Response to Pico Iyer, Lola Akinmade Åkerström, & Alain de Botton

It's 1 o'clock on an Easter morning (does 1 a.m. count as part of Easter morning?), and I'm in the middle of grading, but I was looking through materials from the travel writing course I taught in the fall of 2020 for an essay I wanted to forward to a friend. And of course, I got sucked into other parts of the course materials. I can tell that even though we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were enjoying the class and each other's (virtual) company. (Unfortunately, the English Department doesn't seem to want to let me teach the course anymore. Departmental politics. *sigh*)

Anyway, I wanted to share one assignment from early in the semester and my response to it. I've had to fix some links in it, and one reading I can't legally share online:

Watch "Pico Iyer: A Portable Life" and read Lola Akinmade Åkerström's "When Home Morphs into Space" and Alain de Botton's "On Anticipation." Use the questions below to form a response to these three pieces. (Note: it isn't necessary to respond one by one to each question--in fact, I'd prefer that you not try to answer all of them. But consider them as you think about your response.) In your letters, include quotations from the passages you are responding to.

• As you are watching the Iyer video, write down some of the things that he says that connect with you, either through similarity, difference, or some other kind of relationship. What does he say about travel, home, place, and the self in motion that evokes a feeling of recognition in you?
  
  
• What is your definition of "home?" How does it compare with Akinmade Åkerström's definition of home as "the space where I’m allowed to exist without explanation"? What parts of her essay did you find compelling or did you resonate with?
  
  
• With what parts of de Botton’s chapter do you resonate? Looking back on your own travels (including, possibly, coming to Boston or NU from your hometown), write about your experiences of anticipation, reality, and memory, with de Botton as your “guide” (as he does with Huysmans). In other words, write about the experience, showing how it reflects the connections (or disconnects) with de Botton’s descriptions.
  
  
• What points of intersection (comparison, contrast, extension, …) do you see between de Botton, Akinmade Åkerström, and/or Iyer? Try to lay out some of these connections with an eye toward thinking about how they might influence your own views concerning the relationships among preparing for, experiencing, and reflecting on travel. Try to use specific examples from your own experiences to illustrate your responses.

Here was my response:

I think the first thing that struck me about Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s essay was the way she opened it up with her Swedish husband sending her photos of cuts of meat while she was at home, pregnant, craving Nigerian food. I was in the position of her husband when we were expecting our son--I was the one texting her pictures of Taiwanese food from Kam Man in Quincy to find out if I had found the right thing. One difference, perhaps, from Akinmade Åkerström’s experience was that I had spent almost two decades in Taiwan before we came to Boston, so I approached the experience of shopping in an Asian market with a combination of familiarity and nostalgia. I remember when we first found Kam Man several months after arriving, the familiar Chinese packaging lining the shelves, combined with the Mandopop playing in the background, took me out of my immediate surroundings and back to the Taiwanese supermarkets I used to frequent.

It’s probably hard, though, for someone who hasn’t lived abroad to identify with someone’s impressions about something as pedestrian as grocery shopping. When I was living in Taiwan, my parents would sometimes mention in letters “trips” that they had taken by going to slide presentations or watching Rick Steves programs: “We took a boat cruise on the Rhine this evening and didn’t even have to leave the house!” It was like des Esseintes with a vengeance, as though they were asking me, tauntingly, “What [is] the good of moving when a person can travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair” (De Botton 11)?

Part of the difficulty of sharing my experiences of Taiwan, then, seems to come from the mundanity of my life there as compared with the “distilled” nature of the travel experiences my parents got through Rick Steves and the slide shows. Pico Iyer says of his ordinary life in Japan, “Every day when I wake up, it seems as if the day lasts a thousand hours,” making that sound like a good thing. But sometimes standing in line in another country is not that much different from standing in line in your home country. De Botton suggests, though, that over time, the tedium might disappear from travelers’ memories, possibly leaving them with more interesting stories to tell as a result of everything they had forgotten (14-15).

But that “interest factor” also raises in my mind concerns about how faithfully I’m representing that life abroad. I find myself identifying with an often-repeated saying that those who visit China (or anywhere else, I'd say) for a week write a book about it; those who visit for a month write an article; and those who live for a year or more write nothing. The longer you're there, the more nuance you see, and the more tongue-tied you feel. How do you write about a society--any society--that is in constant change, without oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, or relying on clichés like, “X is a land of contrasts”? What authority do you (I) have to represent others?

