The Half-Year of Paul Bowles

I wanted to title this entry "Bowles Movements" but found it too punny, even for me. Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 by Paul Bowles is a series of essays I wanted to read before jetting off to Seville & Marrakesh in late November, and somehow it took me the ENTIRE five to six months before my trip to accomplish this. As in, the back cover was finally reached with mere days until departure. Not that the book was boring -- dense, and a lot of repetition. And then within the 12 days I was on vacation, I plowed through all of Philip Roth's The Human Stain (no notes; liked it but left it in the Marrakesh riad). Suffice to say it's been an atypical year of reading.

First, I thought Bowles was British but he's American. Second, his essays tend to have more humility than the other, actually British Paul (Theroux; see Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar) and are a solid mix of introspection and description. "Now that in theory anyone can go anywhere, the travel book serves a different purpose; emphasis has shifted from the place to the effect of the place upon the person ... the story of what happened to one person in a particular place" (p.239-40). Generally, his essays strike a balance between introspection and expert witness, and he often acknowledges his otherness in Morocco. He reminded me of Peter Matthiessen -- same generation, also American, also enthralled with solitude and natural spaces ("the sublime" as per Alain de Botton):

"Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price." (p.90; on the Sahara)

Yours truly, from the top of Ait Ben Haddou.

This quote really resonated with me at Ait Ben Haddou (above), which is a medieval-era fortress between the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains / Marrakesh. You stand at the top by the ruins of an old granary and the wind is coming at you in huge constant gusts and all you can see in any direction is mountains and desert forever, and you think about how for hundreds and hundreds of years this was a caravan stop and how many other people saw this before you and how many other people will see it after you. It's not even a National Park or anything: it just IS, along with the Berbers in their isolated rural villages. 

The middle and late essays in the series wax nostalgic as the initial impression of Morocco is changed by politics, technology and the slow march of time. What used to be authentic and inaccessible is now for tourism. This wasn't the foremost thought in my mind when I visited because the first experience tends to scream "HEY YOU'RE NOT IN AMERICA ANYMORE!" a la Bangkok and, I assume, any other major non-Western hub city. The appreciation/nostalgia for layers of a particular place require getting over the initial culture shock, which is difficult on a four-day jaunt. Bowles lived in Morocco for decades; you may as well as a lifelong New Yorker about the differences between the 1970s and today.

Not in America anymore; Jemaa el Fna at sunset, photo by yours truly.

Two favorite parting quotes:

"When you ask a question of a Singhalese who does not know English, he is likely to react in a most curious fashion. First he looks swiftly at you, then he looks away, his features retreating into an expression of pleasant contemplation, as if your voice were an agreeable but distant memory that he had just recalled and thought worthwhile to savor briefly." (p.52)

"Now, after traveling around the country, I know approximately as little as I did on my first arrival. However, I've seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning." (p.207, and the most important thing)

Bowles recorded rural Moroccan music for the Library of Congress in the late 1950s, including this one of Reh dial Beni Bouhiya:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXjwYA7X-8

Other references for future exploration:
Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico!
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday
Peter Mayne, The Alleys of Marrakesh

Bottom line, worth picking an essay or three from the bunch otherwise you'll spend six months of your life reading this collection. Relevant reading for before/after traveling to Morocco. I'll be back for the Sahara some day. 

Magical Thinking & Walking the Woods

Two reflections on two reads:

1) After saying I had no interest in reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I succumbed to the allure of the discount book bin and figured I would give Didion another shot, despite still not having read the ONE book of hers I was originally interested in (Slouching Towards Bethlehem). It was sad in a matter-of-factual way. I re-learned that privileged famous people grieve and suffer like the rest of us. I felt her loss even as she talked about multiple homes and Malibu beaches and Corvettes. And that pretty much sums up the extent of my impression.

(Apparently we loved her in 2015? How Joan Didion Became the Ultimate Literary Celebrity & Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion)

Bottom line: I'll continue to have a "meh / okay" reaction to Didion that will be either confirmed or rebuffed after Slouching Towards Bethlehem.


2) I zoomed excitedly through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, subtitled "Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The book ended and I needed it to keep going for another 200 pages, or 2,000 pages. Returning to my last entry and thoughts on contemporary travel writing, Bryson avoids the "expert witness explaining the natives" trap through his humility and humor -- he's just a out-of-shape everyman who wants to try hiking the trail with his friend, and he happens to be well-informed about the trail's ecological history. There's no soaring rhetoric and little/no existential musings about nature or long-distance hiking ... and that's okay for this story. On a personal note, the book also rekindled a life goal of hiking the AT (section-hiking, not thru-hiking, let's be real). Thanks, Bill Bryson!

Bottom line: Awesome easy read, highly recommend even if you never want to hike the AT!

AT marker at Pen-Mar, photo by yours truly

Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar

In the 1970's Paul Theroux spent four months on an out-and-back railway journey across Asia from London. Then he published a book about it. The Great Railway Bazaar was fantastic and of course now I want to take an epic train journey too.

Accompanying map from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

Theroux's humorous, beautiful descriptions and the characters he meets along the way held my attention across the continent. I empathized with his impatience towards certain passengers, although honestly sometimes he came across as an asshole. I learned that Sri Lanka used to be called Ceylon and that Gokteik Viaduct in Myanmar was built by Pennsylvania Steel in 1900. Theroux's travel fatigue by the end of the book was spot-on and hilarious. Major parts of the book are "so 70's" (hippies, Vietnam) and I'm looking forward to reading the companion sequel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he retraces his itinerary in 2008.

The only thing that gave me a sour-lemon-face about this book was the Western white male perspective and barely disguised sense of superiority, not unlike another famous book about taking an exotic journey in order to write about it (ahem, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert). For comparison and contrast, I submit The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

In an excellent Boston Review piece, Jessa Crispin argues that today's travel writer "sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous ... If your life is an aspiration, you are a beacon, not a human, and you talk rather than listen." For women travel writers, "the focus of attention is the self" compared to the prototypical male writer who is an "expert witness who explains the native." See also this LA Review of Books piece regarding travel writing as memoir.  The issue with travel writing as memoir is the writer assumes they are "the most interesting person in the room." Crispin argues that rather than explain or self-reflect, the travel writer should first engage and listen by passing the metaphorical microphone.

If I were to lay Crispin's gender comparison out on some sort of travel writer scale, where one end is Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed (female, internal) and the other end is Paul Theroux and British colonialists (male, external), in the middle I would put Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard manages to be equal parts spiritual and physical journey; the reader sees the beauty of Tibetan mountains and the grief of Matthiessen. As an added bonus, the native characters exist beyond caricatures and are integral to the story; the microphone is partially passed.

Crispin's "lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous" is crystallized in the opening of Bazaar: "That [head]cold made leaving all the easier; leaving was a cure: 'Have you tried aspirin?' 'No, I think I'll got to India'" (p.15). Four months later and Theroux's final train ride through Russia is fraught with psychological travel fatigue, followed by missing a Christmas flight home: "Fiction is pure joy -- how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction" (p. 379). I was about to argue that Theroux doesn't really present his story as aspirational, but then I recalled this quote: "All travel is circular ... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home" (p. 379). In conclusion, here is inspired man Paul Theroux's Instagram account.

Bottom line: Admire the scenery and the writing, give side-eye to the white Western male perspective, then book your own railroad odyssey ASAP.

"The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical." (p. 235)

also mentioned: The Mezzotint by M. R. James