Tourism Nostalgia Part 1

The older I get, it looks less and less like I am ever going to be able to do the kind of extended, leisurely touring that I have long dreamed of doing and have sunk a considerable amount of time in my life in plotting lists and itineraries for. But even if I were to go, I have the sense that the mid-level European travel world of my imagination, of train station hotels and walk-up pensions with faded carpets and curtains and 1960s amenities, of afternoons and evenings lolling about in cafes on the town square and taverns and small wood-paneled restaurants gawking at, if not the beautiful people, more than adequately attractive ones, all at prices manageable for the possessor of American dollars, may largely have ceased to exist even compared to what remained of it in the 90s, especially in the most famous locations. Now of course it is possible that I would find the new contemporary Europe much more exciting and vital than this old one that I am talking about, and certainly it would make my time there more interesting and myself a more attractive figure than if I were reduced to lamenting to just lamenting all of the things that were not there or that I could not afford to do anymore. It is a real disappointment in my life that I am not a more adaptive person. By the time I could study or absorb enough to have any sense of how to enjoy the culture of the present day, it will have long changed into yet something else.
I guess it is difficult to explain to anyone who did not grow up before the internet the imprint that certain books and certain pictures looked upon hundreds and hundreds of times over a period of many years would make on one's mind. That is obviously a common theme of my blogs, the strange desire I seem to have to keep up my relation to these books from my childhood that I looked up to and aspired to enter the world of in some way. This post has a bunch of pictures of Great Historical Sites of Europe taken from my college Western Civilization textbook which was published in the early 1960s. For some reason I have always loved these rather simple pictures, which I imagined was what these places looked like through the eyes of a cultured person who was really respected for his intelligence, which I have had some idea since an early age was the truly highest state that I had any realistic hope of attaining to. I thought I should look at them side by side with some picture of what they look like now, and record my thoughts on it.

1. Ancient amphitheater at Epidaurus. Everything, for me, has to start with Greece, or the Greek world. Look at those dried out, ancient looking hills in the background, and the sense that a traveler trekking across an empty country could just stumble upon this grand, perfect ruin.

I actually cannot find a modern picture of the place where it is overrun with vulgar tourists, commercialism, etc, so maybe it actually is not ruined, and my whole project of lamentation is going to be defeated.

I have seen more stirring old pictures of the Parthenon, but I'm trying establish a mood here.  

This is more like it, although most of these people at least look young, which is more bearable. Still, the romance of communing with the glory that was Athens is probably hard to achieve when there are this many people.

Aqueduct at Segovia. There's a nice little crowd here even in the 50s, but manageable. You're still going to get that centrally-located room and night of outdoor dancing with comparatively elegant people without too much hassle if you want it.

This is the most crowded modern picture I could find, and at least one blogger has written a post describing Segovia as "That Idyllic European Town You've Been Looking For" so maybe there is still hope for me to live out my European fantasies, or some of them anyway, and this will be an optimistic rather than a pessimistic post.

Mausoleum of Theodoric the Ostrogoth at Ravenna. Those trees. I feel like I'm at the end of a classic movie.

I like the 1950s approach better. The whole setting in the modern picture makes the tomb look less substantial, it looks a little like a CCC-era public restroom in a city park.





The cloth hall at Ypres. This building was rebuilt from 1933-1967 after the medieval structure was destroyed during World War I. This picture may be of the original, I can't tell. The solitary man in this picture decked out for an Alpine expedition as he crosses the square is one of my oldest tourism role models. The spirit embodied in this enthusiastic pilgrim will be mine too, someday, I can imagine myself thinking.

More cars now.

Walled Town of Carcassone. Another picture to arouse the leisure-lover's imagination. Another sleepy afternoon in the village just as it's been for the last 600 years. And a long-haired girl sitting on the wall...

I'm just not finding the nightmarish scenes I was hoping for. 

No nightmare here.

Cologne Cathedral. I'm pretty sure this picture must predate World War II.

Kenilworth Castle, England. I love the muddy approach here.

The modern picture somehow always lacks the romance of the older ones, but this place seems to have stayed pretty true to itself. 

Reims Cathedral. I'm going to bet this is still pleasant and civilized. But the neighboring areas, the nightlife, the cafes, those are all dead now, right? It's not possible that I could still find something of what I imagine I have always wanted, is it? 

