Armchair Travel
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
  Just This Once I'm "It"
One of the chief selling points of my blog has always been that it's not about me; it's about the books. But today it has to be because I've been tagged by my friend Mridula and the conditions of the tag, as I understand them, are that you have to name (and link to) the blogger who tagged you and you have to tag six other bloggers (with links) and you have to say eight things about yourself.

I really enjoy Mridula's blogs and all the other bloggers she links to, so this is a fun project for me. And as for the eight things about me, I'll make them all short and sweet.

So I'd like to tag:

my pal Sony Stark at Pilotgirl Productions (Cross that Bridge)

GoNOMAD Editor Max Hartshorne (Readuponit)

Senior Travel Editor Kent E. St. John (Be Our Guest)

distinguished contributor Liz Y. Brian (I Tend to Wander)

a great blog from Nepal I came across (Sirensongs)

and, lastly, Mridula's Other Blog (Everything Else)

As for the eight things about me:

1. I've met someone who met someone who met Mark Twain. My mom met Helen Keller who, Mark Twain said, was the most interesting person he ever met. And since Mark Twain met Ulysses S. Grant and Ulysses S. Grant met Abraham Lincoln... you get the idea.

2. I once received a Christmas card from Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

3. I have read almost all the novels of Arduous Huxley.

4. Me and my daughter and our singing dog Shucks performed in a talent show with Kurt Vonnegut.

5. I met The Great Spirit in a dream, but I don't talk about it much, except to total strangers.

6. I have written two songs, "Everyone Else Think/That's What I Think," and "I Feel Like A Normal Human Being Today."

7. I don't have a high school diploma.

8. My favorite book is Coniston by the other Winston Churchill.
 
Monday, October 30, 2006
  Universal Disregard of the Spittoon
I mentioned in an earlier entry that when Charles Dickens, back in 1842, asked a chief of the Choctaw who had recently been in Washington what he thought of Congress, the chief replied politely, "It wanted [lacked] dignity in an Indian's eyes."

Let's take a look at Dickens' own observations:

"Both Houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honorable member is accomodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described.

"I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not on any account to pick it up with an ungloved hand...

"I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great experience are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we have heard so much in England. Several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces."

This disregard for the spittoon apparently prevailed in the state legislatures as well. When he was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he stayed with a landlord whom he found "obliging, considerate, and gentlemanly."

"Our host announed, before our early dinner," Dickens writes," that some members of the legislative body proposed to do us the honor of calling. He had kindly yielded up to us his wife's own little parlor, and when I begged that he would show them in, I saw him look with painful apprehension at its pretty carpet; though, being otherwise occupied at the time, the cause of his uneasiness did not occur to me..."

Sure enough, the pretty carpet's pattern got some serious "improvements."
 
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
  "I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son."
I have before me a most remarkable book which was one of a bunch I got for a dollar. It's a little green book with gilt on the spine. It was published in 1877, according to the title page, which is stamped "Southbridge Public Library - Discarded."

It doesn't say when it was acquired, and there is no record of a single withdrawal. It's the Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, and not many people are very curious about Edward Gibbon -- but I was, at least to the tune of a quarter.

To tell the honest truth I still haven't read the Autobiography, only parts of it. The great thing about this book is the introduction by William Dean Howells, a buddy of Mark Twain. In fact Howells and Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a book together called The Gilded Age, a book I'm always hunting for. I had a copy, but I gave it to an official of the Republican Party because she had perfect ankles. Probably still does. Whoops, forgot. Not about me.

Anyway keep your eye out for The Gilded Age. It's rare. And this introduction to the Autobiography by Howells is really hilarious. Turns out Gibbon's story is a very interesting one, if you're interested.

As a young sickly aristocrat in the early 1700s, Gibbon converted to Catholicism, and his father had no choice but to send him to Switzerland, where he stayed with a Calvinist pastor. Gibbon fell in love with the daughter of the pastor in a nearby parish, Susan Curchod, and apparently she with him, but his father disapproved and so, Gibbon says,

"After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son. My wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life."

