As our time in Providencia was drawing to a close, I kept compiling ideas and little notes to myself to mention in the last blog post before I left. I kept putting off writing it, because I was perhaps a little tired of writing, and I figured I would have plenty of time in the coming days given that the rest of our stay there had been fairly low-key. Of course, the last week or so in Providencia managed to make up for the calmness of the earlier period by erupting into a kind of organized frenzy right before we left, so that the three month stay there revealed itself as a long, calm interlude bracketed by near-chaos on either end.
We accomplished a couple of activities we wanted to: kayaking through the mangrove forest (spectacular and tiring), snorkeling around Santa Catalina. But the more significant events involved our making friends, after three months and all at once. From the waitress at our restaurant to the owners at the hotel to friends who landed in the middle of our life there from absolutely nowhere at all, we spent the last week actually getting to know people and experiencing the island in a radically different way from before. It was a sensational way to end the trip and just a little sad, as we managed to make connections just before we left for good, but perhaps we needed the impetus of a departure date to spur us across that unseen divide. I’m not going to recount everything that happened here, because I’m feeling lazy at the moment, and as I’ve discovered with having a blog, telling a story here denies me the pleasure of telling it to friends in person.
But we left for Bogota in a lovely blur of activity, and then arrived to the warm embrace of Silvia’s family for several days. In addition to hearing more Spanish in the last few days than I had heard in all of Providencia, we ate quite a lot and saw a good bit of Bogota. It’s always nice to have residents showing you around a place, so that the city becomes more than just a name on a map and an assembly of sensations, and Bogota was no different. Spending time with a Bogota family (and since it was the holidays, there was a lot of that family around) was just as fun and educative as seeing the city, and also provided a final test of my meager Spanish abilities, which if I passed, I did so just barely scraping by.
Bogota is an interesting city. It’s big, which I had been told before, but that wasn’t quite driven home until we were standing on top of Monserrate and watching the vista of the city from mountain to mountain. It’s a sprawling breadth, too: I was totally unconfronted with the overwhelming density of New York or even Paris, finding instead a spacious, even sparse agglomeration that struck me almost as a smaller city that was larger than it should be. There are small, beautiful historical quarters in the city, but to me they seemed to function less as the pulse of the urban life now than as museums for what it once was. Four days is not enough to truly get a grasp on a place, but Bogota seemed to me a city unlike others I have seen.
Then I got back home, immersed in a comprehensible language and winter air that is actually cold, not just the-ocean-is-so-cold-today kind of cold. There was some reacclimation for sure, but having spent time abroad before I was fairly well prepared for it.
And thus ends the chronicle of Providencia. I will continue to keep writing and posting moving forward, though the content will be less centered around my day-to-day activities than before. But for the moment, I’ll just end with a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Looking for things underwater
It’s surprising (or maybe it isn’t) just how quickly the beautiful and exotic can become mundane. Pretty soon, fish caught hours before you eat it is just the standard (Silvia: This fish was caught yesterday? Gross); if the water is less than absolutely clear for fifteen feet down, it’s not worth going in; and the scooter becomes more of a hassle than a pleasure (actually, that last one’s not true, I still really love driving the scooter).
But then this past Friday, we went snorkeling for the first time in a while. (Although once again, I didn’t actually have a snorkel, just flippers and goggles, so I guess it was really just goggling. Kind of like Googling, but underwater.) We swam for quite a while, and at around the midpoint we found ourselves on Crab Cay, the islet we had been to before about two months ago. There was nobody else there at all, so we had it all to ourselves for the afternoon, and took advantage by lying down on the dock in the late afternoon sun for half an hour and doing nothing in particular. Sitting there on the dock, with the entirety of Providencia y Santa Catalina spread out in front of us and the sun setting into the mountains, it struck me anew, being as isolated and far away from normalcy as I’ve ever been. And then we jumped back in the water, and startled a cloud of calamari into spraying their ink and darting away, and the feeling stayed. Coral reefs will do that to you.
So will meeting other people who are just as intent on savoring the experience, culinary and otherwise. The other day we made friends with a Swiss couple who was here on their honeymoon, and met up with them several times. The first time, they brought along a Spanish couple they had met, and after a not insignificant period of requisite awkwardness, we all ended up talking about Christmas traditions in different countries. (Turns out the Swiss Santa is considerably more violent than the U.S. version, and the Catalonian manger has at least one figurine you would never expect to be there. Hint: the Spanish name is el Cagon*.) The Spanish couple left the next day, and later in the week we went out for dinner again with the Swiss couple and one other Swiss woman they met at their hotel. To the extremely incongruous sound of Enya playing from the restaurant speakers, I ended up talking with the Swiss couple for a while about health care, but more generally about medicine (they’re both med students in their residencies, she’s an OB/GYN and he’s focused on public health). It was really interesting to hear them speak, both from the perspective of doctors who know a lot about medicine and members of a different system who have an outside view on the U.S. And though health care can’t really compete with miles of clear blue water, afterwards it did seem just a little bit new.
*it means "the shitter." It's apparently pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
But then this past Friday, we went snorkeling for the first time in a while. (Although once again, I didn’t actually have a snorkel, just flippers and goggles, so I guess it was really just goggling. Kind of like Googling, but underwater.) We swam for quite a while, and at around the midpoint we found ourselves on Crab Cay, the islet we had been to before about two months ago. There was nobody else there at all, so we had it all to ourselves for the afternoon, and took advantage by lying down on the dock in the late afternoon sun for half an hour and doing nothing in particular. Sitting there on the dock, with the entirety of Providencia y Santa Catalina spread out in front of us and the sun setting into the mountains, it struck me anew, being as isolated and far away from normalcy as I’ve ever been. And then we jumped back in the water, and startled a cloud of calamari into spraying their ink and darting away, and the feeling stayed. Coral reefs will do that to you.
So will meeting other people who are just as intent on savoring the experience, culinary and otherwise. The other day we made friends with a Swiss couple who was here on their honeymoon, and met up with them several times. The first time, they brought along a Spanish couple they had met, and after a not insignificant period of requisite awkwardness, we all ended up talking about Christmas traditions in different countries. (Turns out the Swiss Santa is considerably more violent than the U.S. version, and the Catalonian manger has at least one figurine you would never expect to be there. Hint: the Spanish name is el Cagon*.) The Spanish couple left the next day, and later in the week we went out for dinner again with the Swiss couple and one other Swiss woman they met at their hotel. To the extremely incongruous sound of Enya playing from the restaurant speakers, I ended up talking with the Swiss couple for a while about health care, but more generally about medicine (they’re both med students in their residencies, she’s an OB/GYN and he’s focused on public health). It was really interesting to hear them speak, both from the perspective of doctors who know a lot about medicine and members of a different system who have an outside view on the U.S. And though health care can’t really compete with miles of clear blue water, afterwards it did seem just a little bit new.
*it means "the shitter." It's apparently pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
One Month Left
Things left to do: go snorkeling at various places around the island; kayak through the mangrove forest (possibly); make it to Mancanillo on a weekend; go to the highest point on the island, from which you can see the next island over, San Andres. Return to our original shack before we leave, just to look at it again with a very different perspective; go with the waitress at our restaurant to some of the nightspots on the island, where she said she would show us around. Try and learn as much Spanish as I can. Say goodbye to Mario and Ingrid; Suzette and Herman and Sandra; Greg; the slightly crazy guy who runs a bar on our beach; Deibis and Teresa. Return our moto (sadly), and figure out a reliable way of getting to the airport early in the morning. Then go to Bogota, explore the city for three days with Silvia as a guide. Pack up and fly home the morning of December 21, leaving behind Christmas celebrations in Bogota for the ones at home.
Things done: swim and eat, and a lot of both of those; learn how to ride a scooter; sample tamarind wine (very sweet and a little firey). Overcome many obstacles in pursuit of living on a small tropical island, albeit temporarily. Discover Kitty Wharf, and explore the island; go scuba diving and snorkeling; develop better Spanish comprehension, if not speaking so much. Resume running; read a lot, write a lot, and listen to a lot of music. Attempt a diet for three months that consists almost solely of seafood, rice, and plantains. Watch a large number of mediocre American movies dubbed in Spanish—action and horror movies are better, romantic comedies worse. Make some acquaintances, though not really many friends. Look at the water a lot; develop a new appreciation for laundry machines and high-speed Internet connections. Engage in all-out warfare with the entirety of the insect class. Come across as a complete tourist, despite having been here three months. Forget things I’ve done, and things that I should still do. Pre-empt nostalgia.
Things done: swim and eat, and a lot of both of those; learn how to ride a scooter; sample tamarind wine (very sweet and a little firey). Overcome many obstacles in pursuit of living on a small tropical island, albeit temporarily. Discover Kitty Wharf, and explore the island; go scuba diving and snorkeling; develop better Spanish comprehension, if not speaking so much. Resume running; read a lot, write a lot, and listen to a lot of music. Attempt a diet for three months that consists almost solely of seafood, rice, and plantains. Watch a large number of mediocre American movies dubbed in Spanish—action and horror movies are better, romantic comedies worse. Make some acquaintances, though not really many friends. Look at the water a lot; develop a new appreciation for laundry machines and high-speed Internet connections. Engage in all-out warfare with the entirety of the insect class. Come across as a complete tourist, despite having been here three months. Forget things I’ve done, and things that I should still do. Pre-empt nostalgia.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Disliking Things
Since I’ve been here, the scope of my leisure activities has been reduced significantly. There are some very notable new ones, to be sure (scooter-driving, beach-going), but generally, I read, write, listen to music, and watch the occasional movie when the appropriate channels decide to work at the appropriate time. Consequently, my consumption of all those things has gone way up, and one of the nice perks of being here is that it has offered me the time to really delve into worthwhile projects and reconsider things that had become so familiar as to probably need that reconsideration.
One of these projects has been educational: I’m trying to introduce Silvia to classical music. This has the potential to be a more difficult project than it sounds: the term “classical music” encompasses such an incredible variety of styles, sounds, moods, and ideas that it seems self-defeating to just put my iTunes on random and click “play.” Not every incarnation of classical music might be to everyone’s taste, and there is a definite tendency towards extreme generalization when encountering classical music initially, a tendency to dislike or like a single piece by a single composer and then apply that judgment to the rest of the repertory. This almost inevitably results in disappointment.
Part of the problem here is the tendency for classical music to be viewed as something distinct from the rest of the arts. While few people would dislike a particular painting and infer that they then must dislike all painting, that attitude ends up turning a lot of people off to classical music. I completely (well, mostly) understand that impulse: classical music is intrinsically a lot more nebulous and harder to get a handle on than many other things, and the way that you absorb it is drastically different from the way we generally absorb popular music (two key differences being classical music’s length and kind of narrative as compared to pop). Furthermore, there tends to be a pretty big culture of elitism and pretentiousness (or at least a perception of one) surrounding classical music, and that air of “Unless you play three instruments and know the key of Chopin’s fifteenth nocturne from memory, you’ll never really be one of us.” (It’s f minor, incidentally, and thank you iTunes.)
But all that is a totally valid way to encounter classical music for the first, or even fourth or fifth time. It’s true: it’s hard, it’s abstract, it’s opaque and it can be pretentious as all hell. If that’s your reaction, then don’t try and ignore it, and don’t try to tell yourself that you just don’t “get it” and that you’re just not a classical music person. Use that reaction as a starting point: if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Visceral, emotional responses—informed or uninformed, biased or unbiased, strong or mild—provide the starting point from which to move forward, and the one point of secure leverage around which you can pivot the whole world.
