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Over at the Vagabonding.net Q&A, John B. from New York writes:
“I loved Vagabonding and it has pushed me to look at my life and take a much-needed (and much desired trip) around the world with my long-time partner. We are adventurous and want to explore places like Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Mongolia, etc. My questions are…What should we look out for? Are there places we should not attempt because it will be dangerous for two men in their early thirties to be travelling together? While we are far from flamboyant, we don’t want to feel unbearably uncomfortable in certain hostile places.”
This is what I told him:
“Your question is an interesting and valid one. And, thankfully, your situation shouldn’t pose that much of a problem for you and your partner when you travel. For starters, most any destination guidebook worth its ink will give advice and cultural information regarding gay travelers. Lonely Planet always has a gay-travel section (and their website has a gay-travel discussion board), though most quality indie guides do as well. This advice will tell you exactly what the taboos are, country-by-country. For example, Thailand and Myanmar are extremely gay-friendly, and you can pretty much act however you want (within reason). Brazil is gay-friendly in some cities, less so in others. Egypt is definitely not gay-friendly, but oddly enough you will probably find lots of men taking a sexual interest in you there. So the situation will differ from country to country, situation to situation, and keeping informed as you travel can be a big help.
“In general, of course, it helps to (as you said) not be too flamboyant in the interest of cultural sensitivity. With the proper amount of decorum, in fact, you probably won’t be taken for gay (let alone be harrassed) unless you blatantly advertise it. In places like India and Korea, for instance, straight men are much more physically affectionate with each other than they are in the West. In fact, you could probably walk through Madras hand-in-hand with your partner and attract less hostility than if I walked hand-in-hand with a girlfriend, simply because the cultural norms there don’t see it as strange!
“So, in the end, you and your partner should have no problem traveling together in Asia. For extra measure, however (and since, being straight, I might have missed some considerations), there are a variety of gay travel guides and websites that can give advice as well. Just do a Google search to find them. But keep in mind that many of those books and websites cater to the gay tourist market, and that tends to “ghettoize” gay travelers. Sitges, Spain, for example, might make a great gay getaway, but why isolate yourself there when you can mix in with the rest of the world and have more far-flung adventures?
“On a final note, the countries you mention (Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal, Mongolia) shouldn’t be hostile. Buddhist countries in general are more tolerant than the West (in Myanmar I once watched a transvestite cabaret perform alongside puppet shows and pop singers at a festival in a Buddhist temple). Again, it’s good to double-check your guidebook, but you should be fine.”
“I’d never thought much about how Americans were viewed overseas until I came to France and I was expected to look and behave in a certain way. “You’re not supposed to be smoking,” my classmates would tell me. “You’re from the United States.” Europeans expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and to automatically reject all unpasteurized dairy products. If I was thin, it was because I’d recently lost the extra fifty pounds traditionally cushioning the standard American ass. If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn’t, it was probably due to Prozac.”
–David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2002)
As the 2004 Athens Games wind down, I wanted to share a few more notes on the ancient Greek games, from Tony Perrottet’s recent book, The Naked Olympics.
“Greeks loved to compete over everything
“Success means controlling your own time. If you can gain control over 60 percent of the time in your life, you are really successful.”
–Rod Steiger, Esquire interview, January 2004
The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the “Readings” section of the July issue of Harper’s.
From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted “too frequently” to Strange Horizons, an online magazine of “speculative fiction.” The document was compiled in order to provide guidance to potential contributors.
1. Person is (metaphorically) at point A, wants to be at point B. Looks at point B, says, “I want to be at point B.” Goes to point B, encountering no meaningful obstacles or difficulties. The end.
2. Creative person is having trouble creating,
a. Writer has writer’s block,
b. Painter can’t seem to paint anything good,
c. Sculptor can’t seem to sculpt anything good.
3. Visitor to alien planet ignores information about local rules, inadvertently violates them, is punished.
4. Weird things happen, but it turns out they’re not real.
a. It turns out it was all in virtual reality.
b. It turns out the protagonist is insane.
c. It turns out the protagonist is writing a novel and the events we’ve seen are part of the novel.
5. The future is soulless.
a. In the future, all learning is electronic, until kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in the form of a book.
b. In the future, everything is electronic, until kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in the form of a wise old person who’s lived a non-electronic life.
6. Protagonist is a bad person. (We don’t object to this in a story; we merely object to it being the main point of the plot.)
a. Bad person is told he’ll get the reward that he deserves, which ends up being something bad.
b. Terrorists (especially Osama bin Laden) discover that horrible things happen to them in the afterlife (or otherwise get their come-uppance).
c. Protagonist is portrayed as really awful, but that portrayal is merely a setup for the ending, in which he sees the error of his ways and is redeemed.
7. A place is described, with no plot or characters.
8. A surprise twist ending occurs.
a. The characters are described as if they are humans, but in the end it turns out they’re not humans.
b. Creatures are described as “vermin” or “pests” or “monsters,” but in the end it turns out they’re humans.
c. Person is floating in a formless void; in the end, he’s born.
9. Someone calls technical support; wacky high jinks ensue.
a. Someone calls technical support for a magical item.
b. Someone calls technical support for a piece of advanced technology.
c. The title of the story is 1-800-SOMETHING-CUTE.
