"Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes..."

"... passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, 'Well, you Yanks….' There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading 'Trespassing.'..."

Writes Paul Theroux, in "The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn" (NYT). And that's a free-access link, which I'm giving you because I love Theroux's book "The Mosquito Coast," and the book is connected to the topic under discussion, as he explains. Also there's a great Mark Twain quote and a pretty decent JFK quote. So, please read the whole thing.

"You always hear writers complain about the hellish difficulty of writing, but it’s a dishonest complaint...."

"The only difficulty is its necessity for solitude. Writing is not compatible with anything — its utter self-absorption is generally destructive to family life and friendships — and yet I find it joyous. All creativity is uplifting; I finish a book in a mood approaching rapture.... Growing up, needing privacy in a large family — I was the third of seven children — I became a fugitive, finding solace in libraries and in long hikes and in solitude, as well as in many menial jobs — anything to escape the conflicting demands and the scrutiny of my family. From childhood, I had always written stories in a secret way, offloading my thoughts on paper.... When someone confides to me that they think they might have an ambition to write, I suggest they leave home — go away, get a job. Never enter a 'writing program.'... Writing is neither dreary nor a job. I see it as a process of life...."

Says Paul Theroux, in "Paul Theroux on Necessary Solitude, Risks and the Joy of Writing/After 60 years and almost as many books, the novelist and travel writer, 83, will stop when he falls out of his chair" (NYT).

"It’s more necessary than ever to find the empathetic experience of meeting another person, being in another culture, to smell it, to suffer it, to put up with the hardship and the nuisances of travel, all of that matters."

The pro-travel position, aspirationally articulated by Paul Theroux, quoted in "Would the Pandemic Stop Paul Theroux From Traveling? No. Of course not" (NYT). 

Nice photo of Theroux's workspace at the link. I'm a longtime fan of that genre of photography, and I declare this example worth a click. 

I'm also a longtime participant in the debate about whether to travel, and I'm more of a con than a pro. In that light, I'll say that Theroux sets a somewhat high bar for what you're supposed to be doing in this thing called travel — "empathetic experience," "being in, "smell it," "suffer it," "put up with the hardship." It's no pleasure trip. 

Another Theroux quote at the link: "You cannot be a grumpy traveler. You will not get anywhere. You’ll be killed, you’ll be insulted, you won’t be able to travel. So you need to get along with people. I think that I’m characterized as cantankerous perhaps because if you see things the way they are, and you just describe things the way they are, you can be accused of being unkind."

"In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card, a gringo in his degringolade."

So begins Paul Theroux, in this NYT excerpt — "Paul Theroux’s Mexican Journey/In his 70s, the writer embarks on one of the great adventures of a traveling life, a solo road trip from Reynosa to Chiapas and back" — from his forthcoming book "On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey."

No one has ever before said "degringolade," let alone used "degringolade" in a sentence with "diminuendo." No. Wait. "Degringolade" is a real word, not a sudden coinage based on "gringo."

Being a massive fan of his book "The Mosquito Coast," I trust Theroux with language.

I see that "degringolade" comes from the French French, "dégringoler," which means "to descend rapidly." It has nothing to do with the word "gringo." Theroux came up with that juxtaposition, quite nicely. A "degringolade" is a rapid descent. George Bernard Shaw used it in 1895 in The Saturday Review: "Miss Lottie Collins..will soon find her popularity degringolading from the summit on which the Tarara craze exalted it."

Anyway... I like Theroux, though I haven't read his travel books (but there is plenty of travel in the novel "The Mosquito Coast").

The book excerpt is too long to sample adequately, so I'll just give you one little thing that made me laugh. He's in a restaurant and addresses the owner's granddaughter:

“How old are you?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Twelve.”

Provoked by my question, the old woman’s daughter — the girl’s mother — approached me and sized me up. “How old are you, señor?” “Adivina.” Take a guess.

She studied me, she did not speak, she cocked her head, pursed her lips, and pressed a finger to her cheek, in actressy reflection, liking the suspense she was creating.