This is the most crowded picture of Reims Cathedral I could find. Once again, the older picture makes it look so much more grand, but I am sure that it is pretty exciting to see in real life. Most of the famous places I have been to generally were.

Gratuitous Notre Dame picture. One of the central loci of the old Western European dream that so many today are successfully weaning themselves off of. 



Abbey at Cluny

This place is looking just as good as it did before.

This is the most important of these pictures, the one I came back to the most because it is the one that projects, in those who can make some claim to possession of its ultra-superior qualities, the most authority and self-assurance, and of course it is that that I have always lusted after with complete and shameless abandon. 

I would definitely still go and see this if I were able. It's got too much lore and connection to classic Europe to be too diminished in my eyes.

Well, maybe.

House of Jacques Coeur, Bourges

The Doges Palace always has had a little bit of a crowd--no one dreams of going to empty cities, even generally misanthropic intellectuals.

Now it's the poster child for overtourism. They are getting very close to implementing a fee to enter the city.

Medici-Riccardi Palace. I had to get something from Florence in here. It's another one of the old standbys of the touristic imagination that sounds like it has become somewhat more difficult at least to partake of the feeling of being somewhere very special and great. Perhaps this is not true. I was there in '97, pre-Euro,and the numbers of visitors, while lamented at the time, were certainly much smaller than now, and I felt that I found a great deal of what I was looking for. 

I'm going to publish this now. I was almost finished on the 23rd but I had a bit of a health incident on Christmas Eve so I don't know if I'm going to be up to polishing this for a few weeks. However I may do a short end of year type post in a couple of days because I am laid up for a few days.

Two Movies Named After 20th Century World Leaders

Now that I have caught up on making a record all of the movies I've seen I can see that I'm down to seeing about one a month. I'm going through a stretch now of seeing a few from the periods and categories that I have always liked. I am sure that there are probably a lot of movies from this century that I would like, but I haven't devised a system yet to consistently lead me to them (and I love operating off of systems), so for the time being I still get much more enjoyment out of what I am accustomed to. In any event the idea of generally preferring novel things, or that would even be able to make much of an impression on me, seems more and more strange to me as I get older.  I grasp the argument that one must grow tired of endlessly revisiting familiar things, but I guess I have not experienced in person enough of the tired images and activities and encounters that crowd my imagination to have had my fill of them such as to be always craving novelty. This will be the subject of some upcoming posts.


Tito and Me  (1992)

Another movie in that early-90s European arthouse vein that I have discovered of late enough positive associations that I have grown fond of it. This is a somewhat light-hearted Yugoslavian film about a chunky 10 year old set in 1954 that was made during the period when that country was in the act of violently breaking apart. The description on the DVD box that I bought it in order to watch it, since it isn't streaming anywhere, identifies it as being in the tradition of other wistful European films about childhood such as My Life as a Dog, Small Change, and a third one I had not heard of before the name of which escapes me. The appeal of this to me, and I did largely like it, lies in the details of its depiction of what looks like a fairly tranquil childhood in a minor European capital in a minor and I suppose even backwater European country under communism. The adults, especially those in their prime years, are all pointedly living in despair, from the two married couples and two children and one grandmother living together in a single one bathroom flat, to the artistic parents who frequently have to perform for party officials, to the teacher who writes on the chalkboard with great violence and flings the chalk on the floor afterwards, to the miserable leader of the student pilgrimage to the various sites around the country associated with Tito. The boy who is the main character I would not say loves Tito but develops an oddly vapid fascination for him that leads to his inadvertently winning an essay contest, the prize for which was to be a pilgrim on the aforementioned trip. I think this is supposed to be a metaphor for the absurdity of leader-worshipping political systems. There is a subplot involving a gangly girl from an orphanage who is the object of the protagonist's fledgling attempts at romance that I found oddly endearing. Having had a little glimpse of some of the less threatening remnants of that communist world when I lived in Prague I liked all of the parts that reminded me of that, such as when the student travelers camped out in the main hall of an old mansion on their trip (we did things like that!) or the easier familiarity of people who seem socially accessible to me with the worlds of arts and humanistic learning in general.  Also like many of the European films I am discovering from this time its way of understanding and engaging with the greater world whether via school or walking or traveling or the arts are just familiar to me in a way that I have had great difficulty finding anywhere in contemporary life.

