“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”
– John Muir on travel, in a letter to his wife Louie in July 1888

(photo: John Gabree)

Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream

It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.

Last week Twitter announced that at the end of November the company will host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

According to Twitter, it has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter notes it has even inspired some literary criticism.

To get into the spirit of things, and without getting into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this tweet-length short short story:

On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the desolated creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.

Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.

Unusually affecting portrait at 617 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles attributed to Jr and Vhils. The head was created by scraping the stucco down to the building’s brick wall and shaping the features of the face with paste.
Resources:
The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles
Los Angeles Murals: Red Line Tour (DiscoverLosAngeles.com)

Heading east on I-40 toward Gallup. Bob Dylan‘s great bluesy new album, Tempest, on repeat. Nobody cops licks & embraces cliches with more gusto & abandon than Bob Dylan.

The band’s hot. The stories’re gripping. 50 years and counting. Amazing.


You can get Tempest by Bob Dylan at Amazon.

Chopped a large heirloom tomato — keeping seeds aside — and sprinkled with lemon juice. Laid Spanish anchovies across chopped tomatoes and topped with tomato seeds. Served with cubed feta cheese and whole grain crackers (and a glass of Merlot).

Taxation without representation

Since tourists don’t vote in places they don’t live, it’s customary for local governments to gouge visitors with excessive and arbitrary travel taxes and fees tacked on to hotel rooms, airport, railroad and interstate bus transactions, car rentals, etc., at venues like airports, lodgings,
and so on, where local voters are less apt to go. A particularly egregious example: taxi ride fares in Las Vegas, a sprawling western city where most locals drive their own cars and parking fees are minimal to non-existent to attract gamblers.

You’ll want to think twice before taking a Vegas cab. Turning on the meter costs $3.50 — before you’ve traveled an inch. At the end of the ride, a tip is added with no obvious way to remove or change it. If you choose to use Visa/MasterCard or Amex, there’s a $3 fee to swipe the card. A short trip — from the Venetian to Caesar’s, say, about a half mile — can set you back $15.

Is that $3 swipe fee even legal? (In California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas, at least, it would be against the law; what’s up, Nevada?) Doesn’t charging the fee amount to offering a cash discount? Visa rules don’t allow retailers to charge cardholders a checkout fee for using their cards; probably neither do the agreements of other credit card issuers. Even if, in tight times, a business felt it needed to make up the sums paid to the credit card card companies, these amount to about 3% of the cost of a transaction not, as in the case at hand, a usurious 20%!

Beach, Rosa del viento eco-hotel, Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

On your virtual travels, don’t fail to visit the site of New York-based photographer and fellow traveler Malcolm Kirk. Galleries on the site focus on Iconic Figures — revealing studies of prominent figures in the arts and sciences, from Marcel Duchamp and Saul Steinberg to Richard Feynman and Arthur C. Clarke, including the famous portrait of Andy Warhol that the iconic and ironic artist turned into a series of silk-screened ‘self-portraits’ that hang in major museums throughout the world; Man As Art — a record of tribal body decoration in Papua New Guinea that was published in a large-format hardcover book documenting islanders’ visually stunning tribal body decorations, headgear and carved masks; Silent Spaces — a documentation of aisled barns dating back to the 12th century; and Enclosed Gardens — a pictorial essay covering some of the world’s most magnificent gardens, self-assigned projects that each involved years of research.

Books by Malcom Kirk:
Silent Spaces: The Last of the Great Aisled Barns (Bullfinch Press 1994)
Man As Art (Chronicle 1993)

We read on buses (and trains and planes and subways*), so Bogotá is taking the logical next step in putting books where we use them.

* The Underground New York Public Library is a virtual gallery featuring the reading-riders of the NYC subways. The New York Public Library, the real one not the virtual one, maintains its smallest branch in the Metropolitan Transit Authority located down a flight of stairs, just outside the turnstile entrance to the No. 6 train on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 50th Street.

