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THe American Road Novel: Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac and ...
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EDNOTE. The film "The Terminal" seems to me the antithesis of the road novel. For an excellent exemplar of the anti-road novel I recommend Brigid Brophy's 1969 "In Transit"--an avant-garde novel well worth the effort.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2004 12:38 PM
Subject: Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/weekinreview/11john.html?ex=1090123200&en=39b2c8b911459e24&ei=5062
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 11, 2004
UNCHECKED BAGGAGE
Our Airports, Ourselves
Tim Boyle/Getty Images
In its vast network of air terminals, America has found a new locale for tales of romance, intrigue, adventure and woe.
By JOHN LELAND
Published: July 11, 2004
N the recent movie "The Terminal," the character played by Tom Hanks gets stuck in Kennedy International Airport for nine months, and discovers what many travelers are increasingly sensing: that airports have become their own worlds, laboratories for the latest forms of nourishment, commerce, entertainment, information, romance and fear.
As airport amenities and food courts have expanded, and security concerns have increased the time people spend in them, terminals have become more than places for departures, arrivals and lost luggage, yet remain less than destinations - without local history, tradition, religion or dialect, but borrowing bits of each of these from the people coursing through them.
"The Terminal" is just one of several recent byproducts of a culture that is slowly absorbing the sense that in a post-9/11 world, airports are neither what they once were, nor fully evolved into a singular something else. Where airplanes once served as a dramatic or comic vehicle (the "Airplane" movies; the Harrison Ford thriller "Air Force One"), the airport itself has become the star. Besides "The Terminal," there is the reality television series "Airline," which follows the strange experiences of Southwest Airlines personnel at Los Angeles International Airport and Midway Airport in Chicago. A surprise hit on the A&E channel earlier this year, it began its second season last week. And Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood will headline a fall NBC series called "LAX," set in Los Angeles International. It is only fitting that Ms. Locklear, who once reigned voluptuously over the site-specific Melrose Place, now governs the nonplace of LAX.
This new interest in the airport as dramatic stage reflects the convergence of two changes in airports themselves. Since 2001, the extended security lines, random searches, armed soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs have pushed the airport from the anonymous background of modern travel into the anxious foreground, where we are all both suspects and potential victims.
More than that, the airport now sits at the center of a tangle of American values that have been called into question by the terrorist attacks and unending war on terror: mobility, anonymity, rootedness, nationalism, diversity, homogeneity and globalism.
"I would say we're in an era where there is a distinct airport culture," said Pico Iyer, who has written extensively about life inside terminals, particularly at Los Angeles International. "They represent an image of the way more and more cities are going. It's a culture of nonculture. They're places where people from hundreds of countries congregate, not communicating, thrown together in generic space. I think they're the postmodern metropolis."
That is to say, functionally points of transition, they have become so culturally as well. "There's an odd sense of being nowhere," said Mark C. Taylor, author of "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption" and a professor of humanities, religion and architecture at Williams College and Columbia University. "It's almost as if they're designed to transport you without a sense of movement."
You leave one airport, Professor Taylor said, and the one you land in looks exactly the same, with the same stores, fast food and cable news on television. He suggested that airports are not separate locations but nodes in a network of similar terminals, which collectively are crossed by currents of information, commerce, disease and risk.
Airports sacrifice a sense of place for a sense of occasion, said Karal Ann Marling, a professor of popular culture at the University of Minnesota. "Spielberg did something very smart in 'The Terminal' to emphasize that the airport is one giant shopping mall," Professor Marling said. "It's a dodge game we play with ourselves to pretend airports aren't airports. In that shopping world, it's obvious that the management is going to take great care of you and nothing evil can happen to you. It distracts travelers from the possibility that they will meet bin Laden on the next flight. How can you be afraid when there's a Gap next to you?"
The sameness of amenities from one airport to the next, which can make airport space feel so generic, also provides a sense of comfort, Professor Marling said. "We've all learned to be lulled by name brands and the familiarity of the mall. It's luxurious and normative all at the same time."
The current fixation on airports in popular film and television marks a twist in one of America's central continuing narratives: the romance of the open road. In a nation of immigrants, without great cathedrals or local mythologies, the road has been a founding metaphor, a stand-in for reinvention and discovery. Slaves in the antebellum South built one of early America's greatest institutions, the black church, around the Biblical stories of exodus. Emerson began American letters with the belief that man is great "not in his goals but in his transitions"- a literary analog to the road.
The country's first popular culture, the minstrel show, and first homegrown art form, the blues, both celebrated the footloose traveler. Mark Twain and Herman Melville invented American literature on the open waterway, a wet version of the road, and Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov continued the tradition a century later.
Like the road, the airport is a nonplace, something encountered on the way to going somewhere else, better measured in time - always too long - than in square feet. Now that it is unsafe to hitchhike, and affordable to fly, the terminal makes a better canvas for transition or self-discovery. As such, it is the setting du jour for our narratives of romance, longing, adventure and intrigue.
"It's unlegislated territory," Mr. Iyer said. "It's a psychological limbo that becomes a meeting place of the human and posthuman - people are meeting loved ones, sending them off to war, meeting for funerals, all in the midst of a network of Body Shops, Sharper Images and other stores whose names even speak of displacement."
In a 2001 article titled "Consumer Cities," the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote that since cities are no longer centers for manufacturing, their main role is as stages for shopping and entertainment, conflating the categories of tourists and locals. By this measure, some of the thriving metropolises of the 21st century are not cities at all: they are airports.
Welcome to Mr. Iyer's postmodern metropolis. Your bags - the things that tie you to your home and your past - will be arriving at the baggage carousel. Or not at all.
