July 5, 2008
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
also posted: |
Later that year, Martha and I set off in a battered VW bus cutting a wide swath through the magical sites of Greece (Delphi, Epidaurus, Delos, Pythagoras' Samos), Malta's curious temples, the Caves of Altamira in the Basque country, the Temple of Mercury atop the fog-shrouded Puy de Dome not far from Nostradamus' birthplace in St Remi, the supposed home of Dr Faustus on the verge of Germany's Black Forest--nine countries in all, and dozens of places in each country. A couple of hours south of Paris, our VW chariot entered the Auvergne region from the north at Moulins where, preserved in the municipal library, is a 12th century ms. the Souvigny Bible, bound in red velvet and gold. Souvigny itself, seven miles to the west, has an 11th century church in whose cloisters is the renowned Calendar Stone carved with signs of the zodiac and mythical beasts such as unicorns, griffins and manticores (legendary creatures with the body of a lion and a human head) Next came the Puy de Dome on whose summit the witches assembled on Midsummer’s Eve, celebrating at the site of the Roman Temple of Mercury. They came from as far away as Languedoc for in the Middle Ages the neighborhood of the Auvergne knew witchcraft as part and parcel of everyday life. My favorite music, as it happens, is the hauntingly captivating Songs of the Auvergne, a much-loved classic. Everywhere we encountered timeless folk customs, mysterious caves and grottos, somber forests, cascading waterfalls, sleepy hamlets set amidst the tree covered slopes of extinct volcanoes, haunted castles, magnificent chateaux, springs with legendary properties Not far away St Remi, Nostradamus was born in 1503. His patrons included Henry II and Catherine de Medici and he was said to have forecast Napoleon’s exile to Elba, the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution and his own death which occurred on June 2, 1566. Through thousands of miles of driving I talked almost nonstop, mostly about my theories concerning travel writing. Martha suspected she had found her ideal profession and I wanted to teach her everything I knew. We began by discussing what made a good travel writer. Curiosity, Mez suggested, the willingness to search out every dead-end to find what’s there. Absolutely, I agreed, stressing the value of serendipity, the discovery of the unexpected. And that, in turn, led to the ability to see something in the ‘ordinary’ that others might not see. The familiar usually becomes so familiar that we no longer notice it, which is why it’s sometimes better to have an outsider write about a place rather than somebody who lives there. When I first went to Mexico to do the $5 a day book, even then-- in 1960—friends scoffed and said it would be impossible, and then when the book was published, even people who lived there couldn’t understand how I’d found so many places they didn’t know about. But the answer was quite simple: I got tips from many, many different people. Do you go around asking everybody you meet for their tips? Mez asked. “Not as much as I used to, but when I began I didn’t know any other way to get a fix on what the job was all about. There weren’t many other books and tourist offices had yet to hit their stride. Mez: I think travel writers have to be a bit obsessive, a keen attention to detail, check a fact, recheck a fact, always on the look out for facts, always filling gaps. “Well”, I said, “ I was briefed by Frommer to believe that the only things of consequence were the actual facts and figures. That too much descriptive stuff was pretty much wasted space. The hotels: exactly what they were like, specific prices, what’s on the menu. He maintained that was pretty much all the book needed so I found myself fighting to get more and more ‘useless’ stuff in there as I became more of a writer and less of a clerk”. "The trouble about most of the stuff that appears in newspapers and magazines", I grouched, "is that it's boring. Despite being beautifully written, full of smooth, silky adjectives--better by far than anything I'll ever do, it’s too stylish. It doesn't resemble in any shape or form the actual pattern of people's experiences as they travel".
"Yes" said Martha, "I'd agree with that but I think these people are after something else. The readers are armchair travelers and the writers are appealing to people who want to sit in their living rooms on a Sunday afternoon and read. They won't necessarily take a trip". I said I doubted that many people—apart from the advertisers—even read it. "The reason why I say that it doesn't resemble what people actually experience is that of necessity what travelers go through is very fragmented, very kaleidoscopic, very confused and chaotic. If you ask someone to tell you about her vacation she doesn't reel off a seamless essay. What she tells you is about the waiter in the taverna who balanced the tray on his nose or the woman he came across feeding a flock of cats in the park or the couple in the street from whom she asked directions who turned out to be neighbors of his uncle in Cincinatti. All the little anecdotal things that usually concern people, as opposed to those pieces that contain no people at all, give you no feeling for street life."
