RobOnGuam.com

All Good Things . . .

. . . must come to an end.

If you've been wondering why this space has been so quiet as of late, it's because I've been busy. You'll be pleased, I hope, to know that I am returning Stateside this summer to take up my new tenure-track position this fall as an assistant professor of English at the Augusta branch campus of the University of Maine. Talk about a paradigm shift. So the days of RobOnGuam.com are numbered, as are my actual days on Guam.

I’ve been interviewing for teaching jobs this spring. First interviews via phone have been on and off this spring, and three second interviews via videoconference came up at the last minute, all to be scheduled during the last two weeks of the term. Maine was my personal top choice, and I interviewed for two hours via polycom on Saturday, April 30 at an ungodly 6:00 am my time. For the search committee, it was a nice Friday afternoon. On Tuesday, May 3, the search committee chair called me and offered the position, which I happily accepted. Now the contract have arrived and been returned, so come July I will leave tropical Pacifica for not-so-tropical New England, in effect exchanging sashimi, mango salsa, and fresh papaya for lobster, cranberry relish, and fresh blueberries.

The University of Maine-Augusta (UMA) is one of the seven campuses of the University of Maine system. It's also the newest and most unconventional; originally the associate, two-year) degree-granting school of the system, like a community college, it is already well into its process of becoming a full four-year baccalaureate regional institution. The UMaine system’s and UMA’s strategic plans call for the associate’s degrees being shifted elsewhere within the system and more four-year degrees opened up at UMA, so the whole place is in flux. Nobody is quite sure what it will look like in ten year’s time, but I have some guesses: with its architecture program, its esteemed jazz studies program, and its strong community arts programming, I’m betting that UMA will position itself as the artsy, bohemian school of the system. The student body is largely non-traditional, mostly older and returning students. There’s also a healthy mix of traditional 18- to 22-year-olds, too, and there will be more marketing to them, as dorms are on the long-term wish list. UMA has also pioneered distance ed within the system and the state, so I will have lots of opportunity to design and teach online and interactive TV courses, which is very much the wave of the future in higher ed. In a nutshell, I’m moving into a “help us design a school” school, and it’s going to be great fun. UMA seems to be sort of a cross between a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland “hey let’s get a barn and put on a show” movie and higher education.

I expect that Maine will be wonderful. Augusta is the trim and tidy little capital of the state, with an emphasis on little: population 20,000. It’s about an hour north of Portland and three hours north of Boston. Augusta is also is the gateway to the midstate lakes region and, a little further, the great North Woods for which Maine is famous. I gave away all my winter clothes and sweaters before I left for Guam, and now I need to rebuy that stuff all over again. (For the record, my birthday is October 9.) Maine is politically a blue state, both liberal and conservative in equally good ways, and certainly green in all senses of the word; environmentally, it may be the “greenest” state in the Union, and literally, it’s 90% forested. It’s also a relatively poor state, rich in resources but not necessarily in capital. Hence, education is taken seriously and I’ll be teaching in a place where college degrees really can and do matter.

My new colleagues and department, too, are wonderful so far. The search committee consisted of three very smart and cool women, the Dean of my College looks New England crusty but she’s really a charmer, and to judge from the interview my new Provost may have worked as a stand-up comic before entering academic administration. These are going to be very enjoyable people to work with. (One of the fun, more casual interview questions was “Can you cook?” I have apparently joined a department that’s big on potlucking, thus making this a concern of considerable import.) The department also seems to have an artsy vibe. It hosts the annual Maine Poetry Festival, for instance, which features readings, signings, small presses, and chapbook makers, all peddling their wares and enjoying the deep pleasure of hearing all the right words in all the right places.

Here’s my tentative schedule of events for the summer: I expect to leave Guam around July 1 and fly to Detroit for a few weeks in Michigan. My household goods will be in transit for at least a month, and I will need to freeload, er, visit people while my pots and pans are crossing both the Pacific and the continental USA. I will base myself in Detroit, go up to Fenton/Flint to see my mom and siblings, go to Lansing to see people and work in the collections of the MSU Library on a research project, somehow get to Ann Arbor to see more people, and leave Michigan from Detroit some time in late July. I’d like to take the train to Maine, as it would be much easier to buy a car and arrange insurance there than in Michigan, though I may choose to fly. I will stay at first at my friend Jim’s summer cottage on a coastal island somewhere near Bath; Jim is the theater professor here on Guam, and he goes to Maine every summer as he has since childhood. Then I’ll go up to Augusta, find a place to live, buy the car, get insurance, arrange to have my stuff shipped to my new abode, sleep for a half hour, then start the fall term.

It is an interesting though tangential point that my non-Michigan siblings are also located in extreme parts of the country—Dave and his wife in Florida and Kathy and her family in Arizona. If Jeff and his family or Jennie and her family should decide to move to Washington State, we will have planted ourselves in all four corners of the country. And I think that they should, as I would like to visit there.

