The Worst Vacation Imaginable
On the Titanic, John Jacob Astor IV said, "I asked for ice in my drink, but this is ridiculous!" after the collision with the iceberg. (OK, that's an urban legend, but it's still a good one-liner.)
I’m going on vacation soon (spring training for baseball—my fiancée and I are fanatics), so it’s the only damn thing I can think about, so this post is going to be fragmented. I started writing this about literary vacations I’d love to go on, but then I realized that most of the settings of my favorite stories/novels/poems aren’t exactly places one would want to visit, let alone inhabit. I don’t know what this says about me, but most of my favorite books feature settings that are damaged, destroyed or dying (Dresden/Detroit/damn I can’t think of another city starting with D) or inhospitable places—Antarctica, Mt. Everest, the bottom of the Atlantic. And that doesn’t even mention the often dreary interior landscapes one finds in folks like Yeats, Rilke, or Gregory Corso (especially when he got locked up at Bellevue).
So after thinking about it, there really aren’t that many literary landscapes I’d actually love to visit. Sure, there are exceptions, I mean, visiting Elizabeth Bishop’s haunts in Brazil would be fantastic, and if you’ve ever spent a decent amount of time in St. Paul, you’ve probably already been to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s teenage hangouts, which are a lot of fun. (And a literary bar tour in any number of cities would be fun, of course.)
There is certainly one tour I’d like to avoid. For whatever reason, I’m obsessed with ships, shipwrecks, boats, kayaks, ducks, and above all, water (hey, I’m from Minnesota, so that last one’s a freebie). Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the strange separation between this world and that one, all the great words that come with it (John Fowles’ Shipwreck is particularly good for this), or maybe I just really like fish.
Anyway, I love marine archaeology, and I’ve got a whole shelf of books about shipwrecks and maritime disasters, including—not surprisingly—a bunch dealing with the Titanic. Well, needless to say, I’m going to skip the “100th anniversary Titanic Memorial Cruise.” Yes, they are memorializing the sinking of the great ship with a cruise, which will re-create the ship’s full voyage, during the same time of year.
After I visited their website and ascertained that this was not, in fact, a pretty awful joke, I naturally had a bunch of questions. The website answered the basics. The cruise will be traveling on the M.S. Balmoral, which is run by the Fred.Olsen Cruise Lines (oddly, they have a period between their name). She’s a modern cruise ship, complete with six dining rooms, a pool, two Jacuzzis, a sauna, and probably a whole slew of noroviruses.
But the more obvious questions were still unanswered. For these, I assumed there’d at least be a “frequently asked questions” page, but alas, there was not.
For instance, the site didn’t address whether a full contingent of life boats would be on board, and it actually didn’t even mention life boats at all. (Then again, perhaps they’re only bringing two-thirds of the needed boats and taking historical realism to the extreme).
They also didn’t mention those pesky million-ton, glistening behemoths known as icebergs and whether ice warnings would be heeded. This seemed like a strange omission as the Balmoral is roughly the same size as the Titanic (it’s a bit smaller, actually), and it will be traveling in the North Atlantic from April 8th to the 20th—roughly the same dates the Titanic traveled in 1912. (The Titanic sunk on April 14th.)
And despite every cruise ship captain’s friend–global warming–the International Ice Patrol’s data indicates that icebergs are still around, albeit they are not as plentiful. According the IIP, in April of 2009 alone, there were 1752 icebergs in the vicinity of the Titanic’s Balmoral’s route.
Hopefully, all will turn out well for the Balmoral and her crew—but here’s what I want to know—what are your favorite literary haunts? Have you taken a literary vacation? If so, where? Or, do you have one in mind? What’s the worst literary setting one could visit? (And don’t say Dante’s hell, that actually sounds kind of interesting).
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems—it mentions vacations, so there’s that.
When the Vacation Is Over for Good,
Mark Strand
It will be strange
Knowing at last it couldn’t go on forever,
The certain voice telling us over and over
That nothing would change,
And remembering too,
Because by then it will all be done with, the way
Things were, and how we had wasted time as though
There was nothing to do,
When, in a flash
The weather turned, and the lofty air became
Unbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumb
And our cities like ash,
And knowing also,
What we never suspected, that is was something like summer
At its more august except that the nights were warmer
And the clouds seemed to glow,
And even then,
Because we will not have changed much, wondering what
Will become of things, and who will be left to do it
All over again,
And somehow trying,
But still unable, to know just what it was
That went so completely wrong, or why it is
We are dying.
That is a rather inauspicious vacation poem. Not much better being still a little sad, but here is one relevant to FL which makes even the bugs sound beautiful- Too many of my poetry books are packed up right now, but I remember a midwest poem by Cambell McGrath that involved chasing wild horses- that could be a fun vacation, and Wild Swans at Coole by Yeats isn’t so dreary, for that matter I’ve been to Bellevue, performed there once, and the landscape is rather pretty…and now I will stop talking.
“The Wild Swans at Coole” is actually a kind of a downer, though it’s lovely.
It reminds me of my favorite line from “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” which is probably my favorite poem of all time:
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
One literary vacation I’d recommend: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5741