Martha asked if I included a character or two in my own pieces and I had to admit that it was only lately I'd realized it was important to do so because of the cable TV show I'd been doing. "When I played my tape back I saw that it was pretty but basically lifeless, and I began to understand the importance of having faces--even irrelevant faces. Preferably the face will be saying something but a close-up is even more important than what's said. It adds authenticity to what is fundamentally street-life reporting". On we went, day after day, driving, driving, driving. On our way south one night Mez asked if we were going to Pisa. "Sorry", I said, "Too far out of our way; maybe on the way back". After she'd curled up in the back and gone to sleep I kept driving but had second thoughts and changed course. I stopped for the night so that when we opened the door in the morning, the Leaning Tower would be the first thing in view. Your birthday present is outside, I cried, luring her to the door.
"It's not my birthday" she said. But she went outside anyway to find her surprise. We argued later about whether ancient monuments and natural wonders such as Niagara Falls should be allowed to decay or dry up naturally, or whether it was important to shore them up and preserve them. Ruskin, she said, had written reams on that subject. We were writing, or at least taking extensive notes, all through the odyssey and so I explained some of my time-saving methods: "When I'm on the move with this constant stream of facts to incorporate and connect, it's much easier if you can write each piece of information, each sentence, with a hook at each end so that you can insert it almost anywhere". Mez looked puzzled. "What do you mean by a hook?" "Well, let's take a random subject such as dowsing. If I'm researching it from some encyclopedia, instead of copying it word for word, maybe I'll paraphrase it on the spot but I write all the sentences as if they were in the middle of a paragraph. Then it's simple to fit these sentences in anywhere by bridging with minor transitions". "Excellent!" Martha cried. "I suppose you also skip a couple of steps that way because it means you have already framed it in your own words and you don't have to worry when you come to write it about making it sound different from the original". "Right. Now there is one minor hazard in this method", I cautioned. "You must pay scrupulous attention to the accuracy of your research. If you don't make an exact copy you must play no tricks with it whatsoever. You have got to know, when you come to use it, that the material is 100 per cent reliable. That it is accurate in the sense that you have not distorted or fudged anything despite the fact that you have rewritten it, so it can be used without you being accused of plagiarism". Ours was a near-perfect collaboration. We got along so well it would have been impossible to envisage the disenchantment that would come some 30 years later. Onwards we drove, past the goddess Diana's lake of Nemi in Italy, where Virgil's Cumaean sibyl wrote her predictions on oak leaves; through ancient Pompeii; and into Spain where at Toledo the Moors maintained an occult university for four hundred years. Next came Granada which both of us agreed was the most magical place of our journey. We had not done our homework, were unfamiliar with Washington Irving's Legends of the Alhambra in which he lovingly detailed every room and every fountain of that breathtakingly beautiful palace. It was just as well, perhaps, for we arrived late at night, ignorant of what we were to see, unhampered by the presence of a single other visitor and naively expecting to knock off our explorations in a few minutes or so and then find a room for the night. ("Where's the Mona Lisa; I'm double parked?" goes the old joke about the American tourist visiting the Louvre, and it sums up the modus operandi of the typical travel writer). The Alhambra, sprawling across the spine of Granada's highest hill, has a compelling mystery that pulls like a magnet. The entrance is through an immense rotunda, open to the skies and flanked by sweeping staircases leading to the gallery which encircles the building. The ceiling of the grand hall is a perfectly symmetrical sky, a navy blue globe with at night twinkling dots of light for stars. From here a flight of stairs leads down to wondrous enclosed gardens and courtyards. Stone lions guard gently splashing fountains, languishing in moonlit splendor amid towers of gold mosaics and filigreed plaster. Walls are intricately carved in elaborate Moorish patterns and symbols, the meaning of which can only be guessed; ceilings are recessed, patterned and embroidered with graceful sensuality. Room after splendid room leads one on a seemingly endless journey through a fantasy world in which time appears suspended. We were enchanted, in a dreamlike trance possessed by a feeling of wonderment we had never previously experienced, as the sound of fountains drew us constantly onwards from one delight to the next. Perspectives became distorted, inverted; a glimpse of finery through a hedged arch tempted us into an apparent diversion but the route had been subtly anticipated, predestined by the illustrious architects of this magical realm.