I will try to blog in here for my last few weeks on Guam and attempt to sum up my experiences in this very complicated place that's America but not quite, really. And, at the request of several readers, I will begin a new blog in Maine, maybe with the word "Kennebec" in the title, as that will be my new county. Stay posted!

Brokeback

Reflections on a Film

I write this on the eve of the Academy Awards, hoping that Brokeback Mountain will take the big prize for Best Picture. Everybody else in the cyberspace has weighed in on this film (more on that later), and I suppose it’s time for me to do so as well.

Believe it or not, BBM played on Guam in February, though briefly. I assumed that it wouldn’t and instead saw it in Honolulu when I was there in January. The audience was mostly straight couples, near as I could tell, and I wondered if this film really was the crossover hit that so many critics claimed. Oprah told people to go, and apparently it’s become a date film, with women looking for good romance and their boyfriends accommodating them, even if they are uncomfortable with the idea of seeing two men . . . well, you know, doing it. (Jesus Christ, guys, you wanna join the 20^th century, now that we’ve started the 21^st? Thanks.)

Surprisingly to me, I wasn’t nearly as moved by the film as I assumed that I would be, until the very end. That final scene with Ennis Del Mar holding Jack Twist’s shirt with his own shirt inside, saying, “Jack, I swear . . .” moved me so deeply that I had to walk around mindlessly after the film, really numb and emotionally shaken. In the theater, I got very teary, something that happens very rarely to me when I see films—though pretty often when I’m reading. I’ve since tried to figure out why BBM didn’t take me by the throat initially, and I think it’s because this story is so very familiar to me. That is to say, I know a fair number of closeted gay men who are married or otherwise trapped in circumstances that will never let them love the men whom they really want to. The territory is very familiar to me, I regret to say, though thankfully it’s not my personal experience. Thus I won’t say that I knew how the film would end, but I certainly had a good sense of the story’s potential outline, and that allowed me a little distance. On the other hand, other gay friends of mine have written to me, saying that they cried for days afterward—in some cases have broken down while commuting and had to pull off the road. One friend in particular was deeply affected by it in that he lived out West for a few years and nearly got married. If he had, he would be living the life of Ennis Del Mar. The film cut way too close to the bone.

In a way, the distance was a good thing, because it allowed me to look at the film rather than watch it, the way a critic might. And please don’t get the impression that I didn’t like the film. In fact, I loved it. Heath Ledger’s and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performances are wonderful as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, the two men in love with each other, but I recall really being impressed with Michelle Phillips and Anne Hathaway as their two suffering wives trapped in loveless marriages. Both have relatively small roles. Phillips carries on a long, slow suffering in a very brief set of scenes; the one where she cries alone in her kitchen, confronting to herself what she knows about her husband, will break your heart, as will the Thanksgiving dinner scene where she confronts what she saw years before—her husband passionately kissing his real love. Hathaway’s final scene, where she talks to Ennis after her husband Jack has died is just a plain stunner: without giving too much away, we’re not sure exactly what she knows or not, but the range of emotions she plays, all while talking to Ennis in a low, modulated, cold voice, is a knockout. Ledger is simply marvelous: Ennis is one of those men who seems to think that he only has so many words allotted to him in his life, and when he uses them up, he’ll die, and Ledger captures this. If anything, Ledger underplays his role as Ennis and somehow manages to inhabit him, all small gestures, laconic speech, and rigidly, tightly capped emotions. Gyllenhaal has a harder role, perhaps: Jack Twist is the dreamer, the one who thinks that a life with another man in 1960s and ’70s Wyoming is a real possibility. One of his last scenes, where, so angry at his occasional shot at happiness over the years with Ennis, he says at the end of a long jag, “I wish I knew how to quit you,” encapsulates all the mixture of deep regret, rage, and love that he has for this man. It too will break your heart.

And that’s the point: this movie will break your heart. I mean to say seriously that no film that I can think of is as full of deep sorrow as this one, but it’s not the film that made me realize this. It’s the short story that Annie Proulx wrote that it’s based on, also titled “Brokeback Mountain,” first published in The New Yorker in 1997, later found in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories  (1999), and set where she lives and writes. I checked it out of the library to look at the story and read it aloud to myself to get a sense of the flavor. Proulx is brilliant at capturing the taciturn, terse speech of Wyomingites in her dialogue, and you really need to read her aloud to capture what she’s doing. I could not get through the story without weeping, and I mean weeping. It is that moving.