Reading, relaxing and removing dead skin:

Fish pedicure, storefront window – Prague, Czech Republic (February 2010).

Fish pedicure is eating Asians and Europeans alive.
Reading list:


Garra Rufa – Skin Beauty Therapy from a Fish The Doctor Fish Exfoliates and Treats Skin Problems by Heidi Bolton (Suite 101 – 2010-04).

Experts’ Shocking Warning: Don’t Let Fish Chew on Your Feet (blog, Discover Magazine – 2011-06-28).

UPDATE: There’s an addendum to a 2010 posting about the book exchanges that you find at Starbucks in various parts of the world, although not, apparently, in Southern California: Roadside Assistance: Call the Starbooks — Starbucks book exchanges (The Detourist 2010-06-10).

Brian Fawcett‘s angry, bracing Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow: a daring act of intellectual guerrilla warfare.

A poet by trade (see, A Poetry War in Prince George 2012/04), Brian Fawcett has a side job deconstructing modern civilization in a stunning series of fiction and non-fiction books and stories (his Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown won the 2003 Writer’s Trust prize for Canadian non-fiction). Cambodia, a volume that uses thirteen riotous, edgy, mildly experimental works deploring the mind-destroying impact of consumerist culture and sensationalist mass media to annotate a powerful denunciation of the agonies, extraordinary even measured against the exalted standards of 20th century atrocities, endured three decades ago by Cambodia’s people at the hands of its murderous Khmer Rouge overlords.

The book’s awkward layout — short pieces run across the top of its pages, the long essay along the bottom quarter its entire length — contribute to its subversive appeal. I can’t imagine what section of the bookstore you’ll find Cambodia: it’s at once an incendiary indictment contemporary society, a dissertation on the role of the fiction-writer — the artist — in the late modern era, and a thoughtful, passionate, well-informed and provocative meditation on the lasting poison of imperialism.

What it is not, strictly speaking, is a travel book, although it does capture the faith in human interconnectedness that animates so many of us to caravan to other cultures and places.

Habitual travelers, it seems to me, are frequently driven to explore other societies as a reaction to, almost as a kind of protest against the accelerating homogenization and debasement of their own. It wasn’t so long ago that you wouldn’t have needed to travel much beyond the other side of the next hill to encounter an alien world. Now mass media is forging a universal culture whose shallowness — language coarsened, simplified; bland, anything-goes-as-long-as-no-one-is-truly-offended aesthetics; wealth and power exalted, the cloak of powerlessness meekly donned; dehumanizing indifference to violence and suffering; feeling and “faith” triumphant over fact, seance before science, history reconstituted as subjective fiction; critical thinking feared and rejected; memory and imagination annihilated — causes Brian Fawcett to worry that, on a planet where “Cambodia is as near as your television set,” we risk the loss of “our right to remember our pasts and envision new futures.”

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Collier 1986) by Brian Fawcett is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Follow-up to Good Eatin’: Health Benefits of Coffee (The Detourist 2012-05-17): The Case for Coffee: All the Latest Research to Defend Your Caffeine Addiction, in One Place by Brian Fung (The Atlantic 2012-07-03).

*

Among dog-eared volumes on The Detourist’s crowded kitchen shelf none has suffered more wear and tear than Food Without Borders, a slim menu of healthy recipes using mostly proteins and vegetables compiled by French foreign correspondent, military analyst and adventurer Gerard Chaliand. Now nearly 80, Chaliand is an expert in armed-conflict studies and in international and strategic relations, especially in what are known as asymmetric conflicts, as for example in the fight in Afghanistan between the powerful military of the United States and the diffuse, lightly armed Taliban.

In 40-plus years as a freelance journalist and academic, Chaliand has traveled to more than 60 international hotspots from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nagorno-Karabakh and Sri Lanka to Chechnia, Peru, Chiapas and Kurdistan. Even at the time he published this cookery, in 1981, early in his career, he had already spent time in various parts of the Middle East, South-East Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Along the way, he came to the conclusion that there are, in his words, no “such things as national cuisines. In fact there are only regional cuisines or cuisines with local variations which cover a vast geographical area.”

