touristy?

[Because I am not one for following directions, I did use the Internet when I wrote this. But I knew EXACTLY where the photos were (they're mostly mine) and I swear I didn't venture off into the rest of the Internet until later when I added the one not-mine image. The whole idea came from a picture I had in my head (of a picture I took) so it seemed only right to put them in.]

San Jose fancies itself a cosmopolitan place. In terms of population and land, it's bigger than San Francisco. But it's called the San Francisco Bay Area, not San Jose Bay Area. Ok fine, that's probably because San Francisco has a bay and San Jose doesn't, but really—when someone says "Northern California," you think "San Francisco," don't you? Not San Jose.

So, back to the point—San Jose fancies itself terribly cosmopolitan. The Cinequest film festival is in San Jose, not San Francisco. As you can see (in the kind of crappy cameraphone photo), the downtown movie theatre gets all gussied up for the event—everything is shiny and new! Of course San Jose is the "IT" destination for up-and-coming filmmakers. Who would ever think otherwise? Well, those of us who know the rest of the city has a tendency to look more like this tunnel o'graffiti than the shiny downtown pavilion (which, incidentally, sat empty for five years during the dot-com boom-to-bust—the empty movie theatre reflects more of the true San Jose than the Cinequesty one).

If you're looking for the shiny and new or the ivied and old—the stuff of picture postcards—it's not difficult to find. But the interesting stories are not those made from money. In the shadow of Tower Hall is its antithesis: Peanuts Deluxe Cafe. Don't let the "deluxe" fool you. Just after I took this photo, I flicked a cockroach off the counter and settled in to eat my breakfast. I went there almost every day.

If you click through the photo and look in the background, you'll see a fellow serving up the food. His name is Minh and he's a Korean immigrant. The Korean immigrant owns the American diner and the Chinese place next door, and serves a student population in which Caucasians are barely in the majority, in a city built on Ohlone land by Spaniards.

Then there's the Crepe Lady, whose name I don't even know. On Saturday mornings, this Vietnamese woman—just a few hours after closing up shop at the Chinese restaurant down the block—spends four hours making crepes in the front of a coffeeshop in a relatively tony part of town. She could never afford to live there, and no one she cooks for looks like her. If you pay close enough attention to the financial transactions that go along with the crepe-making, you'll see a lot of white guilt makes its way into the tip jar.

When you visit, what will you see?

[Graffiti picture by Flickr user caracolski, other photos by me.]

a sufficient variety of knowledge

In the grand tradition of blog posts for this class, I'm going to veer slightly from the actual question.

Humboldt is quoted as lamenting the "sufficient variety of knowledge" of the scientists/travelers/collectors who went before him—but not because these scientists/travelers/collectors did a terrible job at science or travelling or collecting. Instead, the rest of the quotation makes it clear that Humboldt was disappointed that this lack of a sufficient variety of knowledge thus disallowed the travellers "to avail themselves of every advantage arising from their position." In other words, perhaps Humboldt is most disappointed in the singular/limited purposes of trips, or the single-minded-ness of collectors? Sort of like that question Amir and Kellan asked in class the other day, about what happens when you're so focused on studying one thing—think of all the stuff you missed out on. Perhaps it's a little of that, but perhaps it's just that Humboldt was so freaking awesome at everything that he wishes he had been part of those early travels and had the opportunity to experience/view the entire context from whence came the first specimens from [insert locale here].

And even if Humboldt was harshing on the scientists/travelers/collectors who went before him, he still got some value from them. In a letter to Carl Ritter, Humboldt says:

If a life prolonged to an advanced period bring with it several inconveniences to the individual, there is a compensation in the delight of being able to compare older states of knowledge with that which now exists, and to see great advances in knowledge develop themselves under our eyes in departments which had long slept in inactivity.

In this quotation, he's talking about himself and his advanced age (he lived to be 89, after all, and Ritter 79), but I could see where he might also be talking about the state of scientific knowledge. The advancements in scientific knowledge that occurred during his lifetime (1769-1859) are pretty spectacular, I would say, and in no small part due to Humboldt himself.