After all, in the biosphere of the terminal, you don't really need anything - not even the connections that make you human. For those you have your carry-on laptop and cellphone: placeless terminals within a placeless terminal, allowing you to travel the world without leaving the familiar touch of plastic.
The New York Times
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2004 12:38 PM
Subject: Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/weekinreview/11john.html?ex=1090123200&en=39b2c8b911459e24&ei=5062
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 11, 2004
UNCHECKED BAGGAGE
Our Airports, Ourselves
Tim Boyle/Getty Images
In its vast network of air terminals, America has found a new locale for tales of romance, intrigue, adventure and woe.
By JOHN LELAND
Published: July 11, 2004
N the recent movie "The Terminal," the character played by Tom Hanks gets stuck in Kennedy International Airport for nine months, and discovers what many travelers are increasingly sensing: that airports have become their own worlds, laboratories for the latest forms of nourishment, commerce, entertainment, information, romance and fear.
As airport amenities and food courts have expanded, and security concerns have increased the time people spend in them, terminals have become more than places for departures, arrivals and lost luggage, yet remain less than destinations - without local history, tradition, religion or dialect, but borrowing bits of each of these from the people coursing through them.
"The Terminal" is just one of several recent byproducts of a culture that is slowly absorbing the sense that in a post-9/11 world, airports are neither what they once were, nor fully evolved into a singular something else. Where airplanes once served as a dramatic or comic vehicle (the "Airplane" movies; the Harrison Ford thriller "Air Force One"), the airport itself has become the star. Besides "The Terminal," there is the reality television series "Airline," which follows the strange experiences of Southwest Airlines personnel at Los Angeles International Airport and Midway Airport in Chicago. A surprise hit on the A&E channel earlier this year, it began its second season last week. And Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood will headline a fall NBC series called "LAX," set in Los Angeles International. It is only fitting that Ms. Locklear, who once reigned voluptuously over the site-specific Melrose Place, now governs the nonplace of LAX.
This new interest in the airport as dramatic stage reflects the convergence of two changes in airports themselves. Since 2001, the extended security lines, random searches, armed soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs have pushed the airport from the anonymous background of modern travel into the anxious foreground, where we are all both suspects and potential victims.
More than that, the airport now sits at the center of a tangle of American values that have been called into question by the terrorist attacks and unending war on terror: mobility, anonymity, rootedness, nationalism, diversity, homogeneity and globalism.
"I would say we're in an era where there is a distinct airport culture," said Pico Iyer, who has written extensively about life inside terminals, particularly at Los Angeles International. "They represent an image of the way more and more cities are going. It's a culture of nonculture. They're places where people from hundreds of countries congregate, not communicating, thrown together in generic space. I think they're the postmodern metropolis."
That is to say, functionally points of transition, they have become so culturally as well. "There's an odd sense of being nowhere," said Mark C. Taylor, author of "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption" and a professor of humanities, religion and architecture at Williams College and Columbia University. "It's almost as if they're designed to transport you without a sense of movement."
You leave one airport, Professor Taylor said, and the one you land in looks exactly the same, with the same stores, fast food and cable news on television. He suggested that airports are not separate locations but nodes in a network of similar terminals, which collectively are crossed by currents of information, commerce, disease and risk.
Airports sacrifice a sense of place for a sense of occasion, said Karal Ann Marling, a professor of popular culture at the University of Minnesota. "Spielberg did something very smart in 'The Terminal' to emphasize that the airport is one giant shopping mall," Professor Marling said. "It's a dodge game we play with ourselves to pretend airports aren't airports. In that shopping world, it's obvious that the management is going to take great care of you and nothing evil can happen to you. It distracts travelers from the possibility that they will meet bin Laden on the next flight. How can you be afraid when there's a Gap next to you?"
The sameness of amenities from one airport to the next, which can make airport space feel so generic, also provides a sense of comfort, Professor Marling said. "We've all learned to be lulled by name brands and the familiarity of the mall. It's luxurious and normative all at the same time."
The current fixation on airports in popular film and television marks a twist in one of America's central continuing narratives: the romance of the open road. In a nation of immigrants, without great cathedrals or local mythologies, the road has been a founding metaphor, a stand-in for reinvention and discovery. Slaves in the antebellum South built one of early America's greatest institutions, the black church, around the Biblical stories of exodus. Emerson began American letters with the belief that man is great "not in his goals but in his transitions"- a literary analog to the road.
The country's first popular culture, the minstrel show, and first homegrown art form, the blues, both celebrated the footloose traveler. Mark Twain and Herman Melville invented American literature on the open waterway, a wet version of the road, and Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov continued the tradition a century later.
Like the road, the airport is a nonplace, something encountered on the way to going somewhere else, better measured in time - always too long - than in square feet. Now that it is unsafe to hitchhike, and affordable to fly, the terminal makes a better canvas for transition or self-discovery. As such, it is the setting du jour for our narratives of romance, longing, adventure and intrigue.
"It's unlegislated territory," Mr. Iyer said. "It's a psychological limbo that becomes a meeting place of the human and posthuman - people are meeting loved ones, sending them off to war, meeting for funerals, all in the midst of a network of Body Shops, Sharper Images and other stores whose names even speak of displacement."
In a 2001 article titled "Consumer Cities," the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote that since cities are no longer centers for manufacturing, their main role is as stages for shopping and entertainment, conflating the categories of tourists and locals. By this measure, some of the thriving metropolises of the 21st century are not cities at all: they are airports.
Welcome to Mr. Iyer's postmodern metropolis. Your bags - the things that tie you to your home and your past - will be arriving at the baggage carousel. Or not at all.
After all, in the biosphere of the terminal, you don't really need anything - not even the connections that make you human. For those you have your carry-on laptop and cellphone: placeless terminals within a placeless terminal, allowing you to travel the world without leaving the familiar touch of plastic.
The New York Times