The American author Washington Irving, who was lucky enough to have lived in the Alhambra during its restoration in the 1820s, said it was indeed a supernatural place, describing the Gate of Justice adorned with a gigantic hand and a huge key--the magical devices on which according to tradition the fate of the 13th century palace depended. The builder, it is said, was a magician who declared that the Alhambra would remain intact until the day that "the hand on the outer arch should reach down and grasp the key, when the whole pile would tumble to pieces and all the treasures buried beneath it by the Moors would be revealed". The tale reminded us of Pythagoras whose laws of visual harmony we had studied in Samos only weeks before. Pythagoras, we thought, would have delighted in the beauty of the Alhambra whose arches and columns created intricate patterns of light and shadow. The geometric mosaic designs on the walls and floors combined with calligraphic panels of stucco to form a masterpiece of harmony and logic: the Alhambra is surely the ultimate structural expression of magic and mathematics. What changed Europe the most was the integration of most of its countries into the Common Market and, at the beginning of this century, the adoption of a common currency, the Euro. To nobody’s surprise, the immediate result was a general rise in prices, notable even in small countries like Ireland where a spokesman for the political party Fine Gael said some prices had risen a full 100% and estimated that customers were paying $1,200 a month extra as a result of “rip-off” markups. While I was there the price of a packet of cigarettes went up to $7.20 and one newspaper estimated that, ounce for ounce, tobacco now cost the same as cannabis. I was amused by a story in the Irish Times that one thing hadn’t changed in the society was the number of “Priggles”, which it defined as a busybody snooping army of Preaching, Righteous, Insipid, Goody-Goody, Lustreless, Euphemists who sought to impose their vision on the rest of society—the same people who managed to get condoms banned from 1926 to 1991. Ireland was changed by the Common Market more dramatically than anywhere else in Europe becoming a dynamic, money driven society where prices went up so fast as to pretty much put it out of reach of the budget traveler. I thought nostalgically of how only a few years previously Martha and I had driven along lonely roads leading to one sleepy village after another, sleeping in cheap and charming bed and breakfast places, spending euphoric evenings applauding the fiddle players in pubs where life had been unchanged for a century or more. Southwest, in the glorious Dingle Peninsula, “the troubles”, as the Irish euphemistically termed the conflict in the north, scarcely seemed to have touched the pastoral countryside but three or four hours’ drive distant. It was still possible, in this green and pleasant land, to forget contemporary society and lose oneself in an aura of the past. This was not hard to do in a region where as many as a thousand pre-Christian and Celtic monuments included most of the remaining Ogham stones inscribed with the earliest form of Irish writing. Most bore the name of Duibhne, fertility Celtic goddess of fertility. As we compiled our research for Magical and Mystical Sites on the captivating Dingle Peninsula, we learned that the mist-shrouded Sieve Mish mountains had once sheltered the Tuátha De Danann, the legendary early mystics who were credited with introducing magic and mettalurgy to the country in pre-Christian times. Their stocks of gold were guarded by leprechauns. Small in stature and elusive, they became legendary even to the invading` Celts who held them in awe. Their supposed magical abilities and their disappearance into the mystic underworld coupled with their ability to reappear gave rise to the belief in fairies (‘little people’) which is still prevalent in many parts of Ireland. Fairies pop up everywhere even today, not merely the wispy beings with gossamer wings that frequent the pages of children’s books, but creatures of greater substance and more specific design who are inclined to trick mortals and make them lose their way. As in Italy, Catholicism in Ireland didn’t destroy heathen sites, customs and pagan beliefs as much as take them over wholesale, “Christianizing” many of the ancient rituals but leaving them essentially unchanged. And here in Dingle, where Celtic is still spoken an annual pilgrimage is made to the summit of 1,323 ft-ft Mount Brandon to celebrate the harvest festival god Lughnasa. At the eastern end of the peninsula, the biggest town for miles is Tralee (pop: 22,000), famed for the song The Rose of Tralee composed by William Mulchinock for his childhood sweetheart. After a sojourn in America he returned to find her dead and was inclined to immortalize her. He stayed in Tralee and died nine years later.
