The Sad Pleasures of Travel

cartoon by Edward Gorey

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "The great affair is to move." To move, to go, to travel; the need can be so great as to be almost a sickness, away-sickness, maybe, an untamably sweet longing to go somewhere that will never be your home among people you'll never know well enough to belong to.

When I was little, my uncle gave me storybooks with pictures of kids around the world: a Dutch girl surrounded by tulips and wearing a starched white cap with wings; a Chinese boy with a pigtail who slept on a brick bed heated by coals. They were cliches so bald it's embarrassing to think about, but I loved those books and wanted to be everywhere those children were. More than that, I wanted to be those children, each of them in turn. I think maybe the first real sadness of my life came when I realized that I couldn't.

Later on, I pinned a map to a wall and drew a red line along the routes I had traveled: Europe, the Andes, India and Nepal; for some reason, I didn’t chronicle the U.S. or Canada. Then I realized that all I had seen was what was on either side of that line, and that made me too sad to continue.

One night in the seventies, friends and I, probably stoned, created a travel agency of the mind. We'd offer package deals to tiny countries (Andorra, San Marino, Fiji), or to countries colored green on the globe, or we'd organize terrorism tours to the sites of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. (Long before 9/11, I used to walk a version of that in Washington on my way to work.) We would call our agency Book in Haste, Repent at Leisure.

And why not, really? Once you eliminate travel for work or family obligation, you have tourism, and tourists have more pretexts than reasons for choosing one place over another. But once you do choose, the world becomes full of reasons: the tart crunch of the apples the Buddhist monk pulled like a magic trick from his maroon-and- saffron robe when we shared a bus seat on the world's highest highway; the Andean air that's ripe as cheese and thin as gauze (music and smells are most evocative of place and time); the moment the lights come on in Florence's Brancacci Chapel and you see the Masaccios for the first - or tenth - time. I have no words for that.

it's time part-time

     An article about the plight -- and burgeoning fight -- of part-time college faculty in The Nation. The comments seem to get hung up, as these things do, on how many women are asked to dance on the head of a pin and loses the focus: that part-timers are generally underpaid (academia is heavy-duty don't ask, don't tell when it comes to who makes how much), overworked, and underappreciated.

At Tufts, where I teach, our salary is considerably better than the average cited here and we're offered a benefits package, but we haven't gotten a cost-of-living increase or merit raise in 4 years and have been informed that those of us who have been there for any length of time -- the majority, I think -- will never see one again.  (My contract specifies that I'm getting the same amount -- down to the last 48 cents.)  Market rates, we're told.  No one actually says "salary cap," nor have they said explicitly, like it or lump it -- but that's what they mean.    As far as I know, no other group of employees at the university is in this position.  (And, incidentally, it sure looks like the majority of us are female and older. Or maybe we're just the ones who show up at meetings?)  Even those of us who have taught there for years and, by all accounts, are skilled, committed, hard-working and valuable teachers, are on year-to-year contracts, so we could be let go with no repercussions or recourse. (The only reverberations might come from students and alums, two groups who are hard to organize for any sustained action.)

I'm happy at Tufts; I like my students a lot, like teaching them, appreciate the facilities I and they have access to & the people who staff them.  When I used to work in arts administration (including a stint with the govt at the National Endowment for the Arts), we called that sort of thing "psychic benefits," noting that while those are nice, you can't eat them.

So it seems like a no-brainer that a union would give us some leverage, some bargaining power, with an ever more numerous administration (how many deans have had their pay frozen, I wonder?) and would help us protect our jobs, work situation and status.  We have no way to push back now and the administration, like all administrations, likes it that way.  They could have bought us off on the cheap and instead they chose to piss us off.

The larger issue -- the end-run around tenure, which results in an academic workforce that is increasingly fractured and harried -- is a political one, but my beef is more specific.  I don't like being pushed around and I resent being treated unfairly.  I'd prefer not to be in an adversarial position with people I used to think of as colleagues and friends.  I just want what I deserve.  Tufts talks big about being a community, but to us they talk about being a marketplace -- and it isn't a marketplace of ideas they have in mind..  

where you'll find me

See under "formidable" in the American Heritage Dictionary.  Really.  I couldn't make it up.  And (you'll excuse me if I boast) it's probably my proudest publication credit.

ohh, baby, baby, where did our love go?

Marriage being some combination of symbolism, legalities, and romance, the Supremes got it right on 2 out of 3 in ruling no mo DOMA -- or was it, stop, in the name of love?  So, though the robed 9 often give me nothing but heartache, I'd like to say to them, no matter what sign you are, somedays, we'll be together.

law of older relativity

Aging = Diminution + Letting Go

my city in ruins

April 19, 2013: So this is what it's like to live in a war zone.