Figure out why you don’t like it, and know that for now, that particular stimulus generates that response in you. Try listening to something else; the breadth of the art is so large that there is probably something you will react to well. (If you really just don’t like anything at all, nothing whatsoever, then I got nothing. You just don’t like it. It happens.) When you discover something you do like, figure out why it appeals to you and leads you to feel that way. Encountering something new is a process, like anything else, and progress doesn’t come overnight, or even over several. But as long as you’re starting from a place of honest reaction, that journey can be undertaken with as much confidence and surety as any self-proclaimed connoisseur .
And to a certain extent, I think that same process can inform one’s encounter with other things as well. When it comes to traveling, it can be immensely counterproductive to force yourself to acknowledge the beauty or history or richness of a place. For sure, all of those things should be acknowledged, but forcing that judgment renders it hollow, all form but no content. In a way, you have to be unafraid to find things uninteresting, to let yourself be bored, so that the moments of genuine meaning are free to be truly genuine. Not everything comes in earth-shattering revelations or even revelations at all; some things are exactly what they seem and no more. Some things are more than that too, and as always, it’s a tricky process of negotiation. Sinking into complacency and apathy is at least as bad as seeing only what you want to see, so this is definitely a case of “everything in moderation, especially moderation.”
So while I will probably continue to find Kitty Wharf beautiful (see below for supporting evidence) until the time I leave, I have to remind myself that sometimes, negative reactions can be a valid way of encountering the world as well as positive ones. And though you’d have to ask her, Silvia can probably testify to this as well with classical music. Not everything I’ve played for her has been a well-received by a long shot, but openly acknowledging the lack of appeal or understanding in reaction to particular pieces has allowed for some overwhelming successes: she is currently in the midst of a love affair with Tchaikovsky that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. (And if you’re looking for a place to jump-start listening to classical music, or just for something to do when you’re procrastinating at work, check out the first 3-4 minutes of his piano concerto. It’s the kind of thing that storms out of the speakers, that demonstrates the full, bombastic potential of music in all its overwrought emotional glory. Even if you don’t intend to listen to another classical piece ever (and you should! it's good), it’s worth checking out. I’m sure it’s on youtube somewhere.)
And in the interest of full disclosure (and to belie all of this), I should confess that I've been listening to energetic pop music like nonstop lately.
One of these projects has been educational: I’m trying to introduce Silvia to classical music. This has the potential to be a more difficult project than it sounds: the term “classical music” encompasses such an incredible variety of styles, sounds, moods, and ideas that it seems self-defeating to just put my iTunes on random and click “play.” Not every incarnation of classical music might be to everyone’s taste, and there is a definite tendency towards extreme generalization when encountering classical music initially, a tendency to dislike or like a single piece by a single composer and then apply that judgment to the rest of the repertory. This almost inevitably results in disappointment.
Part of the problem here is the tendency for classical music to be viewed as something distinct from the rest of the arts. While few people would dislike a particular painting and infer that they then must dislike all painting, that attitude ends up turning a lot of people off to classical music. I completely (well, mostly) understand that impulse: classical music is intrinsically a lot more nebulous and harder to get a handle on than many other things, and the way that you absorb it is drastically different from the way we generally absorb popular music (two key differences being classical music’s length and kind of narrative as compared to pop). Furthermore, there tends to be a pretty big culture of elitism and pretentiousness (or at least a perception of one) surrounding classical music, and that air of “Unless you play three instruments and know the key of Chopin’s fifteenth nocturne from memory, you’ll never really be one of us.” (It’s f minor, incidentally, and thank you iTunes.)
But all that is a totally valid way to encounter classical music for the first, or even fourth or fifth time. It’s true: it’s hard, it’s abstract, it’s opaque and it can be pretentious as all hell. If that’s your reaction, then don’t try and ignore it, and don’t try to tell yourself that you just don’t “get it” and that you’re just not a classical music person. Use that reaction as a starting point: if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Visceral, emotional responses—informed or uninformed, biased or unbiased, strong or mild—provide the starting point from which to move forward, and the one point of secure leverage around which you can pivot the whole world.
Figure out why you don’t like it, and know that for now, that particular stimulus generates that response in you. Try listening to something else; the breadth of the art is so large that there is probably something you will react to well. (If you really just don’t like anything at all, nothing whatsoever, then I got nothing. You just don’t like it. It happens.) When you discover something you do like, figure out why it appeals to you and leads you to feel that way. Encountering something new is a process, like anything else, and progress doesn’t come overnight, or even over several. But as long as you’re starting from a place of honest reaction, that journey can be undertaken with as much confidence and surety as any self-proclaimed connoisseur .
And to a certain extent, I think that same process can inform one’s encounter with other things as well. When it comes to traveling, it can be immensely counterproductive to force yourself to acknowledge the beauty or history or richness of a place. For sure, all of those things should be acknowledged, but forcing that judgment renders it hollow, all form but no content. In a way, you have to be unafraid to find things uninteresting, to let yourself be bored, so that the moments of genuine meaning are free to be truly genuine. Not everything comes in earth-shattering revelations or even revelations at all; some things are exactly what they seem and no more. Some things are more than that too, and as always, it’s a tricky process of negotiation. Sinking into complacency and apathy is at least as bad as seeing only what you want to see, so this is definitely a case of “everything in moderation, especially moderation.”
So while I will probably continue to find Kitty Wharf beautiful (see below for supporting evidence) until the time I leave, I have to remind myself that sometimes, negative reactions can be a valid way of encountering the world as well as positive ones. And though you’d have to ask her, Silvia can probably testify to this as well with classical music. Not everything I’ve played for her has been a well-received by a long shot, but openly acknowledging the lack of appeal or understanding in reaction to particular pieces has allowed for some overwhelming successes: she is currently in the midst of a love affair with Tchaikovsky that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. (And if you’re looking for a place to jump-start listening to classical music, or just for something to do when you’re procrastinating at work, check out the first 3-4 minutes of his piano concerto. It’s the kind of thing that storms out of the speakers, that demonstrates the full, bombastic potential of music in all its overwrought emotional glory. Even if you don’t intend to listen to another classical piece ever (and you should! it's good), it’s worth checking out. I’m sure it’s on youtube somewhere.)
And in the interest of full disclosure (and to belie all of this), I should confess that I've been listening to energetic pop music like nonstop lately.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Kitty Wharf in Pictures
I had planned to put the pictures below in order so that you would be seeing everything as though you were walking there, but I cannot for the life of me get blogger to let me arrange my pictures as I want, so they're a little discombobulated. But here they are, more or less in sequence:
Getting off the scooter, the stone wall with the path is just visible in the background.
Fire ant tree
Coconuts!
Getting off the scooter, the stone wall with the path is just visible in the background.
Fire ant tree
Coconuts!
Here you begin to come out of the forest
standing on the wharf, looking to the left
The beach to the right
The beach on the left, with a waterfall and a rope swing.
Looking back out towards the ocean, and trying to give a sense of the clarity of the water.
Some more views, and some conchs
And my semi-successful attempt at using my camera timer
standing on the wharf, looking to the left
The beach to the right
The beach on the left, with a waterfall and a rope swing.
Looking back out towards the ocean, and trying to give a sense of the clarity of the water.
Some more views, and some conchs
And my semi-successful attempt at using my camera timer
Thursday, November 5, 2009
I will never complain about mosquitoes again.
That's a lie. I almost certainly will. But I will never mean it as much as I mean it now.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Unknown Beaches
Because this island is so small and there’s really just the one road, it’s easy to think that we’ve seen everything that there is to see here. But when we stop and explore we keep discovering new things, primarily new beaches. The first one we found is a few minutes past where we live. It was bigger and emptier than our normal beach, and is supposed to be one of the hot nightspots on the island. The road to this beach is a long, windy and hilly one that seems almost entirely uninhabited and is great fun to drive on the scooter, and on the way back reveals a good portion of the island spread out between the palm tress lining the road.
The other beach that we went to more recently (sorry, no pictures yet), may or may not be called Kiki Wharf (it’s unclear because everyone always says it in Creole). Silvia found it on her own first, after having four or five different people guide her closer and closer to the place. It’s very well hidden, and unless you knew what you were looking for you would never notice it. You have to park on the street, and go through a break in an old stone wall and hike down an overrun path for a few minutes, which just generally contributes to the feeling of seclusion and secrecy of the place. You eventually emerge along a little freshwater stream onto a rock outcropping that divides two beaches. The two beaches are both backed by cliffs, and are clearly known only to the locals, furthering the perpetual quest of overcoming our tourist status. We explored the one on the left first. The beach is small and crescent shaped and nestled into the cliff wall behind it. The rock extends fairly far on both sides so that it feels wonderfully private and secluded. In the middle, falling from the cliff above there are two freshwater waterfalls that land in the middle of the beach. There’s no way to walk there so you have to swim to get to the beach after jumping off the rock outcropping in the middle. The water there seems even clearer than usual; standing several feet above water that was maybe four or five feet deep I could still see everything crystal clear on the sea floor. It’s an incredibly idyllic spot, easily one of my favorite places on the island so far. There’s also a rope swing tied to a tree on the top of the cliff that hangs all the way down to the water and requires some probably inadvisable climbing to get to. We used it a little bit closer to the water, but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it probably would higher up. I made my way around to higher ground, but after contemplating just how far away I was from the water as well as the fact that it was low tide, I decided to wait until another time to actually give it a shot.
We swam past this beach to find another one just around a bend in the island, this one almost entirely rocky. The water is so clear that every swimming expedition turns into chasing after fish, and there were a few rock and coral formations that had huge numbers of colorful fish I could see from above the water. There was even a ray that Silvia spotted, then lost track of, just before I realized we were basically standing on top of it and sprinted away (or whatever the swimming equivalent of sprinting is) because the ray seemed agitated by our proximity and neither of us particularly wanted to be on top of an agitated stingray.
Other updates:
The other beach that we went to more recently (sorry, no pictures yet), may or may not be called Kiki Wharf (it’s unclear because everyone always says it in Creole). Silvia found it on her own first, after having four or five different people guide her closer and closer to the place. It’s very well hidden, and unless you knew what you were looking for you would never notice it. You have to park on the street, and go through a break in an old stone wall and hike down an overrun path for a few minutes, which just generally contributes to the feeling of seclusion and secrecy of the place. You eventually emerge along a little freshwater stream onto a rock outcropping that divides two beaches. The two beaches are both backed by cliffs, and are clearly known only to the locals, furthering the perpetual quest of overcoming our tourist status. We explored the one on the left first. The beach is small and crescent shaped and nestled into the cliff wall behind it. The rock extends fairly far on both sides so that it feels wonderfully private and secluded. In the middle, falling from the cliff above there are two freshwater waterfalls that land in the middle of the beach. There’s no way to walk there so you have to swim to get to the beach after jumping off the rock outcropping in the middle. The water there seems even clearer than usual; standing several feet above water that was maybe four or five feet deep I could still see everything crystal clear on the sea floor. It’s an incredibly idyllic spot, easily one of my favorite places on the island so far. There’s also a rope swing tied to a tree on the top of the cliff that hangs all the way down to the water and requires some probably inadvisable climbing to get to. We used it a little bit closer to the water, but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it probably would higher up. I made my way around to higher ground, but after contemplating just how far away I was from the water as well as the fact that it was low tide, I decided to wait until another time to actually give it a shot.