Now, of course, I want to return to the film and see it again, as many seem to be doing. I’ve done some web surfing and discovered blog pages so devoted to this film that it’s kind of unbelievable. Some of clearly fan pages, which is fine, but one has an open forum where bloggers can dissect the film, scene by scene. And they do. The scene where Jack goes to collect Jack’s ashes at his parent’s house, for example, is discussed for 34 webpages—and that’s just a five-minute scene. Clearly, this film is speaking to something out there: it seems to be the story that a lot of people need told because they’ve already lived it. But it’s also just an enormously felt, really romantic movie. And for all the sorrow, this is a sweeping romantic movie. The romance is rough, masculine, utterly unvarnished, incomprehensible to the lovers, and often inarticulate. But it’s so damn real. Please go see it.

Chamorro Village

The Everything Island Place

The weekly Wednesday night market at Chamorro Village is the place to be on island. There you can see Pacific native dancing, buy a sarong, get the loudest aloha shirt imaginable, eat Chamorro carry-out, and jostle up against military personnel, Japanese tourists, and elderly Guamanians dancing to the oldies (read: ’70s soft rock) in the Village pavilion. One-stop shopping indeed!

Chamorro Village was conceived in the late 80s, I believe, as the place to showcase traditional island culture, though it’s obvious that’s not quite how it developed. You can get traditional stuff there—Chamorro metalsmithing, knives and tools and such, for example—and there a couple retail places that sell Indonesian wood furniture. But I don’t think that chocolate is a particularly Pacific product, so I don’t quite understand the presence of the Village chocolatier, and a number of the tropical gift shops sells tacky Guam keychains and coffee mugs festooned with dolphins and hibiscus and such. In its present conception, Chamorro Village is a combination “festival marketplace” and flea market, which isn’t a bad thing; it’s just not quite what I think its originators intended.

The physical plant itself is great. There are hibiscus and bougainvillea bushes interspersed with palm trees galore, with little walkways winding around lots of Spanish-style huts with terra-cotta tile roofs. The architecture is so nice that one wonders why it isn’t replicated elsewhere on island, where most buildings look kind of, well, like concrete pillboxes. The Village backs up onto the Paseo, the island’s little baseball stadium that has a winding runwalk track encircling it, always full of nice Filipina ladies in their Reeboks out for their evening aerobic strolls.

Wandering around the stores and stalls is great fun. Which of the outdoor vendors will have the tackiest aloha shirt this week? The competition is fierce and last Wednesday the shirt with antique jalopy with surfboards in the back seat in electric blue print won by a country mile. What new silly souvenir will the impulse gift store have this week? Why, big seashells inscribed with "Guam"! On the assumption that you won’t mistake them for the seashells you collect from Nebraska, perhaps? . . . what odd concoction will be at Mt. Lam Lam, the ice cream store? Lately it’s halo halo (“hol-lo hol-lo,” not “hay-lo hay-lo”), a Filipino dessert that involves fruit syrup, condensed milk, and shaved ice, often in sort of peculiar colors. It’s very good when it’s made well, and very bad when it’s not. And finally there is lots and lots of Asian tat: Powerpuff Girl ripoffs that have faintly Asian features (Buttercup, Bento, and Bamboo, perhaps), cheap electronic games, flip flops and slippers galore, jewelry, and everything you can conceviably make out of shells, with the possible exception of kitchen appliances.

There are a set of regulars that I see every week that I go, and I’ve gone fairly regularly since the summer: Viki, selling her watercolors; Tim, the lawyer on island that I know from the pool, who has gone to the market faithfully every Wednesday for the past thirteen years; Carlos, who owns the Teak Gallery that sells teak furniture; Mark, owner of Treasure Hut, a gift store that also stocks wonderful Indonesian stuff (but isn’t in Chamorro Village, so don’t go looking for it—he just frequents the market); a number of my students, often with their kids and/or spouses; sometimes my Senators; and everybody else on island. Chamorro Village is designed for you to see and be seen.

The center pavilion is always filled with dancing Pacific Islanders of the 50 years-plus variety. Social dancing is very big on the islands, to its great credit—the mainland could take a good cue from us—and there’s usually a small live band playing covers of soft rock hits circa 1978, all behind the sweet Chamorro and Filipino couples gently swaying their geriatric hips to the beat.

Then, finally are the food vendors, which are everywhere. They hawk what you’d expect: barbeque and lots of it. Five bucks will get you a skewer of barbequed beef, two scoops of rice, the ubiquitous Guam side, a little finadenne (the local hot pepper soy sauce), a whole pile of pancit, and some kind of salad, often marinated cucumbers. Even better is marinated cucumbers with pickled papaya, which is delicious. (Incidentally, two scoops of rice come with everything. Even McDonald’s breakfast meal comes with two scoops of rice unless you specify that you want hash browns. If you move out here and are not a rice eater, you will become one.) Many people I know come every Wednesday night to have dinner, and why not? It’s cheap, good, and filling.

