The Palouse Tourist

Dear ________

I’ll confess I stopped skimming Lucy Lippard’s article “The Tourist At Home,” after this part:
“Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are. Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around” (13).

Here is a little test: What kind of birds hang out in your neighborhood? What is the last varmint (defined as anything furry and pesky that some people like to shoot) you have seen scampering around? How high is the Palouse River that runs through downtown Pullman, and how many feet must the river rise before it floods the Subway parking lot?

O.K, I’ll accept just about any bird or critter you mention, and I’ll give credit if you know that the river well above its normal level.

I don’t know if you have ever thought why people smoke (not including the addictive part), but in searching for an answer to why people smoked cigarettes, one old roommate suggested it had to do with breathing, which is something everyone does (kinda like “live free or at least breath, or die” as a motto for life’s license plates) but not very deeply or with much conscious effort. Just as smoking gave people permission to breath deeply and with conscious effort (something this roommate thought was important to one’s physical and spiritual health) looking around and taking in the visuals of one’s environment is deeply seated human activity that too often requires special locations and lots of time set aside. We are tourists because we need to breathe, that is, we need to know what the birds look like, how the trees arrange themselves, the pitch of the sky, the color of the rivers, the scum in the gutters, the smell of urine in an alley—we can’t just take in these sights sounds and smells when we get two weeks off, or go to an academic conference.

For example, the human penchant to gawk and marvel at the natural world is now perverted (like smoking and breathing) into an unnatural alliance. Wrong! Remember what Frank Sinatra said about “love and marriage” –“can’t have one without the other” but that is too easily laid to waste. Surely we can look around without Birkenstocks and Nikons, or even return tickets. What would happen if people started to breath in the sights around them, even if they think there is nothing worth looking at?

I know when I do travel, I find the birds to be more exotic than they really are. The birds are supposed to be more colorful in tropical places, but I am shocked at how exotic regular brown birds can be when you give them a good look. The patterns on a few Warblers inspired me to get out my binoculars the other day, which I often use to gaze out my windows at the birds milling about the low shrubs and empty lots near my house. I am amazed at how the blue tints in Magpies wings can be so rich and varied, sometimes shimmering metallic rays of grey and white. I swear, if I ran into one of these big loud Magpies for the first time in another state or country, I’d be sure to think of them as exotic. In fact, I have begun to see my environs as exactly that—exotic, colorful, rich—as if I was a tourist in my own town. I often wonder what real tourist see when they come to Pullman, and pick out things to do that tourist might find amusing or edifying. I went to Kamiak Butte because its too close for locals to visit, and the same for the Boyer Park on the Snake river, both not an hour away, but full of people from places very far.


It is easy for me to talk about looking around where one lives, well, because I don’t get around all that much. Above 40 years of age, I thought by now I would have spanned the globe (my childhood visions globe trotting await my second childhood, which is coming soon!).

I sing the corporate body electric

This photo comes from this site, and explains:
"An ad placed at the Johannesburg International Airport to greet arriving and departing passengers. It’s a world first, a 5000 m2 billboard which required 1000 liters of paint and 9 separate permits from different regulatory authorities."

“Place” is a word that (corporate trademark reference alert), like the Yellow Pages ad says, “gets used”-- a lot. Sometimes “location” is the primary meaning:
“Is this the place?” “I need directions to your place.”


But usually there is some tinge of “judgment,” approval or disapproval:
“What kind of place are you running here?” “I love that place!” “This place is a dump” “There’s no place like home.” "Is this the place to put an ad?"


In addition to location and judgments, place is always tied to “relationships” between oneself and others, and one’s environment--relationships like:
“I don’t belong in this god-forsaken place.” “How the F#@% did I get in this place” “I can’t seem to find my place” “Everyone deserves a place at the table”


Edward Relph’s critical look at corporate colonization of the world’s airports claims that corporate culture has spawned clones to replace real places. These black holes of place only partake of “placelessness,” undeserving of a full place at the table (of course, puns always get a place).

The sense of the loss of “authenticity” reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of modern photography in the industrial age, which he thought stole a bit of the allure from the real thing (say, the Virgin Mary or a Tomato Soup can), making reality less magical than it would be otherwise, and reducing all substance to the mere similitude of a photograph. Pierre Bourdieu (yes, another French theorist gets a place at the theory table) is more positive, seeing the ability of specific “locations” with their peoples and traditions to create a sense of authenticity, to give or withhold approval, and to build and maintain relationships in concert with their own notions of place-ness.

I’m not sure any of this matters too much in the airport bar, so of course
“Save me a place”

Collection Inspired Narrative: Truth or (Con)Sequence?

A plausible or pleasing narrative can be pieced together with complimentary components, say, a sequence of events, which anchors the collection spatially and temporally. What if the "neatness" of sequential ordering inspires "veracity-light," less truth, but more (in the words of Colbert) "truthiness"?

I like true stories to end happily (despite my love of suffering as an art form), so I've inserted the last photo to show that my children survived the loss of their favorite car (the youngest was crying also about her crayons that had melted into the back seat upholstery), even though the picture was actually taken before we knew the car was toast.

Long Distance Confabulations

“Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmellow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high” Lennon & McCartney

You don’t have to drop acid to feel the childish thrill of traveling into unknown places. In Nigel Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, he cites the work of Kames, who ”formulated the aesthetics of distance in terms of a rhetorical question which illustrates the dynamic relationship between curiosity and its cognates such as novelty, singularity, and wonder” (25). So, moving away from Bruno Latour, where the “mobility” of curious discoveries and collected objects is central to the purpose and context of scientific travel, Kames sees the retention of “distance” as essential to maintaining the allure of travel writing. Desire to forage among the new and fantastical could be a described as a circle of confabulation, a half-real half-conjured memory, a recurrent proclivity to seek new experiences valued for their ephemeral connection to remote lands and peoples. “Seeing” is believing, but seeing from a distance is conjuring too.

