Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
 What do you mean you didn't watch it? So the new Mission: Impossible movie came out. Yes, Reader, I saw it, and I liked it.
It must have been in September 1990. A year earlier the Berlin Wall had come down, and now the Gulf War was starting. One day my mother, excited, announced to us what she must have just read in the papers: a new Mission: Impossible series would soon be broadcast on Taiwanese television. I doubt many of you remember the 1988 TV revival of the original 1966-73 series. Apparently ABC green-lit the revival because of a threatened Hollywood writers’ strike, which prompted the studios to go back to the vault for existing scripts. And the fact is that, although the 1966 original might be considered something of a classic in the annals of American television, the 1988 revival was... not good. It was not surprising that it only ran for two seasons. Both the Washington Post and Rotten Tomatoes decided to remind me this week that it’s the tenth anniversary of one of the most influential films of our age, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Before those of you who are sick of superhero movies (or have always been too snobbish to enjoy them) start rolling your eyes, let me quote Roger Ebert (as the Post also does) in pointing out that The Dark Knight is a film that transcends its comic book origins to become “an engrossing tragedy.” And I am hardly the first person to read into the film something beyond the surface of its plot and action sequences. At the time of its release in 2008, many saw it as something of a metaphor for America in the age of the Iraq War and the War on Terror. Gotham might be a stand-in for Baghdad, and Batman a stand-in for the U.S. military, his very presence by the its violent and extreme nature inviting escalation and challenge. In the end, Batman wins a pyrrhic victory through mass surveillance like the NSA. At the more obscure end of commentary, the good folks over at Overthinking It (hey Mark) presented an interesting essay interpreting the film through the philosophy of Schopenhauer: Gotham as Will and Representation.  Warner Bros. Fair use. Regular readers of this blog, if any exist, should not be surprised by now that sometimes I nerd out about one thing or another. Last week I was in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, and it quickly climbed the chart of my favorite cities in the world. I won’t suggest that it was solely because of what Edinburgh represents in the annals of human achievement, but I won’t say that it didn’t play a role either.  Monument of Adam Smith in central Edinburgh. Yesterday, July 1, marked for me three years on the road. Three years. That’s as long as Jesus spent preaching. It so happens that I was reading Bruce Chatwin’s strange 1987 masterpiece of travel writing, The Songlines. The book begins and ends with Chatwin’s investigations in Australia into the Aboriginal practice of “the walkabout,” in which one would go walk and sing along paths or “songlines” that totemic ancestors once followed, sometimes for months at a stretch or even years. But halfway in, the book turns ruminative and begins to reflect on the meaning of travel itself and what it says about human nature. “Our nature lies in movement,” Chatwin quotes Pascal’s Pensées, “complete calm is death.”  Some images from the past year of traveling: This one of hiking in Alkhornet, Svalbard. There was tension in the cold, crisp air. Drama, climax. The sun shone brightly on the ice all around us. Our latitude then was 81°50’1”N, about as close to the North Pole as we would ever come on this voyage, deep into the loose pack ice that had formed over the sea north of Svalbard. The ice was hunting grounds for polar bears. And right now, a female polar bear was slowly but assuredly approaching a ringed seal resting on his belly. “But where is it?” Silly me, never very skilled at spotting wildlife at a distance, asked my fellow passengers. Chris, a tall young NHS worker from England, pointed me in the right direction.  View from the Longyearbyen port. On a promontory in Oslofjord, a short ferry ride away from Oslo’s city hall, two parallel edifices encase two famous boats and commemorate their respective creators. On one side is the Fram, the world’s first polar exploration ship, custom-ordered by Fridtjof Nansen specifically to withstand the pressure of ice that would crush any other ship at the time. On the other is the Kon-Tiki, the balsa raft that Thor Heyerdahl built in 1947 according to traditional Native American methods for him to attempt to sail from Peru to Polynesia. The contrast as well as the parallels between the two men are presumably why the Norwegians have chosen to commemorate them side by side.  Ferry piers, Oslo.  Vlad the Impaler in Bucharest. John Polidori has been on my mind.
No doubt this is in part because I happen to be back in Romania, the country that originated the vampire myth. As I type this, I’m sitting only a stone’s throw away from the statue of Vlad Tepes “the Impaler,” the 15th century prince of Wallachia and real-life Dracula with his fabulous mustache, that stands at the center of Bucharest’s old town. It probably also has to do with my learning just the other day that someone decided to make a movie about Mary Shelley and how she wrote Frankenstein. Apparently the film is not much good. But Polidori was there, present at the creation, when she first conceived of Frankenstein. Or put another way, she was there, present at the creation, when he first conceived of his parallel invention. I didn’t plan to go to the Aeolian Islands. Then again, I didn’t plan to go to Sicily either. Then again, I’d more or less stopped making plans. From Malta, I had made a last minute decision to head to Catania, Sicily’s second city on that island’s east coast. It turned out that Sabrina, a German friend I’d made over two years ago when I was traveling in Turkey, was also visiting Sicily and nearby. We met up, along with her friend Susanne, and went up Mt. Etna. “Where are you going after this?” I asked. “Lipari,” Sabrina said, the administrative center of the Aeolian Islands.  Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates engages in a debate with his friends Glaucon and Adeimantus that strikes me as suddenly newly relevant to our age. Bear with me. Socrates, like all great moral teachers in history, proposes that one must strive for moral virtue, or “justice,” as he calls it. His companions offer a counterargument. They point out that, even if a person is just, if he or she is perceived as unjust, then that person will suffer all the negative consequences of being unjust anyway. Glaucon puts it in graphic terms:  The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Anyone who has watched season one of Netflix’s “The Crown” surely knows that Queen Elizabeth II, back when she was Princess Elizabeth, lived for a while in Malta. At the time, Malta was still a British possession and an important base for the Royal Navy, and Elizabeth accompanied Prince Philip here during his naval service. But most of us are likely unaware, not before visiting, of the other historical personages connected to this tiny island country. First up, St. Paul. In 60 A.D., Paul set sail from Crete to Rome to face trial. A storm blew the ship off course. The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 27:27—28:5) tells the story:  St. Paul's Island in Malta's St. Paul's Bay, where they put up a statue of the apostle commemorating his shipwreck. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
October 2018
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