In that spirit, Food Without Frontiers divides the world into geographical/historical regions with “cuisines which seem to me outstanding or worthy of special attention.” From each of these Chaliand presents foods that he found most appealing during his travels. Though its author has had long career as a social scientist and his interest in what people eat springs from a desire to understand the cultures he visits*, Foods Without Frontiers is anything but pedantic. Instead, it is a highly enjoyable visit to the kitchen of an opinionated Frenchman as he whips up meals that are exotic at the same time that they are well within the ken of most American cooks (Chaliand includes a list of substitutes for ingredients that may not be available in your neighborhood, although these days it is unusual for an urban supermarket not to devote a row or two to ethnic foods and fixings).

Food Without Frontiers is parceled into seven sections: Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans (lamb dishes are typical); East and South East Asia (steamed duck); India, Pakistan and South Asia (Mulligatawny Soup); The Americas including the Caribbean (Chicken Sauté à la Creole); Black Africa (Bobotie – Cape Malay-style meat loaf); Northern, Central and Eastern Europe (Hare in the Pot); and Western Europe — the Latin Countries (Blanquette de Veau). Although only 120 pages including an index, I’ve used it for 30 years without tiring of it. Most of the recipes are easily adapted to US kitchens. As with many regional cookbooks, it will lead the adventurous cook to experiment with new flavors and ingredients.

*Regional cuisines “and probably also music,” Chaliand says, writing before cable tv, the internet and Putumayo Presents, “are the most accessible parts of a culture and, at the same time, the most resistant to outside influence. They are the first points of real physical contact with a different society. Part of knowing how to travel is to have an appreciation of other cuisines: this is the very essence of the pleasure of traveling.”

Food Without Frontiers by Gerard Chaliand, long out of print, is available used from Amazon and other booksellers. He is also the author of such works as The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age; The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qæda (with Arnaud Blin); and Nomadic Empires: From Mongolia to the Danube.

Street art takes a philosophical turn in Mexico.

Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico (photo: John Gabree)

Wall art and abandoned furniture, Isla Mujeres — July 2012

A handy and convenient improvement on the insulated lunch bag

PackIt is a freezable, foldable lunch bag that the manufacturer says will keep food fresh for up to 10 hours. The personal cooler bag gets the job done without resorting to melting ice or bulky, toxic ice packs. PackIts come in a variety of styles and sizes — for mini, individual and social lunches; accommodating single and double bottles; for bringing frozen and refrigerated food home from market — priced between $15 and $27. Store it folded in the freezer until you’re ready to pack it. Available online and many retailers.

Hotel Las Palmas, Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico 07/2012

Here are some links to cost-effective summer travel from Tips and Tricks: Summer Savings by Robert Brokamp (Motley Fool‘s Rule Your Retirement Newsletter 07/2012):

Summer travel season is here, and FareCompare.com, Kayak.com, HotWire.com, FamilyVacationCritic.com, AirFareWatchDog.com, SkyScanner.com, SkyAuction.com, and CheapTickets.com have great deals. For spur-of-the-moment trips, see Jetsetter.com, LastMinuteTravel.com, and Sniqueaway.com. Go uncoventional with time shares at CondoDirect.com, EVRentals.com, and ResortTime.com, or vacation rentals from owners at VRBO.com. Check out hostels, adventure travel, or temporary work overseas at BootsnAll.com. Go to SlowTrav.com for tips if you’re looking to settle in and explore a locale in Europe or North America. Use Hotelsweep.com to find places skipped by the bigger travel websites. Backbid.com shops your hotel reservation around for a better deal.

For more money-saving tips, go to Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement newsletter for July 2012.

Double the health benefits of your daily walks with free urban foraging.

“Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world.

“By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation.

“Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject matter.

“Theoretically, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” — from the website.