We swam past this beach to find another one just around a bend in the island, this one almost entirely rocky. The water is so clear that every swimming expedition turns into chasing after fish, and there were a few rock and coral formations that had huge numbers of colorful fish I could see from above the water. There was even a ray that Silvia spotted, then lost track of, just before I realized we were basically standing on top of it and sprinted away (or whatever the swimming equivalent of sprinting is) because the ray seemed agitated by our proximity and neither of us particularly wanted to be on top of an agitated stingray.
Other updates:
- I had an actual dialogue in Spanish with someone! And they didn’t even look at me like I was an idiot. Admittedly, it was mostly because all I said was “Bien,” “Si,” and “Mas o menos,” but it was still a big moment for me.
- Our channel lineup changes randomly and inexplicably, but the one constant is the local Providencia channel, whose sole purpose seems to be showing b-roll montages of the island set to reggae. We did get to watch most of Aladdin in Spanish the other day (or should I say Aladdín), during which I got to enjoy the classics “Tienes un amigo fiel en mi” and “Un mundo ideal.” (Thankfully, melody transcends the language barrier.) Unfortunately the cable decided to go out just as it was about to show Kill Bill, which I had been looking forward to for days (it was basically my Friday night out), but from what I could see it was in Spanish anyway, and that is one movie that really should not be dubbed. The Queen of the Crime Council speech, which is one of my favorite things in that movie, is just not the same when Lucy Liu is standing on the table holding that guy’s head and mouthing words while somebody else screams curses in Spanish on the soundtrack.
- Having automotive transportation is great.
- One of the things I love about Providencia is how chill everyone is. On multiple occasions, when we have not had exact change and the vendor couldn’t make change, they just give us the food or whatever and we promise to come back and pay them later. That just seems kind of great to me.
- I just got La Traviata from Silvia and am listening to it now, and man, I am not always the hugest fan of opera, but Verdi knew what he was doing.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Pictures
Among the pictures below are:
-a view from our hotel balcony
-the edge of the mangrove forest
-our daily restaurant El Divino Niño and its mascot
-some hiding crabs
-a view of our beach (Southwest)
-some fisherman cleaning what was very possibly our lunch one day
-the entrance to the cemetery
-a hotel where we go swimming sometimes
If you click on the image it should expand enough that you can view everything in detail.
-a view from our hotel balcony
-the edge of the mangrove forest
-our daily restaurant El Divino Niño and its mascot
-some hiding crabs
-a view of our beach (Southwest)
-some fisherman cleaning what was very possibly our lunch one day
-the entrance to the cemetery
-a hotel where we go swimming sometimes
If you click on the image it should expand enough that you can view everything in detail.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The one road for running
Since we’ve had the scooter and are kept from having to walk everywhere all day, I’ve started running again. There are a lot of hills here and it’s been a while, so I’ve had to use the trick where you focus on getting to a specific object in the road, then another object, and then another, and so on until you’re up the hill. Only here I realize that the markers I use are not the ones that I usually do. Instead of “Just get to the branch! Then just get to the mailbox!” now it’s “Just get to the crushed crab! Then the two horses near the mangoes!” It’s kind of a nice way to render the exotic totally and utterly mundane. Activities like that offer a good way into acclimation, allowing new content into familiar structure. Running’s an easy one: all you need are sneakers, shorts, and a road. And getting lost is an excellent way to learn your way around, though admittedly that’s already fairly easy when there’s only one road. But coming back along the beach and wading across the sand bridge in front of the mangrove forest is a nice way to find the particularity in the vista.
I am still doing my best to get used to the fruit. There are more tropical fruits that I’ve never heard of than I’ve ever encountered before. To my eyes, they are strange and exotic, and have a tendency to contain insides that are wildly different from what their outsides suggest. Of them, so far I think my favorite might be guanamana: spiky green skin with a white pulpy mess in the middle. There is also maracuya (you have to say it like maracuYA, not maraCUya, which is fun because it feels like you’re always really excited to talk about it); mango (that’s the easy one); granadilla, which has a hard orange skin that must be cracked first, revealing the seeds all contained within a kind of translucent pulp, which you then eat (but curiously, without chewing); anón; lulo; mamoncillo; and plenty more that I cannot remember.
When I’m running, I actually attract fewer strange looks than I would have expected. This may be partially due to the presence of the military base down (well, really up) the road from us. We see them running along the road fairly often. As locations for military bases go, this one seems unusual. It is—to put it lightly—rather calm here. But they’ve certainly got a nice locale for training at least.
When I reach Aguadulce, my favorite thing there is the colors of the houses and hotels. The area is fairly concentrated, by Providencia standards at least, and many of the structures here adhere to the same color palette. It’s a bright and vibrant one that’s all primary and secondary resonation. I remember noting them but not really understanding why everything was so color-blocked until I was sitting one day near the beach, and looked out at the water through a teal and orange and yellow railing. The colors, all of them, popped as never before, as their exuberance became obvious as being in camaraderie with the water. The water itself, from translucent to utterly electric, sets the tone, and everything else draws energy and strength from that. It’s like plugging into a supercharged outlet, anything less than a high wattage bulb would burn out in seconds.
If I go far enough, I get to the Fresh Water Cemetery. Like all the other cemeteries here, it is bounded by bright purple walls. I don’t know why. I have noticed that the rich purple of the cemeteries is not a color that appears elsewhere here. But to my eyes, it is such an unusual color to be used for that purpose that it’s one of the more striking things here.
It finally stopped raining(!), so I’ve been trying to take some more pictures, and with any luck they’ll be the next things that go up here.
I am still doing my best to get used to the fruit. There are more tropical fruits that I’ve never heard of than I’ve ever encountered before. To my eyes, they are strange and exotic, and have a tendency to contain insides that are wildly different from what their outsides suggest. Of them, so far I think my favorite might be guanamana: spiky green skin with a white pulpy mess in the middle. There is also maracuya (you have to say it like maracuYA, not maraCUya, which is fun because it feels like you’re always really excited to talk about it); mango (that’s the easy one); granadilla, which has a hard orange skin that must be cracked first, revealing the seeds all contained within a kind of translucent pulp, which you then eat (but curiously, without chewing); anón; lulo; mamoncillo; and plenty more that I cannot remember.
When I’m running, I actually attract fewer strange looks than I would have expected. This may be partially due to the presence of the military base down (well, really up) the road from us. We see them running along the road fairly often. As locations for military bases go, this one seems unusual. It is—to put it lightly—rather calm here. But they’ve certainly got a nice locale for training at least.
When I reach Aguadulce, my favorite thing there is the colors of the houses and hotels. The area is fairly concentrated, by Providencia standards at least, and many of the structures here adhere to the same color palette. It’s a bright and vibrant one that’s all primary and secondary resonation. I remember noting them but not really understanding why everything was so color-blocked until I was sitting one day near the beach, and looked out at the water through a teal and orange and yellow railing. The colors, all of them, popped as never before, as their exuberance became obvious as being in camaraderie with the water. The water itself, from translucent to utterly electric, sets the tone, and everything else draws energy and strength from that. It’s like plugging into a supercharged outlet, anything less than a high wattage bulb would burn out in seconds.
If I go far enough, I get to the Fresh Water Cemetery. Like all the other cemeteries here, it is bounded by bright purple walls. I don’t know why. I have noticed that the rich purple of the cemeteries is not a color that appears elsewhere here. But to my eyes, it is such an unusual color to be used for that purpose that it’s one of the more striking things here.
It finally stopped raining(!), so I’ve been trying to take some more pictures, and with any luck they’ll be the next things that go up here.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Scuba Diving
Ten meters under, and chasing after yellow schools of fish, I wondered what everyone else I knew was doing. We went scuba diving on Tuesday, and explored a coral reef. There was huge school of bright yellow fish, other tiny electric blue fish, fish that were nearly translucent with huge black eyes, two stingrays, lobster, a flounder, a sea turtle, an eel, and a shark that refused to come out from under some coral. The day before, we learned how to use the equipment, and waded out on the shore to practice breathing and cleaning our masks in the water on the beach. The next day we took our instructor’s boat and went maybe ten minutes offshore to dive. We got suited up and jumped in the water, and with surprisingly little preamble, descended. Here, I feel like I have to confess: diving makes me nervous. I am generally a relatively calm and controlled person, and have participated in other somewhat risky sports without getting seriously worried. But the idea of being under thirty feet of water and running out of air freaks me out, so as we started to follow the anchor rope to the bottom, I definitely experienced several panicky moments. I came very close to just sucking up my pride and saying I couldn’t do it, but I just kept signaling to the instructor that I was okay and eventually I was. Once we were on the bottom, things got easier, and swimming around a coral reef with flippers and an oxygen tank is just really kind of awesome and otherworldly. The water is so clear that you can see fairly far even that far down, the variety of life is overwhelming, and for once I was on equal linguistic footing with the people around me. So all in all, for about an hour this past Tuesday morning, it was a reasonable bet that I was the coolest person I knew.
A few days before we went diving, we took our scooter (named Elvis, but you have to say it with a Colombian accent) around the island to check out some stores on the other side. It was our first full circuit under our own power, and it was fantastic. Aguamansa, the other side of the island, is less populated and has fewer beaches, but the water there is mesmerizing. The way to travel: coasting along at unknown speeds (our speedometer is broken, as is one brake and one rearview mirror), bounded by the scorched blue of the ocean and the sunset through the mountains, windblown but cool and exhilarated. You also feel like you’re going faster when you don’t have a windshield. We met a woman, very friendly (like most people here), who showed us around her house and the collages and artwork she had for sale, and regaled us at length with stories about the island. And she turns out to know someone in Silvia’s family. Small world.
The conversation proceeded in a mixture of Spanish and English, and I could follow the English (whew!) but as usual, only partially the Spanish. My studies have been proceeding intermittently, and at the moment I can still understand far more than I can say. I’m trying to practice speaking with Silvia, but the differences between French and Spanish keep tripping me up. One thing that I’m just not used to at all is that where the accent goes changes the meaning of the word. Consequently, there are a large number of words that sound extremely similar to me but mean entirely different things. My favorite so far has been when I tried to say “They listened” and ended up saying “Is big spoon.” These two things may seem wildly different in English, but they are a mere slip of the tongue away in Spanish. A demonstration:
“Escucharon.” = “They listened.”
“Es cucharón.” = “Is big spoon.”
and the last one
“Escucha, Ron!” = “Listen, Ron!”
That last one is admittedly not one often encountered, but to me they all sound very similar. Thankfully I think I now have that one under my belt, but there’s still a whole language to master.
Pictures to come soon, if it ever stops raining here.
A few days before we went diving, we took our scooter (named Elvis, but you have to say it with a Colombian accent) around the island to check out some stores on the other side. It was our first full circuit under our own power, and it was fantastic. Aguamansa, the other side of the island, is less populated and has fewer beaches, but the water there is mesmerizing. The way to travel: coasting along at unknown speeds (our speedometer is broken, as is one brake and one rearview mirror), bounded by the scorched blue of the ocean and the sunset through the mountains, windblown but cool and exhilarated. You also feel like you’re going faster when you don’t have a windshield. We met a woman, very friendly (like most people here), who showed us around her house and the collages and artwork she had for sale, and regaled us at length with stories about the island. And she turns out to know someone in Silvia’s family. Small world.