It’s this hesitance to publish my impressions of Taiwan that makes travel writing both intriguing and intimidating. It comes not only from the worry about “getting it wrong” (it’s always going to be wrong to someone), but also from the feeling that what you say is permanent and has effects on people in ways that you might not imagine. One summer Sunday, a minister at my parents’ church announced to the congregation that I was visiting them from Thailand, and I found myself having to argue with an older woman who insisted to me that I was living in Thailand and not Taiwan because that’s what the pastor had said. Iyer declares, “The first rule of travel is, the minute you arrive somewhere, all your plans go out the window.” I’d add that the minute you write about somewhere, all your intentions go out the window when your reader gets hold of your text.

Works Cited

Akinmade Åkerström, Lola. "When Home Morphs into Space." Modern Adventure, November, 2018, modernadventure.com/magazine/november-2018/home-the-art-of-lagom. Accessed 23 August 2020.

De Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. Vintage, 2004.

Iyer, Pico. Interview by Don George. NG Live!: Pico Iyer: A Portable Life, n.d., youtu.be/I6GB1uAy3gE?feature=shared. Accessed 23 August 2020.

Thoughts on Taiwan Travelogue

I finished reading Lin King's translation of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taiwan Travelogue this morning. I enjoyed the novel a lot, including its postmodern framing, where the English translation I read is supposed to be a translation of Yáng's Mandarin translation of Aoyama Chizuko's original novel, a novel that went through several Japanese, English, and Mandarin editions. (If memory serves me correctly!) 

I also enjoyed getting a picture of Taiwan--and particularly Taichung--during the period of Japanese colonialism. The descriptions of the Taichū Train Station and its environs, the markets, the streets and countryside were fascinating to me. King's translation also cleverly creates the point of view of the Japanese travel writer/novelist by using Japanese names for most of the cities and sites in Taiwan (which she often calls "the Southern Country" or "the Island" in contrast to "the Mainland," which refers to Japan). For example, Taichung's Lü Chuan River (or Lyu-Chuan Canal) is called the "Midori River." 

Lü Chuan River (Midori River) during the Japanese Period, from Wikimedia Commons

Much of the book is focused on discussions of food, particularly Taiwanese cuisine (Aoyama-san describes herself as having an always-hungry "monster" in her belly as the result of unfortunate events during her childhood). While there were a lot of dishes, snacks, beverages, etc., that I was familiar with, there were also quite a few that I don't recall ever trying or even hearing of, particularly because their names are written in romanized Taiwanese (though the Mandarin names are often added in footnotes). Reading this book made me hunger for Taiwanese food, both familiar and strange. 

Perhaps my unfamiliarity with the food mentioned in the book and with some of the places they visited should be a warning to me. Without giving away the plot of the novel, the ending made me question my own relationship to Taiwan and Taiwanese people, and what my role should be (if any) in representing Taiwan (and Taiwan's rhetoric) to others. Maybe it's not my place to speak but rather to continue to learn. 

Speaking of which, what should be my fifth book for 2025?

P.S. This interview with Lin King gives more information about the novel. And here is a more complete review of the book (spoilers!).

P.P.S. Next book on my reading list: Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. 

P.P.P.S Here's another nice review of the book. I find myself hoping a movie version of this comes out one of these days...

Another new(ish) book in the former native speaker's collection

I had a chance to got to Brattle Book Shop this afternoon, and after searching through their outside book racks finally came across something that interested me enough to want to buy it. 

According to several sources, The Silent Traveller in London was published in 1938, but this copy says "First published 1939." This copy wasn't in great shape, with some tears on the dust jacket that I'll have to fix, but it was only $5. The plates inside the book look good--nothing missing. (Someone else has helpfully posted scans of the plates.)

I found an interesting article about the author, Chiang Yee (蔣彞), that was published a few years back. There's another good article about Chiang here on the Victoria and Albert Museum's website.

Mary Louise Pratt on the relations of movers to "stayers"

Came across this seven-year-old talk by Mary Louise Pratt on "The Rough Guide to Geopolitics," about travel as relationship of people who are in place (the "stayers") with people who are displaced (the travelers or movers).