There’s a small stage at the Village where the Natibu Dancers perform for the crowds.  Natibu is the local troupe that has preserved (or, more likely, reconstructed) Chamorro dance—the Mariana Islands equivalent of the Hawai‘ian hula. The troupe is mostly very young people, high school on down, and they are often very good. I don’t know how authentic the dances are, and the costuming is sort of Hafa Adai Island meets Off-Broadway Road Show, but the Japanese tourists love it; you can tell because their video cameras start whirring away whenever the dancers start up. And heck, the enthusiasm makes up for a lot.

Incidentally, dancing for young people is also extremely big on island: not just traditional stuff, but jazz and hip-hop, ballroom dancing, you name it. I don’t know if there is something in the water in metro Manila that makes folks just move in rhythm, but young Filipinos are just very good and often great dancers. Can anybody shed light on this?

Hiking Hawai'i

On Sunday, the conference was over, and I met with my friend Flynn to go hiking. I had met Flynn on Guam a few months previous to my trip, as he works for the federal government in the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, and travels throughout the big blue Pacific on business. He and his wife and two sons lived for six years on American Samoa, and now live in Pearl City just north of Pearl Harbor. Flynn knows O‘ahu and its hiking trails well. There are a lot of them on this very green and lush island.

We drove to a trailhead north of Pearl City and through Pacific Palisades, a suburb that looked exactly like the one in the old show The Brady Bunch, except that the suburbanites had mango trees in their front yards. (The name of the city should clue you in that it’s very suburban, as would, for example, Pineapple Vista Heights or Coconut Grove Estates.) I don’t know why I didn’t expect Honolulu to have suburban-looking suburbs—I assumed that everybody lived in a little plantation-style bungalow climbing the hills surrounding the city, apparently—but this was obviously not the case. Prices were maybe lower than those in central Honolulu but not by much; Flynn mentioned what his home in Pearl City was appraised for, pointing out that it’s doubled in value in only two years, and my eyeteeth nearly dropped out.

That said, the trailhead was at the end of the suburb, and we had been climbing steadily throughout the suburb. By the time we got the top of the city, as it were, all of Pearl Harbor was spread out to our south, and more suburbs spreading out to the mountains in the north. It didn’t look a lot like paradise. Actually, it looked like Phoenix.

I was struck at how much the trail initially reminded me of a trail in Michigan. The trees were of course very different, but they arched over the trail like a hardwood forest would back in the Midwest and the climate was mild as a May morning. The ironwood trees in particular look like pine trees, though of course they’re tropical; they have kind of needlish-looking leaves, and their wood is extremely hard and durable, which is how they got their name. They are all over Guam.

There were a few other hikers on the trail. First was a nice Korean couple. Koreans are the world champions of hiking, and even if a Korean were to go up a small hill on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas, he would set out with the gear that one would normally take to ascend the Matterhorn. Certainly they are the most stylish of hikers; there are hiking equipment stores in Seoul in the way that there are Starbucks in Seattle. Then there was a Filipino couple, I think, with a great gaggle of kids who were surprisingly well behaved and polite. “Did you make it to the bottom?” Flynn asked, and they had.

We were hiking to the bottom of the river valley several hundred feet down in a forest of really lush greenness. It started out pretty easy and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The slope down was a serious slope. I mean serious. I’m guessing a 75 degree incline, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is when you’re hiking it. It made going down very difficult at times, as there was nothing to keep you from slipping unless you grabbed onto a tree branch and hope that it didn’t break and send you slipping down down down until a tree broke your fall, or so you’d hope. Fortunately, many of the tree branches ran sort of perpendicular to the actual trunk—that is to say, they grew naturally across the steep slope rather than up and down it to hold the soil and formed “steps” so that you could carefully descend the staircase of gnarled tree roots. It wasn’t easy, nor was the little muddy stretch that you had to go through and get your shoes sopped and really dirty, nor the stretch that was so precariously steep that previous hikers have thoughtfully provided a rope tied to a sturdy tree with which you can work your way down like a mountain climber. I did pretty it clumsily but well, feeling totally Vin Deisel as I did so, and it was fun. I’m amazed at what a wuss I’ve become, living such an urban life.

For the most part the trail just kept going down down down, and then it stopped. And then you see the little stream that you’ve been hearing in the distance, and all of a sudden you’re on it: you’re standing in a little tiny tropical valley with two waterfalls and wading pools, all plashing about and hung over with ferny things and deep shadows from the late afternoon sun. It was just glorious. By this time the sun had set and it was chilly so we opted not to go wading in the little pool, but just seeing this little slice of hidden paradise was enough for me.

Going back up was even more strenuous but oddly easier. Because you were climbing a hill, you had better far traction than going down it, something I hadn’t really thought about the next day when my very sore ankles made me think about it. It took a longer time to go back up, and I was surprised to discover that the hike down was maybe a mile or so. So our two-mile hike took about two hours—not an impressive pace.