The conversation proceeded in a mixture of Spanish and English, and I could follow the English (whew!) but as usual, only partially the Spanish. My studies have been proceeding intermittently, and at the moment I can still understand far more than I can say. I’m trying to practice speaking with Silvia, but the differences between French and Spanish keep tripping me up. One thing that I’m just not used to at all is that where the accent goes changes the meaning of the word. Consequently, there are a large number of words that sound extremely similar to me but mean entirely different things. My favorite so far has been when I tried to say “They listened” and ended up saying “Is big spoon.” These two things may seem wildly different in English, but they are a mere slip of the tongue away in Spanish. A demonstration:
“Escucharon.” = “They listened.”
“Es cucharón.” = “Is big spoon.”
and the last one
“Escucha, Ron!” = “Listen, Ron!”
That last one is admittedly not one often encountered, but to me they all sound very similar. Thankfully I think I now have that one under my belt, but there’s still a whole language to master.
Pictures to come soon, if it ever stops raining here.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Providencia Treatment
Providencia, at first glance, is exactly what it seems: tropical, remote, lush and overgrown, hot, humid, and communal. Then, at second glance, it stays the same. The third look perhaps shades in some detail, but the portrait remains essentially unchanged. This is a place that grows in its acquaintance by the depth of its themes rather than their variety, a perhaps needed reminder that composition comes in myriad varieties.
From its start, the visuals echo the narrative: vistas of stunning beauty join run-down buildings of a sort that would be called “charming” by a particular sensibility in the same breath that it would turn around and look for a resort. If Providencia doesn’t distinguish itself from its stereotype, it’s because it has no need to. Why bother, when even the idea of an identity crisis here seems bizarre, and when ulterior motives of that kind would seem (to me at least) as foreign here as, well, me.
The breadth of the panorama here joins together abstraction and specificity. The oft returned-to water is glorious when seen as water, but when sitting and daydreaming it’s equally easy to lose reference points in the blue field. One scene at night had the horizon line vanish during dinner on the beach. The storm relegated the sky and water to the same monochromatic status, and beyond the shore and anchored boats, the dark could as easily have been a canvas positioned just past the light from the restaurant. Sounds are subject to the same principle: so many crabs scurry away at your approach that the accumulation of noise approaches the purity of its ideal, a sound effect of crabs rather than the crabs themselves.
Though a good portion of people here probably qualify as living below the poverty line, using the word “poor” has not yet crossed my mind. Superficially at least, none of the problems associated with poverty seem in evidence: crime, hunger, housing. It may be only because of the superficiality of the observation, but differences from the familiar here seem to stem from diverging in standards rather than failing to meet them. It’s a tricky judgment to make, and one that I would rather stay away from altogether, except that avoiding it falls into the reverse trap. Overcoming the fallacy of cultural solipsism means avoiding the avoidance of judgment as much as it means a relaxation of critical standards. When you encounter a new place, it seems to me that neither saying “Everything here is different, and thus wrong” nor “Everything here is different; but it’s okay, because they don’t know any better” is the right response. (Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but exaggerating renders point-making that much easier.)
But almost as if to compensate, the narrative offers opportunities for learning: language, motorbikes, different kinds of fish. Learning of the specific sort, not principles but skills, offers a concrete point of access. Getting a handle on riding a scooter is pretty much the same no matter where you do it, and language acquisition, though lengthy and trying, can be incredibly rewarding both in terms of convenience and genuine understanding: linguistic revelations often lead to other kinds of the same. Learning offers a chance to both take and expand, to preserve and focus inward by opening up to the world around you. Learning can offer immense satisfaction too, both in smaller doses and grander ones, when you’re done and have a new skill in your arsenal.
With learning under our belts, we tackle the slow process that is acclimation (and here, acclimatization too). When all is said and done, there’s no real climax or chase scene—there rarely is—just the slow and quiet revelation of what was already known. With this location in particular, it’s the truth that your first impression was right, but insufficient. It comes in the feeling that underlies the action, in the reasons learned and invented for courses already taken. The initial beauty is still almost as beautiful (and the color of the water in particular comes to mind), but now the stunned beauty of first contact joins with a small, warm feeling of possession and ownership to gain depth, and if not permanence, then at least durability. The narrative is no longer abstract (though it still might be just a little fictitious), but concrete. There will be a homecoming, and then all of a sudden, this particular story, without further obfuscation or philosophy from on high, will end.
From its start, the visuals echo the narrative: vistas of stunning beauty join run-down buildings of a sort that would be called “charming” by a particular sensibility in the same breath that it would turn around and look for a resort. If Providencia doesn’t distinguish itself from its stereotype, it’s because it has no need to. Why bother, when even the idea of an identity crisis here seems bizarre, and when ulterior motives of that kind would seem (to me at least) as foreign here as, well, me.
The breadth of the panorama here joins together abstraction and specificity. The oft returned-to water is glorious when seen as water, but when sitting and daydreaming it’s equally easy to lose reference points in the blue field. One scene at night had the horizon line vanish during dinner on the beach. The storm relegated the sky and water to the same monochromatic status, and beyond the shore and anchored boats, the dark could as easily have been a canvas positioned just past the light from the restaurant. Sounds are subject to the same principle: so many crabs scurry away at your approach that the accumulation of noise approaches the purity of its ideal, a sound effect of crabs rather than the crabs themselves.
Though a good portion of people here probably qualify as living below the poverty line, using the word “poor” has not yet crossed my mind. Superficially at least, none of the problems associated with poverty seem in evidence: crime, hunger, housing. It may be only because of the superficiality of the observation, but differences from the familiar here seem to stem from diverging in standards rather than failing to meet them. It’s a tricky judgment to make, and one that I would rather stay away from altogether, except that avoiding it falls into the reverse trap. Overcoming the fallacy of cultural solipsism means avoiding the avoidance of judgment as much as it means a relaxation of critical standards. When you encounter a new place, it seems to me that neither saying “Everything here is different, and thus wrong” nor “Everything here is different; but it’s okay, because they don’t know any better” is the right response. (Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but exaggerating renders point-making that much easier.)
But almost as if to compensate, the narrative offers opportunities for learning: language, motorbikes, different kinds of fish. Learning of the specific sort, not principles but skills, offers a concrete point of access. Getting a handle on riding a scooter is pretty much the same no matter where you do it, and language acquisition, though lengthy and trying, can be incredibly rewarding both in terms of convenience and genuine understanding: linguistic revelations often lead to other kinds of the same. Learning offers a chance to both take and expand, to preserve and focus inward by opening up to the world around you. Learning can offer immense satisfaction too, both in smaller doses and grander ones, when you’re done and have a new skill in your arsenal.
With learning under our belts, we tackle the slow process that is acclimation (and here, acclimatization too). When all is said and done, there’s no real climax or chase scene—there rarely is—just the slow and quiet revelation of what was already known. With this location in particular, it’s the truth that your first impression was right, but insufficient. It comes in the feeling that underlies the action, in the reasons learned and invented for courses already taken. The initial beauty is still almost as beautiful (and the color of the water in particular comes to mind), but now the stunned beauty of first contact joins with a small, warm feeling of possession and ownership to gain depth, and if not permanence, then at least durability. The narrative is no longer abstract (though it still might be just a little fictitious), but concrete. There will be a homecoming, and then all of a sudden, this particular story, without further obfuscation or philosophy from on high, will end.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
In Harry Potter's Defence
For me, the most miraculous aspect of the Harry Potter series is how wonderfully and richly it grows. On the joy of its fantasy it is worth reading the first book alone, but as it develops, it proves its worth as something more than a purely imaginative object. Rowling is not one of the great English authors: let’s state that to begin, and furthermore let’s clarify the obvious superfluity of that fact. Harry Potter does not pretend to canonical status, so let’s not waste time detailing the ways in which Rowling is not, in fact, Henry James. These books are at heart a children’s series; they have the simple joys and ease of access that define them as such. Even as their world deepens and darkens, they retain to the end their ethos of youth, and I mean that as a compliment.
Rowling matures as a writer in time to make her characters mature as well, and the somewhat surprising result is that over the course of seven books, her characters grow as believably and as thrillingly as could reasonably be hoped, even exceeding that expectation to become genuinely surprising. Her world increases its complexities to provide the room for that growth, and it is a testament to the scope of her vision that it happens naturally, with grace and pride. It does not achieve the security of inevitability but strives for something else instead, blossoming into a myriad of possible routes, revealing both the tenuousness and the tenacity of that individual choice.
Harold Bloom seems to find in Harry Potter a lack of imagination, originality, quality writing and effective satire. On that last count, he is indisputably, incontrovertibly accurate: the series almost entirely forsakes the dark undercurrent of the societal psyche, and consequently fails utterly as a satire. The series chooses other roads of appeal instead, and other routes towards imaginative flight. The initial thrill of the first book is one of vicarious fantasy, a thoroughly imagined and enchanting fantasy. It is not wholly original, if we define original to mean without precedent. It does, to a certain extent, rest on cliché. But synthesis is a form of originality as well, and if done with skill and joy can be as much a success in its own way as the fabrication of something wholly novel. There is more than one kind of creative act, and Rowling’s imbues the clarity of familiar, straightforward ideas with a richness and depth that render the cliché immediate and the stereotype utterly believable.
Her writing has been disparaged. It is not flawless; as was stated before, her hypothetical status in the literary canon is self-evidently suspect. But she is clever, and genuinely funny; she is inventive in small, memorable ways, and her writing endearingly mirrors her subjects. It is not high English, with a capital E and an imperious voice, but keep in mind that these are children’s books, and after all, lord knows, when you’re a kid, what you really hunger for more than anything isn’t imagination or liberation but the ability to distinguish between finely nuanced layers of prose styles. This is not to say that children’s books should not be written well; they should. But there are different kinds of standards, and Bloom’s is not the one to which Harry Potter adheres. Difficulty certainly has its worth, but the value represented by difficulty can manifest itself in other ways as well. Not everything rests definitively on the apparatus of its presentation.
There is inherent and inextricable value to entertainment, value that justifies itself. Belittling Harry Potter for taking entertainment and enjoyment as one of its core values seems plain curmudgeonly. Looking at the series retrospectively and contextually undoubtedly has worth, but it misses out on the thrill of that first contact high and the exhilaration of discovery. Children’s books can sometimes be read intellectually, but doing so only helps to chart the architecture that lends the narrative its fundamental appeal. To read it on a critical level alone refuses to acknowledge the point; it seems only fair to do the series the favor of at least trying to enjoy it. For me, the books grow in value as the series progresses and its world grows richer, more expansive, and more real. Why subscribe to an economy of narrative when you can revel in magic and adventure instead? These books perhaps do not work to justify their existence as the sole arbiter of taste and intelligence, but they do not intend to. Few things exist in a vacuum, and partaking in one type of enjoyment does not preclude experiencing others as well.
And this, to me, seems to be at the core of Bloom’s critique: the Harry Potter books do not align with his particular conception of quality literature. It is at heart a top-down critique whose varied aspects can all be traced back to the notion of the Right Way to Do Things. Having only read part the preface to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (because that’s what’s available on Google Books), this is a mode of thought that underwrites his thinking there as well: singularity joined to pervasiveness, and a unitary judgment from which all things can be derived. There, it is poetic influence (this is admittedly a hasty judgment to make, but I’m all about making grand inferences from small amounts of information), while here, it is what literature should be. This is a notion that gets under my skin, because the consequent worldview renders everything a variation on a theme. There are compositions based on different themes as well, and ones that turn their back on a thematic world entirely.