In fact, this quotation was the epigraph to An Abstract of Mr. Emerson's Remarks Made at the Celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Von Humboldt, September 14, 1869. In those remarks, Emerson referred to Humboldt as "one of those wonders of the world [...] who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind." And, Emerson goes on to say, Humboldt's mind was not like the rest of our minds: "As we know, a man's natural powers are often a sort of committee that slowly, one at a time, give their attention and action; but Humboldt's were all united, one electric chain..." But the connection to what I'm trying to say here about the "sufficient variety of knowledge to avail themselves of every advantage arising from their position" comes in this observation by Emerson: "He was properly a man of the world...for at any point on land or sea he found the objects of his researches"—perhaps not because he specifically set out to collect or study a particular object, but because he saw potential for study in everything.

This conception of Humboldt as some sort of superscientist was not solely Emerson's, of course. In an 1866 letter from John Muir to Jeanne Carr [CONTEXT: In 1866 Muir was a few years removed from his study of botany at Univ of Wisconsin; his prof was Jeanne Carr's husband (Ezra Carr) and Muir formed a relationship with the family. Muir then went walking around Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Canada—he hadn't made his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf or ever been to California, and had read a little bit of Emerson and Thoreau but wouldn't meet Emerson for another five years.], Muir discusses his dislike for having to focus on only a few things, and none of those things are the big things he really wants to do:

I do not believe that study, especially of the Natural Sciences, is incompatible with ordinary attention to business; still I seem to be able to do but one thing at a time. Since undertaking a month or two ago to invent new machinery for our mill, my mind seems to so bury itself in the work that I am fit for but little else; and then a lifetime is so little a time that we die ere we get ready to live. I would like to go to college, but then I have to say to myself, "You will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to invent useful machinery, but it comes, "You do not wish to spend your lifetime among machines and you will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to study medicine that I might do my part in helping human misery, but again it comes, "You will die ere you are ready or able to do so."


How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!

where i haven't been

In my first post for this class I wrote (a little bit) about the first time I went to Yosemite and how I just had to go there if I was going to be working on Muir for the rest of my life(ish). But that doesn't mean I've been everywhere. Far from it.

I haven't been to Walden Pond. Or Concord. The horror!

Actually, I haven't been to Massachusetts at all since 1992, and then I wasn't studying the Transcendentalists. I did, however, eat some fine cannoli in Little Italy. But cannoli aren't very Thoreauvian, so back to the point.

The point is, not a day goes by that I don't think about Walden Pond or Concord. It could be that I'm trying to paint a picture in my head while I'm reading some primary text or secondary scholarly article, and I'm always reading one or the other. But it also could be (and most likely is) that I can't consider myself a scholar in my chosen field until I do my best to follow Thoreau's map of the pond, or I wander down the path into town and pop in on someone for dinner and conversation (ok, I wouldn't really do the latter, but I would walk into town just so I can chuckle at how not in the wilderness HDT actually was...the weenie).

And, as morbid as it sounds, I feel like I need to touch all the authors' gravestones on Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

I'm not sure how all this will help me develop as a person or a scholar, except to say that I honestly believe I won't be "complete" until I, uh, complete that task. I have to walk in their footsteps (even to their graves) and see some of the same things they saw (what's 150 years of changes between friends?). If I'm to make historical and/or cultural claims about people and places, I need to have shared the same spot of earth with them.

our month in Smyrna

[While in MASC, Tim and I looked at A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the years 1809 and 1810 (London, 1813) by John Cam Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton.

I know this isn't really on prompt (this is a what-we-did rather than a what-we'll-do), but I think it's more interesting than me saying "well, I plan to eat a lot of figs" and I got to use photos. :)]

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre'—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer', a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering."—Henry David Thoreau, from "Walking"

After spending considerable time aboard a ship traveling all around the Aegean, my compatriot and I did a little dance when we docked at Smyrna. Not only were we thrilled to touch dry land—any dry land—we had heard tell that Smyrna was one of the most beautiful of all the ancient cities in this part of the world. As we were to stay at the governor's residence for the month, we knew we would be treated to the finest in food, drink, and *ahem* entertainment.