Wilson (1944)


Big budget biopic of the now seriously downgraded 28th President of the United States, who is presented here as the near heroic but ultimately tragically over-idealistic figure that the popular histories of my youth still depicted him as. This flopped at the box office upon its initial release and I had never heard of it nor seen it come up in any discussion of Golden Age Hollywood, though it did get 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture, and won 5. I found it interesting and liked it, even though as a narrative it hits on all the points of the standard story of Wilson. There is Princeton, there is the governorship of New Jersey, the 1st Presidential campaign, the early progressive legislative successes, the contention with the Republican faction led by Henry Cabot Lodge, the death of his first wife, the courting of his second wife, the narrow re-election, America's entry into World War I, the Fourteen Points, the Versailles Peace Conference, the frantic tour around America to win support for the Treaty, the final collapse and debilitating stroke that left him bedridden for the final year of his Presidency. Filmed in technicolor with fairly loose restraint on expenses, it's a great-looking movie, almost worth seeing for the sets alone, and it has a cast full of very distinguished-looking though not especially well-remembered actors--the most recognizable to modern audiences (or at least audiences of my raised-on-TV 70s and 80s generation) would likely be Thomas Mitchell and Vincent Price, who appear here in minor roles. Wilson himself was played by Alexander Knox, a Canadian-born actor, in what appears to be by far his most prominent film role. Geraldine Fitzgerald, a very handsome Irish actress who had a solid career in the 30s and 40s, appearing frequently in adaptions of literary classics, portrayed the 2nd wife of the President. The 3 Wilson daughters were played by the kind of wholesome looking 1940s all-American girls I like, and the English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who was pretty celebrated in his day, was striking as Henry Cabot Lodge. The notable French actor Marcel Dalio, who appeared in several of Jean Renoir's 30s classics, appeared as Clemenceau, along with Henry Cabot Lodge the traditional villain foiling Wilson's noble plans. It was directed by the longtime Hollywood stalwart Henry King, several of whose pictures I have written about here, mostly positively.

As someone who is generally a fan of the aesthetics of the periods of American history covered in this movie (those being the 1910s as they were remembered in the 1940s) I was able to get a lot of pleasure from being able to revisit that alone. The beautiful fashions and hairstyles and rooms of the time, the confident energy of the still-rising American nation. There is a scene where the student body of Princeton (all-male at that time of course) serenades Wilson outside his house on the night of his election to the presidency which I suppose would be regarded by most sentient people as corny but which always evokes to me something attractive about the spirit of that time. I liked the football game scene and the golfing scenes as well.


Given the recent controversies surrounding Wilson's evidently severe racism and the demands that places that still publicly honor him, at Princeton and elsewhere, stop doing so, there is an amusing scene at the end of the movie when the ailing Wilson laments to his wife that his grandchildren and the generations of the future will judge him hardly for his failures at achieving disarmament and getting the United States to join the League of Nations and so forth. That 100 years after his Presidency the most salient aspect of him to these people of the future, and one that was essentially universally regarded as negative, would be that he was an enthusiastic supporter of segregation and other appalling racial attitudes, probably never occurred to him. It certainly doesn't seem to have occurred to the script writers of the 1940s or most critics up to modern times who disliked the film for other reasons either.
  

Forward-Looking Me

Or at least in-the-moment me. I'm going to do a post of short takes regarding pressing current (trending?) subjects. Especially since I have some of my more typical backward-looking ones in the queue preparing to roll out.




I was going to riff on whatever was coming across my Twitter feed, but I just logged on and someone is talking about what is the best Shakespeare play. Well, I can start with that. The best play is obviously Hamlet, right? All of those big tragedies would take up the "best" spots mostly. My favorites, meaning those I derived the most spontaneous enjoyment from reading, would be something like 1. Henry the Fourth I, 2. Antony and Cleopatra, 3. Julius Caesar, 4. Romeo and Juliet, 5. tie between Hamlet and As You Like It.


If called upon to give an unplanned 18-minute TED talk, what would you discuss? I don't know about anything that is up to date enough to interest a professional audience, so I would probably just talk about some the neglected American Literature of the period between the Civil War and World War II and what arguments can be made for its relevance to the present, which is something not a lot of other people are talking about anyway, though I doubt it would go over well.