The Harry Potter books are fundamentally and wonderfully good-hearted. Like the books themselves, their characters are flawed, but good. Redemption is offered, but it is realistic, not operatic. They are underwritten with a deep sense of belief in love and friendship, an honest faith that is not maudlin in any way, and that, to me, seems good. Unlike Twilight (and that’s a whole another article right there), their fantasy carries no insidious subtext. For all its whimsy and fantasticality, the series is deeply and warmly human. Reading them does not involve any temporary relaxing of standards or demeaning of morals, demanding instead that each hold steady to their beliefs, as it itself does with pride. Rowling’s narrative is no weaker because her characters are sometimes dislikable or irritating, even for long stretches at a time: I find it admirable that she is unafraid to present temporary abrasiveness because the overall arc is rendered that much more compelling.
Why read Harry Potter? Because it’s fun. Because as it grows and matures and reveals its almost incidental master plan, the extent to which it becomes affecting takes you by surprise. Perhaps it is not universally appealing (though book sales would seem to suggest that it is), and like many children’s books, it probably takes a particular kind childishness to enjoy fully. I like fantasy generally, and as in much fantasy, the success of Harry Potter’s particular brand depends as much on its ability to be extended in the imagination of reader as in the mind of the author. The world is fully realized on the page, but more importantly, off it as well. The series’ greater literary merit or endurance or sophistication or whatever may be up for debate, but I enjoyed every minute of those books.
Rowling matures as a writer in time to make her characters mature as well, and the somewhat surprising result is that over the course of seven books, her characters grow as believably and as thrillingly as could reasonably be hoped, even exceeding that expectation to become genuinely surprising. Her world increases its complexities to provide the room for that growth, and it is a testament to the scope of her vision that it happens naturally, with grace and pride. It does not achieve the security of inevitability but strives for something else instead, blossoming into a myriad of possible routes, revealing both the tenuousness and the tenacity of that individual choice.
Harold Bloom seems to find in Harry Potter a lack of imagination, originality, quality writing and effective satire. On that last count, he is indisputably, incontrovertibly accurate: the series almost entirely forsakes the dark undercurrent of the societal psyche, and consequently fails utterly as a satire. The series chooses other roads of appeal instead, and other routes towards imaginative flight. The initial thrill of the first book is one of vicarious fantasy, a thoroughly imagined and enchanting fantasy. It is not wholly original, if we define original to mean without precedent. It does, to a certain extent, rest on cliché. But synthesis is a form of originality as well, and if done with skill and joy can be as much a success in its own way as the fabrication of something wholly novel. There is more than one kind of creative act, and Rowling’s imbues the clarity of familiar, straightforward ideas with a richness and depth that render the cliché immediate and the stereotype utterly believable.
Her writing has been disparaged. It is not flawless; as was stated before, her hypothetical status in the literary canon is self-evidently suspect. But she is clever, and genuinely funny; she is inventive in small, memorable ways, and her writing endearingly mirrors her subjects. It is not high English, with a capital E and an imperious voice, but keep in mind that these are children’s books, and after all, lord knows, when you’re a kid, what you really hunger for more than anything isn’t imagination or liberation but the ability to distinguish between finely nuanced layers of prose styles. This is not to say that children’s books should not be written well; they should. But there are different kinds of standards, and Bloom’s is not the one to which Harry Potter adheres. Difficulty certainly has its worth, but the value represented by difficulty can manifest itself in other ways as well. Not everything rests definitively on the apparatus of its presentation.
There is inherent and inextricable value to entertainment, value that justifies itself. Belittling Harry Potter for taking entertainment and enjoyment as one of its core values seems plain curmudgeonly. Looking at the series retrospectively and contextually undoubtedly has worth, but it misses out on the thrill of that first contact high and the exhilaration of discovery. Children’s books can sometimes be read intellectually, but doing so only helps to chart the architecture that lends the narrative its fundamental appeal. To read it on a critical level alone refuses to acknowledge the point; it seems only fair to do the series the favor of at least trying to enjoy it. For me, the books grow in value as the series progresses and its world grows richer, more expansive, and more real. Why subscribe to an economy of narrative when you can revel in magic and adventure instead? These books perhaps do not work to justify their existence as the sole arbiter of taste and intelligence, but they do not intend to. Few things exist in a vacuum, and partaking in one type of enjoyment does not preclude experiencing others as well.
And this, to me, seems to be at the core of Bloom’s critique: the Harry Potter books do not align with his particular conception of quality literature. It is at heart a top-down critique whose varied aspects can all be traced back to the notion of the Right Way to Do Things. Having only read part the preface to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (because that’s what’s available on Google Books), this is a mode of thought that underwrites his thinking there as well: singularity joined to pervasiveness, and a unitary judgment from which all things can be derived. There, it is poetic influence (this is admittedly a hasty judgment to make, but I’m all about making grand inferences from small amounts of information), while here, it is what literature should be. This is a notion that gets under my skin, because the consequent worldview renders everything a variation on a theme. There are compositions based on different themes as well, and ones that turn their back on a thematic world entirely.
The Harry Potter books are fundamentally and wonderfully good-hearted. Like the books themselves, their characters are flawed, but good. Redemption is offered, but it is realistic, not operatic. They are underwritten with a deep sense of belief in love and friendship, an honest faith that is not maudlin in any way, and that, to me, seems good. Unlike Twilight (and that’s a whole another article right there), their fantasy carries no insidious subtext. For all its whimsy and fantasticality, the series is deeply and warmly human. Reading them does not involve any temporary relaxing of standards or demeaning of morals, demanding instead that each hold steady to their beliefs, as it itself does with pride. Rowling’s narrative is no weaker because her characters are sometimes dislikable or irritating, even for long stretches at a time: I find it admirable that she is unafraid to present temporary abrasiveness because the overall arc is rendered that much more compelling.
Why read Harry Potter? Because it’s fun. Because as it grows and matures and reveals its almost incidental master plan, the extent to which it becomes affecting takes you by surprise. Perhaps it is not universally appealing (though book sales would seem to suggest that it is), and like many children’s books, it probably takes a particular kind childishness to enjoy fully. I like fantasy generally, and as in much fantasy, the success of Harry Potter’s particular brand depends as much on its ability to be extended in the imagination of reader as in the mind of the author. The world is fully realized on the page, but more importantly, off it as well. The series’ greater literary merit or endurance or sophistication or whatever may be up for debate, but I enjoyed every minute of those books.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Special Center for Children God Bird
We finally have transportation! I just drove to use the Internet now instead of walking half an hour! It was awesome! On Friday we took the bike to Aguadulce (where we get Internet) and back twice without any problems, so by island standards we’re good to go. It was the first time we went out on the main road, I was driving and Silvia was on back. And of course, because we have a very odd kind of luck on this island, on that first ride I had to navigate both a torrential downpour and a herd of cattle. (It was the first time we’ve ever seen cows on this stretch of road. There were maybe 20 of them and we just kind of honked and poked our way through). I feel fairly confident in our ability to deal with unexpected situations at this point, automotive or otherwise.
Also, I was bit by a fish the other day. It was like a marine blitzkrieg, it just made a beeline for my finger out of nowhere, attacked, and then darted away. It really wasn’t serious at all, there’s not even a mark, but it was off-putting all the same.
So my next post is going to be a bit odd. A little while ago somebody commented on one of my posts, referencing the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s a name that I’ve heard before but didn’t really know anything about, so I went and googled him to see what popped up. I tried reading a few pages from one of his books, but more to the point, I came across a review he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Potter back in 2000. You can read it for yourself here, but the gist of it is that the Harry Potter series sucks. I happen to really enjoy the whole series and consequently was really irritated by his review, so I ended up jotting down some thoughts while reading it and then putting them together into a defense. (Hey, I’m on a remote tropical island and have plenty of time on my hands. And it’s a good activity while watching Futurama in Spanish, which I can only follow because I’ve seen them all before anyway.)
I’m going to post that review as its own post, but in case you really just came here to read about Providencia (very understandable), I decided to do a parallel post. Since I was already writing one review, I figured I’d do another, this one of something related to Providencia. It’s a bit of an odd idea, but it’s for a blog, so why not? Call it a review/treatment of a hypothetical movie. They should both be up in the next day or two (assuming our Internet connection isn’t interrupted by a thunderstorm or passing bird or something).
And now, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures. I haven’t taken a huge amount yet, as we’re going to be here for a while and I was going to wait until we had transportation and could get around more easily, but here's a small sampling nonetheless:
San Andres from the air
Front view from the shack
Back view from the shack
The shack
Bathroom area
Road to the beach
And a small narrative:
Look at the children playing and having fun!
Whoops.
(He was fine, but the game was over)
And in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it’s what’s written in huge letters on the side of one of the school buses here. It doesn’t really have to do with anything else, I just thought it was funny.
Also, I was bit by a fish the other day. It was like a marine blitzkrieg, it just made a beeline for my finger out of nowhere, attacked, and then darted away. It really wasn’t serious at all, there’s not even a mark, but it was off-putting all the same.
So my next post is going to be a bit odd. A little while ago somebody commented on one of my posts, referencing the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s a name that I’ve heard before but didn’t really know anything about, so I went and googled him to see what popped up. I tried reading a few pages from one of his books, but more to the point, I came across a review he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Potter back in 2000. You can read it for yourself here, but the gist of it is that the Harry Potter series sucks. I happen to really enjoy the whole series and consequently was really irritated by his review, so I ended up jotting down some thoughts while reading it and then putting them together into a defense. (Hey, I’m on a remote tropical island and have plenty of time on my hands. And it’s a good activity while watching Futurama in Spanish, which I can only follow because I’ve seen them all before anyway.)
I’m going to post that review as its own post, but in case you really just came here to read about Providencia (very understandable), I decided to do a parallel post. Since I was already writing one review, I figured I’d do another, this one of something related to Providencia. It’s a bit of an odd idea, but it’s for a blog, so why not? Call it a review/treatment of a hypothetical movie. They should both be up in the next day or two (assuming our Internet connection isn’t interrupted by a thunderstorm or passing bird or something).
And now, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures. I haven’t taken a huge amount yet, as we’re going to be here for a while and I was going to wait until we had transportation and could get around more easily, but here's a small sampling nonetheless:
San Andres from the air
Front view from the shack
Back view from the shack
The shack
Bathroom area
Road to the beachAnd a small narrative:
Look at the children playing and having fun!
Whoops.(He was fine, but the game was over)
And in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it’s what’s written in huge letters on the side of one of the school buses here. It doesn’t really have to do with anything else, I just thought it was funny.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Character of Places
Random movie observation of the day: the face-grabbing gesture that John Travolta’s family makes in Face/Off to indicate affection is extremely odd. There’s obviously some symbolism intended, but it gets totally lost behind how weird that motion is.