“Seventy-six,” she said. Tilting her head back, looking haughty, she was triumphant.

“But I’m a cabrón,” I said, thumping my chest.

They shrieked, because the word had a belittling meaning here, not “dude,” as I had meant, but “dickhead.”

I didn't know it was still predicted, but "A blue wave is predicted for the midterms. I’m not convinced" is...

... the title of an essay in WaPo by Paul Theroux, who wrote a book I like a lot — "The Mosquito Coast" — so I'll give it a read. I doubt if the author wrote the headline, but it is what caused me to click — only because I was just thinking that the term "blue wave" had been abandoned and the elections were now being discussed as some sort of dead heat to the finish line.

Ihave quite a lot of sympathy for certain Trump voters, and (wait, please, let me finish) I've been making a list of some concerns that Donald Trump the candidate (I beg you to stop interrupting me — this won't take long) raised when he was on the campaign trail and in the White House...

Ihave quite a lot of doubt about the copy editing at a news site that runs the first words of an essay together like that. They've got an eminent author, and they serve him that poorly! And here he is tripping off to a lovely start, conjuring up clamorous readers objecting and shouting him down.

Writing from Oaxaca, Mexico, Theroux is concerned about the poor labor conditions in Mexico: "the visible obscenity of American factories a few hundred yards over the border at, say, Mexicali or Ciudad Juarez or Reynosa, merely to allow these companies to pay workers $8.50 a day." What do Democrats propose to do about that?

And what will Democrats do about immigration? Theroux asks, even as he rejects "building the Murus Hadrianus Trumpus at the border.

Trump's hostility to immigration and his appeal to old-fashioned Americana is seen as nativist and sometimes racist.... Anyone who came of age in 1950s America has witnessed a doubling of the U.S. population and an enormous cultural shift. Its upside is diversity, of course; its downside is an erosion of historical memory, and culture shock.

Yes, it's a pity that young immigrants, and plenty of young people generally, have never heard of Elvis, Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Annette Funicello. It's of greater concern to me that the names Emmett Till and Rosa Parks are so seldom invoked; that there is so little awareness of America's tradition of dissent, or of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s hope to live in a nation where people "will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."...

To write off Trump's message, or to see his voters as racist and deplorable, is to miss the point.... There are many loud Trumpers, but there are shy Trumpers, too. So I distrust polls more than ever.... I discovered that many in my large and lovable and liberal-minded family, and maybe yours too, revealed themselves as shy Trumpers.

"On the one hand, he insists that the writer’s life is 'almost unapproachable, full of ambiguities.'"

"On the other, he defaults to the writer’s highest calling, his obligation 'to be vigilant and unsparing'. Spend time with a writer, he declares, and what do you get? 'Wool-gathering, silences, rants, evasions, the contents of a cracker barrel.' But then... in fewer than 500 words, he tells us all we need to know and it’s almost banal in its simplicity. His divided self derives from his parents. On his maternal side, he comes from upwardly mobile, highly successful Italian-American late-Victorian immigrants whose 'competitiveness', he declares, made the Dittami family 'insufferably pretentious'. On his paternal side, his 'dear old dad’s' people were 'country folk, a kindly, laconic, unpretentious and uneducated family' who called him 'Paulie'. As the smoke clears and the mirrors cease to dazzle, we encounter the 'Paulie' who loves his dad and finds his mother 'demanding, thin-skinned and impatient'. Her legacy to her son is 'a horror of weak and vain, nagging and castrating women'. When Paulie hears the 'snarl of the she-wolf', he heads for the hills, driven by a determination never to become 'the person my father became in his old age, reduced to dependency on an unhappy woman.':

From a review in The Guardian of a new collection of essays by Paul Theroux. Here's the book, "Figures in a Landscape: People and Places."

"Not much on Earth can beat the American road trip in travel for a sense of freedom -- no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and leaving at will...."

