The Paper Journal

Here's a photo of my paper journal - which I'm keeping simultaneously with a blog. But I have never been very faithful to paper journals - somehow they remind me of diaries I kept when I was ten - for a week or two. I am determined to do better. Isn't it pretty? It was given to me for my birthday last year by the wonderful secretary for the NCC English Dept., Peggy Geffinger. It's sparkly and textured and very Asian-looking. During the first week or so, when it was hard to get online, I appreciated the value of a paper-based journal: it's portable; you can write in it at any time; you can collect ephemera (tickets, receipts, business cards); it's as low-tech as it can get. You don't need electricity or a computer or a camera, just a pencil or pen. And of course, unless you choose to share it, it's private, quite the opposite of a blog. Some of the students are keeping journals in multiple formats, both paper- and electronically-based. The students have been contemplating the argument Fussell makes in his 1980 book Abroad about the replacement of travel with tourism, which he illustrates with examples from a golden age of British travel writing in the Interwar years. This week Ashley wrote,"According to Fussell, a tourist doesn’t brave hardship; instead he avoids it at high costs. All of this is a bold and rather logical argument when one is caught up in the reading of Abroad but further and independent contemplation can lead to some radically different conclusions. It seems to me that Fussell pines for days long past and his argument against tourism is not entirely useful. The real distinction between travel and tourism lies only in the mind of the traveler." Tim, writing about whether or not preferring "travel" to "tourism" is a kind of snobbery, found a quotation from Fussell he appreciated: “These people [like Hemingway, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence] made their money take them very far, less because they were equipped with capital than because they were equipped with intelligence, energy, and curiosity.” Hemingway is of course American and Joyce Irish, but they were among the expatriates who found Paris in the 1920s cheap as well as intellectually and artistically nourishing.