Unfortunately we haven’t managed to get a hold of a scooter yet. It keeps raining, which prevents us from learning how to drive because the field where we’re learning is too muddy to do anything in. And the guy who’s teaching us wants us to drive a few more times around the field before we go out on the roads (irritating to us because we have to wait, but in principle I can’t really argue with him). In the meantime we’re hoping for a stretch of dry weather…
The other night Silvia and I went for a walk on the beach. It was close to a full moon, and although the clouds obscured it most of the time, water was still startlingly lucid and clear in what light there was. Shadows on the sand turned into clusters of crabs and scurried away at our approach. We waded across the entrance to the mangrove forest (? swamp? whatever it’s called) to the bar of a guy who had been accosting us to come have a drink for days now. We sat there on the beach, sipping our “coco-locos” (less good than they sound), almost entirely alone except for the lights and the reggae music from the bar. It was a Saturday night, and although we were told the party had dispersed only because of the rain earlier, imagining the solitude of the moment as all-encompassing was effortless. It’s a common theme for me here so far, so posit living here and the life that would be. (Oh wait, I am living here. But in truth it’s still temporary.)
I love trying to discern the character of different places. It’s easiest with cities, particularly big ones, both because they come loaded with myth and preconceptions, and the sheer intensity of the experience makes its personality that much easier to ascertain. It’s also interesting that it’s a character that exists in conjunction with but not necessarily because of the people who live there. Such a character can be complex and difficult to articulate, and is perhaps as much my creation than anything intrinsic to the place itself. But whether arising from the perceiver or the object itself, it’s a personality that reveals itself quickly but deepens and grows richer the longer I spend there. New York is full, diverse, and rich; Berlin is young, vital and determined; Paris is French.
So what is Providencia? It’s remote, a bit run-down, friendly, and idyllic, but even together those seem to miss the pulse of life here. With only two weeks on the island it’s hard to pin it down exactly, and its diffuseness makes it that much harder. But that in itself is striking, that there’s no imposition on my sense of rhythm, just a suggestion and a strong inclination towards moving a little bit slower and lazier. Except for getting used to different accommodations, transportation, etc. (although that was a bit more of a transition than I anticipated), I feel comfortable sticking to my own objectives to a surprising degree. Moving anywhere new and doing your best to truly live there rather than just be a tourist always involves a negotiation between individuality and adaptation; residents of a place always remain independent to a certain degree, nonchalance being a necessary component of cosmopolitanism. But when you grow up in a place you can almost always choose to breathe its rhythms, and going somewhere new requires a conscious acknowledgement of what otherwise is near-instinct.
So what does all this say about Providencia? Just that since most of my traveling has been to cities, I expected to be struck over the head. Instead, I am finding that acclimation here means dialing back rather than ramping up, relaxing into new rhythms instead of trying to force myself into lockstep. It’s odd also, because I am largely isolated from people I know. In a way it’s wonderful to have the freedom and time for pretty much anything, but you also are reminded just how much other people factor into the idea of motivation in the first place. So that to me, living here for several months, as I am, seems feasible and enjoyable, and I am excited at the prospect. But really living here? I still have to figure out exactly what that would mean.
Unfortunately we haven’t managed to get a hold of a scooter yet. It keeps raining, which prevents us from learning how to drive because the field where we’re learning is too muddy to do anything in. And the guy who’s teaching us wants us to drive a few more times around the field before we go out on the roads (irritating to us because we have to wait, but in principle I can’t really argue with him). In the meantime we’re hoping for a stretch of dry weather…
The other night Silvia and I went for a walk on the beach. It was close to a full moon, and although the clouds obscured it most of the time, water was still startlingly lucid and clear in what light there was. Shadows on the sand turned into clusters of crabs and scurried away at our approach. We waded across the entrance to the mangrove forest (? swamp? whatever it’s called) to the bar of a guy who had been accosting us to come have a drink for days now. We sat there on the beach, sipping our “coco-locos” (less good than they sound), almost entirely alone except for the lights and the reggae music from the bar. It was a Saturday night, and although we were told the party had dispersed only because of the rain earlier, imagining the solitude of the moment as all-encompassing was effortless. It’s a common theme for me here so far, so posit living here and the life that would be. (Oh wait, I am living here. But in truth it’s still temporary.)
I love trying to discern the character of different places. It’s easiest with cities, particularly big ones, both because they come loaded with myth and preconceptions, and the sheer intensity of the experience makes its personality that much easier to ascertain. It’s also interesting that it’s a character that exists in conjunction with but not necessarily because of the people who live there. Such a character can be complex and difficult to articulate, and is perhaps as much my creation than anything intrinsic to the place itself. But whether arising from the perceiver or the object itself, it’s a personality that reveals itself quickly but deepens and grows richer the longer I spend there. New York is full, diverse, and rich; Berlin is young, vital and determined; Paris is French.
So what is Providencia? It’s remote, a bit run-down, friendly, and idyllic, but even together those seem to miss the pulse of life here. With only two weeks on the island it’s hard to pin it down exactly, and its diffuseness makes it that much harder. But that in itself is striking, that there’s no imposition on my sense of rhythm, just a suggestion and a strong inclination towards moving a little bit slower and lazier. Except for getting used to different accommodations, transportation, etc. (although that was a bit more of a transition than I anticipated), I feel comfortable sticking to my own objectives to a surprising degree. Moving anywhere new and doing your best to truly live there rather than just be a tourist always involves a negotiation between individuality and adaptation; residents of a place always remain independent to a certain degree, nonchalance being a necessary component of cosmopolitanism. But when you grow up in a place you can almost always choose to breathe its rhythms, and going somewhere new requires a conscious acknowledgement of what otherwise is near-instinct.
So what does all this say about Providencia? Just that since most of my traveling has been to cities, I expected to be struck over the head. Instead, I am finding that acclimation here means dialing back rather than ramping up, relaxing into new rhythms instead of trying to force myself into lockstep. It’s odd also, because I am largely isolated from people I know. In a way it’s wonderful to have the freedom and time for pretty much anything, but you also are reminded just how much other people factor into the idea of motivation in the first place. So that to me, living here for several months, as I am, seems feasible and enjoyable, and I am excited at the prospect. But really living here? I still have to figure out exactly what that would mean.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Water Pics
Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what I mean when I say I can't get over the color of the water:
Friday, October 2, 2009
Observations
Thankfully, we’re more or less settled in now. We’re set to start lessons on the bike this afternoon, so hopefully that’ll go well and shortly we will have wheels, freedom, and the wind in our hair. It’s a bit of a pain to get around exclusively by taxi, and both of us are looking forward to an easier commute to a functioning internet.
And now here, in no particular order, are a series of observations I have made of life in Providencia:
And now here, in no particular order, are a series of observations I have made of life in Providencia:
- The instructions on gmail have now switched into Spanish without my guidance. I now know that “Acceder” means “Sign In.”
- The seafood here is (unsurprisingly) fantastic. So far on menus I’ve only seen various kinds of seafood and then chicken, so it’s clearly the primary food on the island. At the place we go for lunch every day (a restaurant on the beach called El Divino Niño with a pink statue of a baby Jesus in front), we often see people carrying handfuls of fresh lobster or fish from a little boat to the kitchen, so it’s obviously fresh. If we order the mixed plate for two, we get: two whole fish; a lobster; calamari; crab; coconut rice; tomatoes; and patacon (smashed, fried plantains). It’s pretty fantastic. We could also get shrimp or conch. And Silvia particularly enjoys the vinegar garlic-chili sauce we use to flavor everything.
- I had never seen crab roadkill until we got here. It’s understandable, seeing as there are crabs everywhere. When you walk along the side of the road, you here tens of them scurrying away as you approach, especially at night or after it rains. Unfortunately we missed the crab migration season, when they close the roads and thousands of them migrate from the mountains to the sea to lay their eggs, but there seem to be a lot as is.
- There are a lot of mosquitoes and other insects. You learn that “itchy” is really just a state of mind. I recognize that I itch, but I choose not to be “itchy.” It’s all in how you think about it.
- Heavy rainstorms blow up out of nowhere, last forty seconds, and then disappear.
- My sense of time and urgency is much reduced from before.
- It’s an interesting experience, being this disconnected. We still check the internet once a day, but we only really use it for essential stuff, and I know that for most of the day I am utterly inaccessible, and even more important, that it doesn’t really matter. It takes some getting used to, but it’s kind of wonderful. Not quite life-changing, but enjoyable all the same.
- In the same vein, I am fascinated by what it would be like to live here, and particularly to grow up here, with a worldview that is unfettered and uncluttered. The primary pastime here seems to draw a fine line between hanging out and doing nothing. People sit on the side of the road, talk, listen to reggae, dance, and maybe play dominoes. How different is it from seeing movies in theaters, taking the subway to friends, and going to concerts? I’m not sure; sophistication (in its many meanings), maybe? Perhaps its just because I’m here for such clearly defined objectives, but I have a hard time imagining not moving towards something.
- I can’t get over how beautiful the water is. Crystal clear and brilliant, multifaceted blue.
- It’s hot. And humid. Thankfully it’s easy to go swimming.
- Following that, the showers are only cool, because the main source of water is rainwater (and who has a heater on this island?), but it’s really great. It would be counterproductive to have a really hot shower here.
- The people are very friendly and helpful.
- There’s something nice about not being able to choose the movies you watch. You get an interesting assortment of films you wouldn’t see otherwise.
- Pola ran away again last night, but we found her. Cats run away a lot.
- Because everybody uses motorcycles to get around here, you get a really odd cross-section of people you wouldn’t expect to see on them. The oddest one yet was the two preteens coming back from school, followed by two women driving next to each other so they could gossip between motorcycles.
- Life here is nice.
Silvia's Blog
Silvia is just getting her own blog started. You can check it out at sjmantillaortiz.blogspot.com, I'll put a link to it over on the side.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Prelude to Living in Providencia, Part Two: "Houses"
To part two of the story in a moment. I am currently writing this post while watching the new version of Grey Gardens on HBO in our rooms (yes, we get HBO. We’re on a remote tropical island where we have to walk thirty minutes to get cell phone and Internet service, but somehow our rooms have HBO. So it goes) after a day spent jetting around the island on a boat tour. Some of Silvia’s extended family showed up pretty much out of the blue yesterday and then took us along today on a group tour around the island. We got to see the whole island from the ocean, climb up this little rock islet for some spectacular views of “The Sea of Seven Colors” (so called because of the myriad blues formed by rock and coral), go snorkeling all around the same islet (although I didn’t actually have a snorkel, so I guess it was technically just swimming around and looking at stuff, which is surprisingly feasible because the water is crystal clear), get an excellent dinner, and end with a long walk on the beach. It was really enjoyable, and probably the first time that I’ve felt really comfortable with the idea of living here for the next two months, which is almost as important as getting to do all the stuff we did. I think I might even getting marginally better at understanding Spanish, and even Silvia is impressed by my ability to look like I know what’s going on. Providencia ftw.
Now for part two, and it’s going to be a long one:
At the airport, we met Silvia’s friend-of-a-friend architect/artist Antonio who owned the house we were planning to stay in. He helped us get all our luggage into one of the pickup truck taxis that are the only real way of getting around here if you don’t have a motorbike, and then we set off around the island. There’s basically one road that goes all the way around the island, so there were some beautiful views just from the car. We parked in front of a dirt clearing with a tiny, rickety wooden house in it. In the house there was a couple who greeted us and Antonio before we set to take our bags to our house, which we were told was higher up on the hill.
