Category Archives: Nonfiction – Travel

On the road again…. Anitober begins with a review of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (by Jill)

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This is the first book in my “Anitober” reading challenge, in which I finally read books recommended to me by my old college roommate, Anita.  Travels with Charley was the first book I remember Anita recommending to me, sometime back in college sometime.  I remember she had me read this one section about hunters in New England and how crazy they can get.  My dad is a hunting type and I used to always make fun of him for it in college (that was before I discovered how delicious game meat can be, and decided that maybe it’s better to eat animals who aren’t raised to be food, because maybe, just maybe, they have better lives than feed lot creatures.  And now I will cease discussing a controversial topic).  At some point I purchased it at Green Apple, probably with Bethany.  My copy cost seventy-five cents when it was first printed, but cost me $3.75.  It’s always bothered me when used bookstores charge more for a book than is printed on the cover.  Shouldn’t it cost what is says it should cost, or less if it’s used?

I wanted to write this review and post it yesterday since I finished Travels with Charley on Monday night, but unfortunately, my actual life got in the way of my blogging life.  On Tuesday night, my thirteen year old dog, Spinner, swallowed a fuzzy cat ball whole.  It was too big to pass and too big for him to vomit back up, so yesterday he had surgery to remove that stupid ball from his stomach.  So yesterday was not a good day for blogging around here.  He is doing fine today, though, and is at home safe and sound.  Perhaps Spinner thought it would be best for me to have a recent anecdote about my own old dog before I started writing about John Steinbeck and his?

The premise of Travels with Charley is that John Steinbeck, famous author and soon-to-be Nobel Laureate, decides he needs to take stock of his country.  He buys a large truck, has it fitted with a custom camper, names it Rocinante, and heads out with his ten-year-old standard poodle named Charley.  He makes a loop from Sag Harbor, New York, through New England, the Midwest, down the Pacific Coast, back through the south, and up to New York again.  This journey took place in 1960 from September to December.  There has been some recent controversy about how true some of the anecdotes in the book are (see this article), but after reading the book I don’t necessarily care a whole lot about the veracity of some of the stories; the sentiment behind the stories in the book is the important part.

Let me take a moment to discuss my relationship with John Steinbeck.  I read Of Mice and Men in high school, as a freshman.  The best thing I had to say about it at the time was that it was short.  I didn’t enjoy it much at all.  And that was the last time I read anything by him.  I managed to avoid The Grapes of Wrath somehow—my sophomore English teacher put something else in our curriculum, and at the time if was fine with me, because my friends who did read it had many negative things to say about it.  I’m not sure if Bethany enjoyed it the first time around or not, but if she did, she was the only one of us.  Now, of course, I wish I had been forced to read more Steinbeck because I feel like I’ve missed out.  I mean, he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  His work can’t be as bad as a bunch of teenagers made it out to be.  At some point, someone told me East of Eden is actually quite good.  Probably it was Bethany or Anita.  So I bought it.  And then I decided a few years ago that probably I should own The Grapes of Wrath as well.  And when I was in Monterey on my honeymoon in 2009 I bought Cannery Row at the aquarium, forgetting that my copy of Of Mice and Men also contained Cannery Row.  Oh, well.  And of course, I bought Travels with Charley at some point in the late ‘90s.  And that’s the extent of my relationship with one of America’s most celebrated and honored novelists.  Fortunately for me, that’s beginning to change.

So where was I?  Oh, yes, Travels with Charley.  The first passage I marked as memorable was this one, describing autumn in New England: “The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and the yellows you can’t believe.  It isn’t only color, but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.  There’s a quality of fire in these colors (p. 27).”  I wanted to get on a plane and go to New England after reading these sentences.  I’ve never seen the fall leaves there, or anyplace that really has seasons, but I have always wanted to.  This is just one example of the wonderful descriptions of our country that are peppered throughout this book.  Steinbeck writes beautifully—this is something I didn’t remember from Of Mice and Men.  Steinbeck is also a funny fellow.  The best example I came across that illustrates his humor is the aforementioned story about the hunters.  “I know there are any number of good and efficient hunters who know what they are doing; but many more are overweight gentlemen, primed with whisky and armed with high-powered rifles.  They shoot at anything that moves or looks as though it might, and their success in killing one another may well prevent a population explosion.  If the casualties were limited to their own kind there would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs, farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a dangerous season in which to travel.  A farmer in upper New York State painted the word cow in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway (p. 57).”

There’s moments when Steinbeck definitely comes across like he was in a dark place while he was writing this book.  From what I’ve read about the book from outside sources, he was not in good health at the time of his trip—heart disease—and made the journey when he did because he was worried he might not be alive for much longer.  There are some chapters in which he sounds downright depressed and longing for a time long gone by.  “These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside.  You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders.  No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets.  When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a thing (pp. 89-90).”  I found myself wondering what he would think about our country now; everything he was worried was going to happen seems to have come to pass.  Homogeneity.  The loss of regional accents.  All that stuff.  It’s unfortunate.  But then I think about how connected everything is now and how easy it is to keep in touch with people so far away, and I am glad for interstates and the internet and all that comes with it.  If sacrificing individuality is the price we have to pay for all we’ve gained, I guess I’m okay with that, though we should all acknowledge what was lost—because it was pretty good too.