From this Howells concludes that Gibbon "was certainly not of the heroic sort." In truth Gibbon was an aristocratic snob. The irony is that after her father died and she had to support her mother in dire poverty by teaching, Susan Curchod married Jacques Necker, then a bank clerk in Geneva.

Necker became incredibly wealthy, wealthy enough to loan lots of money to the King of France. That's wealthy. Then he became Director of Finance under Louis XVI, and later a darling of the revolutionaries. In fact when the king removed Necker, they say, it led to the storming of the Bastille. Long story, Google Necker if you're interested.

The point of the story is that Madame Necker strikes up a friendship with her old boyfriend, and since she has become rich, he's thrilled to hang out with her. Howells wryly observes, "Mr. Necker, fatigued with the cares of office, used to go to bed and leave his wife tête á tête with the undangerous lover of her youth."

"He has become humble," Madame Necker wrote to a friend, "a zealous admirer of opulence... My feminine vanity has never had a completer, a juster triumph."

Howells writes, "One smiles at such a close for love's young dream, and yet in its time the passion was no doubt a sweet and tender idyl."

Incidentally, Madame and Monsieur Necker were the parents of another famous personage, Anne Louis Germaine Necker, known as Madame de Stael. She was very close, if you know what I mean, to Charles de Talleyrand-Perigord, known just as Talleyrand (like Madonna or Sting), and eventually married the writer and politician Benjamin Constant.

She was also pals with Diderot, Goethe, Schiller and Jean-Jacque Rousseau, among many others including -- get this -- John Quincy Adams, whom she met and dallied with a good deal in St. Petersburg. But that's another story altogether.
 
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
  Visit Scenic Cairo, Illinois!
I'm going to send this passage from Charles Dickens American Notes to the Cairo, Illinois Tourism Bureau; they may want to use it in some of their promotional material:

"The scenery as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, was not at all inspiring in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number; their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet.

"No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift-passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along as wearily and slowly as the time itself."

But then it gets a lot better, right Chuck?

"At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld that the forlornest places we had passed were, in comparison with it, full of interest.

"At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the housetops, lies a breeding place of fever, ague, and death.

"A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away; cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming then with rank, unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither droop, and die, and lay their bones.

"The hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course, a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo."
 
Friday, October 20, 2006
  Dickens Has a Laugh With a Choctaw Chieftain
On his way from Cincinnati to St. Louis in 1842 aboard a steamboat, Charles Dickens met a chief of the Choctaw tribe named Pitchlynn, who was well versed in English and American literature, a fan of Sir Walter Scott and yes! James Fenimore Cooper.

Pitchlynn had been visiting Washington "on some negotiations pending between his tribe and the Government: which were not settled yet (he said in a melancholy way), and he feared never would be: for what could a few poor Indians do against such well-skilled men of business as the whites? He had no love for Washington; tired of towns and cities very soon; and longed for the Forest and the Prairie."

Dickens asked him what he thought of Congress. "He answered, with a smile, that it wanted [lacked] dignity in an Indian's eyes."

"He would very much like, he said, to see England before he died; and spoke with much interest about the great things to be seen there. When I told him of that chamber in the British Museum wherein are preserved household memorials of a race that ceased to be, thousands of years ago, he was very attentive, and it was not hard to see that he had a reference in his mind to the gradual fading away of his own people.

"This led us to speak of Mr. [George] Caitlin's gallery, which he praised highly: observing that his own portrait was among the collection, and that all the likenesses were 'elegant.'

"Mr. Cooper [James Fenimore], he said, had painted the Red Man well; and so would I, he knew, if I would go home with him and hunt buffaloes, which he was quite anxious I should do. When I told him that, supposing I went, I should not be very likely to damage the buffaloes much, he took it as a great joke and laughed heartily.

"He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek bones, a sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing eye.

