Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I’m staring this post during halftime of the World Cup final, which I’m watching in a Wetherspoon’s in Hull. That Wetherspoon’s has become a sign of home, a familiar place for a cheap pint and a filling meal, reminds me once again of one of the key lessons I’ve learned in my decade-or-so of wandering: the speed with which the human organism adapts to new circumstances and make the unfamiliar familiar. I’m particularly vulnerable to the creation of routines: when I was in Trieste, I think I cooked the same thing every day for lunch. On the other hand, I wasn’t the only one who, when talking about going back to hotel, talked about going “home”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t fly direct to Trieste. Instead, I took an early morning flight from Dublin (after a wee-hours bus ride from Belfast) to Venice where I stayed at a campground on the mainland and spent two days exploring on foot. I only made it through the big island, and skipped a lot of the sites that charged because everything was so expensive (even the public toilets cost 1.5 euro!). I did make an exception for the Ducal Palace, however. It was crowded, and a lot of construction blocked the views, but inside the churches and other buildings, Venice was amazing. I wasn’t just seeing these incredible works of art: I was seeing them at the angles and under the lighting for which they were made.

After two days, I took a train to Trieste. The first part of the journey was swift, but it slowed down a bit in the mountains, which turned out to be a good thing. As Trieste came into view, I thought that I could see why James Joyce had stayed there for so long. It was an intense week—academically of course as the summer school I was attending had 2-3 lectures every morning, and I was in the Finnegans Wake reading group in the afternoon—but also personally. The processing of that won’t happen here; it will happen, has been happening, in poetry and other words that come under the heading of creative, which means it could all be lies, which means privacy is preserved. I entertained the thought that there’s something about the city that plays on certain temperaments, but that’s making connections where there are none. Probably.

But I’ll stop being obscure and say just this: And Trieste, ah Trieste ate I my liver!

After a week in Trieste, I took a bus down to Pula, another city where Joyce taught EFL. I even got to drink coffee with him.

Coffee with James Joyce

His statue is located in front of the building where he taught English, and the cafe serves ridiculous cocktails with Joycean names.

Most of my first afternoon in Pula, however, was spent climbing around the hill in the center of town, looking at ruins. A Roman arena dominates, but there’s also the remains of a theatre. The museums were a bit of a disappointment, but as they cost less than the equivalent of 2 euro, I really couldn’t complain.

I spent the following day in the Brijuni Islands. I went on a boat tour that lasted for two hours and then spent the afternoon on a small island with rocky beaches. I took a lot of photographs (these, like the others from my trip, will eventually show up on my Flickr page; I’m still working on processing the images from Prague last month) and then hit the water. The most interesting fish were to be found hiding under the rocks on the parts of the shore that seemed too jagged for recreational swimming; I had them almost all to myself.

The next day, my last on the Continent, I spent wandering around the shoreline of Pula, not looking for anything in particular. My flight left the next morning; I bought a bottle of carob liquer in the airport duty-free shop that turned out to be even better tasting than I had hoped. Somewhere along the line, I also managed to get tanner than I ever have before.

But this was mostly an academic trip, I swear.

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Especially in light of how increasingly hostile the airport environment has become since 9/11, this is excellent news:

President Barack Obama outlined his plan for “long overdue” high-speed rail on Thursday that would rival air travel, create jobs and help curb the U.S. transportation system’s appetite for oil . . . Obama envisions a network of short and longer-haul corridors of up to 600 miles plied by trains traveling up to 150 miles per hour.

One of the reasons I loved living in Japan was the ease with which I could travel. All I had to do was wake up in the morning and buy a ticket at the station. I didn’t have to worry about arriving early or finding transportation out to the airport. The worst thing that happened was when I accidentally sat in a smoking car on the shinkansen on my way from Tokyo to Hiroshima.

Besides all that, train travel is simply more pleasant than air travel (unless you get stuck on an overnight hard seat during one of China‘s national holidays, but that’s another pint of beer entirely). Your body doesn’t have to contend with changing pressures, and you get a much closer view of the scenery. While I admit that there is something to be said for the bird’s eye perspective planes offer, one can get much the same effect from a mountain or skyscraper.

In reading Joe Sharkey’s April 13th column, Looking You Over, With a Shameless Gaze, I couldn’t help but think that the reaction of the woman who had been directed to go through a whole-body imaging machine was remarkably similar to the way many women respond after experiencing sexual assault (emphasis mine):

“I was stressed out and in a hurry,” she said, when a female screener directed her to one of the boothlike machines. Ms. Jost said she assumed it was another kind of machine, one of those so-called puffer devices that check for explosives traces.

“When I figured it out, I really felt violated and mad at myself,” she said. “I’d been trying to avoid these machines, and I literally walked into one without knowing it. I really did not connect the dots until later when I was sitting on the plane, and I said, oh my God, that was one of those strip search machines.”

Indeed, the first paragraph of that quote is reminiscent of institutional rape in which an individual with power, possibly a trusted figure, directs someone to engage in or tolerate acts that they may not understand until later (if at all). Now, obviously, I am not saying that the security guards in question were acting out of a desire to violate this woman (though especially if whole-body imaging should expand, it seems unlikely that the TSA would be able to screen out people who would find such things titillating, even if they tried). What I am saying is that such security systems feel like an assault. Being forced to display your nudity when you do not wish to, even if only one other person sees it, is an assault.

That said, the column in which this woman’s experience appears is highly problematic. Sharkey feels the need to note that “[l]ike Ms. Jost, many people who object to the invasive nature of the machines insist they are not puritanical”. Why is it that people, especially women, who do not want to be forced to reveal their bodies need to defend themselves against charges of being puritanical?

Even worse is that when it comes to the possibility of someone figuring out how to save images from these machines, especially images of celebrities, Sharkey turns the violation into a weak attempt at a joke. Ending his column on that note, undercuts the seriousness of violating a woman’s right to control her body and who sees it.

Seven people die on the roads of China‘s Henan Province every day. When I was teaching there, this led to a lot of jokes about checking the local news to see if the quota had been met before heading into the city. (It took forty minutes to get into rail-hub Zhengzhou from dirty little Dragon Lake.) I wrote Henan Highway Stretch, now up at foam:e 6, after returning from a trip to a hot spring resort about an hour away.

Two images stuck with me from the ride there: one was of mannequins with skin of a plush maroon material in the dusty window of a village store. The other was of a narrow bridge that had arches placed on either end to keep the larger and heavier trucks off. Rather than find alternative routes, however, any truck that could conceivably make it would inch through, even if it meant scraping off the inevitably blue paint or, as in one case, temporarily removing half the load of watermelons.

Henan Highway Stretch is part of my unpublished manuscript, Who Escapes the Yellow River, a partial exploration of present-day China which takes the central provinces, once the seat of power but now largely impoverished, as its starting point.

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