And what kind of book blogging veterinarian would I be if I didn’t at least touch on Charley?  Charley is a ten-year-old blue standard French poodle.  From France.  It appears that Steinbeck finds him quite intelligent.  And also quite old.  Now in this day and age a ten year old dog is old, but certainly not ancient.  So it surprised me how often Charley was discussed as an ancient dog.  I will say one thing about this book that I know to be true: there was a dog named Charley, and John Steinbeck knew him very well and loved him very much.  I don’t care if he never met a Shakespearean actor on the side of a road in North Dakota; he definitely owned a dog. “Before a plan is half formed in my mind, Charley knows about it, and he also knows whether he is to be included in it.  There is no question about this.  I know too well his look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home (p. 138).”  What dog owner hasn’t seen that face?  On two separate occasions Charley takes ill with what Steinbeck assumes is prostatitis; one veterinarian tells him it’s just a “cold,” and the other actually makes Charley feel better.  I shudder to think that a veterinarian would actually provide the explanation to an owner that his dog couldn’t urinate because he has a “cold.”  Apparently it was much easier to be a veterinarian in 1960 than in 2012.

There was so much more in this book I wanted to touch on: Steinbeck’s trip home to Monterey.  The horrible integration protests in New Orleans.  Texas.  But if I kept going on this post no one would finish reading it.  Thank you, Anita, for recommending this book to me.  I wish I had read it sooner, but at the same time I’m also glad I waited, because I’ll never get to read it for the first time again, and it was worth waiting for.

A Review of Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (by Bethany)

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This book is not about yoga. Not in the slightest little bit. This book is many things – a collection of travel essays, a memoir of the early stages of a nervous breakdown, a contemplation of geography and history and time, a narrative of what it was like to be a global citizen in the years before 2001, when we all became global citizens whether we wanted to or not. But it is most definitely not about yoga.

At first the title disappointed me. Its origin is in a bad joke whose punch line you probably don’t even need me to tell you (Dyer: “I have an idea for a self-help book: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.”His friend Kate: “But you can’t be bothered to write it, right?” Dyer: “You stole my punch line” [103]), and at first I thought a stupid joke – plus an attempt to sell books to gullible New Agers – was all it was. For the first two thirds or so of the book, I thought that a phrase Dyer uses a couple of times in his essays, “the archaeology of ignorance,” would have made a better title. But then later on I figured out what Dyer was going for. The title is good – painfully subtle, but good.

Here is a quick synopsis of the book: Dyer has recently turned forty (sometime in the very-late nineties) and is still living a pathologically itinerant lifestyle that he seems to have lived for some time. He crashes for a while in New Orleans, tries to write a novel there, but doesn’t. He and a girlfriend named Circle visit Cambodia, and shortly after Circle departs Dyer has a fling with the aforementioned Kate, whom he meets when she has just emerged from the ocean having been stung by jellyfish all over her body. He travels to Amsterdam and Florida with someone named Dazed (who appears to be female), and in Rome he flirts with someone named Monica, who shows him a picture of her parents at the ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya, which prompts him to go to Libya on his own to see the ruins. He also visits Detroit on assignment to cover an Electronic Music Festival, and finally he goes to Burning Man with Circle, who is now going by her given name, Sarah. In most of these places, Dyer consumes significant quantities of alcohol and a variety of drugs – mostly hallucinogenics. He is often miserable and contemplates time and eternity and decay of various things – civilization and himself being the two primary objects of decay that he contemplates. He often tries to write but finds it impossible to complete projects. He despairs.

I have never found the drug memoir to be a compelling genre. I have no interest in Hunter S. Thompson or William Burroughs or Denis Johnson, although I have read enough of the latter to know that he’s a very skilled writer. The only thing worse than being around people who are taking drugs is reading about people who are taking drugs – and there were times when this book bored and annoyed me for that reason. I’m sure Dyer found the day-long saga of trying to change out of a pair of wet pants and into a pair of dry pants in a series of Amsterdam public restrooms absolutely hilarious when it happened – but someone (Dyer’s wiser self? His publisher? His girlfriend? Never mind that last one – a person named ‘Dazed’ is probably not the right person to advise anyone on how to keep drug stories to a minimum in one’s memoir) should have explained to him that this is not the kind of story that anyone else wants to hear. The Amsterdam episode in this book is boring and frustrating, and the Florida episode isn’t much better – although the frequency with which Dyer and Dazed consume smoothies in Florida (without ever directly calling attention to the number of smoothies they are consuming) made me laugh and almost made up for the excessive use of similes to describe the experience of taking Ecstacy.

What this memoir is really about, though, is the process of coming apart. As the title suggests, in this book Dyer is a person who knows what he should do for his health and well-being but cannot do it. Perhaps on some level he “can’t be bothered to do it” – but mostly there is some kind of miswiring in his brain that prevents him from doing what he knows to be healthy and good. And on this level, once the drug references begin to fizzle out, this book is extremely compelling.