Hatred of Trump. I am as tired of talking about Trump as much as everybody else. I haven't liked him going back to the 80s--indeed I probably hated him then more than I do now, I was younger and more hopeful about things and I thought it was terrible that the media seemed to celebrate and encourage his rude and disrespectful behavior. In the present day, I don't have anywhere near the inchoate fury with regard to him that other people have for him now. This hatred in a lot of people seems to be motivated by the sense that they are morally good while he is an abomination, or that they are intelligent while he is stupid, but I am not capable of feeling indignant in this way anymore. I have theorized that the subconscious cause of a lot of this rage is that he overtly make a mockery out of so many people's lives and earnest efforts by his ridiculous successes in fields that others take very seriously and devote much of their lives to trying to have a career in, not only politics but book publishing and selling, entertainment. How many Phds toil in poverty for decades trying to land any position, while Trump founds his own "university" and has people sending him their life savings right away? For all that he is despised by multitudes of women for his appalling, unenlightened, misogynistic, gross, etc, etc, etc, he has willingly taken to bed more reasonably attractive women than the average well-intentioned male feminist or beleaguered modern liberal husband could hope to lay a finger on in a hundred lifetimes, or five hundred. I know the self-righteously angry men online, or some of them anyway, do not care about their personal inability to have sex with an army of bimbos at the drop of a hat when the scourges of sexism and patriarchy need to be opposed and defeated, and . But I'm not going to pretend that I don't care about it or take the hard cold truth into consideration. 




Somebody watching the Pretenders performing in Austin. I had their greatest hits album on cassette back in '89 or so, and it was one of the handful of albums I would listen to pretty much from beginning to end. "Kid", "Talk of the Town", I liked those songs, I'd kind of forgotten about them. I only remember being made fun of by a cool person for listening to this one time.




Somebody Supporting Julian Castro. Why? I am completely at sea on the election now. I don't know who to vote for. Even the candidates of whom I kind of like something have serious drawbacks.


I admit I didn't follow the impeachment hearings very closely. I had no interest in them, or in anything that came out in them. I guess I have to force myself to pay attention more.




Oh yes, Kamala Harris dropping out. I was never sure why anybody thought she was going to catch fire. Regular people didn't like her, there was no evidence that she even had any interest in seriously addressing the decline of the middle classes, and former middle classes of America, which for the time being is what these elections are primarily about.


I took a day off and now I'm going to give this a second try.


Guy trashing Jason Garrett's coaching and raving about the Chicago Bears' socks. I don't have anything to add to this (assuming that these are the traditional Chicago Bears' socks) although the Jason Garrett criticism is approaching the beating a dead horse phase. The Dallas Cowboys overall are the sports team I have felt the most hatred for/fear of over the course of my life, though as I approach fifty, and the eras where they loomed most menacing recede ever further into the past my capacity for that level of loathing is weakening. I still enjoy watching one game in a week when I get the chance, though.


My Friend and Sometime Reader of the Blog Gil Roth is tweeting about a new book claiming that Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB. That is a new one to me. Further emphasizes that being a serious international-level author entails a lot more than it looks like when you're a teenager thumbing through these books sitting in a plush chair in a library on a snowy day in Maine.


Death of Journalism/Learn to Code Joke. I have let some younger people into my feed. The Learn to Code meme I think is played out. What is my opinion of people in their 20s and 30s? A few of them are clever but seem aimless.  I find very few who both reveal a sense of humor/personal charm and are "serious" or accomplished in some professional or recognized way. I've known a few women from this age group--late 20s to 30s, mostly teachers or otherwise involved in children's activities--who seemed to me like they would be pretty good catches for marriage or whatever, but were single and didn't even have boyfriends as far as I know. I suppose it's possible they weren't interested in that, and we are certainly trained to assume that as the default position unless told otherwise, but I don't know, if you're 32 and working in a school in New Hampshire, making some effort to be conventionally attractive, I am guessing that they probably would like to get married at some point.


Stephen King on how the Trumpers hate the 3 million vote differential in the popular vote in 2016. I actually do not have that impression. It's the anti-Trumpers who bring it up incessantly. I am not one of these people who wants to get rid of the Electoral College. It may be an unwieldy system but we have inherited it and I think we should try to preserve our foundational institutions as long as we can until they become completely untenable. Even with the election of Trump I don't think that time has come yet.


Joe Biden Challenging an 83 year old voter to an IQ test.  Not great. There are actually several themes here related to future posts, so I will save my thoughts for that future occasion.