"There were but but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilized, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence.

"But they were not many; and the rest were as they had always been. He dwelt on this: and said several times that unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilized society.

"When we shook hands at parting, I told him he must come to England, as he longed to see the land so much: that I should hope to see him there some day: and that I could promise him he would be well received and kindly treated.

"He was evidently pleased by this assurance, though he rejoined, with a good-humored smile and an arch shake of his head, that the English used to be very fond of the Red Men, when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for them since.

"He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of Nature's making as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, another kind of being. He sent me a lithographed portrait of himself soon afterwards; which I carefully preserved in memory of our brief acquaintance."
 
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
  Meeting Sony In Person


We had an historic moment at the GoNOMAD Cafe last week when I finally got to meet Sony Stark in person.

Sony and I have become good buddies over the last two years working on more than twenty stories on our website. Max and I are both incredibly proud that a writer of this calibre was first published on GoNOMAD.

I really enjoyed traveling around the world with Sony when she made her documentary on the Semester at Sea program. Among many other adventures, she crossed the Atlantic with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and visited South Africa with him.

To me Sony Stark means punchy prose and eye-popping photos -- the kind of stuff that makes my job fun. So it was a real thrill to meet her in person at long last.

Check out her stories and photos from China, Myanmar and Vietnam. I also love the lead photo in her story on Quebec City. That was the first story of hers that I edited, the one where she sleeps on a park bench.
 
Friday, October 06, 2006
  WAC Panties
During the lull in fighting before the invasion of Sicily, Ernie Pyle wrote a series of articles about the WACs (Women's Army Corps) in Algiers. In The Story of Ernie Pyle, his buddy Lee G. Miller writes about Ernie's visit to a WAC barracks:

The WAC officer who showed him through their downtown barracks, "after careful yoohooing and peeking ahead," pointed out clotheslines filled with stockings and underwear.

"You're the first man who has ever seen this many pairs of WAC panties at one time," she told him.

"Madam," Ernie replied, "due to the rigors of old age and the encroachment of war work upon my spare time, I have never seen even one pair of WAC panties before."
 
  Great Turtle and Little Hatchet
Here's another selection from Charles Dickens American Notes about his first visit to the US in 1842. He's in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the passage Dickens makes reference to "The Parish Register" by George Crabbe (1807) a poem in which a country clergyman is looking through his registers, and utters the reflections and memories stirred in him, in turn, by the entries of births, marriages and deaths.

"I was very much interested," Dickens writes, "in looking over a number of treaties made from time to time with the poor Indians, signed by the different chiefs at the period of their ratification, and preserved in the office of the Secretary to the Commonwealth.

"These signatures, traced of course by their own hands, are rough drawings of the creatures or weapons they were called after. Thus, the Great Turtle makes a crooked pen-and-ink outline of a great turtle; the War Hatchet sets a rough image of that weapon for his mark. So with the Arrow, the Fish, the Scalp, the Big Canoe, and all of them.

"I could not but think -- as I looked at these feeble and tremulous productions of the hands which could draw the longest arrow to the head in a stout elk-horn bow, or split a bead or a feather with a rifle ball -- of Crabbe's musings over the Parish Register, and the irregular scratches made with a pen by men who would plow a lengthy furrow straight from end to end.

"Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in the course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds.

"I wondered, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had signed away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the new possessors of the land..."
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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MOST RECENT POSTS
Cool Houseguests
Kimball Chen -- Small Steps
Let's Hear It For Snail Mail
House of Cards
New Visitors to the Back Porch
Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Goodrich Foundation
The Lady Cardinal
The Dearly Departed


MY FAVORITE BLOGS
  • Kent St. John's Be Our Guest
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  • Mridula's Travel Tales from India
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  • GoNOMAD Travel Website Great Travel Writing
  • Sony Stark's Blog "Cross That Bridge"
  • GoNOMAD's Travel Reader Blog Travel Articles
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