Notes: Analysis of Travels With Charley Part 2
Note Taker: Tena Banks
Date: 03/24/2011
Chris: I did Travels With Charley with Landscape of Home with Sopher. Talking about how when you are away from home… What I got from it, he goes to Texas and talks about Texas. Indians travel around and marry different people and do what those people do in their culture. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Snowden: I like the way you link the (____) to Steinbeck. Any questions about the way he did the paper.
Chris: (I didn’t catch what he said.)
Nick: I like the way he’s talking about how Steinbeck goes around to see how others are living. It’s like an anthropological attitude.
Markus: I don’t think he’s scientific at all.
Snowden: I agree with both of you. There’s absolutely nothing scientific about Travels With Charley.
Chris: He’s harsh on Texas. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Nick: He had nothing scheduled about his trip.
Snowden: He didn’t set out to document America.
Mick: When Steinbeck’s writing it’s with biased. The bias is the same sort of stereotype of perception as he travels around.
Snowden: Steinbeck is kind to California. As he gets into the South he gets hostile to what he sees. He’s driven to get home.
Mick: He puts out how terrible the south is…(I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Chris: He wants to be home so bad that he says people in the south suck and he leaves.
Markus: (I didn’t catch what he said.)
Snowden: When you look at the map in the book you see this long journey he’s supposed to take. As he travels around though he makes very deliberate stops. Then he goes home and writes from memory.
Mick: I like how he writes in the beginning. I like how he says that you can travel the interstate and se nothing. Then you see how the interstate became a tool to get home.
Snowden: Chris is there anything else you want to add?
No.
Tena: I used Tuan. (I don’t remember everything that I said.)
Snowden: Why did so many of you choose Tuan and Sopher? Why these two?
Markus: It was the only one that I could relate to Steinbeck.
Snowden: The image of landscape is fabricated. We create the image of the old man that he picks up. All we have to create the image is the truck and the old man.
Mick: He mentioned the vernacular landscape through the book. Don’t remember anything about vernacular.
Snowden: So few cues that we take baggage. We get mad because he writes so much about Texas.
Markus: I got mad at it because he wrote so little.
Snowden: So Sopher and Tuan are going so heavy, in these analyses. I wonder where you’ll go with The Abby book.
Mick: (I didn’t catch what he said.)
Snowden: Thomas did you use the Sopher or Tuan piece?
Thomas: I focused on home and the journey particularly the part about the mobile homes. He mentions the ruthlessness. Sopher quotes Tuan. I took it to mean that people in mobile homes once they’re gone they realize it was once a home. They don’t know what they have until it’s gone.
Snowden: So nostalgia?
Thomas: Sopher uses several quotes. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.) If someone chooses to leave like the people in the mobile homes. They can set up life in one place make friends and leave. Like when you are taking into account Tuan’s views rootlessness is a paradox. When at home not tied to it but when you leave it there is a tie to it.
Snowden: The idea that people aren’t settled not to be trusted.
Thomas: Instability.
Snowden: The idea if not fixed in one place something is wrong with you. Begin to see models dragged through history. Towns versus dwellers.
Thomas: He asks Charley if it could be that people are nomadic Americans that came from immigrants. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Snowden: Going into Turner’s U.S. people pick up and move more than anyone else in the nation. That smacks of more rootlessness than people in (____).
Thomas: People can’t overcome it they’re nomadic by nature.
Snowden: People drive through mobile home parks and slur the people who are mobile.
Mick: No dependence on other people in the community because of movement. Each time they are going somewhere. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Snowden: I don’t need the electric company I can hook up through the park. When Steinbeck is writing about mobile homes it is just taking off.
Mick: Can we bring RV’s into this.
Snowden: Yes. Today we have the snowbird culture.
Thomas: Mobile home people can move if they want to, but don’t. Steinbeck almost seemed in theory to be envious of the mobile home people, but if it comes right down to it he wouldn’t like it. He was reluctant to go on the journey.
Snowden: He was afraid of this journey.
Markus: I like how in the first ten miles of the trip he spills everything.
Snowden: Steinbeck is a member of the elite. When he takes the journey…. He seems like he’s conquering things. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Mick: Can we interpret the poodle in this too? We discount the poodle.. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Snowden: So far we are seeing interpretations of Tuan and Sopher and the mobile home culture.
Mick: Mobile homes are so cheap these days, and we treat them as temporary. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Snowden: Mobile homes can’t be moved more than once or twice before they fall apart.
Mick: Why are the mobile homes door knobs are really high and the light switches are really low? (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Snowden: It’s an interesting culture. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Markus: I used Sopher and focused on the American journey. I find more to tie into the Quote’s that Tuan quotes T.S. Eliot. Sopher. Ture opposition of home. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.) Sopher offers example of myths to make people go and travel and I feel Steinbeck is compelled and childish to take journey. An elitist trying to create sense of home. Steinbeck what carried in my head was a bag of worms. He’s carrying baggage along with him. He says he found no strangers these are my people and my country, but really they’re not. Sopher’s meaning of social meaning Steinbeck trying to experience his country social but couldn’t get rid (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Snowden: Did you find it strange that Steinbeck says these are my people?
