To Shed All Memories

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Oct 032014
 

The newcomers make themselves at home; they adapt themselves easily and gladly to the material environment, and make a moral environment of their own on that solid basis, ignoring or positively condemning the religion and culture of the elder Americans. Perhaps the elder Americans are assimilated in spirit to the new ones more readily that the new Americans to the old. I do not mean that any positively German, Italian, Jewish, or Irish ingredients are incorporated into American traditions: on the contrary, the more recent immigrants are quick—much quicker […] Continue reading >

Moral Climate and the Inner Landscape of the Mind

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Sep 232014
 

Yet migration like birth is heroic: the soul is signing away her safety for a blank cheque. A social animal like man cannot change his habitat without changing his friends, nor his friends without changing his manners and his ideas. An immediate token of all this, when he goes into a foreign country, is the foreign language which he hears there, and which he probably will never be able to speak with ease or with true propriety. The exile, to be happy, bust be born again: he must change […] Continue reading >

Tipping in America, Hand to Hand (Part 2)

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Sep 172014
 

It took some time getting used to tipping in America, and I still have a problem with it. Over the years, Lindsay and I have had many a healthy and heated argument about my resistance to the automatic 20% tip, our cultures and personal experiences clashing like pot lids being banged against each other. No need to go into the details because in this clip from Quentin Tarantino’s movie Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) outlines some of my arguments. After all the back and forth, Lindsay and I […] Continue reading >

Tipping in America, Hand to Hand (Part 1)

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Aug 272014
 
Tipping in America, Hand to Hand (Part 1)

When I travel one of the first things I look up about a country is restaurant tipping customs and etiquette. This wasn’t the case when I came to the U.S. 11 years ago, chiefly because I didn’t have the money to go out much, not to mention tip. After returning from the yearlong round-the-world trip and changing my tipping habits (and currencies) every few weeks, I was reintroduced to tipping in America with something close to a jolt. Tipping in Slovakia In my native Slovakia tipping isn’t a strict […] Continue reading >

Secular Homelessness

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Aug 212014
 

Recall Lukács’s phrase ‘transcendental homelessness’. What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent. Perhaps it is not even homelessness; homelooseness (with an admixture of loss) might be the necessary (hideous) neologism: in which the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily. Clearly, this secular homelessness overlaps, at times, with the more established categories of emigration, […] Continue reading >

Through Other Lenses: American Robotnik Readings for August 2014

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Aug 192014
 
Through Other Lenses: American Robotnik Readings for August 2014

From Around the Web Religion “The numbers are in: America still distrusts Atheists and Muslims” by Dan Arel, Salon, July 21, 2014 – “Intolerance towards those with different beliefs: A deeply American tradition.” Language “Learning to Speak American” by Tim Parks, New York Review of Books Blog, December 14, 2012 – Take it down a notch, American English. “Saturday Stat: The Invention of the ‘illegal immigrant’” by Lisa Wade, Sociological Images, August 17, 2014 – The phrase “illegal immigrant” wasn’t part of the English language before the 1930’s. Demographics […] Continue reading >

American Robotnik Is Back!

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Aug 052014
 

The world trip adventure is over (if you followed along on the travel blog Where Is Your Toothbrush?, thank you, and if not, please visit). I am back in Portland, Oregon, and with me, American Robotnik. You may have seen a reading list and a quote I posted last month, shortly after my return. That’s all just a warm-up. I am very excited about embarking on this next iteration of American Robotnik. As of August 2014, I will continue exploring the grand immigration experience, researching the issue and reporting […] Continue reading >

A Refusal to Go Home

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Jul 252014
 

I bump into plenty of people in America who tell me that they miss their native countries – Britain, Germany, Russia, Holland, South Africa – and who in the next breath say they cannot imagine returning. It is possible, I suppose, to miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore, and refuse to go home, all at once. Such a tangle of feelings might then be a definition of luxurious freedom… Logically, a refusal to go home should validate, negatively, the very idea of home, rather in […] Continue reading >

Through Other Lenses: American Robotnik Readings for July 2014

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Jul 212014
 

From Around the Web Immigration experience “On Not Going Home” by James Wood, London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 4, 20 February 2014, pp. 3-8 – Why, even as a voluntary migrant, you can never go back Home. “Losing my voice” by Chika Unigwe, Aeon Magazine, 14 March 2014 – “When I left Nigeria for Belgium, I made my husband’s home my own. But homesickness lodged like a stone inside.” How an African immigrant dealt with the “sorrow of migration.” “Reflections on Exile” by Edward Said, Reflections on […] Continue reading >

Arbitrary Nature of Existence

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Jul 092013
 

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. I knew something they didn’t, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too. —Charles Simic, “Refugees”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language […] Continue reading >

Fruits of Meaning

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Jul 032013
 

To be sure, in our human condition, it takes long, strenuous work to find the wished-for terrains of safety or significance or love. And it may often be easier to live in exile with a fantasy of paradise than to suffer the inevitable ambiguities and compromises of cultivating actual, earthly places. And yet, without some move of creating homing structures for ourselves, we risk a condition of exile that we do not even recognize as banishment. And paradoxically, if we do not acknowledge the possibility and the real pain […] Continue reading >

All Homesickness Is Fiction

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Jun 272013
 

[T]hese days we are wont to say not so much that all fiction is homesickness as that all homesickness is fiction—that home never was what it was cracked up to be, the haven of safety and affection we dream of and imagine. Instead, home is conceived of mostly as a conservative site of enclosure and closure, of narrow-mindedness, patriarchal attitudes, and dissemination of nationalism. And, indeed, the notion of “home” may have been, in recent times, peculiarly overcharged, as the concepts of “country” and “nation” have been superimposed on […] Continue reading >

The Danger of the Exilic Posture

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Jun 192013
 

[T]he potential rigidity of the exilic posture may inhere not so much in a fixation on the past as in habitual detachment from the present. [T]his posture, if maintained too long, allows people to conceive of themselves as perpetually Other, and therefore unimplicated in the mundane, compromised, conflict-ridden locality that they inhabit; it allows them to imagine the sources and causes of predicaments as located outside, in a hostile or oppressive environment, rather than within. —Eva Hoffman in “The New Nomads”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, […] Continue reading >

An Excess of Memory

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Jun 112013
 

[A]s a psychological choice, the exilic position may become not only too arduous but too easy. Perhaps the chief risk of privileging the exilic narrative is a psychic split—living in a story in which one’s past becomes radically different from the present and in which the lost homeland becomes sequestered in the imagination as a mythic, static realm. That realm can be idealized or demonized, but the past can all to easily become not only “another country” but a space of projections and fantasies. Some people decide to abandon […] Continue reading >

An Oblique Angle to One’s New World

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Jun 032013
 

In a way, we are nothing more—or less—than an encoded memory of our heritage. It is because these things go so deep, because they are not only passed on to us but are us, that one’s original home is a potent structure and force and that being uprooted from it is so painful. Real dislocation, the loss of all familiar external and internal parameters, is not glamorous, and it is not cool. It is a matter not of willful psychic positioning but of an upheaval in the deep material […] Continue reading >

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