Our travels took us all around Ireland from Cork in the south, to Sligo in the north, the home of the poet William Butler Yeats who devoted much of his life studying the occult. In scores of rural haunts ancient beliefs lived on and, as our car sped onwards, we got so attuned to the sight of cairns, raths, dolmens and other ageless monuments that on more than one occasion we mistook a flock of sheep for a group of standing stones. By the time we got back to England, eight countries already behind us, we had agreed to compile a little brochure of helpful hints, a sort of Theory & Practice of Travel Writing beginning with a reminder to check that your passport was up to date and that you hadn 't forgotten to include a plug and a 100-watt light bulb for all the hotel rooms where the light was too dim to read. "Scissors, stapler, Band-aids, Swiss army knife, Scotch tape, flashlights, batteries..." Mez began. "...Tiger Balm, the single indispensable remedy for absolutely anything" I added. "Oh, and a pack of cards or dominoes so you can play with your driver over lunch". Mez laughed. "You sit there and actually play games with your guides?" "Of course," I said. "You need to have lots of little things to give away because people get bored and it's good to have something with which to fill the blank moments. A token gift, however trivial, is good for communication. I've often found balloons are handy--for children or cats to play with when you're in somebody's home; the cats leap all around when they encounter balloons and everybody loves it. “Or you can inflate a balloon and toss it behind you on a long-distance bus. Forty people on a long trip and they're all bored. Foreign coins are also a useful trinket to give away as a souvenir. They cost next to nothing but they're a gesture of goodwill". Mez said that one thing she'd learned on this trip was how much time it saved to address all your postcards at once and write them as you go along. "I've also bought lots of little items as souvenirs" she said. "Things people haven't seen; something representative of the country, that's light, portable and cheap". I noted that another essential for a travel writer was to always have some emergency food rations: a small plastic bottle of frozen water that would stay cold for half a day; processed cheese, foil-wrapped bread, a can of sardines. "I could enumerate a number of occasions when I've arrived at a Japanese ryokan at nine o'clock at night", I said, "nobody speaking English, no shop for miles, raw eggs and seaweed offered to a famished traveler who hasn't eaten for eight hours". As it happened, I said, a certain amount of Spartan deprivation could be helpful because one of the essential qualities of a travel writer was the ability to see the commonplace in a new light. Ancient stones seemed to be everywhere we looked. We'd been impressed in Brittany by the eleven parallel rows outside Carnac that stretched for fully 1,000 yards, culminating in an impressive semicircle just outside the town. It looked like an advancing army---"fatal, invincible, eternal, marching, and growing as it marched" as Gerald Hawkins described it in Stonehenge Decoded. And, of course, Stonehenge itself was still a wonderful experience even in the early '70s although today it has become little more than an overcrowded, overregulated theme park.
