currently reading... travelogue from China, Yiyun story, language essay

back from the austrian mountains, home for a bit, and onwards to the black forest and its lakes tomorrow. i am packing bags, booking a place to stay, and printing pages to read. since i discovered the "print 2 pages on 1 page" option, i rather print longer texts, and take them along as folded "booklets". one of the reads that accompanied me to the mountains was a blog-based travelogue with images:

blog entries from a jouney through China, by Will Buckingham (i arrived there through Jean Morris' blog entry vicarious travels)

so perfect, to read about travel while travelling, and even more so when the travelogue includes musings on writing: "I confess to being something of a geek when it comes to the technologies of writing. Without these technologies, we would not write at all; but I think there are also all kinds of connections between the forms in which we write, and the technologies that underlie these forms. Nobody sensible, after all, writes War and Peace by carving onto stone slabs. There’s a wonderful three-way connection between the aesthetics of the page, the technology of printing, and the words on the page, and this is something that came across strongly in the museum collection, so I spent a good while admiring manuscripts and tracing the evolution of the page down to the present." (link)
connected in theme of travelling and place, yet inversed in format and direction, i read a short story by Yiyun Li "The Science of Flight" (from The New Yorker summer issue): the story of an immigrant Chinese woman who lives in Iowa now, and returns to China every year to visit family, until the year she decides to go to England: "What’s there to see in England in November? Ted asked. Zichen did not answer, because anything she said would fall short of his expectations."

and there it is, the word that connects to travel so often: expectations. it made me think of the gap between anticipation and expectataino again, and all the things (and stories) coming from it - a theme that i recently discussed with Rose Hunter in an author talk. the context is different, but the question similar: "Und wenn ich wirklich reise?" / "And if I really travel?" (link)

it also made me think that reading is different on the road, that there often are more pauses between reading, and that there is more reading that happens in different places.

another text i had with me as print was a NY Times article on language: "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" - by Guy Deutscher. the article also picks up on the german gender system for nouns. "Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim."

the thing is, when you grow up in Germany, you don't really think about this until you start to learn another language. which now also connects to travel: there are so many details to every culture, and many of them, you don't think about much until you are in a different cultural surrounding, where everything happens in the same, but slightly different way, which also changes your own habits slightly.

(now i am running out of time, so here in brackets, the link to another book i had with me: reflections on running by Ben Tanzer: 99 Problems. in the book Tanzer runs and writes in different places: Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, ...)