, by  someone, somewhere, the cocktail hour."

    
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See Venice! Read a novel!

Image from Gerald Brimacombe Photography

If Levar Burton has taught me anything, it's that when I pick up a book, "I can go anywhere." If you're an intrepid mental traveler like me, you'll enjoy trotting across the globe with our See The World series. We kick things off in one of the most beautiful locations on the globe: Venice, Italy. Here are some excerpts from three great books that will take you there:

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

“And so he saw it once again. The most amazing of landing places, the dazzling composition of fantastic architecture that the Republic presented to the worshipful gazes of approaching mariners. The airy magnificence of the Doge’s Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the columns depicting lions and saints on the shore, the splendid and projected flank of the fairy tale temple, the view of the gateway and the gigantic clock. And while contemplating this scene, he mused that arriving by the Venice railroad station by land, was like entering a palace through a back door, and that one could only do as he had done, sail across the high seas in order to reach the most improbable of cities.”

The Aspern Papers, by Henry James

"The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. “How charming! It’s grey and pink!” my companion exclaimed; and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career. But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile, or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean melancholy rather lonely canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side."

"…I spent the late hours either on the water- the moonlights of Venice are famous- or in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange old church of Saint Mark. I sat in from of Florian’s café eating ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances: the traveler will remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches like a promontory into the smooth lake of the Piazza. The whole place, of a summer’s evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices and light footsteps on marble- the only sounds of the immense arcade that encloses it- is an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks and to a still finer degustation, that of the splendid impressions received during the day."

Across the River and Into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway

"He penetrated into the far side of the city, the side that finally fronted the Adriatic, and that he liked the best. He was going in by a very narrow street, and he was going to not keep track of the number of more or less north and south streets that he crossed, nor count the bridges, and then try and orient himself so he would come out at the market without getting up any dead ends.

"It was a game you play, as some people used to play double Canfield or any solitary card games. But it had the advantage of you moving while you do it and that you look at the houses, the minor vistas, the shops and the trattorias and at old palaces of the city of Venice while you are walking. If you loved the city of Venice it was an excellent game. 

"It is a sort of solitaire ambulante and what you win is the happiness of your eye and heart. If you made the market, on this side of town, without ever being stymied, you won the game. But you must not make it too easy and you must not count."

Which other books bring the City of Canals to life for readers?