She takes this idea from a variety of perspectives. Maybe I can use this video in my travel writing class if I get to teach it again.

Wenchang Jun Figurine (文昌君公仔)

In last semester's Travel Writing class, I asked students to write about a "souvenir" that they had acquired (or hoped to acquire) in their travels. I asked them to describe the item, to explain where they had acquired it, to discuss its meaning to them, and to consider how the souvenir might be metonymic (based on the article by Morgan and Pritchard that I cite below). I thought I'd share what I wrote in response to that assignment for anyone who might be interested. (It's not likely to be published anywhere else!) We wrote our assignments as letters to each other, which as I explained to them at the beginning of the semester has long been one of the main forms of travel writing.

---------------

Hi everyone,

I acquired this little figurine of the 文昌君 (Wenchang Jun), or “God of Literature and Culture," in a bookstore in Taichung back when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. This god, who is also called by other names like 文昌王 (Wenchang Wang) and 文昌帝君 (Wenchang Dijun), has historically been associated with learning and literacy; he was traditionally called upon by people who were preparing for the Civil Service examinations in Imperial China. Even today, students who are preparing for the university entrance exams or other important tests will go to Wenchang temples (Wenchang Ci, 文昌祠) to ask for the god’s blessing. 

Photos of my 文昌君 figurine (公仔) taken by myself (August 22, 2020).

Obviously, the figurine above is the "cute” version of the god. A more “serious” version can be found in temples like the Wenchang Temple in Xinzhuang, New Taipei City (see image below). 

Wenchang Dijun (文昌帝君), taken at the Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple (新莊文昌祠), Taiwan. (Photo taken by Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One place in Taiwan where the Wenchang Dijun can be found is in academies established to teach children (typically boys) and train scholars to pass the Civil Service examinations during the Qing Dynasty. Back in 2006, my wife and I visited the Huangxi (or Huangsi) Academy (磺溪書院) in Dadu, Central Taiwan, which, according to a sign in front of the school, had been established on the site of a Wenchang temple around 1887. (If you want to know more about the temple and academy, check out this post on Alexander Synaptic's blog.) 

Photo of the Huangsi Academy taken by myself (Dec. 29, 2006).

Although I do not worship Wenchang Dijun and never (consciously) asked for his blessing on my dissertation work, I couldn’t resist picking up the figurine when I saw it in the Nobel Bookstore. The name of the bookstore itself calls up several associations--besides sounding a little like Barnes and Noble, it also suggests a promise that customers can become successful scholars like Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲), a Taiwanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986. Even more than Barnes and Noble, Nobel, like many bookstores in Taiwan, devotes much of its space to stationery and test-preparation materials in addition to selling popular and scholarly books, gifts, and manga. 

This souvenir isn’t an expensive, hand-crafted art object. It cost me NT$85 (less than US$3) with my Nobel membership card. To me, though, it signifies something important about the place I was in at that time, both literally and figuratively. Sitting in the stationery section of that multi-storey bookstore, it reminds me of the important role examinations play in the lives of Taiwanese and the various methods they might use to do well on those exams (from attending exam prep classes at night to visiting a Wenchang temple to ask the god for help getting into their “first-choice” school). I imagine the meaning of the “100 分" on the paper Wenchang Jun is holding is clear to anyone in this context--you can imagine how having this on your desk as you study might encourage you in the middle of those late night study sessions. That was also a reason that I bought this--to motivate me as I worked on my dissertation, a long drawn-out process that didn’t seem to want to end. Seeing him sitting there, brush in one hand, the promise of a perfect score in the other, gave me a feeling that this was a marathon I would finish. 

The figurine also speaks to Morgan and Pritchard’s assertion that “souvenirs are rhetorical, socially incarnated signs, registering a complexity of acquisition and signalling complex social messages” (41). At one point, I had the figurine in my office, and it acted as a “cute” conversation piece that simultaneously indexed my own “authenticity” as someone who understood the meaning and significance of Wenchang Jun. I also probably hoped that it would remind people of my (self-perceived) status as a scholar through its association with the long tradition of Wenchang temples and academies in Chinese culture. 

Now the souvenir acts as a touchstone for memories of a previous place in my life--the waning years of my formal studenthood and the culture in which I was trying to immerse myself. 