I can name all the places I’ve been that I think count as distant, and they are not many. For example, the closest I ever came to leaving the U.S. was a year in Hawaii, so I still harbor childish notions of what it means to travel and what I might find there. Rare and wonderful as the a Pacific island can be, the reality of day-to-day activities lets the some of the air out of those fanciful thoughts, but still bobbing and hobbling closer to the earth.

As a child I remember asking people from “distant” places like New York State what the birds, trees, and mountains looked like there. People seemed remarkably unimpressed with the question and not many offered anything more than “pretty much same as here, only some bigger, some smaller.” The best answer was about trees: “The branches of pine trees back East grow all curly, not straight like these.” I sat with that one for a long time. Twenty years or so later I went on a trip to the East coast and I see one of those twisted armed trees. The arms curled much more vigorously and energetically in my confabulated trees.

Narratives of Omai

“At the heart of these enterprises was the desire to find evidence of the origins of human civilization, the basis from which their own society had self-evidently progressed so far”
Michelle Hetherington, The Cult of the South Seas.



The three readings form the Cult of the South Seas demonstrates the rich context of the encounters and travels of the English voyagers. In Hetherington’s piece, the “cultural assumptions” of the Europeans as the epitome of the advanced human condition (the upper-crust of evolutionary and cultural refinement) means that European audiences of travel literature expected “tales of difference” that “throw their own culture into high relief.”


Question: Do readers of scientific travel literature still expect “tales of difference,” if so, how is it changed to suite our cultural assumptions?


Scientific discoveries are often couched in terms of finding out what and who we are. The space telescope looks at the “birth” of our universe, other planets tell us what the earth was like billions of years ago, the human genome finds a common ancestor. It all seems to point to the origins of life, whether in the lines on Mars or hot springs in the deep ocean.

Question: Is scientific travel a kind of rational theological exercise, in the sense that discovery seems prone narratives of human teleology and genealogy?

Along the same lines, Peter Raby describes the two-directional properties of the finding oneself through tales of difference in his chapter of Bright Paradise “Through the Looking-Glass.” Like Alice, who realized the mirror held much more than the reflection could show, scientists, travel junkies, and collectors of every stripe, found themselves crawling through the observation glass and falling into a topsy-turvy world that threatened to cut off the very head that led them there.

Question: Is the traveler in control of the experience?

Predictably, Omai’s travels to England inspired notions of the noble savage, perhaps best exemplified by the legacy of Montainge’s more deliberate tinkering with travel tales about New World encounters used to contrasts “discovered” peoples from Europeans, and to belittle and chastise the state of European society. Just as looking through the other end of the telescope makes things look smaller rather than larger, Omai comes to stand for both noble savage and the savage European. In a sense, Omai comes with the baggage of a stock character embodying a kind of difference that suggested Europeans might have taken a wrong turn along the evolutionary road to become poor substitutes for humanity in the buff. That is, humanity stripped of its gadgets and universal god might show Europeans to be less dignified and honorable than they imagined themselves. It is notable, Hetherington points out, that the embrace of the idea of the Noble Savage “bore a direct relation to one’s class and education,” which suggests that this early-stage relativism relied upon knowledge of the classics, a bit of leisure time, and a serene assumption of natural social privileges associated with class that could be surprisingly brittle under inspection. It seems that those with the most to lose could be the first to see it coming.


Question: Why does the upper-class grapple with “difference” in specific ways as Hetherington suggest?

Question: How did working-class people in England interact with the “difference” found in New World encounters?


In Ian McCalman’s look at the Omai incident, Spectacle of Knowledge: OMAI as Ethnographic Travelogue,” the narrative of difference becomes popular spectacle, taking advantage of the tension inherent in the binaries created by looking outward to see one’s inner self. The tales of Cook’s murder seems to tap directly into the narrative of difference that at one moment basks in the Eden-like simplicity of life in the Sandwich Islands and the next moment must contend with the bludgeoning of a famous sea captain. The tension between the beautiful and the grotesque, magic and science, study and destruction, travel literature and Biblical dogma, superior and inferior peoples, adulthood and infancy, seems to keep the spectacle moving like a spinning top, always more fascinating while it oscillates. And then there is “realism,” a concept of authenticity that seems ripe to peel coins from earnest onlookers and novelty enthusiast. I am reminded of a comment of a survivor of Pearl Harbor who went to see the movie “Pearl Harbor,” which, he exclaimed, “was louder in the theater than the actual attack.”


Question: McCalman notes commentators praised De Loutherbourg’s spectacle of Omai for its realism. Thinking of modern film that reproduces historical accounts with claims to accuracy, how does realism in travel narratives manage to be both aesthetically pleasing and authentic?


Finally, In Harriet Guest’s “Omai’s Things,” the concept of collecting takes an interesting turn in the other direction. As Omai is carried to the Banks’ sanctuary along with other collectibles, he too is laden with items to store in a newly built English-style house in Tahiti. The notion that Omai had been contaminated by European society inaugurates a long-lived and persistent narrative of the defiled Noble Savage, and the satirist who took jibes at the odd and “useless” items Omai took home assume a kind of paternal high-ground that ironically unleashed a guilt-laden and more destructive ambition to turn New World peoples into god-fearing Christians.

Question: You live in England when Omai arrives and have two weeks to spend with Omai, what do you do? What will the satirist write in response?