The Gun List

300,000,000       approximate number of guns owned by Americans
         31,000       approximate number of Americans killed by guns yearly
           2,793       number of children killed by guns in 2009
    4,000,000       number of NRA members
$25,000,000       minimum estimate of NRA spending on political ads and lobbying
                           in 2011-12

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
Wayne LaPierre, Ex. VP of NRA
suggesting that all schools come equipped with an armed cop
IGOER (Insert GIF of Eye Roll)

question of the week

"...things like, Do we all need assault weapons?"
Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, commenting on "issues that merit discussion" when considering the possibilities for gun control legislation in his state. My husband likes to think it was tongue-in-cheek.  I'd like to think so too.  But I don't.  (This was posted a few hours before the murder of school children in Newtown, CT.)

la plus ca change

I found myself singing the first lines this morning, as I listened to reports of rioting in Cairo over the proposed new constitution.  Eerie how appropriate it is over 50 years later.

The Merry Minuet

They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain
the Whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like Anybody very much.

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lucky day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away

They're rioting in Africa
There's strife in Iran
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow Man

-- Sheldon Harnick (1958) in his pre-Fiddler on the Roof days -- and not Tom Lehrer

Goin' to the chapel and?

What is it with this spate of movies about weddings that turn into disaster zones, then end with everyone dancing some ethnic version of the hokey pokey?  Is it Hollywood's way of saying that marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be?  Oh, wait. These movies aren't at all about that version of hokey pokey.

I want Molly Ringwald's publicist!

Congratulations to Molly Ringwald's agent or publicist or whomever is responsible for her being ALL OVER THE PLACE.  I mean, does anyone who has access to any news or gossip source not know that she's written a novel about a mother and her kid and has thought about mothers and kids and wants to be a writer about mothers and kids and not just pretty in pink and.... Well, I confess that I stopped listening somewhere in the middle of the first of her umpteen interviews.  But, hey, getting a book -- any book which doesn't claim to reveal all about sleazy politics or sexual predation, which Ringwald's doesn't (it appears to be a perfectly mediocre first novel) -- is a notable accomplishment.

I thought about writing a letter to the editor, but that seemed unfair since I haven't read the book and don't particularly want to.  Nor do I want to sound like sour grapes when, actually, I'm impressed and hope other publishers can learn something about marketing their books from this full court press.  Not being of the Breakfast Club gen, tho, I'm probably out of luck.

BREAKING NEWS!

Romney is human.
This is the best PR can come up with?

By the numbers

I've been reading Dexter Filkins piece in a recent New Yorker about future prospects for Afghanistan.  In sum: they're grim.

As they are in Iraq.

Which made me think that for everyone who was sent to conduct those wars/occupations/ counterinsurgencies/nation-building exercises -- regardless of how right or wrong they believe their actions to be -- the futility of both campaigns must be overwhelming.

In Iraq, after 7½ years and at a cost to the U.S. of at least $800 billion, 4486 American troops died and 32,223 were wounded; well over 50,152 Iraqi citizens have been killed (we didn't start keeping count until 2005), and about 4.6 million were displaced, either internally or as refugees. Today, the Iraqi government is riven, the infrastructure is shaky, and violence continues, with 977 civilians killed in sectarian clashes in 2011 alone. (Imagine if that many Americans were killed in “domestic terrorism” incidents.)  The only one of our ever-shifting goals that we accomplished there was to depose Saddam Hussein.
 
U.S. forces are scheduled to leave Afghanistan after 13 years, and as I write this, at a cost of about $554 billion dollars, 2075 U.S. soldiers have died,15,322 have been wounded, 50,152 Afghan civilians have been killed (again, since 2005), and still, the Taliban, along with a long list of war lords, hold sway in much of the country, the government is head-swivelingly corrupt, and the only purported goal we've accomplished has been to kill Osama bin Laden, who neither came from Afghanistan, nor was killed there. 

Is the world better off without the two despots?  Probably.  Were there better, less costly ways to get rid of them? Very likely.  Did the United States corrupt itself in the process?  Undoubtedly.

It's quite an equation.

moral injury: mad bad sad

My piece on moral injury in veterans on TomDispatch.com (a blog worth following) and picked up by a lot of other sites.

Mom's the word revisted

So now momism is the political battleground de jour with the prez declaring that "being a mom is the hardest job in the world" and women who can afford it defending their "career choice" to be a "stay-at-home mom."  Pah-leeze!  Surely everyone knows that there are harder jobs out there. (President of the United States might qualify.)  And motherhood is not a career; it's a biological event -- which, BTW, many of those most outraged by the Dem. operative's dissing of Ann Romney want to make sure is moved beyond the realm of choice.