Following our hike, Flynn and I drank beer on the shores of Pearl Harbor in a small public park, the only public land on the harbor. All of Pearl Harbor is owned by the military, and you get the sense that if you are to so much as dip a toe into it, a Navy gunboat will rush up to collect you and deposit you in the nearest jail. Following that, we rewarded ourselves with a Vietnamese dinner. A fine, fine day in metro Honolulu.

Conference, Part 2

What made the conference work was of the course the networking, which is the primary reason for a conference, presentations notwithstanding. I met people who do what I do—teach mostly, research some, and carry out all the professional duties that academics carry out. It was fun to compare notes and institutions, and I must admit that coming from the University of Guam gave me a certain cachet—that and the fact that I didn’t have to go out and buy myself an aloha shirt to attend the conference in.

Incidentally, most male academics started out the conference in the usual long-sleeved, open collared shirt and often a jacket, as if they were unaware that they were on Waikiki. One would’ve thought that the large ocean-like object due south fifty paces would’ve clued them in. But by Saturday morning of the conference, aloha shirts, shorts, and Tevas were the order of the day. The women for the part dressed for the climate, and it is one of the pleasures of the tropics that women can actually dress more sensibly than men here. 

The most successful sessions at the conference were the panels, in which a session was organized around a topic rather than a disparate set of papers that didn’t tie together. (See previous entry.) I attended two terrific sessions. One was on integrating library instruction into composition courses and run by two women from the University of South Dakota who have, to a greater extent than anybody else I’ve met, Figured It Out. The second was on multiculturalism in the classroom, which was a really fun workshop in which we all essentially compared notes and strategies, again run by two very cool women, this time from Central Connecticut State. I again had a lot of unintentional cachet, teaching at a school that 80% Pacific Islanders and where multiculturalism is pretty much a given. But the interesting thing that came up is how multicult plays out elsewhere: one woman from western Massachusetts reported that economic diversity was the issue in her school, where most of the student body is seriously working class, and another reported on how the issue isn’t really even framed and how she, as a woman scholar, is sort of ignored on the issue in the United Arab Emirates, where she teaches. It was just plain fascinating, and the participants in the group were among the most interesting I’ve met—people I would love to have as colleagues.

I’d never attended a poster session before, and I really like the whole concept. In a poster session, an individual sets up her presentation in a visual form on a tri-fold poster (hence the name) and meets with wandering scholars individually, who mill about the tables in the big ballroom. It’s a lot like elementary school science fair, though the topics are considerably more esoteric. Poster sessions are fun because you talk to folks up close and personal and you have their undivided attention, unlike in a present-your-paper session, where other people can ask off-the-mark and occasionally stupid questions that don’t get at the scholarship at all.

A lot of the presentations looked awfully boring—interesting as scholars and their topics may be, visuals matter in a poster session, a point lost on many of the presenters—but then I met the woman dealing with female cross-dressing in early modern England, a sub-sub-subfield I know nothing about, being neither a woman nor a cross-dresser. (Early modern England I know a few things about.) Even more fun was all the stuff from Jacobean material print culture featuring, you guessed it, cross-dressing women: women pirates, actors (-resses?), soldiers. I’ll be darned. To sum it up fast, generally women cross-dressed in order to gain access to power the culture only afforded men. This didn’t come as a great surprise to me, but I simply had no context for this, or even a context to think about this. I’d better read Marjorie Garber’s study Vested Interests, and if you want to talk to me about this, you better too!

Conference

The conference that I was in Honolulu for, the Hawai'i International Conference on Arts and Humanties, was held at the Ilokai Renaissance Hotel, one of the big resort hotels at the western end of Waikiki. It was rather what you might expect: lots of potted plants and framed art of tropical beaches in the public areas, stores selling aloha shirts and muumuus galore, a bridal store complete with wedding gowns and tuxes that you could rent. It would seem to me that if you traveled all the way to Hawai‘i to get married, you wouldn’t overlook the minor detail of what you might actually wear for the occasion, but I suppose it could happen.

Much of the conference was kind of surreal, sometimes in a very good way. The big ballroom in which poster sessions and meals were held was filled at breakfast and lunch with pointy-headed academics, myself included, all sitting at tables and wolfing down eggs, pastries, pastas, chicken, salads, fruit, desserts galore, the usual kind of hotel buffet food. The wait staff of the room, efficient nearly to the point of annoying, ran their feet off fetching coffee and tea for everyone.

The conveners wisely decided not to assign places at the tables—not that they really could have—so one ended sitting up with whomever. This was a wise tactical move, as it was a great way to meet people: Helene from Sweden; David, the dancer from L.A.; the urban planner from Ottawa whose name I can’t remember; Alison, the scholar of South African literature at Queen’s in Canada; and many others. At the first lunch we were serenaded by the Georgia Tech University Men’s Glee Club, whose members attended the conference to perform in a workshop demo with their director. Hearing an arrangement of “Proud Mary” sung a cappella while eating tropical fruits and chatting with a West Coast director about theater design was an experience I don’t expect to repeat soon.