But then, after a restful but unrewarding vigil beside Loch Ness, we discovered--at Scotland's furthest northern tip the crowning glory of them all--Callanish. What makes this site so dramatic is its isolation, high on a hilltop with jagged, grey stones etched against a bleak, blue grey sky. A few cottages dot the surrounding countryside but otherwise the grim, empty landscape is desolate. The breeze rarely abates but the keening cry of an occasional circling gull can be heard above the shallow loch which always looks cold and menacing. All around are barren, rocky hills stretching for miles, which appear to be waiting as they have for centuries. Nobody has satisfactorily explained Callanish which may well be the "winged temple" referred to by Herodotus. That brilliant engineer and mathematician Professor Alexander Thom believed it was designed as a lunar observatory and the astronomer Boyd Somerville who surveyed the site in 1912 found it to be astronomically aligned like so many of the other megalithic sites. In his Islands of Western Scotland, W.H. Murray estimates that Callanish was built about 200 years after Stonehenge and argues that it is too elaborate to be merely a seasonal calendar but might have been used for sun worship or fertility rites. Many other stone circles, he wrote, were known in Gaelic as Bel Beachd ("the circle of Bel"), the Celtic sun god, and Beltane was still being observed in remote areas of Scotland. When we left we were still pondering over two questions: was the sun ever to be seen in these dour, grey skies and how many worshippers could possibly be gathered together in this remote, unwelcoming place? English social mores had certainly changed over the years. I read in the paper that the names new owners were giving their homes had shifted from the once-proud Algernon’s Lodge or Weaver’s Cottage to the more captious, grittier Costaplenti, Stillowin, Stoneybroke or Grotti Cottage. And deep in the Hampshire countryside, those innocent rural parish hall shows where once the art was by the vicar’s wife and the local art school—had been infiltrated. All the old naff favorites, from topless dancers to wave-lashed seashores, were turning up, the product apparently of hot-art sweatshops in Hong Kong. Or so the tabloids explained. (There’s always some unlikely story like this making the rounds, which, as often as not, turns out to be true). The Daily Mirror speculated that my opinions about England might be interesting after a 20-year absence, and offered me $350 for such an essay. They clearly felt the results were too anodyne and at first declined to pay although they eventually forked over $80 as a kill fee. In the unpublished piece I had written that the English were still so formal they wore collar and tie at the seaside and viewed with disdain people who’d bought cars on the Continent to get foreign plates so they could drive around without getting tickets. To do this would be second nature to an American, I suggested, but many Brits were shocked by such unethical behavior. I asked why Britain was still restricted to three television channels when an obvious improvement would be to allow them as many commercial channels as technologically possible siphoning off 10% of all their revenues to finance the BBC. (Then they wouldn’t need that unfair and unpopular license fee). I decried the long hassle that major companies put you through to replace simple parts (I’ve always believed that The customer is always wrong is a fundamental English belief) and asked why if the English loved dogs so much they made it so difficult for visitors to bring one in. (It’s because they’re foreign dogs, a friend explained). When I bitched to Bronx-born Amber about how we’d have to miss some London party because there were no late trains, she shrewdly suggested that the reason why the underground shut down so early was so that the working class peasants won’t be too tired to get up and work. IN LONDON, I met Clark Siewert, an expatriate Texan who said he had been impressed by my Japan book many years before. He was now publishing his London Travel Letter for up-market American subscribers, the kind who came often to Europe for shopping, theatre and gourmet pursuits. Clark invited me to write a monthly column, John Wilcock’s Britain, in which I checked out such crowd-pleasers as medieval banquets, farm weekends, Hampton Court, canal boat excursions and the kind of trashy gossip that seemed to cut the snotty Bloomsbury intellectuals down to size.