Works Cited

"新莊文昌祠" (Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple). Wikipedia, zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E8%8E%8A%E6%96%87%E6%98%8C%E7%A5%A0. Accessed 22 August 2020.

Morgan, Nigel, and Annette Pritchard. "On Souvenirs and Metonymy: Narratives of Memory, Metaphor, and Materiality." Tourist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 29-53. doi:10.1177/1468797605062714.

New year's resolutions for the 2020-2021 academic year

Just noticed my resolutions from last year--that seems like it was a century ago. Not sure I achieved any of the goals I had set for last year, no matter how vaguely I phrased them. I can't blame it all on the coronavirus, though. As I have chronicled elsewhere on this blog, not having a Twitter account doesn't mean that I haven't spent time on Twitter. I just do it, I suppose, less efficiently. (But not having an account does probably decrease my time on Twitter overall because I'm not posting, responding to posts, etc.)

I achieved a couple of things that I didn't mention as goals in last year's resolutions, like developing a new course (Travel Writing), revamping my first-year writing course (which went well), co-writing a successful proposal for a "peer connections" exchange program for the mentoring of incoming international students from China (most of whom, as it turns out, will be participating from China), and figuring out how to put together my son's new bicycle with minimal use of colorful language. 

This year will be a challenging one personally and professionally. My son will be doing his kindergarten classes remotely, which means we'll have to keep an eye on him so he doesn't swipe away his teacher in favor of YouTube videos. I'll be teaching all my fall courses online, which is both a blessing and a challenge because I've never taught first-year writing online before (and I daresay most of the students have never taken an online writing class before, so none of us probably knows quite what to expect). The peer connections project will continue throughout the fall. I might be involved with a couple of other research projects as well. 

I hope to be able to continue posting summaries/discussions of scholarly articles related to communication practices in Taiwan. Those are interesting to me, personally. (I don't know if anyone else gets anything out of it--I might just be displaying my ignorance for all to see in those posts--but I'm learning a lot from reading the articles.) The motivation for doing this came from something I wrote last year when I was preparing to talk to incoming English majors about my career path in English, and I wrote in a brief self-introduction about Taiwan being a place where "communication practices grew out of historical experiences of migration, colonialism, and political marginalization." Being smart, analytical people, several of the students had written questions about this characterization of Taiwan, questions to which I could either give broad, unsatisfying answers or very particular and also unsatisfying answers. So this little summarizing project is an attempt to educate myself in case anyone approaches me with this question again. As I said in my summary of Todd Sandel's chapter on "communication modes" in Taiwan, it's actually incredibly difficult to describe communication practices in Taiwan (or probably anywhere) in any coherent but also inclusive way. (This is something we discussed way back when in my intercultural communication class at Tunghai when we were discussing the overwhelming "whiteness" of some authors' descriptions of "American" communication patterns.) Anyway, if I have time, I will try to keep reading and writing about these articles. If anyone knows of some good articles about Taiwan communication practices (somewhat broadly conceived), drop me a line in the comments!

Speaking of Taiwanese communication practices, I'm trying my hand (my mouth, actually) at learning Taiwanese Hokkien through a website called Glossika. I'm mainly using this site because the Taiwanese lessons are free--they do that for some languages out of their expressed interest in language preservation. I have no idea how "authentic" the language in the lessons is, but I'm not at a point yet that I want to commit to paying for lessons. So far one phrase I've been able to use is "you are lazy," which I say to myself a lot...

Some sources about Norwood, MA

I'm preparing for the fall semester--I'll be teaching two sections of First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students and one section of Travel and Place-Based Writing. At least two of these classes will be fully online (we'll see what happens with the remaining one), which means that the students taking these courses will probably be scattered around the world--though some will probably be in Boston.

For Travel Writing (and possibly for First-Year Writing, as well), I've been thinking about a project in which students would introduce their hometowns or the places where they currently live to each other. This was something that we did somewhat indirectly in last spring's Travel Writing. I found out some interesting things about Norwood when I was working on these projects along with the students. I did a Google Slide presentation about Ellis Pond, an artificial pond nearby. I also discovered a book about Norwood that collected newspaper columns written by Win Everett, a local journalist, during the 1930s. 

