EXPAT MASTERS: ART OF LIFE ABROAD - RUSSIA TODAY
EXPAT CHILDREN CAN’T ADJUST TO THEIR HOME COUNTRIES
INTERESTING PIECE IN THE ARAB NEWS about the difficulties facing expat children when they repatriate to their home country.
BEST AND WOST EXPAT MOVIES - CNN
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I”VE BEEN READING THROUGH THE TWO ARTICLES CNN HAVE POSTED ON the best and worst Expat movies, and I’ve been struck by how difficult it must be to be as snarky as this author and work for CNN. I can only assume that the author’s mouth is permanently bleeding as he bites his tongue whenever he’s close to Wolfman Blitzer. Nothing wrong with being snarky, but there’s something VERY wrong with rating “The Year of Living Dangerously” higher than “The Third Man”.
Anyway the posts are here if you want to take a look. As ever with this type of post, bask in the asinine comments people leave.
THIS WAS ENGLAND - PAUL THEROUX
GREAT PIECE IN THIS WEEKEND’S OBSERVER by author Paul Theroux detailing his time living in England from 1971 through to 1990. The article is an extract from the upcoming Granta - Granta 114: Ailens. Almost certainly that’ll be required reading for anyone interested in the sort of thing we post here at the Cluless Immigrant tumblr.
“It is the happy, often pompous delusion of the alien that he or she is a witness to an era of significant change. I understand this as a necessary conceit, a survival skill that helps to make the stranger watchful. I lived in England for 18 years, as a pure spectator, from the end of 1971 until the beginning of 1990. I was just an onlooker, gaping at public events that did not involve me. I was a taxpayer, but couldn’t vote; a house owner, but still needed an entry visa; and for quite a while I had to carry an alien identity card…”
Article contines here
OF ELIOT, ELEPHANTS AND EXPATS
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INTERESTING ARTICLE OVER ON ONE OF OUR FAVOURITE BLOGS “SEEN THE ELEPHANT” as Mary-Lea’s latest post isn’t just about expat experiences, she’s also referncing one of our favourite authors - George Eliot.
Get yourself there!
AMERICAN EXPAT IN CARIO WATCHES REVOLUTION
INTERESTING REPORT IN THE LA TIMES from Clare Fleishman, an American expat in Cairo, about her experiences in Egypt over the last week.
“Just one Friday ago, immediately after the afternoon call to prayer, a few thousand protestors were repelled from a mosque in Giza by rubber bullets, water hoses and clouds of tear gas. A stone’s throw away were young mothers with babies, sweepers gathering the trash and men hawking sweet potatoes and plump tomatoes. I saw two young men walking arm in arm when one stopped to choose a big onion — for later, I was told, when the eyes and throat burn from tear gas…”
Full article here
REAGAN-MANIA IN AMERICA
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TOMORROW ISN’T JUST THE SUPER BOWL, but also the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. The Telegraph has a piece by Sebastian Doggart, a British expat in the US, about the Reagan-mania that seems to be sweeping parts of the US at the moment and why he still appears to be relevant to the American political discourse.
“Like most non-American natives, I first heard the name of Reagan in 1980, when I was ten, and the news reported that a B-movie actor was running for president. Since I moved to the US, in 2000, I’ve become increasingly amazed at how his legacy has blossomed. No other Western leader continues to inspire so much adoration and vitriol as Reagan. Thatcher’s the closest, but who in Britain is seriously lobbying for her to have a mountain or airport named after her?
This week-end, Reagan may well be bigger than Jesus..”
Full article here.
THE COMIC LIFE OF EXPATS IN JAPAN
FROM THE JAPANESE TIMES a piece by Gianni Simone about expats in Japan writing or drawing manga about their experiences. And yes, reference is made to the brilliant Charisma Man.
“Tales of expat life in Japan all too often get blown out of proportion and quickly become picaresque adventures that little resemble real life.
For some reason, many writers can’t resist the temptation to exaggerate things. In their stories — be them fiction or memoir — weird, exotic details abound, turning this country into a sort of Wonderland that, depending on the witness, alternate between sleaziness and the Theater of the Absurd…”
Full article can be found here.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JAMES JOYCE’S PARIS
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YESTERDAY WE POSTED a piece by Saul Bellow and his experiences of living in Paris in the late 40s, today we want to point you towards an article about another expat writer in Paris. This piece comes from a 1982 edition of the New York Times and it concerns James Joyce’s Paris. As ever, the full article can be found at the New York Times’s website - link here.
“N o. 7, Rue Edmond Valentin. A six-story facade, heavy ornamental moldings, a wrought-iron grille door, the Eiffel Tower in sight down the street: the heartland of upper-bourgeois Paris. Poodleland. Beneath the city’s winter overcast, these arrondissements - the 7th, the 8th, the 16th, the 17th -are an endless yellow-gray undercast: bland and impermeable. They are a chilly mask: and for the later James Joyce, who cloaked his turbulence with formality, they made an oddly appropriate residence.
Joyce spent 20 years in Paris - almost as long as in Dublin - but that is like counting the time we sleep. In 1922, two years after he arrived from Zurich, he immersed himself in the elusive dream that took him 16 years to finish: ”Finnegans Wake.”
In ”Ulysses,” the tangible presence of Dublin is memorialized: paving-stone and brick wall, legend and grilled kidneys, gab and gossip. ”Finnegans Wake” is a sleeping packrat dragging the world in, bit by bit. There are slivers of Paris in the pack but they are transmuted, as a dream transmutes the sound of a passing car into an army in flight.
So how is the pilgrim to find Joyce in Paris? There is, of course, his biographical presence, which will be attended to in a moment. But mostly what we look for in a literary pilgrimage is the cafe the characters drank in, not the one where the author did. Not, that is, unless the author is materially incorporated in the characters. We follow the characters Stephen and Bloom in and about Dublin; and we follow Joyce too, because he gave them his meanderings. In Paris, Joyce’s work and his life diverge d. How do you follow the sleeping Hum- phrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose dream is ”Finnegans Wake”? Strictly speaking: by eating an indigestible dinner, falling asleep, and letting the toots and stirrings outside and an uneasy memory infiltrate your dreams…”
Full article can be read here on the New York Times website.
The Unknown Citizen by W.H. Auden
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AUDEN WHO EXPATRIATED himself to the US in 1939 wrote this poem shortly after arriving in the States. A satricial play on how govt. organization view and supress the indivivual, it’s perhaps not a surprising work for someone who has just been through the process of immigrating to another country.
The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was Popular with his mates and liked to drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a Paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured,
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace he was for peace when there was war he went.
He was married and and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he Happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