"The American road trip rekindled my interest in travel and, most of all, reminded me how lucky we are in our country's spaciousness and modernity.... So over the course of 2012-14, in four seasons, I drove tens of thousands of miles, meandering through the back roads of the deep South, listening to the blues on the radio, visiting churches and gun shows and family farms, and writing down people's stories -- of hardship and striving, raising families, struggling in adversity and remembering the past.... In my car, driving slowly, stopping often, the word that occurred to me was overlooked. Later, during the turmoil of last year's election, I began to think of them as the people no one listens to.... What made the experience a continuing pleasure was that, in my car, I never knew the finality of a flight, or the ordeal of being wrangled and ordered about at an airport, the stomach-turning gulp of liftoff or the jolt of a train, but only the hum of tires, of telephone poles or trees whipping past, the easy escape, the gradual release of the long road unrolling like a river through America. It is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on Earth."

From "The Romance of the American Road Trip/No other travel experience, especially today, can beat the sense of freedom it brings," by Paul Theroux — in The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall).

"Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor."

"The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ('to tinker'), with the English term DIY ('Do-it-yourself') being the closest equivalent...."

Instrumental bricolage in music includes the use of found objects as instruments... In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand... Bricolage is considered the jumbled effect produced by the close proximity of buildings from different periods and in different architectural styles... In literature, bricolage is affected by intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meanings by reference to other texts.... In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities....

AKA cultural appropriation.

In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used "bricolage" to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought...

In her book Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle discusses the concept of bricolage as it applies to problem solving in code projects and workspace productivity. She advocates the "bricoleur style" of programming as a valid and underexamined alternative to what she describes as the conventional structured "planner" approach...

The fashion industry uses bricolage-like styles by incorporating items typically utilized for other purposes. For example, candy wrappers are woven together to produce a purse. The movie Zoolander parodies this concept with "Derelicte", a line of clothing made from trash.

MacGyver is a television series in which the protagonist is the paragon of a bricoleur...

The A-Team, the 80s television series, uses bricolage as a means to create alternative escapes or weapons in every episode, for example, building from scrap a tank that fired cabbages.

I got to that Wikipedia article after looking up the word "bricoleur" in this 1982 NYT review of Paul Theroux's "Mosquito  Coast" (which I recently read and am rereading). From the review:

[The main character, Allie Fox] is, by his own account, a kind of industrial Darwinist, a comber of beaches and dumps: ''The things that get to this beach are indestructible remnants that survived the storms and tides and the bite of the sea. They've proved themselves - stood the test of weather and time. By putting them to use, we are making a settlement that can't be destroyed. Your average Crusoe castaway lives like a monkey. But I'm no fool. Take those toilet seats. That's natural selection.'' But if Father's theories are suspect, his practice is astonishingly effective. As the centerpiece of his creation at Jeronimo, this inspired bricoleur constructs his masterwork, a gigantic edifice of old pipes and boilerplate which, in effect, transforms fire into ice.

Question that occurred to me, reading the Wikipedia bricolage about bricolage: What is bricolage in politics? Is Trump a bricoleur?

Anthony Burgess invented slang for "A Clockwork Orange" and began to write a dictionary for it.

He never finished, and, worse, the thing was lost. But now it's found.

What survives are 6x4 slips of paper on which each entry is typed. There are 153, 700 and 33 slips for the letters A, B and Z respectively.

Anna Edwards, the archivist of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, said:

"We found the surviving fragments of the dictionary at the bottom of a large cardboard box, packed underneath some old bedsheets. I suppose the reason for not finding this earlier is that the box seemed to be full of household objects, not literary papers.”...

There are a few entries reproduced at the link (which goes to The Guardian), including:

Abdabs (the screaming) – Fit of nerves, attack of delirium tremens, or other uncontrollable emotional crisis. Perhaps imitative of spasm of the jaw, with short, sharp screams....

Abortion – Anything ugly, ill-shapen, or generally detestable: ‘You look a right bloody abortion, dressed like that’; ‘a nasty little abortion of a film’ (Australian in origin)....