On my latest search, I found three four "new" (new to me) sources about Norwood that look pretty interesting:

• Fanning, P. (2010). Influenza and inequality: One town's tragic response to the Great Epidemic of 1918. University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk99j
  The "one town" is Norwood, MA. This seems like a timely book, given our current pandemic.  A past president of the Norwood Historical Society, she has also published a more general history of Norwood. Here's a profile of Fanning about the influenza book.
  
  
• Fanning, C. (2010). Mapping Norwood: An IrishAmerican memoir. University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk3d9
  The Fannings are brother and sister--Patricia Fanning and Charles Fanning--who grew up in Norwood. (I don't know if their other brother Geoffrey wrote any books about Norwood, but I see that he passed away in 2019. My belated condolences to the family.) Googling Charles Fanning, I found a speech he gave about growing up in Norwood. 
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). Fall of a meteorite in Norwood, Massachusetts. Science, 31(787), 143-144. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1634788
  This short article (or letter) describes "a meteoric stone [that] fell to earth on the farm of Mr. W. P. Nickerson, of Norwood, Mass." overnight Oct. 7-8, 1909. Now I'm going to have to find out where that farm was. I have some old maps of Norwood that I have found online, so I'll check there first. 
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). The Norwood "meteorite"' a fraud. How meteoritic evidence may be manufactured. Science, 31(794), 415-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636137
  I came across this article when trying to find out where W. P. Nickerson's farm might have been (no luck with that so far). It seems Very did some more research and discovered the whole affair to be a fraud and that Nickerson was in it. There's another article following this one entitled "The Norwood Meteorite (?)" that I haven't looked looked at yet. Oh well, I was going to look for the farm where the meteorite fell, but now I don't know that I have to.

I'll have to skim through the two books to learn more about Norwood and to think about what students might be able to find that's comparable.

Go Grandriders 不老騎士

I saw that ｢不老騎士：歐兜邁環台日記｣ Go Grandriders (2012) was on Kanopy and asked our school library to order it. I'm thinking of using it in my Travel Writing class in the fall as a look into another perspective on travel by looking at what motivates the elderly people in this documentary (averaging over 80 years old) to go on a motorcycle trip around Taiwan. The movie came out about a year after I left Taiwan, but evidently it was filmed in 2007, while I was still there. For some reason, though, I don't recall hearing about this trip while I was there (though I imagine it was in the news). And I only had a vague recollection of the film before I "discovered" it on Kanopy. Here's the trailer for the movie:

As you can see from the trailer, the film is somewhat sentimental. Reviews that I read of the movie ranged from Miriam Bale's snarky and dismissive hit piece to slightly more appreciative pieces, like Justin Chang's review that calls the movie "warmly ingratiating" while admitting that the movie is somewhat superficial and at times "unexciting."

But I wonder how the film plays to different audiences. It seems to have been well-received in Taiwan, as well as in Hong Kong and South Korea (Chinese Wikipedia). It touches on some aspects of Taiwanese modern history, particularly the Japanese colonial period when some of the riders had been police or on opposing sides of the war between Japan and China. It might be that a reaction like Bale's is due at least in part to not understanding the whole context of the film. Bale claims (she doesn't support the statement, so I can't call it an argument) that what she calls "mystery" in the film comes "mostly from omission in the sometimes inept storytelling." But my guess is that anyone familiar with Taiwan's history--the primary audience of the film--would not find much mysterious about it. When one of the riders, a former Nationalist Chinese soldier, says that another rider, a Taiwanese lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese army, used to be enemies but that "a smile between brothers can melt enmity"(兄弟一笑泯恩仇), this seems no mystery to me (the question then being whether it's the director's responsibility to spoonfeed Taiwanese history to an American viewer like Bale).

It might be, too, that the style of the movie is also more suitable for some East Asian audiences than for American audiences. That's certainly a possibility, given the fact that the film was a winner at the Asian American International Film Festival and was nominated at the 17th Busan International Film Festival and the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. However, it's also interesting to observe that the most positive review I saw published was by Frank Scheck, in which he concludes,

The filmmaker documents the proceedings in refreshingly matter-of fact-fashion, thankfully avoiding the temptation to overly sentimentalize or mine cheap humor and contrived suspense from the proceedings. It somehow seems doubtful that an American director would have shown such restraint.

I don't know much about Scheck besides the fact that he's described as an "American film critic," but he has a more understanding perspective on the film than Bale.