For the first week of our stay, our party indulged in a little Deadly Sinning. The generous amounts of Smyrna's finest figs proved too much for the delicate systems of some of our crew, and their gluttony proved their downfall. Having learned from the fates of these men, we sampled the citrus in moderation. Once adjusted to the fine foods of our host, we proceeded to gorge ourselves on sherbets, yaort, wine, coffee, and plenty of fresh fish.

I was most satisfied with the thick, rich Turkish coffee, while my companion made off with the bulk of the wine; for hours and hours he would smoke and drink with the locals, often placing bets on horse races and matches in which athletes would throw what was known as a "djerid." I feared we would lose him to this life of debauchery, but apparently he was madly in love with a maiden back home and thus was perfectly willing to leave his new-found friends at the end of our stay.

As for me, I spent most of my time sauntering throughout the city. Although part of the city is built on a hill, luckily for me the finest of the ruins are on flat land, near the sea. (For all my love of sauntering, I am not an accomplished climber.) Everywhere I went, history followed. Some of the ruins were once a "Homerium," a temple honoring the great Greek poet, Homer. I sat in those ruins over the course of many days, but I could not conjure an epic poem about our journey. An ode to food, perhaps. An epic, not so much.

[Source for image at top found here; photo by Flickr user Rastoder. Source for image at bottom found here; photo by Flickr user Anna-Qu.]

on (not) collecting

I don't like clutter, so I've never been a big collector of souvenirs-from-gift-shops without other utility—mugs are ok, tshirts are ok, stickers for my car are ok (advertising both of the place and the fact that you're cool enough to have been to the place). But I do have very specific items I have collected over my life. Mostly these things (cards, letters, tattoos) are used to mark events in time, and I suppose "where I've been" and "journeys I've taken" if we're talking about mental or emotional journeys rather than hikes, travels, or other forms of physical journeys.

The first time I went to Yosemite, I was a little militant about not screwing up the land. I had a totally irrational fear that on my first trip to Yosemite I was accidentally going to start a fire, or hit an animal with my car, or otherwise do some sort of damage to nature that would result in being thrown out of all National Parks forever and ever. (I told you it was irrational.) So, no matter that I could have reached into Mirror Lake and pocketed a stone that had been pummeled smooth by years of rushing water, I didn't. I thought that would be Just Plain Wrong.

On the way back down the trail from Mirror Lake, we walked past a Japanese tourist who had ripped up some sort of fern, roots and all, and was happily carrying it down the trail. Out of nowhere, a Park Ranger stopped her and had a "conversation" with her about not taking things out of National Parks. I took that as a sign that my irrational fear of screwing up nature was not so irrational, because clearly Park Rangers hide out behind trees waiting for people to pocket rocks and ferns.

When we left Yosemite Valley the next day, I realized that not only had I not collected any rocks or ferns, but I never set foot in a gift shop and I never used my camera. I was in Yosemite and didn't use my camera. All the pictures I have of the trip are from my friend who was with me. She took all the pictures. So the only collected items of my own that I have from that trip are my memories and the stories I can tell (and if you want to hear a really funny one, told by someone else, that paints me as a total lame-o, go here).

Since I didn't collect anything tangible on that trip, I made a point to collect photos, mugs, t-shirts, and stickers for my car on the next trip. I kind of made it a point to conquer things on this second trip. We weren't just going to see waterfalls and rushing rivers—I was going to purposefully scare the crap out of myself (I have a terrible fear of heights) and stand on the edge of a cliff 7503 feet high, and I was going to take a picture not only of where I was, but where I'd been. That's the photo you see here: Yosemite Valley floor 7503 feet below Taft Point.

In that instance, I collected tangible items, sure, and those I can share and the viewers of that collection can construct their own narratives if so desired. but I also have a set of not-so-tangible emotions that you bet I can recollect in tranquility—I just have to think about standing 7503 feet up and I get all weak in the knees and flash back to the whipping wind and the burning sun and the feeling of immense fear and joy.