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At Home, Nowhere: Growing Up Between Cultures
There are advantages to not particularly liking where you are.
Growing up in smalltown Florida, identifying with essentially mythic cultures instead of the boring stuff found locally, gives one a taste for places that are neither here nor there. There were exotic first-hand accounts available, courtesy of our family friends: the British war bride and her Pennsylvania-born ex-soldier husband; the self-important retired general who owned a Japanese sword acquired on the deck of the Missouri accompanying General McArthur to formalize the Japanese surrender; there were also assorted more local rural types, still more interesting than the small-minded movers and shakers who frustrated my father. Then there were the othernesses of literature, photographs in National Geographic Magazine, and the hints of being surrounded by actual cultural inheritances from Africa (this last intuition was, as I learned later via Robert Farris Thompson’s books, quite true).
But it means that I have a predilection for dwelling imaginatively in the zones between cultures, where things that don’t really belong together collide in romantic combinations.
Jan Morris’ “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” is a splendid read regarding this topic.
I was inspired, at age ten, by the illustrated space in my album for the stamp of Carpatho-Ukraine, a country that existed for one day (or slightly less than one day) and issued one postage stamp, a lovely dark-blue thing with Cyrillic characters and an engraved picture of architecture that was strange to my Anglicized eye. Much later I learned that Andy Warhol’s family had hailed from the region (a few miles away, in the part that stayed in Slovakia). “I come from nowhere,” his description of himself, is now on the website of Slovakian Ruthenia’s Andy Warhol Museum as a promotional slogan.
Carpatho-Ukraine is one of those territories characterized by Ruthenian log churches in the valleys and Hungarian stone castles on the hilltops. And that sort of multicultural country of the imagination has just been colonized in fiction by Jennifer Egan’s new novel “The Keep.” Though there are bravura passages enough in the book, the review in the New York Times tells the whole story. The novel uses as its setting a Central European castle being transformed into a hotel by Americans. The dichotomy between the dark depths of decaying aristocratic vistas (presented in full gothic-novel panoply) and the dark shallows of totally disconnected cellphone addicts (whom Egan also describes in their colorful native garb back home in America) is played for all it’s worth.
It’s where we ourselves are, and it helps me to realize that what I like about the Web is that you can be in two places at once while not being anyplace at all, as Firesign Theatre put it in the days of yore. It replicates the conditions of my childhood, except instead of waiting anxiously for a possible reply by mail from some distant corner of the globe, with luck you can find somebody’s jpegs of the place as it was last month. And their under-pixelled blurriness sometimes has the romantic tinge of an old, waterstained photograph.
There are advantages to not particularly liking where you are.
Growing up in smalltown Florida, identifying with essentially mythic cultures instead of the boring stuff found locally, gives one a taste for places that are neither here nor there. There were exotic first-hand accounts available, courtesy of our family friends: the British war bride and her Pennsylvania-born ex-soldier husband; the self-important retired general who owned a Japanese sword acquired on the deck of the Missouri accompanying General McArthur to formalize the Japanese surrender; there were also assorted more local rural types, still more interesting than the small-minded movers and shakers who frustrated my father. Then there were the othernesses of literature, photographs in National Geographic Magazine, and the hints of being surrounded by actual cultural inheritances from Africa (this last intuition was, as I learned later via Robert Farris Thompson’s books, quite true).
But it means that I have a predilection for dwelling imaginatively in the zones between cultures, where things that don’t really belong together collide in romantic combinations.
Jan Morris’ “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” is a splendid read regarding this topic.
I was inspired, at age ten, by the illustrated space in my album for the stamp of Carpatho-Ukraine, a country that existed for one day (or slightly less than one day) and issued one postage stamp, a lovely dark-blue thing with Cyrillic characters and an engraved picture of architecture that was strange to my Anglicized eye. Much later I learned that Andy Warhol’s family had hailed from the region (a few miles away, in the part that stayed in Slovakia). “I come from nowhere,” his description of himself, is now on the website of Slovakian Ruthenia’s Andy Warhol Museum as a promotional slogan.
Carpatho-Ukraine is one of those territories characterized by Ruthenian log churches in the valleys and Hungarian stone castles on the hilltops. And that sort of multicultural country of the imagination has just been colonized in fiction by Jennifer Egan’s new novel “The Keep.” Though there are bravura passages enough in the book, the review in the New York Times tells the whole story. The novel uses as its setting a Central European castle being transformed into a hotel by Americans. The dichotomy between the dark depths of decaying aristocratic vistas (presented in full gothic-novel panoply) and the dark shallows of totally disconnected cellphone addicts (whom Egan also describes in their colorful native garb back home in America) is played for all it’s worth.
It’s where we ourselves are, and it helps me to realize that what I like about the Web is that you can be in two places at once while not being anyplace at all, as Firesign Theatre put it in the days of yore. It replicates the conditions of my childhood, except instead of waiting anxiously for a possible reply by mail from some distant corner of the globe, with luck you can find somebody’s jpegs of the place as it was last month. And their under-pixelled blurriness sometimes has the romantic tinge of an old, waterstained photograph.