Siewert's American readers adored this sort of stuff, because what made this kind of a story exceptionally good for the Yankee intellectuals who read London Travel Letter was being able to walk around an area of lovely tree-lined streets and squares so rich in transatlantic literary history. Thomas Wolfe and Ralph Waldo Emerson had both stayed Russell Square; Edward Fitzgerald, the author of Omar Khayyam, on Great Russell Street; the family of Edgar Allan Poe on Southampton Row; Anthony Trollope on Keppel Street; Nathaniel Hawthorne on Bloomsbury Street. The author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft, lived on Store Street, a neighbor of Percy Bysshe Shelley whom she later married; William Butler Yeats lived in Woburn Walk and Charles Dickens roosted at the corner of Woburn Place while writing such later classics as A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. The entire area, in fact, is saturated in commemorative blue plaques and as recently as a decade or two ago was the kind of place to which visitors made adulatory excursions, just as today they go and visit scenes where movies were shot. My most interesting assignment from Siewert was to attend one of the very earliest “Murder Weekends”, then being run by their originator, Joy Swift. She had gotten the inspiration as a means of attracting off season visitors to the northern hotel chain for which she worked, and it had proved successful enough to cross the Atlantic and was about to be imitated by tour operators in other countries. The weekend I attended, in the rambling Victorian Royal Albion Hotel at the coastal resort of Brighton—“the home of peers, queers and racketeers, as the old saw had it”—was billed as the 20th annual reunion of Made In Heaven, a lonely hearts society to which everybody was obliged to claim a connection. So strict was this injunction that, upon requesting news about ‘the Murder Weekend’ at the hotel’s reception desk, I was frostily informed that they knew of no such function and it was only when I muttered the magic words ‘Made in Heaven’ that I was directed to the opening cocktail party, already in progress. Suffice it to say that the fiction was maintained by everybody, all of the time, and my own efforts to identify fellow press people (I knew there were some) were continually rebuffed. Everybody had chosen their role, and whether claiming to be a successful marriage broker or cupid’s victim was all the same; nobody would step out of character for an instant. Unwilling or, in truth unable, to play a part, I was soon floundering in doubt and suspicion although what followed was one of the most fascinating weekends I have ever experienced. Notwithstanding my own stubborn refusal to be anything other than a reporter covering the event, the “cast” and audience were inseparable, every event ambiguous. During the post-dinner dancing, one woman suddenly slumped to the floor so unexpectedly that it could have been real; in fact, even though programmed to expect the unexpected, most of us were stunned, especially when an ambulance, sirens hooting, arrived to remove her and bulletins about her progress began to appear on the notice board. It became obvious that she was one of the ‘actors’ but now she was gone, leaving everybody unsure who the other participants still were; unsurprisingly since (as it later transcribed) they had all been trained to obfuscate and mislead. Then another ‘murder’. A blood-smeared body was discovered in the next room with nobody quite sure who might have been in that room at the same time. Excited discussions, speculation, questions, questions, questions. Everybody was chattering excitedly at once but the fact that everybody present was an ‘actor’ by definition had by then muddied the waters to such an extent that it was hard to find a reliable co-inquisitor with whom to strip away the pretenses and establish some basics. Nor was anybody immune from questioning, even the role of this innocent reporter attracting suspicion, a suspicion greatly enhanced by my own brief absence the next morning. I had taken advantage of being in the area to visit and interview Paula Lennon, the widow of John Lennon’s father. This explanation however was greeted with understandable disbelief even though it was true. (I had been doing research for Albert Goldman’s biography of John Lennon.) Later that day, for the press at least, some of the mystery was solved. Joy Swift herself turned up to hold a secret backstage press conference attended by myself, the three other genuine reporters and the eight-member cast. That left 28 other participants who were still being kept in the dark. “When I first came up with the idea I knew it had to be realistic” Ms. Swift explained, “because if it wasn’t, people would be merely onlookers and resist getting involved. There’s no rubbish. All the clues relate to what really happened and, although I rewrite it, as it’s happening to shift people’s attention, I never cheat by changing the ending. There’s only one person who lies, the murderer. “I tell my actors I want them to be as natural as possible. My main criteria are that they are really quick and intelligent, remember all their facts, communicate very well and are chatty, because you can’t have introverts. Most guests step right into the story because people love creating new identities for themselves. I’d say eight or nine out of ten play the game and try to solve the murders but there are always one or two who try to trip us up and are quite determined to get one to say, ‘Okay, I’m an actor’”. Did the actors get fed up with constant questioning? I asked. “No, because if people keep at you and at you, that’s what gets the adrenalin going. Guests have to be prepared to get as well as they give. It always amazes me how much the process breaks down inhibitions. ‘And who have you been sleeping with, Betsy?’ they ask. They’re incredible; they don’t care what they say”. On Sunday morning, the detective inspector—guests knew at least that he was an actor—summoned us to an after breakfast meeting at which all would be explained. “Many of you” he begins, “are obviously pathological liars” and he revealed how he had satisfied his suspicions by searching the rooms of the more ostentatious guests. Among his discoveries, he claims, had been pornographic photos taken by a self-described ‘journalist’, specimen jars and rubber equipment, and evidence that one ‘couple’ had actually met for the first time at Victoria Station where the man had offered his pickup $25 to accompany him for the weekend. Everybody laughed at these disclosures, especially the embarrassed guests who were named. NOT YET READY to leave Europe,I spent a day or two in Paris which seemed very hospitable. There were ample supplies of hash among the lively artists and writers at the legendary Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur, to which the painter Sam Middleton had introduced me. And always a free bunk upstairs for a visiting writer by George Whitman’s Shakespeare & Co bookstore across from Notre Dame. And already becoming legendary was Jim Haynes, the American who'd been involved with the alternative society in Europe for as long as I had been in the U.S. He'd founded the offbeat Traverse Theatre, the all-purpose Arts Lab and helped to start London's International Times before making his Paris atelier a gathering place for virtually everybody on the cultural scene of three or four continents. For years Jim's Sunday night parties have been open to anybody who wanted to attend (as long as they were among the first 60 to telephone that week and were willing to kick in 25 francs. Dishes such as boeuf Bourguignon or sometimes a visiting cook's specialty are copiously ladled out with piles of cheese and fresh fruits on the side. "The rule is eat and drink all you want, but talk, talk, talk" a recent visitor said. And Jim gets his guests talking by memorizing everybody's name and relentlessly introducing them to each other.
"I love talking to people”, he confessed, “meeting people, and when I travel I always collect a lot of addresses, which more often than not are of people who also want to meet other people. If there's a theme running through my life it has been introducing people to each other. The idea of a dancer from Moscow talking to a writer from Buenos Aires is a little like Noah's Ark. It's a total mixture of humanity". Next Jim took it a step further with his People to People books which are simply and functionally lists of names and addresses of people in Eastern European countries who are willing to act as guides and hosts to visitors--a bit like my old Travelers Directory from which, he says, is where he got the idea. When I had first announced, in a 1960 Voice column, that I would be driving to Mexico I received invitations from several strategically placed readers to visit them en route and from this grew The Travelers' Directory, a listing initially of about 50 people all of whom received a copy. Members wrote their own entries offering varying degrees of hospitality and the directory expanded for more than 20 years under various editors eventually containing 1,200 names spread over a dozen countries. In 1971, it earned a three-page feature in The New York Times which named some of its better-known listees--Marvin Kitman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Krassner and Dave Dellinger. One commented: "There's a real camaraderie among Directory listees--the feeling of being in one family".] As Jim and I talked about the underground press and he was not entirely uncritical. "Maybe I'm too tolerant" he said, "but then we have to have more tolerance. I think the underground is often as guilty of intolerance, slander, misquoting, not getting the facts straight--whatever facts are--as the so-called straight press. If only more people on both sides of the fence, the moving fence--it's moving all the time--would just be a bit more tolerant. if people wouldn't get uptight about each other all the time, putting people down. If people would just stop all rumors. “Just don't listen to gossip about who's laying whom or leaving whom or buying what. Just say; 'Look man, we don't want to hear any more of your bad news. Give us some good news. In many ways the best medium, the first medium we are working in is ourselves. People don't realize this. We are broadcasting stations, transmitting our attitudes to the world, philosophical, political, sexual, economic. You name it we're broadcasting it, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. We're never off the air. And it's up to us to transmit our beliefs. “We can't abstractedly say: 'When the revolution's won, we're going to be friendly. We're going to share, we're going to do this or that'. We've got to begin now, sharing, living, smiling, being courteous, being tolerant, helping people, doing it all the time and increasing the sensitivity level. When you hear somebody saying something nasty about somebody else, stop him. When you hear somebody being stupid, stop him".
Tokyo: Rick Kennedy recalls ================================= |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
©
2006-2008 ojaiorange.com
|