The sessions themselves were a mixed lot. The conveners probably intended to make the conference a real interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, but organizing sessions randomly may not have been the best strategy. The four papers in my session were: mine, on contemporary Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto; a paper on the photographic children’s books of Pippi Longstocking fame Astrid Lindgren; a paper on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; and a paper on dramatic conventions in 17^th-century Spanish drama of the Golden Age. Discussion was somewhat fleeting.

All the sessions were like that, which made it a bit difficult to find what you were looking for, and even more difficult to generate any kind of discussion. I mean, we’re all generally well read, but nobody’s read everything, and academics read within their fields. A music session might have a paper on vocal technique in a Bach cantata followed by a paper on the use of instruments in Australian aboriginal ceremonial music. Well, OK . . . on the other hand, you found out about things you never would’ve known before.

Of course, many people came to the conference, went to their session, and then disappeared into the pleasures of Waikiki for the rest of the time. One can hardly blame them, as most participants came from the wintry wilds of North America and Hawai‘i must have felt balmy and wonderful right after Christmas. It seems to me that if you want people to attend the entire conference, you shouldn’t schedule it in January on a tropical island. More to come.

Paradise

First Impressions of Hawai'i

Spend a day in Honolulu and you’ll understand why everybody calls Hawai‘i a paradise.

The weather is as perfect as it gets: in the 70s all the time, year ’round, and trade winds blowing all the time, year ’round as well, to keep the humidity down. It’s lush and green; it doesn’t get hit by typhoons as regularly as Guam does, so palm trees grow taller and flowering things more profusely. (Greenery on Guam, as rapidly growing and lush as it is, is kind of stunted compared to that on Hawai‘i.) Like on Guam, there are no seasons. Everything is always in bloom.

The setting is nothing short of spectacular. Honolulu is ringed by mountains that are volcanic, of course, and weathered away by the tropical rain to a pleasant, slouchy gentleness. They are still nonetheless a real presence, high and steep enough to make themselves known, and covered in greenery and little houses climbing up their slopes. Often the tops of the mountains directly north of the city, close enough that you could actually hike to them, are shrouded in clouds. Rain is light, misty, and frequent in Honolulu. Because it’s so often accompanied by sunshine, rainbows are constant. The mascot of the University of Hawai‘i sports teams is the Rainbow Warriors. It fits. 

The beaches are equally spectacular. Waikiki is so (over)built that it’s a bit hard to imagine it not ringed in by one high-rise hotel trumpeting its importance after another, but imagine living on that near-perfect, broad swath of white sand overlooking the collapsed volcano that is Diamond Head, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, in a little Victorian cottage by the ocean. Actually, Waikiki was formerly a swampy set of taro fields that got drained, but you wouldn’t know it looking at it today. If you could design the perfect beach, it would look a great deal like Waikiki, though maybe without the high-rise hotels.

The downtown and Waikiki areas of Honolulu are the usual maze and street canyons of nondescript high-rises that announce that you are in a Modern and Dynamic City, but the domestic architecture is low-slung and in the Hawai‘ian vernacular “plantation” style: built in wood, with low sloping roofs, overhanging eaves, lots of windows to catch the cross breezes, and set up off the ground so that air circulates all around and even under the buildings. Houses are airy, small, and charming, on little postage-stamp lots. You just want to move in.

Honolulans are an enormous ethnic mix. There are native Hawai‘ians, of course, as well as Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and other Pacific Islanders; haoles and other Americans because of the large military presence; and a fair number of Hispanics. The state has no ethnic majority, which is highly unusual, and relatively harmonious relations among everybody, which is also highly unusual for polarized America.

Alas, paradise has its price. Because it’s remote, even more so than Guam (Hawai‘i is the most isolated place on earth that is permanently inhabited), prices are high, about 20% over what anything costs in the States. This is roughly equivalent toGuam prices, until you come to real estate. The median house price in Honolulu is a whopping $600,000. And climbing. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) very rich people constantly moving there and jacking up prices to an astonishing degree because they can, and will, pay anything for the privilege of island life; and 2) the fact that Honolulu is hemmed in by mountains so that there’s just no more land to build on, and even if there were, there are still severe limits to the amount of available land on what is, after all, an island. The downside is that people in lower-paying jobs, such as the service industries that support the mammoth tourism trade, who need to live there, frankly, can’t. (You can’t commute from somewhere else, or at least not somewhere else very far. O‘ahu is an island.) Actually, all sorts of people can’t live there. Property taxes have gone through the roof, fully doubling in the past two years. Rents are out of control. Older homeowners are being forced out of the place that they’ve lived in and loved for decades. Native Hawai‘ians are being forced literally to leave their own land. An article in the Honolulu Advertiser grimly suggested that the median price of a house could climb to near $700,000 by year’s end. Nice place to visit, really nice place to visit, but . . . I couldn’t possibly afford to live there. And I’m not alone.

