Tag: Jan Morris

Writing Above

Which is a way of translating “epigraph,” one of the genres I’ve been exploring as I write my Sea of Intimacy. In the process, I’ve come up with some rules to give myself some productive constraints. The constraints, I’m feeling, are needed because they — epigraphs, that is — are a little too fun to… Continue reading Writing Above

Trieste as Cultural Nexus (rather than “nowhere”)

When Jan Morris opens her 2001 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere with the phrase, “I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye,” I feel bad for her. When she adds, rhetorically, it seems, “Who can?” I want to object, “Well, I can!” Probably the difference in our perceptions comes from how each of… Continue reading Trieste as Cultural Nexus (rather than “nowhere”)

Racializing Travel Narrative

Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century,… Continue reading Racializing Travel Narrative

Kaplan’s Adriatic

I’m about 60 pages into Robert D. Kaplan’s Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Era and am still uncertain about it. With such a big sounding title, in such a nice new cloth bound edition from Random House, it seems it should be more substantial than it is so far.… Continue reading Kaplan’s Adriatic

Glagolitic Reflections

The so-called “Glagolitic Path,” or, as the locals name it, the Aleja glagljaša, runs for a little more than four miles through the idyllic countryside of Istria’s Mirna Valley Basin between the villages of Roč and Hum. Nowhere near so well-traveled as the coastal towns just to the west, it is no less picturesque. Hilltop… Continue reading Glagolitic Reflections