ose places and people you see on a trip, journey or adventure stay/remain there after you leave. Along lines of the literal trace of presence, I always come home with a bunch of dirty clothes, jet lag and often times a stomach virus of sorts from eating disagreeable but delectable foreign morsels. (Mmmm crazy German Head Cheese -- excuse the gratuitous pork product pictures). Does a withered bank account count as a presence in absence? I always have one of those after a long, healthy journey / adventure.Pork and sarcasm aside, what most obviously remains after a trip where you collected no objects or souvenirs, are the memories of where what happened to who. More specifically, you retain a personal narrative of events regardless of material possessions that may or may not travel with you. In this personal sense, the narrator collects objects from the field for themself and not for some audience, viewer or voyeur come and usurp the context by creating their own narrative based on someone else's collection. When I go on a trip and gather objects while on said trip, I do so under the premise that these things will remind me of my experiences and I have little concern for the feelings of others in this matter. I am not sure how I feel about other people (friends and family) attempting to construct a narrative of my trip based on the crap I brought back (which is almost always foreign bottles of alcohol anyway). Of course, I am refering to the JM/Tim discussion about how many narratives a collection gets and who gets to define or interpret these different narratives. I particularly found JM's comment about how there shouldn't necessarily be only one narrative for a given collection interesting (I hope I'm not twisting JM's.. taking them out of context is another issue) because it seems to beg a question of context. Me going on a trip to Thailand and bring back crazy rice booze is no where near the same context of someone like Banks going out and collecting plants to put in a museum. The museum piece is a cultural artifact on display for everyone to wander by and participate in generating some sort of narrative 
or story about what kind of place on earth could possibly be home to strange looking lizards and shrubbery.
Ultimately, I suppose the context or purpose of the trip limits a collection's number of possible narratives not only by limiting the size of its viewing audience thereby restricting interpretation, but also by creating a public, cultural space reserved strictly for the purposes of generating interpretive narratives. My bottles of crazy rice booze, unfortunately have no such public space reserved for their glory, spare this artist's rendition I found somewhere on the internet, and now this blog space. Finally, the context of the trip also defines whether or not the collection will be public or private, and in both cases the collector's narrative or intention (if I may dare to use such a term) changes with respect to anticipation of audience. Please do not contruct a narrative of my rice booze collection.(My "collection" of sake is in Olympia and looks very similar in size and colors to this guy).
4 comments:
Kellan
You write: "In this personal sense, the narrator collects objects from the field for themself and not for some audience, viewer or voyeur come and usurp the context by creating their own narrative based on someone else's collection."
True, and like you note, someone might construct a narrative out of your stuff. I see you've got a link to Bourdain's blog, the host of the travel/eating show"No Reservations," which reminds me that even private collections become public artifacts. Some of these artifacts gain their narratives long after the founder has had their last rice beer. Don't worry, you're still young.
"Me going on a trip to Thailand and bring back crazy rice booze is no where near the same context of someone like Banks going out and collecting plants to put in a museum."
I don't know,man...rice is plant-ish. Totally counts. You are basically the reincarnation of Banks, in my book.
Bonus: crazy foreign booze is a sweet souvenir, because in drinking it, you could get a whole new experience. (How meta!) So maybe that makes it a better choice than my non-alcoholic tchotchkes.
Thomas Keller was on the Today Show this morning! :o)
Kellan—You have a talent for asking evocative questions. Here’s my stream-of-consciousness responses as I read through your entire blog this morning:
“What does it mean to kill literature or even authors that for all intents, purposes, and accordances, are already dead?” Wow. Good question. This assumes that the life of the literary work “lives” somewhere between the text and the mind of the reader, or, as Rene Wellek asks, “what is the mode of existence of the literary work of art?”
Hummm, "the collector defines the new context of a collection, but how does a collector reconcile this idea that the original context must be lost in order to call it a collection?" Maybe collectors don’t need to reconcile, or maybe, like a literary work of art, for them the collection lies in that liminal space between reader and text, nature and culture.
“Why does context (destroyed, restored, or manipulated) matter if you're just going to eat the collection anyway?” This is interesting. The body as a as creator, consumer, and destroyer of collection.
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