This is too bad, because Honolulu is seriously seductive. The Pacific island lifestyle is seductive on general principle, but Hawai‘i might have it down the best. What a beautiful place. People I know on Guam like Guam a lot, are fond of the Philippines, enjoy Japan and Korea, but they invariably love Hawai‘i. I get it now.

A Note on the Funky Little Punctuation Mark You Keep Seeing

It does have a name, but I don’t know what it is. In Hawai‘ian, the mark ‘ indicates a glottal. Thus “Hawai‘i” is properly pronounced “ha WA ee ee” (double the “ee” at the end, and don’t elide the vowels) and “O‘ahu” is properly pronounced “oh AH hoo” and not “owe WAH hoo,” with the “w” elided. Notice that it looks like the single quotation mark that precedes a word rather than follows it; it’s the opposite of an apostrophe. There are other diacritical marks that mark long vowels, but you don’t see them as consistently; in fact, you don’t see this one much outside of Hawai‘i, either, and if you did, I wouldn’t be explaining it to you.

2006

Wishes for a New Year

New Year’s was a bit subdued for me, as I had a bad cold and chose to forgo most of the usual celebratory stuff. Most of you are probably thinking that I’ve been subdued for months now, given that you haven’t seen a weblog entry since, what, October? Those of you who got my Christmas newsletter know already that fall term was exceedingly rough and something on my plate had to go. Unfortunately, dear reader, it was you.

I stayed in bed, mostly, and tried to get rid of my throbbing sinus headache and drippy nose. One would think that living in the tropics, colds would be a thing of the past and that one would have new a maybe more interesting diseases to deal with—malaria, perhaps, or dengue fever. This is (un)fortunately not the case. But I did feel well enough to answer the door about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and it was my neighbor Liz, who invited me to her and her Palauan husband Ken’s New Year’s dinner party.

I am very glad I went. It was the usual Guam gathering: lawyers and artists and importers and interesting professionals and children and Ken’s many Palauan relatives. The highlight was, as is typical, the food: the usual Guam fiesta plates reigned, but one of the guests, who is a very good cook, made Japanese udon noodles, which are eaten on New Year’s Day for good luck through the year. You put them in broth and add little green onions, fish, diced veggies, and slurp away. It is a delicious dish, and I hope that it insures good luck for the year. I certainly feel better today, if that means anything. I spent an enjoyable evening locating the “hidden pictures” found in various issues of Highlights for Children with a lawyer friend Tom and my other friend Alison. Liz and Ken’s son David gets Highlights, and I didn’t even know it was still published. The Timbertoes, Goofus and Gallant, and the three of us had a fond trip down Memory Lane.

This email arrived today from Lee Kottner, host of this very weblog on her own site, and it’s the best New Year’s Day wish that I know. She sends it out every year, or some version thereof, and I reprint it here without her permission—mea culpa—as I can’t assume that you will access her own blog or will be able to. Here it goes:

“I wish you all health and happiness, pleasures of the body and the mind, success, new adventures, the rekindling of old loves and/or the discovery of new ones, fireworks, candlelight, security financial and otherwise, good stories, continual astonishment, spiritual enlightenment (your choice of dogma or karma), frequent amusement, a wee dram when you need it, big hearts, deep pockets, long tempers, patience, something warm and fuzzy that is already house-trained, a sense of the ineffable, and people in your life who are as dear as you all are to me. Most of all, I wish all of us peace in a time of war; compassion in a time of natural disasters; courage in a time of repression and justified torture; generosity in a time of greed and self-interest; love in a time of hatred; self-knowledge in a time of blame. Best wishes for 2006.”

I cannot improve on this. So, what she said. Blessed and happy 2006.

Forty-Four

Officially An Old Person

Another birthday came and went on October 9, and it again crept up on me unawares because there was no change of fall color to clue me in. In fact, this might be the hottest and most humid time of the year, as we're in the middle of Guam's wet season. I am now 44, an Old Person of Note, and someone who loves his students even as he has no idea what kind of cultural framework they have. And vice versa.

I had a wonderful dinner with my friends the Pangs, formerly of Kaua'i, Hawai'i, and now of Guam. Lisa is married to Patrick, who's one of the pharmacists on island, and is a native Hawai'ian. His mother is French, his father is Chinese, and he has the kind of exotic looks one might expect from such a marriage. Lisa is originally a Seattlite (Seattler? Seattlinian?). Their four children all grew up in the middle of the Pacific, so that their frames of reference are skewed a bit: Neil and Jason, for example, have never been on a roller coaster at, say, the Cedar Point amusement park. But they have ridden an elephant in Bali. So there!