10. Scientist uses himself or herself as test subject.
11. Evil unethical doctor performs medical experiments on unsuspecting patient.
12. Office life turns out to be soul-deadening, literally or metaphorically.
13. Protagonist is given wise and mystical advice by Holy Simple Native Folk.
14. In the future, criminals are punished much more harshly than they are today.
a. In the future, the punishment always fits the crime.
b. In the future, the American constitutional amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment has been repealed, or is interpreted very narrowly.
“American leadership seems to be required even in cases — such as Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 — where the British and their fellow Europeans had the means to resolve the crisis unaided. The US is cruelly unsuited to play the world’s policeman — Washington’s attention span is famously short, even in chronically troubled regions like Kashmir, the Balkans, the Middle East, or Korea — but it seems to have no choice. Meanwhile everyone else, but the Europeans especially, resent the United States when it fails to lead, but also when it leads too assertively.”
–Tony Judt, “Its Own Worst Enemy“, from the New York Review of Books, August 15, 2002
“In the post-September 11 world, even leaving aside Iraq and all the distortions, half-truths, and lies used to justify the invasion, even leaving aside the cataclysmic impact of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, I believe America would have attracted significant wrath simply in doing what had to be done in routing out the Taliban in Afghanistan, in reorienting its foreign policy to try and tackle international terror networks and breeding grounds. That is why I come back time and again in my mind to the tactical brilliance of Al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks: If America hadn’t responded, a green light would have been turned on, one that signaled that the country was too decadent to defend its vital interests. Yet in responding, the response itself was almost guaranteed to spotlight an empire bullying allies and enemies alike into cooperation and subordination, and, thus, to focus an inchoate rage against the world’s lone standing superpower. Damned if we did, damned if we didn’t.”
–Sasha Abramsky, “Waking up from the American Dream“, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2004
I was happy to discover this morning that my college classmate Gina Ochsner has a piece of fiction in the current issue of The New Yorker. Entitled “The Fractious South“, it is set (as is much of her short fiction) in Russia. Though Gina has in the past won the Flannery O’Conner Award for Short Fiction, the Raymond Carver Prize, and the 2002 Oregon Book Award (among others), this is the first work of hers I’ve seen in a major magazine. Her stories have also appeared in publications such as Prairie Schooner, Iron Horse Review, and Phoebe. Her first book of short stories, The Necessary Grace to Fall, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002; a new collection, A Cloud For a Carpet, will be published by Houghton Mifflin next spring. Gina and I both attended George Fox College in the early nineties, where we took part in an intensive writing seminar taught by the late Laurel Lee.
Though far more culturally important to the Greek world than the modern Olympics, the ancient games took place over the course of just five days. Below is a reconstruction of the ancient Olympic program, taken from Tony Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics:
The original format of the ancient Olympics was such a success that it hardly changed after its main contours were established around 470 B.C. There were a few ill-fated experiments, but by and large the schedule remained consistent, a beacon of Greek tradition in a world transformed by conquests, plagues, exotic religions, and grasping empires. Historians still argue about the details, but a consensus has emerged on the basic schedule of the five-day program:
A.M.
A.M.
My favorite writing teacher from my college days, memoirist Laurel Lee, died of pancreatic cancer last week in Oregon. She was 58 years old.
Laurel was perhaps best known for her 1977 book Walking Through the Fire, which was a Christian-themed account of her simultaneous struggle with Hodgkin’s disease, a dangerous pregnancy, and the fact that her husband was leaving her for the babysitter. The book began as a hand-written journal entitled the “Laurel Lee Goes to the Hospital Book”, and eventually went on to become (with the help of a doctor, who sent it to an editor in New York) a best-seller in the U.S. It was reprinted in 52 countries and made into a CBS-TV movie in 1979. Laurel went on to write several children’s books and four more books for adults, including Tapestry: The Journey of Laurel Lee, which came out earlier this summer. Her obituary in the Oregonian can be found here.
In the classroom, I always appreciated Laurel’s willingness to push the envelope at our decidedly conservative college (she once drove in a prostitute for us to interview for a Biography/Memior class), as well as her enthusiasm for all forms of creativity (including the time I shamelessly fictionalized a profile-bio of my dull track coach to include tales of hallucinogenic drug use and public urination). Outside of the classroom, she took an interest in my travels and encouraged me to stay with her friends (including children’s author Mike Thaler, whom she later married) during my first vagabonding stint around the USA in 1994. Two summers before that, she’d let me crash in her basement for a few months in exchange for helping her son Matthew build a room onto the house (I also worked as an extra on the set of Dr. Giggles that summer with her daughter Mary). Though I eventually lost touch with Laurel, I’ve remained long-standing friends with her oldest daughter Anna (whom I briefly dated during college).
Laurel even made it into the pages of Vagabonding, where I pulled a quote about the trappings of materialism from her 1990 book Godspeed. “Cities,” she wrote wryly, “are full of those who have been caught in monthly payments for avocado green furniture sets.”
My condolences and thanks go out to Anna, Matthew, Mary, Mike and the various grandkids. I’ll remember Laurel well.
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