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 . . .
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