Dyer is constantly trying to write a book about antiquity and ruins. I get the sense that what he wants to write is a very philosophical book – much more like something by Foucault than something by Thomas Cahill – about the theory of ruins, about what it means to live in a world with the crumbling artifacts of our forebears in various stages of decay all around us. I simultaneously find this idea interesting and think it’s as good a sign as any that Dyer needs to check himself into a hospital NOW, and I think that is how Dyer intends us to read it. Because, of course, he himself is a ruin – at least during the years in which this book is set. He himself is the destroyed remnant of some former, healthier, more robust, more courageous self– and the process through which Dyer comes to realize this is the (very loose) plot of this memoir.

This book is marketed as “uproarious,” “freewheeling,” “sidesplitting,” “mordantly funny,” and “exquisitely manic” (all of these are quotations from the front and back covers), and I honestly didn’t find it to be any of these (oh, OK – I guess it’s a bit freewheeling). The only part I found laugh-out-loud funny was an essay from the first third of the book, when Dyer and Circle are visiting the holy city of Angkor in Cambodia. They are tired and thirsty, and a young girl approaches them and offers to sell them a Coke. They are in the process of making the transaction – Dyer even has the Coke in his hand – when a boy who has lost both of his legs to a land mine (he has one wooden leg and one stump, and walks with crutches) approaches and offers to sell them a Coke. Dyer immediately decides to return the original Coke to the girl and buy a Coke from the legless boy. As they share the Coke, Dyer and Circle visit with the boy for a while, learning the story of how he lost his legs, while the girl who tried to sell them the original Coke follows them around having a temper tantrum – “BUY COKE FROM ME! YOU BUY COKE FROM ME NOW!!” – while Dyer and Circle steadfastly ignore her. I laughed hysterically at this, but it wasn’t the kind of laughter that makes you feel very good afterwards. Now, there is nothing wrong with this kind of laughter (most Americans could probably benefit from experiencing more of it, to be honest), and when I finished that chapter I almost forgot how funny it was, since its ultimate effect is not the release of laughter but the recognition of how much desperation and pain exist in the world and how little Westerners do to alleviate it. It reminded me of how I felt after reading the essay in which David Sedaris and his partner tour the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and then decide that it is their dream house and try to convince the historical society to sell it to them – and then go on and on in front of all the other tourists about how they would decorate it. It’s hilarious (much more hilarious, actually, than it would be if it were less offensive), but when you finish reading it you feel poisoned – or, more accurately, you feel suddenly aware of the poison that was in you all along.

And speaking of David Sedaris – you know those moments of honest and shocking self-hatred that pop out like violent subliminal messages spliced into a children’s movie during the most hilarious parts of his  essays? Dyer operates in that landscape of self-hatred all the time. And for me, because I was so acutely aware of the darkness of this book, many of the moments that were supposed to make me laugh simply didn’t. It’s like when Harry Potter returns to school at the beginning of The Order of the Phoenix and realizes that he can see the thestrals that pull the students to from the train station to the castle – monstrous (though harmless) beasts that no one can see unless he has witnessed death.

The Harry Potter reference is a frivolous aside, of course – but any book about ruins and antiquity (and this book – which is more properly described as a book about NOT writing a book about ruins and antiquity – is about ruins and antiquity just the same) is by necessity also a book about aging and death. Dyer is constantly aware that he is an absurd figure – wandering the world doing drugs, having casual sex, feeling rooted nowhere. He writes that “it was better being forty than twenty, when one was full of fire and ambition and hope. It was even better than being thirty, when those hopes that had once animated you became a goading sense of torment” (165), and while he continually returns to the subject of ruined buildings, he really never states or betrays any desire for the kind of permanence that forty year-olds are supposed to want: houses, mortgages, children, jobs that require showing up every day at a certain place at an appointed time. It almost seems as if in his own mind he is the building that will one day be ruined: he sees the ruins that he explores in Cambodia and Rome and Libya not as representations of the buildings of our era but as representations of himself: “Perhaps the simplest lesson of antiquity is that, after a time, anything vertical – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, whatever – commands admiration. Ultimately, though, the lure of the horizontal will always prove irresistible” (208). That “whatever,” of course, is a stand-in for “human” – this is one of many very oblique references to the suicidal impulse that pulls this novel forward, making Dyer’s collapse in the second-to-last essay in the book the only reasonable way for the book to end – or almost end.

This is a good book – at least, it’s a good book for a certain kind of reader in a certain kind of mood. Dyer’s prose is extraordinary, for one thing. As I’ve said, parts of the book bored, annoyed, and disgusted me – but I think that the experience of being bored, annoyed, and disgusted is part of reading a book like this and going through Dyer’s decline with him. It’s a cerebral book, which I like, and, of course, this IS the book about antiquity that Dyer claims he failed to write. It is a book about the way – when we are closest to our own mortality and decline – we are compelled to look away at things that, in their very decline, seem immortal.