We encounter space but we make place.
Back in my collection of verse, Europa (2006), I first began to form this idea, prompted by poet, Yves Bonnefoy, who, incidentally, was born in Tours on the Loire in 1923. When we travel, it is clear that unknown towns and ports offer opportunities for the relief from space, not only the undifferentiated space of the ocean but also the possibility of an encounter that will relieve the isolation of the visiting researcher. An isolation felt even in the space of a noisy crowd.
Max Jacob - Poet in Quimper, Brittany
Max Jacob makes this encounter. His drunken sea captain is the beginning of a story that will make a place out of the space of Quimper's crowds. Where is that coffee house? Why does the action move to there? A demand is set up in the literary tourist. I am drawn to those urban European places, coffee houses.
Intention and Expectation
But we embark
on fieldtrips and holidays with intention and expectation. Ajzen (1991) has theorised about this type of
planned behaviour. The tourism
specialist categorises these two aspects of visitors’ testimony as they plan their
time at the destination to help reveal how tourists will seek pleasure at the
holiday site. For the travel writer a
simplified process can be extracted from the two elements of visitors’ expectations
and intentions to write an article that offers advice in both areas. What to expect. What to do.
My intention during this fieldwork in Quimper is to find any traces of the poet, Max Jacob. Is there a street which still bears a trace of the name, Chestnut Quay, for example? Could that coffee house still exist? My expectations, though, are lower. I have been disappointed before in quests to find traces of earlier writers in tourist destinations. William Crossing, a travel writer who lived in South Brent, Devon in the nineteenth century is unknown to locals and no one knew where his former house was situated under the shadow of Dartmoor's looming mass during my field visit there. William Crossing is famous for documenting the little people in his book of 1890 Tales of the Dartmoor Pixies: Glimpses of Elfin Haunts and Antics. Very cleverly, he adds narrative to those empty spaces of the wild moorland turning them into places. Crossing's presence now is as ephemeral as the elusive pixies. The ferry crossing, long into the night, provides ample opportunity for reading.
References
Ajzen, I.
(1991) 'The theory of planned behavior' Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2) 179-211.
Crossing, W.
(1890) Tales of the Dartmoor Pixies: Glimpses
of Elfin Haunts and Antics. [online] Available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/tdp/index.htm
Your French Lesson today is on adjectives.
J'avais toujours son petit livre vert foncé.
I still had her
little, dark green book.
No way of telling
in French if it is his book or her book. The possessive adjective agrees with
the object, the book in this case, not the subject. Look, too, at those adjectives all stacked
around le livre, the book. Little,
before the noun, then green and dark after it, whereas in English the
adjectives come rushing in before the noun, making themselves seem more
important than the book itself.
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