Irony?

From the House of Travel website:

Top 5 Things to do in Asia:
• Barter at the local markets in Thailand for a great bargain

Personally I found I got better bargains if I paid for things with actual money.

Summer holiday reading

One evening in early March, when she went to the Rockefeller Library to pick up the reserve reading for Semiotics 211, she found Leonard there as well. He was leaning against the counter, speaking animatedly to the girl on duty, who was unfortunately rather cute in a busty Bettie Page way.
"Think about it, though," Leonard was saying to the girl, "Think about it from the point of view of the fly."
"O.K., I'm a fly," the girl said with a throaty laugh.
"We move in slow motion to them. They can see the swatter coming from a million miles away. The flies are like, 'Wake me when the swatter gets close.'"
Noticing Madeleine, the girl told Leonard, "Just a sec."
Madeleine held out her call order slip, and the girl took it and went off into the stacks.
"Picking up the Balzac?" Leonard said.
"Yes."
"Balzac to the rescue."
Normally, Madeleine would have had many things to say to this, many comments about Balzac to make. But her mind was a blank. She didn't even remember to smile until he'd looked away.
Bettie Page came back with Madeleine's order, sliding it toward her and immediately turning back to Leonard. He seemed different than he did in class, more exuberant, supercharged. He raised his eyebrows in a crazed, Jack Nicholson way and said, "My housefly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older."
"Why's that?" the girl asked.
"It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole."
"Yeah, sure," the girl teased, "that follows."
But Madeleine had understood. "That makes sense," she said. "I always wondered why that was."
"It's just a theory," Leonard said.
Bettie Page tapped Leonard's hand to get his attention. "Flies aren't always so fast," she said. "I've caught flies in my bare hands before."
"Especially in winter," Leonard said. "That's probably the kind of fly I'd be. One of those knucklehead winter flies."
There was no good excuse for Madeleine to hang around the reserve reading room, and so she put the Balzac into her bag and headed out.

From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

 

1Q84

The opening paragraph of the long-awaited English translation of Murakami Haruki's latest novel, 1Q84 (due out on 25 October 2011):

The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.

Yukon

In Vancouver I had sold my first gun, never having had an occasion to use it, and I was scared of the thing anyway. On my way north this time, however, the incessant panic talk had stampeded me into buying a gross and unwieldy shotgun - a "Savage," so it said on the barrel.
To learn something more about the weapon, I took it to the local gun expert, which in this land populated with nothing but gun experts happened to be the assistant postmaster. He confirmed my worst fears: "It's factory-flawed. You've got one shot and then you might as well chuck it." We agreed that one shot would probably only enrage several hundred pounds of bear and all but guarantee for me a swift and messy exit from this life.
Fortunately, I chanced to meet a man named Leach, chairman of the Yukon Trappers Association. "I've been in the bush for getting on thirty years," he said, "and never have I seen anything I didn't want to see."
"Well, what did you carry?"
"A bell." He then added, almost defiantly, "You won't need a bloody gun!" That did it. I happily abandoned the Savage.
Beyond the small settlement of Upper Liard, I came upon a herd of horses grazing beside the road. They eyed me and my pinging bell, for they, too, wore bells, partly for the same reason. It was an odd musical confrontation as our different notes momentarily mingled on that cool spring day.

From The Longest Walk by George Meegan

Distance walked since last post: 36.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 298.9km
Days left until departure: 4

On quitting

Larry King: Did you ever think of quitting?

George Meegan: No, because I never had the courage. To give up requires great courage. To turn back requires great courage. I think any fool could go on. Provided you have the legs to move. And I think to surrender one's dream, half finished, is a terribly difficult thing and I never quite had the authority within myself to do that.

Quoted on the back cover of The Longest Walk by George Meegan

Distance walked since last post: 21.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 74.9km
Days left until departure: 82

American Journeys and American exceptionalism

The young man who sought the meaning of life among the poor and in religion, and the train driver who knew nothing of the world twenty miles either side of the tracks he drove, were both in their different ways expressions of American 'exceptionalism'. [Alexis de] Tocqueville, who coined the term, would have found their like in 1831. That is to say, at some level both shared the assumption of Americans, from the Pilgrim Fathers to George W. Bush, that America is different from all other countries because America is a country - the only country - blessed by God.

The idea is essential to the doctrine behind the War on Terror, to the strength of religion, the weakness of the social security system, the pervasiveness of the flag and other symbols of the nation; to its violence, its self-deceits and hypocrisy, its inability to confront its own contradictions, its childish fears and paranoia, and its mind-numbing provincialism. It is also, very likely, the reason for its power, its creativity, its capacity for self-renewal, its numberless heroic examples and the desire of people everywhere to live in the United States.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Think of the music

No people on earth make music like the Americans - no-one else comes close.... When anti-American feelings sneak up on you, when you think the democracy is a bit of a sham, the people are ruled by ignorance and fear and no good can come of the place - think of the music.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Amtrak bagels

The Crescent came in at 11.18 pm, which meant the dining car was closed, but the snack bar was open. I tried the bagel. Amtrak bagels come in a vacuum wrapping. The whole thing is heated in a microwave, along with the cream cheese which comes inside a sort of plastic ravioli. The heating turns the bagel into rubber and the cream cheese into sour milk. They put it in a cardboard box with a plastic knife and a serviette, and when you've eaten it you have to sit quite still for an hour, like a cormorant after swallowing a salmon, and let the thing dissolve inside you.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Wanderlust quotes

"Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts."

"A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant."

"To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one's advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests."

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

More Wanderlust

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilling rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

The importance of travelling on foot

"If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear that you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose."

- Werner Herzog

Tourism

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space."

- Guy Ernest Debord

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since blog began: 78.4km