This makes me think of a topic I'd been contemplating writing about: the problem of making a movie out of a book. I'm thinking about it today because I finally got the DVD of "The Mosquito Coast" that I ordered. While waiting for the movie, I read the book. Now, I'm trying to watch the movie without being dogged by thoughts about what's different from the book or not as good as the book, etc. etc. I was just reading a lot of articles about why it's so hard to make satisfying book-based movies (unless the book is rather bad (e.g., "The Godfather")).

With that in the background of my thoughts — and I'd just read about how Stephen King didn't like Stanley Kubrick's version of "The Shining" — writing this post made me wonder what Anthony Burgess thought of Stanley Kubrick's version of "Clockwork Orange." I found this quote:

"Science fiction gave people more false hope than two thousand years of Bibles... It was all lies!"

"The space program... It was a hollow, vaunting waste of taxpayers’ money. There is no future in space! I love the word— space! That’s what they were all discovering— empty space!... This is the future.... A little motor in a little boat, on a muddy river. When the motor busts, or we run out of gas, we paddle. No spacemen! No fuel, no rocket ships, no glass domes. Just work! Man of the future is going to be a cart horse. There’s nothing on the moon but ruts and pimples, and those of us who have inherited this senile exhausted earth will have nothing but wooden wheels, pushcarts, levers, and pulleys— the crudest high school physics, that they stopped teaching when everyone flunked it and started reading science fiction. No, it’s grow your own or die. No green pills, but plenty of roughage. Hard backbreaking work— simple, but not easy. Get it? No laser beams, no electricity, nothing but muscle power. What we’re doing now! We’re the people of the future, using the technology of the future. We cracked it!"

Paul Theroux, "The Mosquito Coast" (Kindle Locations 4972-4980).

A passage from a book I just finished that sprang to mind when I read this:

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has spent the last six years working on a giant aircraft capable of launching rockets to space. It's not quite ready to fly, though. Over the next few days, each of the six fuel tanks will be filled independently to make sure that the tanks are properly sealed and that the fueling mechanisms work. How big is it? On a football field, the wingtips would extend beyond the goalposts by more than 12 feet on each side. Video of the rollout here.

At least he's using his own money. What's the carbon footprint? 6 fuel tanks... not very Paris Accord-y. 

"This week the Harvard campus served as a reunion of sorts for several former Obama administration officials."

"Former vice president Joe Biden spoke to college graduates, and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates addressed the graduating class at Harvard Law school," and former secretary of state John F. Kerry spoke to the graduates at the Kennedy School of Government.

“And the truth is – no, this is not a normal time,” Kerry said. “It’s not normal to see a president of the United States decrying ‘so-called judges.’ It’s not normal for the leader of the country that invented the First Amendment to routinely degrade and even threaten journalists. And no, it’s not normal to see the head of the FBI fired summarily because he was investigating connections between Russia and the presidential campaign of the very man who fired him. And it’s not normal that when you close your eyes and listen to the news, too often the political back and forth in America sounds too much like it does in the kinds of countries that the State Department warns Americans not to travel to."

ADDED: This makes me think of the novel I've been reading, "The Mosquito Coast" (by Paul Theroux). The narrator describes his father, a genius who dropped out of Harvard:

Father [was] talking the whole way about... the awfulness of America— how it got turned into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks. And look at the schools. And look at the politicians. And there wasn’t a Harvard graduate who could change a flat tire or do ten pushups....

[Father] boasted that he had dropped out of Harvard in order to get a good education. He was prouder of his first job as a janitor than his Harvard scholarship....

“Strictly speaking,” Father said, “there is no such thing as invention. It’s not creation, I mean. It’s just magnifying what already exists. Making ends meet. They could teach it in school— Edison wanted to make invention a school subject, like civics or French. But the schools went for fingerpainting, when they could have been teaching kids to read. They encouraged back talk. School is play! Harvard is play!”