Markus: Yes.
Snowden: It seems like he’s grasping at this as U.S. being a melting pot connected and his book this isn’t the case.
Mick: It’s almost like he’s arrogant.
Snowden: (I didn’t catch what she said.)
Markus: Didn’t you say that the book doesn’t say that?
Snowden: Yes. He doesn’t belong in their environment, and the people know that.
Amy: I can only thing of two examples of when he doesn’t think he’s better than everyone else. One was in California because he’s with friends. The other was encounter with the actor. Because he was interested in what the actor does, and the actor assumes that Steinbeck is a fellow actor.
Snowden: The actor thought he was an actor too.
Amy: Those were the only two instances when he didn’t think he was so much better than everyone else.
Mick: How about how he gets disgusted with the people that are around the little girl going to school. Yet he traveled all day just to watch the cheerleaders.
Snowden: Considering the number of complaints about Tuan, but you read him and understood him and you’re applying him and Sopher is on Tuan’s shoulders too.
Markus: Sopher sits on everyone’s shoulders.
Thomas: (I didn’t catch what he said.)
Snowden: Sopher is younger than Tuan.
Mick: Did Tuan create the word Topophelia?
Snowden: Tuan heavily influenced the field of landscape.
Amy: I also did Sopher but in a different direction. I went with Sopher’s difference of home and what Steinbeck says about Texans. One can say people (I couldn’t keep up with everything she said.) Steinbeck talks about how his wife is the Texan that got away. He’s wife doesn’t have an accent until she talks to another Texan. Steinbeck talks about how everywhere he goes something reminds him of Texas. His wife has mementos of Texas and he can’t escape it. How the Texas millionaires are businessmen, but buy ranches and wear the boots. However, they don’t use the ranch for what it is intended. They use it as a sense of identity. They use symbolic things to identify themselves.
Snowden: Mick do you want to add anything to this?
Mick: Not really.
Snowden: We buy into the stereotype. Mick pointed out that we.. (I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Mick: In the Texas chapter I loved how he says he’s wived, cousined, and uncled in Texas. I see it as Texans are so rooted into Texas that they don’t want to get away.
Amy: that’s the way I took it.
Snowden: Steinbeck makes it sound like there’s only one dialect in Texas.
Amy: the mixture of words is like an A is in front of it.
Mick: Talks about how his wife’s voice changes when she meets another Texan.
Markus: (I didn’t catch what he said.)
Nick: I did Pierce Lewis Axioms. I figured it would be a good one. In their different axioms one is common things. An example is a vending machine wouldn’t think of it as being important. He was remembering back in the day when he’d buy gum from vending machines. The technology would allow him to buy.
Mick: the vending machine becomes a landscape we’ve created. I want it now no human contact. In the 1960s. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Snowden: (I didn’t catch what she said.)
Mick: Vending machines were a great invention of technology.
Snowden: In the past he’d have to go to the store and ask for what wanted. Now he can put a quarter in the machine and get what he wanted.
Nick: He’s just talking about common things.
Snowden: What other common things did you look at.
Nick: I don’t know.
Markus: Would the roadside garage be considered a common thing?
Mick: A thought: Technology advances more and more and we no longer have to interact with people. In the 1950s and 1960s we had two or three TV stations. Now we have so many. As technology advances we have less and less interaction with people. No day to day interactions unless we want to.
Snowden: People have the ability to express opinions more and more on blogs.
Mick: There is a lot of far right and far left.
Thomas: People could go somewhere where people are of like minds if they wanted to.
Snowden: Nick, you started with vending machines and here we’ve tied it with people moved..(I couldn’t keep up with everything.)
Mick: Considering of the interstate and the vending machine serve as very temporary food.
Snowden: The food from the vending machine is temporary and not meant to sustain you.
Thomas: Vending machine on the side of the interstate. People miss the landscape but stop for the vending machine.
Mick: You never stop on the interstate to see what’s down the side roads.
Snowden: Interstate is safe and the side roads aren’t. in Europe you wanted to use back roads the highways were dangerous. What else?
Nick: The mobile homes willing to go around to ordinary things he wants to experience.. (I couldn’t keep up with everything he said.)
Snowden: Did you use all the axioms. Which other ones did you use?
Nick: I used the historic axiom.
Snowden: What’s the historic axiom about and how did you use it?
Nick: When he talked to the man in the military.
Snowden: What’s another one?
Nick: Context Geography and Ecology Axiom. Where he’s going to New England. How people want to go to Florida.
Snowden: All of them have the idea that Florida is a warm Mecca.
Nick: I used the Historic Axiom again.
Snowden: So you used a second example from that.
Nick: talk about how hunters hunt because our forefathers did.
Snowden: Tradition. O.K. so what else?
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