Negatives

While musing about Jim Putnam’s post that expands on my own about the US South, I keep noticing how necessary it seems to be defensive when writing about this place –  a place that I don’t think should need any defense, at least not to myself. A place — my home — that is beautiful, perfumed, intoxicating, lush — in the most full-blown sense of the word, both literal and metaphorical. But then again, my conceptions of places with which I am not familiar (have not lived) are cartoonish, flat and thin in much the way that the South seems to be to those who don’t or haven’t lived here.

This reminds me of a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about early photography: 

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you will. [ Holmes italics]

The South is fixed in the mind of many non-Southerners as “a few negatives.”

This reminded me of my reaction to a blog that I am currently reading, written by two people (a couple) who are doing research in Lebanon:

Travels with Darwin is the blog of Cori Boyko. I’m in my second year of graduate school at UC Davis. I just got an MA from the Department of Anthropology and am working towards a PhD in Anthro and an MS from the Graduate Group in Ecology. I do research in as many places all over the world as I can manage, and along the way I’ve started to collect some interesting stories. This is where they end up.

During the summer of 2009, I’m traveling to Qatar, Lebanon, Turkey, Croatia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam and India with my husband Ryan Boyko in order to collect genetic samples from village dogs.

The husband recently posted (July 6) about what it was like in Lebanon. Now, my conception of Lebanon consists of  ”a few negatives.” Actually, my conception of Lebanon is more than a few negatives — I imagine it to be a very dangerous place for an American to be wandering about. So, imagine my consternation at this description:

This is a long overdue post about Lebanon, which is a beautiful country full of very welcoming people and great food. For starters, we saw basically the entire country. We went north along the coast to Tripoli, south along the coast to Tyre (as far south as foreigners can go — even here there are UN tanks guarding the roads) and along nearly the entire extent of the Bekaa Valley an into the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. At times we were mere meters from the Syrian border (our GPS was unsure of which side we were on) and of course at times we were in the Mediterranean :).

Given the kind of people/travelers Cori and I are, we most enjoyed the remote mountains at the Lebanese-Syrian border. The views were breathtaking and the people were very nice, offering us to enter their tents/homes, giving us coffee and giving us great fresh food (goat meat, bread and mixed goat/sheep yogurt is great when it’s served incredibly fresh).

The South, too, is a place “full of very welcoming people and great food.” Hmmm …

Another enjoyable post from that same blog (unrelated to the topic of misconceptions), is the post about driving in Lebanon:

… The furtherst lane on each side of the road is not only for slow traffic going the correct way, it’s also nearly equally for slow traffic going the wrong way. Because left turns take a lot of skill and luck, people will avoid them by driving on the wrong side of the road for awhile. Add to that the people walking in the street, the people stopping their cars at random locations to chat to the people walking on the street, the barracades sprinkled along the roads and the double and triple parking, and you start to get the picture. While you frequently have to travel relatively slowly, as soon as there’s an opening you’re expected to speed up to 130-140 kph (around 80-85 mph). …

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/