"Are we able to stay at home and explore the meaning of the things around us, at least until the world has gotten a little more 'normal' again? "

"Pierre Bayard, a professor and psychoanalyst in Paris... may provide us with some additional requisite know-how on how to not lose face and even be comfortable with staying at home. In How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel, he dissects the reports of the likes of Marco Polo, Jules Verne, Karl May, on minute details of geographies they had never visited, to tell the reader they were wrong. He exposes the alternative reality they unfolded, but he doesn’t blame them: 'Ill-equipped to defend itself against wild animals, inclement weather or illness, the human body is clearly not made for leaving its usual habitat and even less so for traveling to lands far removed from those where God intended us to live.' And: 'We know from Freud and the works of other psychiatrists who have studied various travelers’ syndromes that traveling a long way from home is not only liable to provoke psychiatric problems: it can also drive you mad.'"

From "Between Everywhere and Nowhere/A little review of travel literature," by Bernd Brunner, which I'm reading mostly because it has something about Paul Theroux — "one of the grand doyens of travel writing... His passion for the foreign appears to have been lost, if only partly so" — whose novel "The Mosquito Coast" I started reading after seeing it likened to a movie I loved ("Captain Fantastic").

But I got interested in Bayard, and added How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel to my Kindle. Love the title, and I'm fascinated by the critique of travel, since I love to read and feel prodded to travel, and reading is so much faster and simpler than traveling.*

I had the vague feeling that I'd blogged about that book before, but it was another book by Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, which I blogged about without reading.

______________________

* You know me, I'm not up for a challenge.

"In Paul Theroux’s new book, 'Deep South,' the superficial stereotypes pile up at once."

"In the first scene, it’s a 'hot Sunday morning' in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and there’s mention of snake-handling and talking in tongues, poverty, holy-roller churches, a black barbershop, gun shows, college football, the requisite Faulkner quote ('The past is not dead . . . ') and even a sassy black lady ('You lost, baby?'). So far, I haven’t left the first page."

Jack Hitt hits the rueful Theroux.

That's all very interesting, but I'm just going to say a couple things about that Faulkner quote, which, Hitt slightly misses, putting "not" where the dramatic and time-related word "never" belongs: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

This line is often paraphrased, as it was by then-Senator Barack Obama in his speech "A More Perfect Union."  In 2012, Faulkner Literary Rights LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sony Pictures Classics over a scene in the film Midnight in Paris, in which a time-traveling character says, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party." In 2013, the judge dismissed Faulkner Literary Rights LLC's claim, ruling that the use of the quote in the film was de minimis and constituted "fair use." 

Obama's paraphrase was: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

"Didn’t I find, like Paul Theroux, 'the quest for manliness essentially rightwing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic, and fueled largely by a fear of women'?"

"Yes, absolutely, and this belief did nothing to change the fact that I have wanted and sometimes tried in life to feel more manly. In fact, I was trying as I rendered judgment on the Wilderness Collective video, because one of the easiest ways to feel manly is to feel superior to other men’s efforts to feel manly."

From Ben Crair's TNR piece titled "Bro Fall/I lost my masculinity in Brooklyn, so I climbed a mountain to get it back." The Paul Theroux piece he quotes is "The Male Myth." I'm going to concentrate on the Theroux article, a NYT op-ed from 1983. What I love about it being 30 years old is that it's (presumably) underblogged. So let me begin the catching up on blogging "The Male Myth."

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life. (By contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness.)...

Even the expression ''Be a man!'' strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. Man means ''manly'' - how can one think ''about men'' without considering the terrible ambition of manliness?...

The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is effectively separated from women - it is the most savage tribal logic - and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance....

Femininity - being ladylike - implies needing a man as witness and seducer; but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so grotesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy - because it denies men the natural friendship of women....

The quote in the post title fits here. He goes on to speak of his personal struggle becoming a writer in a country where writing seems insufficiently manly, which supposedly is why male American writers invent protagonists who drinks heavily and hunts or wrestles and so forth.

There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted that to be a man is somehow - even now in feminist-influenced America - a privilege...

And this is also why men often object to feminism, but are afraid to explain why: Of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe - and with reason - that their lives are much worse.

Well?