Well “higher up on the hill” turned out to mean a 10-15 minute hike (unburdened and without baggage) directly up the mountain, a hard one with a minimal trail, and one that we had to bring all our luggage up. (Have you ever hauled 90 kilos of luggage up a mountain? It’s hard.) The farther up we got, the more worried and exhausted I became, until finally we arrived at the house way up on the mountain. Admittedly, the view was spectacular. On one side, there was a panoramic view of the arc of the reef traced out in cyan and azure against the darker blue of the ocean, and on the other side, the mountainous interior of the island rose up out of the mists. And in the middle was a glorified shack that was supposed to be the aforementioned house. It was a wooden structure with one big room and an outdoor shower and toilet attached to the side. No electricity, no running water, just two hammocks, three beds, and unrestricted communing with nature. Silvia and I hiked back down, half laughing and all worried, and got the rest of our 90 kilos of luggage back up the mountain trail. Antonio then showed us how to get rainwater from the cistern (to be fair, most of the water here is rainwater) and where to start a fire in the “kitchen” and left for the night.
At this point, several things happened that drove the whole situation from dubious to full-on bad. 1) Pola (Silvia’s cat) ran away, and we couldn’t find her because it’s hard to find a cat in the freaking jungle, 2) insects besieged us, 3) the sun set, which wouldn’t be a problem except that we had no power and it’s hard to do stuff in the dark (thankfully we had two flashlights), and 4) a serious storm broke, forcing us to close the four doors (one in each wall of the house) and windows and fortify ourselves in this shack on top of a mountain while a torrential thunderstorm did its best to kill us. (This may all seem kind of melodramatic, but it was also made worse by the fact that I had just been traveling for over 24 hours straight without much food and sleep and wanted nothing more than to eat a solid meal, take a shower, and get into a comfortable bed. It really was like something out of a movie.) Long story short, after the storm abated and it was clear that we were not going to get blown off the mountain, Silvia and I ended up huddled together in the dark under the mosquito netting on one bed, one cat fewer, batting away insects by flashlight, sweaty and dirty from hauling luggage up a mountain, appetites lessened, exhausted but not wanting to go to sleep in the bug-ridden beds, and just generally doubting the whole enterprise. And neither the cell phones nor the internet router-thing got service. This was clearly not going to work for three months.
Eventually we discovered that opening all the doors and windows got a breeze that kept the insects away, made some peanut butter sandwiches, and sat out on the terrace, talking and enjoying the view of the sea by moonlight. So it ended up getting marginally better (and as Silvia pointed out, things couldn’t , but still, when Antonio showed up the next morning, after enlisting his help to find Pola (unsuccessful, though Silvia did manage to run into a tree full of fire ants), we told him it wasn’t going to work out. We had two other leads: a guy he knew with an apartment, and some cabins whose owner Silvia had been talking to until he stopped responding to emails. We hiked down, walked to the apartment (not so good), then headed towards the main town, not knowing how far it was and hoping a taxi would drive by. It started raining again, but it took about 45 minutes for a taxi to show up and give us a ride to the cabins. They were run-down and decrepit and clearly not functional, so we were left more or less homeless.
We made our way to the central town, where we tried the internet again (still not working, a serious problem because I needed it to be able to do the writing that was my source of income), ran into a tourist couple who told us about the hotel they were staying at. We made our way out to there, found a place for the night, then we (mostly Silvia) proceeded to ask a bunch of places nearby about the possibility of staying there for several months. The answer was generally “no” with a few conditional “maybes.” And our luggage was still at the top of the mountain on the opposite side of the island, so we rented a golf cart for 24 hours, went back, hiked up and back down with everything, and moved into a place for the night. We then showered, felt immensely uplifted because we were now clean and not in a shack, finally got cell phone and internet service, then continued to search (in the golf cart) for a place to stay. Each person told us another one to try (and everyone seemed to reference one Miss Vicky), until on the way back at the end of the day, we finally found a place that seemed reasonable. It was a hotel, the sections had multiple rooms, and Silvia knew the guy who ran the place because her dad had offered him good medical advice before (small world). So we talked to him, then headed back for the night, got an actual meal for the first time since Monday afternoon (it was now Wednesday night), and went to sleep.
The next day, we moved into our new place, then returned the golf cart and walked for about 40 minutes in a torrential downpour back to our new place. We then discovered neither the internet nor our cell phones worked at this new place, talked to the owner and learned the internet only worked in two or three places on the island, the closest one was where we had just come from (the 40 minute walk). We also had no transportation and no real access to a kitchen. We were going to try and arrange with a restaurant on the to give us one big meal a day for a reduced price and just have sandwiches for the rest. So there were still some major issues to sort out.
In short, because this is already long enough, over the last few days, we did manage to arrange with a restaurant on the beach to feed us, we have someone who is going to teach us to drive a Vespa and then rent it to us for a month (I took a shot at riding it on my own first and was doing fine until I tried to turn around and hit a rock) so that we have a way to get around, it finally stopped raining, and I have made the 30-40 minute walk to where we get internet and cell phone service so many times that it actually doesn’t seem too bad anymore. And we found a great place to sit on a hotel terrace right by the beach that gets internet and the owner has no problem with me working there. And we finally found Pola by tempting her with cooked fish, hiking up and down the mountain several more times in the process. So all in all, a very trying first week, but things are finally beginning to look up. If nothing else, this has been a serious lesson in not being in control and just going with the flow. In general, you cannot expect anything to happen quickly or efficiently here; you just have to trust that things will work out. So far, it’s gotten us a place to stay and a beautiful beach to frequent, and for the moment, that’s enough.
Now for part two, and it’s going to be a long one:
At the airport, we met Silvia’s friend-of-a-friend architect/artist Antonio who owned the house we were planning to stay in. He helped us get all our luggage into one of the pickup truck taxis that are the only real way of getting around here if you don’t have a motorbike, and then we set off around the island. There’s basically one road that goes all the way around the island, so there were some beautiful views just from the car. We parked in front of a dirt clearing with a tiny, rickety wooden house in it. In the house there was a couple who greeted us and Antonio before we set to take our bags to our house, which we were told was higher up on the hill.
Well “higher up on the hill” turned out to mean a 10-15 minute hike (unburdened and without baggage) directly up the mountain, a hard one with a minimal trail, and one that we had to bring all our luggage up. (Have you ever hauled 90 kilos of luggage up a mountain? It’s hard.) The farther up we got, the more worried and exhausted I became, until finally we arrived at the house way up on the mountain. Admittedly, the view was spectacular. On one side, there was a panoramic view of the arc of the reef traced out in cyan and azure against the darker blue of the ocean, and on the other side, the mountainous interior of the island rose up out of the mists. And in the middle was a glorified shack that was supposed to be the aforementioned house. It was a wooden structure with one big room and an outdoor shower and toilet attached to the side. No electricity, no running water, just two hammocks, three beds, and unrestricted communing with nature. Silvia and I hiked back down, half laughing and all worried, and got the rest of our 90 kilos of luggage back up the mountain trail. Antonio then showed us how to get rainwater from the cistern (to be fair, most of the water here is rainwater) and where to start a fire in the “kitchen” and left for the night.
At this point, several things happened that drove the whole situation from dubious to full-on bad. 1) Pola (Silvia’s cat) ran away, and we couldn’t find her because it’s hard to find a cat in the freaking jungle, 2) insects besieged us, 3) the sun set, which wouldn’t be a problem except that we had no power and it’s hard to do stuff in the dark (thankfully we had two flashlights), and 4) a serious storm broke, forcing us to close the four doors (one in each wall of the house) and windows and fortify ourselves in this shack on top of a mountain while a torrential thunderstorm did its best to kill us. (This may all seem kind of melodramatic, but it was also made worse by the fact that I had just been traveling for over 24 hours straight without much food and sleep and wanted nothing more than to eat a solid meal, take a shower, and get into a comfortable bed. It really was like something out of a movie.) Long story short, after the storm abated and it was clear that we were not going to get blown off the mountain, Silvia and I ended up huddled together in the dark under the mosquito netting on one bed, one cat fewer, batting away insects by flashlight, sweaty and dirty from hauling luggage up a mountain, appetites lessened, exhausted but not wanting to go to sleep in the bug-ridden beds, and just generally doubting the whole enterprise. And neither the cell phones nor the internet router-thing got service. This was clearly not going to work for three months.
Eventually we discovered that opening all the doors and windows got a breeze that kept the insects away, made some peanut butter sandwiches, and sat out on the terrace, talking and enjoying the view of the sea by moonlight. So it ended up getting marginally better (and as Silvia pointed out, things couldn’t , but still, when Antonio showed up the next morning, after enlisting his help to find Pola (unsuccessful, though Silvia did manage to run into a tree full of fire ants), we told him it wasn’t going to work out. We had two other leads: a guy he knew with an apartment, and some cabins whose owner Silvia had been talking to until he stopped responding to emails. We hiked down, walked to the apartment (not so good), then headed towards the main town, not knowing how far it was and hoping a taxi would drive by. It started raining again, but it took about 45 minutes for a taxi to show up and give us a ride to the cabins. They were run-down and decrepit and clearly not functional, so we were left more or less homeless.
We made our way to the central town, where we tried the internet again (still not working, a serious problem because I needed it to be able to do the writing that was my source of income), ran into a tourist couple who told us about the hotel they were staying at. We made our way out to there, found a place for the night, then we (mostly Silvia) proceeded to ask a bunch of places nearby about the possibility of staying there for several months. The answer was generally “no” with a few conditional “maybes.” And our luggage was still at the top of the mountain on the opposite side of the island, so we rented a golf cart for 24 hours, went back, hiked up and back down with everything, and moved into a place for the night. We then showered, felt immensely uplifted because we were now clean and not in a shack, finally got cell phone and internet service, then continued to search (in the golf cart) for a place to stay. Each person told us another one to try (and everyone seemed to reference one Miss Vicky), until on the way back at the end of the day, we finally found a place that seemed reasonable. It was a hotel, the sections had multiple rooms, and Silvia knew the guy who ran the place because her dad had offered him good medical advice before (small world). So we talked to him, then headed back for the night, got an actual meal for the first time since Monday afternoon (it was now Wednesday night), and went to sleep.
The next day, we moved into our new place, then returned the golf cart and walked for about 40 minutes in a torrential downpour back to our new place. We then discovered neither the internet nor our cell phones worked at this new place, talked to the owner and learned the internet only worked in two or three places on the island, the closest one was where we had just come from (the 40 minute walk). We also had no transportation and no real access to a kitchen. We were going to try and arrange with a restaurant on the to give us one big meal a day for a reduced price and just have sandwiches for the rest. So there were still some major issues to sort out.
In short, because this is already long enough, over the last few days, we did manage to arrange with a restaurant on the beach to feed us, we have someone who is going to teach us to drive a Vespa and then rent it to us for a month (I took a shot at riding it on my own first and was doing fine until I tried to turn around and hit a rock) so that we have a way to get around, it finally stopped raining, and I have made the 30-40 minute walk to where we get internet and cell phone service so many times that it actually doesn’t seem too bad anymore. And we found a great place to sit on a hotel terrace right by the beach that gets internet and the owner has no problem with me working there. And we finally found Pola by tempting her with cooked fish, hiking up and down the mountain several more times in the process. So all in all, a very trying first week, but things are finally beginning to look up. If nothing else, this has been a serious lesson in not being in control and just going with the flow. In general, you cannot expect anything to happen quickly or efficiently here; you just have to trust that things will work out. So far, it’s gotten us a place to stay and a beautiful beach to frequent, and for the moment, that’s enough.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Prelude to Living in Providencia, Part One: Planes
So I’m here in Providencia, finally moved into the place where it looks as though we’ll be spending the next 2-3 months. It’s Saturday morning, and I started traveling Monday afternoon. It’s been a very long week. I’m sitting in a restaurant called Pizza’s Place that gets good reception for the internet, and although it’s closed now nobody really seems to care that I’m sitting here because nobody really cares what you do here in general. Providencia is undeniably beautiful and has all the allure you’d hope for in a remote, somewhat run-down tropical island. (Though for such a small place, I have to say that it takes an awfully long time to get around, and for an island, there are surprisingly few beaches.) In somewhat reduced form, here follows the chronicle of getting to this point. I’m going to post it in two parts, because a whole lot of crap was packed into the last few days.