Lisa cooked a lovely chicken dinner with spinach, wine and cheese, and lemon teacake. Neil provided one of the Harry Potter videotapes so that I can catch up and be prepared for the new movie that's opening in November and to which we will all go. Pottermania is big even out here, which gives you a sense of the global reach of Hogwarts. Jason provided comic relief, as he always does.

My mother sent me a check which I happily spent on a new running tank top, and I got best wishes from siblings and such via the Net. I don't pay a great deal of attention to birthdays any more and really haven't for years, though I have friends who are deeply invested in them. I suppose there is a certain amount of sense to that--it isn't every day that you get to be the focus of all the attention, after all--but I'd just as soon drink a wee glass of sherry at 9:45 pm (when I was actually born) and be done with it.

Birthdays are a big BIG deal on Guam. A first birthday party is a major celebration, and not for kids exclusively. It's not uncommon to throw a party for 200 people, and the kids are really auxiliary to the whole shebang. One does provide entertainment for them, of course, in the form of face painting or clowns or something, but all the family friends, parents, grandparents, godparents (a very big deal on very Catholic Guam), cousins, neighbors, aunties and uncles, show up too. This means that children's parties must also include lots of barbecue, plenty of beer, a band--everything that you'd have for a fiesta. Then you do it again on the fifth birthday, maybe the tenth--all the milestone birthdays. Typically, Guam turns innocuous days into massive celebrations, and if I'm here long enough I just might be willing to throw a bash for 200 on my fiftieth.

Honolulu Bound

Aloha, Midwesterners!

Well, it’s official. I paid the (extremely high) registration fee, booked the airline ticket, and made the housing arrangements. I’ll be in Honolulu for a week in January for the Hawai‘i International Conference on Arts and Humanities from January 11 through 14, giving a paper on Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto’s novella Kitchen. Everything’s done, except of course actually finishing the paper.

Most of the trip will be paid for by the generosity of my College, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences—henceforth known as CLASS, of which my unit, the Division of English and Applied Linguistics (DEAL—this just sings, doesn’t it?), is a part. The travel grants that the College makes each semester are relatively competitive, so I’m very happy to be awarded a grant to go. And I got the housing deal of the century; I will be staying at the East West Center of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, which is one of its research units for visiting and long-term scholars. I heard about the Center from my DEAL colleague, the heavily tattooed writer extraordinaire and cool guy Bruce Campbell, who managed one of the Center’s housing buildings when he was a graduate student in Pacific studies at the University. One has to have some kind of academic affiliation to stay at the Center, but the deal can’t be beat: $26 a night. The conference hotel, by way of contrast, is $175 a night, though it’s assumed that one can stay more than one in a room, and the registration form has a way to facilitate that. The plane ticket, on the other hand, is a steep $1300—one of the disadvantages of living way way way off the beaten path.

As it turns out, friends of mine from Detroit will be in Honolulu at the same time. Larry and Donna Crabtree are members of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and they visit Honolulu regularly. Larry sang in the Choir of Men and Boys with me, and Donna was my old Twingo’s Café pal. They know the city well, which is more than I can say, so I look forward to dinner with them. My mom may fly out and see me, too, which would be great fun, as she’s never been out in the middle of the Pacific. (As in fact none of my family has.) My friend Pepe on island will get in touch with some of his old Honolulu friends, as he lived there for three years before coming to Guam (by way of Massachusetts and Texas), so I will have an evening of drinks with his friend Larry. And my DEAL colleague Sharleen’s uncle and his partner live just off Waikiki, and have already graciously offered to pick me up at the airport and deposit me on the Manoa campus. I love how Pacificana is just one big network of acquaintances!

All I know about Honolulu is what I say at the airport flying through with a layover, but even from that, you can tell why Hawai‘i is everybody’s version of paradise. The airport itself has marvelous Japanese and Chinese meditative gardens that you can wander around, as O‘ahu is the crossroads of the Pacific, lots of planes stop over, and people need to stretch their feet. You can also get nearly every product that could possibly involve macadamia nuts in the many aloha shops in the airport. And looking at Honolulu itself—well, you can see the city creeping up the green mountains that encircle it with mists on the upper peaks, and the blue ocean opposite. Paradise comes at a price, though; because there is just no room for Honolulu to grow, the average house price there is now slightly over half a million. Gee! And you thought the Bay Area was bad!

This will be a fun trip. All I have to do is write the paper, the research of which is turning out to be fun. One of the advantages of writing about contemporary writers (Kitchen was published in 1995) is that there’s not a lot of criticism, which makes your job easier. Someone should have told me this years ago, before I decided to become a medieval and Renaissance scholar . . .