At any rate, I'll be interested to see how students in my Travel Writing online class respond to the movie. I'm putting together some questions for them to think about regarding the role of place vs. the role of the journey in the film. I'll have to think more about the questions, which will probably involve watching it again. Pass the Kleenex, please!

"A Lasting Memento: John Thomson’s Photographs Along the River Min"

Happened this morning upon a TV show called Asian Focus that's on Sunday mornings at 7:00 (why so early on a Sunday morning??). There was a segment on about an exhibit of photographs of Fuzhou, China, taken in 1870-71 by Scottish photographer John Thomson, with accompanying contemporary photographs by Luo Dan, a Chinese photographer inspired by Thomson's photographs. The exhibition is open until May 17th at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA:

As far as travel souvenirs go, few can beat John Thomson’s leather-bound photo album Foochow and the River Min. From 1870 to 1871, the Scottish-born photographer traveled 160 miles up the River Min to document the area in and around the city of Fuzhou (Foochow), an important center of international trade and one of the most picturesque provinces in China. Thomson sold his book by advance subscription to the foreign residents of Fuzhou — tea planters, merchants, missionaries and government officials — who wanted a way to share their experiences with friends and family back home.

Fewer than 10 of the original 46 copies of this album survived, and the Peabody Essex Museum is privileged to own two of them. A Lasting Memento: John Thomson’s Photographs Along the River Min presents this rare collection of photographs for the first time at PEM. The exhibition also features 10 works by contemporary Chinese photographer Luo Dan.

Luo Dan's photographs sound interesting because he evidently used the same complicated photographic process (apologies to my late father for my complete ignorance about the history of photography) to photograph members of the Lisu and Nu ethnicities in southwestern China. So his pictures look very old even though they're not. (You can see an example on this page.)

Guess I'll have to find some time to go up to Salem before May 17 to have a look!

[Update, 5/20/20: Well that never happened.]

Just read: Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country

Louise Erdrich, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors. Harper Perennial, 2014.

My first book of the year. I picked it up at Brookline Booksmith from a table of sale books (there might still be some copies there if you hurry). I'm a weepy sort of reader anyway, but I never thought I'd get emotional over a brief description of a tree that was felled by a storm.

I bought the book because I'm teaching an online course in travel writing this semester. I bought it too late to make it required reading, but I quoted a portion of it in a letter to the students, where Erdrich describes a motel room that she and her infant daughter Kiizhikok stop at after they get back from spending time with friends and family outdoors in Ojibwe country (in northern Minnesota and southern Ontario):

The loneliness of roadside motels steals over me at once. Walking into my room, number 33, even with Kiizhikok’s presence to cushion me, the sadness soaks up through my feet. True, I might have dreams here, these places always inspire uneasy nights and sometimes spectacular and even numinous dreams. But they test my optimism. My thoughts go dreary. The door shows signs of having been forced open. I can still see the crowbar marks where a lock was jimmied. And oh dear, it is only replaced with a push-in knob that can be undone with a library card, or any stiff bit of plastic, I think, as I don’t suppose that someone intent on breaking into room 33 would use a library card. Or if they did, I wonder, dragging in one duffle and the diaper bag, plus Kiizhikok football-style, would it be a good sign or a bad sign? Would it be better to confront an ill-motivated intruder who was well read, or one indifferent to literature? 

I reign my thoughts in, get my bearings. There are touches. Although the bed sags and the pickle-green coverlet is pilly and suspicious looking, the transparent sheets are tight and clean. A strangely evocative fall foliage scene is set above the bed--hand painted! Signed with a jerky black squiggle. The bathroom shower has a paper sanitary mat picturing a perky mermaid, breasts hidden by coils of green hair. The terrifying stain in the center of the carpet is almost covered with a woven rug. As always, on car trips where I will surely encounter questionable bedcovers, I’ve brought my own quilt. There is a bedside lamp with a sixty-watt bulb, and once Kiizhikok is asleep I can read. (78)

I used that to introduce students to a "great tradition" in travel writing: describing one's iffy living quarters. I like a lot of things about these paragraphs, but one is the simple adjective "terrifying" to describe a stain in the carpet. It evokes so much without saying too much.

Of course, there's a lot more to recommend this book than a description of a motel room and a fallen tree, but I'll leave that discovery to the reader.