Monday, 1:30 pm: My mom and I leave the house, heading for LaGuardia. The plan: NY to Houston to Bogota to San Andres to Providencia, all in all a solid 24 hours of traveling. At this point, I am wishing that I could just cut to Tuesday night and be happily and comfortably moved in, avoiding all of the hassle of traveling. (Big mistake. Tuesday night = extremely, comically miserable. If I had seen into the future, I might have chosen to abandon the whole enterprise.) We arrived at the airport, I went through security and everything, no problem, waited for the plane, and took off on schedule. Arrived in Houston at around 8:00 pm (really 9:00 with the time difference) and killed time until taking a connecting flight to Bogota at midnight. I arrived in Bogota tired but on schedule at 5:00 am. So far, so good.
I met up with Silvia and Pola, her cat, at the Bogota airport. After breakfast at a place called Crepes y Waffles (exactly what it sounds like), we made our way through security, including a security officer opening all my carry-on luggage and squeezing the lining to make sure I wasn’t concealing everything, and caught our flight to San Andres. Upon landing, we made our way past some sort of customs officer who did not seem pleased that we were planning to stay as long as we were. There, our bags were checked again. A guy at the airport helped us store our luggage for a few hours and then drove us to lunch and back. Lunch was stewed conch. It was very good. When we returned to the airport and checked in for our final flight, they informed Silvia that her cat Pola was going to have to be checked. Silvia may have thought that it was cause for concern, but it was in fact hilarious, and both I and the guy moving the luggage acknowledged this fact. When we got to the plane, the guy showed her that Pola was safely stowed on top of all the other luggage (it was a little propeller plane so all the luggage was just in the back). Providencia looked gorgeous from the air. We landed. We made it.
The hilariously, cinematically disastrous escapades of part two to come next.
Monday, 1:30 pm: My mom and I leave the house, heading for LaGuardia. The plan: NY to Houston to Bogota to San Andres to Providencia, all in all a solid 24 hours of traveling. At this point, I am wishing that I could just cut to Tuesday night and be happily and comfortably moved in, avoiding all of the hassle of traveling. (Big mistake. Tuesday night = extremely, comically miserable. If I had seen into the future, I might have chosen to abandon the whole enterprise.) We arrived at the airport, I went through security and everything, no problem, waited for the plane, and took off on schedule. Arrived in Houston at around 8:00 pm (really 9:00 with the time difference) and killed time until taking a connecting flight to Bogota at midnight. I arrived in Bogota tired but on schedule at 5:00 am. So far, so good.
I met up with Silvia and Pola, her cat, at the Bogota airport. After breakfast at a place called Crepes y Waffles (exactly what it sounds like), we made our way through security, including a security officer opening all my carry-on luggage and squeezing the lining to make sure I wasn’t concealing everything, and caught our flight to San Andres. Upon landing, we made our way past some sort of customs officer who did not seem pleased that we were planning to stay as long as we were. There, our bags were checked again. A guy at the airport helped us store our luggage for a few hours and then drove us to lunch and back. Lunch was stewed conch. It was very good. When we returned to the airport and checked in for our final flight, they informed Silvia that her cat Pola was going to have to be checked. Silvia may have thought that it was cause for concern, but it was in fact hilarious, and both I and the guy moving the luggage acknowledged this fact. When we got to the plane, the guy showed her that Pola was safely stowed on top of all the other luggage (it was a little propeller plane so all the luggage was just in the back). Providencia looked gorgeous from the air. We landed. We made it.
The hilariously, cinematically disastrous escapades of part two to come next.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Traveling
So I am leaving shortly to spend roughly three months in Providencia, a small, somewhat remote island in Colombia. I'm going to be living with my good friend Silvia, spending my time writing, exploring, and learning Spanish. I'll post updates and stories on here, so check back later to find out more about my travels. I'll also try and set up a place to look at pictures (though that might be iffy depending on Internet speed), and I'll post the link here once I get that up and running.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Cormac McCathy and Blood Meridian
I recently finished reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I had read The Road previously, a book that intrigued me even if it didn't entirely convince me. I decided that the restraint of the language, its desolate quality, the way that nothing in the book ever quite peaked, was all part of what the book was trying to do: depict a world lacking. And anyways, I'm a sucker for apocalyptic fantasies and it was really just a slow, drawn-out thriller so it made for good summer reading outside in the sun. In the interim between then and now, I saw No Country for Old Men, which was an excellently made, drawn-out thriller that hinged on its own spareness and ultimately, insufficiency. So I was beginning to see a theme.
I had developed the conception of McCarthy as a masculine writer based both on my experience with him and his tendency to be a preferred author of several of my male friends. Reasons why I think this is valid (and I grant that these are based on largely traditional conceptions of masculinity, but so be it): he is violent; strong; hard and spare; individualistic, and quite romantic in his own way. It's a cowboy's, hero's romance, and though some would call it subversive, I don't think it is; a failed hero is all the more romantic for the failure. Another obvious point is that his books are about men. That is not unique in itself, except that they are almost exclusively about men without being obviously misogynist, which is no small achievement. (Or they are only as misogynist as they are generally misanthropic.)
Upon beginning Blood Meridian, I found it to be similar to The Road, if more violent. It starts off with a similar desolation, but then blossoms into a kind of pure literary beauty. He is indisputably an excellent writer, one with a full grasp of his technical abilities; but in spite of this, I could not wait for the book to end. Why? I have no objection to good writing. I like good writing. I think it is sometimes worth reading things only because they were written well. But come on, give me just one sentence without a freaking simile. Just one without decadent imagery, just one where the language doesn't buckle under the ripeness of its fruit. A typical passage: "They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those white regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds (182)." Gorgeous. Drop dead, utterly beautiful, a knockout of a passage. But I couldn't stand it at the end, the obsessive beauty that was so overwhelmingly present I had difficulty seeing it as beautiful. Was this the point? I don't know, I can't tell as it stands. It certainly would correlate to the way that The Road operates structurally as well as narratively, but as a strategy I just can't get behind it. As the novel blooms from aridity into lushness, I am stunned, then overwhelmed into indifference. With some writing, I pause and reflect on the excellence of the author, then continue reading. With Blood Meridian, all I thought about was the author. Perhaps I approached it too academically, but I found myself wishing that McCarthy would stop being a Good Writer long enough to write.
But then there's this: "You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow." So I'm a little torn.
I had developed the conception of McCarthy as a masculine writer based both on my experience with him and his tendency to be a preferred author of several of my male friends. Reasons why I think this is valid (and I grant that these are based on largely traditional conceptions of masculinity, but so be it): he is violent; strong; hard and spare; individualistic, and quite romantic in his own way. It's a cowboy's, hero's romance, and though some would call it subversive, I don't think it is; a failed hero is all the more romantic for the failure. Another obvious point is that his books are about men. That is not unique in itself, except that they are almost exclusively about men without being obviously misogynist, which is no small achievement. (Or they are only as misogynist as they are generally misanthropic.)
Upon beginning Blood Meridian, I found it to be similar to The Road, if more violent. It starts off with a similar desolation, but then blossoms into a kind of pure literary beauty. He is indisputably an excellent writer, one with a full grasp of his technical abilities; but in spite of this, I could not wait for the book to end. Why? I have no objection to good writing. I like good writing. I think it is sometimes worth reading things only because they were written well. But come on, give me just one sentence without a freaking simile. Just one without decadent imagery, just one where the language doesn't buckle under the ripeness of its fruit. A typical passage: "They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those white regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds (182)." Gorgeous. Drop dead, utterly beautiful, a knockout of a passage. But I couldn't stand it at the end, the obsessive beauty that was so overwhelmingly present I had difficulty seeing it as beautiful. Was this the point? I don't know, I can't tell as it stands. It certainly would correlate to the way that The Road operates structurally as well as narratively, but as a strategy I just can't get behind it. As the novel blooms from aridity into lushness, I am stunned, then overwhelmed into indifference. With some writing, I pause and reflect on the excellence of the author, then continue reading. With Blood Meridian, all I thought about was the author. Perhaps I approached it too academically, but I found myself wishing that McCarthy would stop being a Good Writer long enough to write.
But then there's this: "You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow." So I'm a little torn.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Julie & Julia
This past weekend I saw Julie and Julia with my family, and aside from the movie itself (it's light, cheerful, and maybe just a little—albeit in a truly wholesome way—subversive), the most indelible impression left is, unsurprisingly, Meryl Streep. She is an unquestionably superb actress, capable of incarnating a pop-cultural deity in a way that supremely announces her presence as a performer by vanishing, deft and quick, into the icon herself, but even more than that, she is a professional. This notion is perhaps one of the few modern myths that I buy into almost wholeheartedly. The idea of the pro: someone who performs their function quietly and efficiently, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of success; one of the most enduring and realistic cultural legacies of a capitalistic society, and one that I cannot help but aspire to. What is the seductiveness in this notion of the professional, of someone who is not just good at what they do but good at being good? It combines an ability that is just crucially short of being unearthly with a sense of direction and duty that is forever grounded in the task at hand. It is perhaps the focus that makes the difference, the unrelenting drive to succeed. But that only accounts for part of the equation, and moreover, is too romantic a notion by far. The lack of romanticism is part of the professional's defining characteristic, and in its place a kind of clear-sightedness that leads to the endlessly practical. A professional is never a dreamer, never a cynic, but instead a pragmatic idealist: a realist with a firm belief in the unending power of ability. Perhaps the declaration of the professional as capitalistic was overly hasty, as a Marxian work ethic does not seem entirely incompatible. But in feeling, a pro is entirely too individualistic, and too far at odds with any sort of immediate collectivism.
The professional is attainably heroic, and only as capable as he has the power to be. A significant part of it is the sense of traditionalism, seen in the individual's utter dedication to the mastery of a craft. In the traditionalism is seen the existence within a community of professionals, though those of the past and future can suffice. Is the professional an anti-revolutionary figure? Perhaps, as they are almost necessarily dogmatic. Innovation is inevitably inefficient; inventors are always amateurs. Whether actress or soldier or banker, somebody who does what they do well, and for no other sake than to do it. The professional is a kind of livable crucible, a negotiation between extremes that does not compromise but draws strength from the tension instead. Part of it is that they must remain in motion, and dedicated to the task: a professional without a profession is nothing at all. I think the professional is perhaps a paragon of immanent idealism, if such a thing exists: a materialism (they must be craftsmen, not philosophers) that gives rise to a religion, one that exists in tandem with but independent of its origins. To be good, to be great at what you do; to have something to be great at, and know it.
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