“I get on with them well enough, but these people were my mortal enemies twenty years ago.” Thus spoke Tom (whose name I’ve changed for his privacy), yr. correspondent’s guide for a Troubles-themed tour of Belfast. Tom, ever-affable, is a former-Catholic and forever-republican; he offered the sentiment above when I asked about a unified Ireland,…
London and Paris Cosmopolitanism and (De-)construction For the Original Post please go to: https://greatideastour.wordpress.com/london-and-paris/ With friends arriving from ‘divers and sundry’ places, meals with origins across the globe, and an artistic and cultural scene almost as far-reaching, London presented myriad opportunities for yr. correspondent and his associate to realize the ideal of cosmopolitanism (at least in…
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Durham ‘The North’ For the original post, go to: https://greatideastour.wordpress.com/glasgow-edinburgh-and-durham/ Spending any time in the US South reveals it to be an (in)coherent and imagined space. On occasion geographically and socially nebulous, it nevertheless shares (forgive how trite the observation is) a unifying history—the plantation system, Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil Rights Movement—and set of…
Brighton and Brussels Rest; Modernization and Preservation Yr. correspondent and his associate did in Brighton exactly as they set out: to press pause. I relaxed my attentive anthropological eye, as well as my tendency to exhaust the day with as many outings as possible. And Brighton was brilliant for these restorative ends: even when overcast—as…
“God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” Or so goes the popular maxim. Indeed, the Dutch landscape demonstrates adept cultivation: from the (once non-native) tulips that have become a national staple, to the canals which prevent the sea from swallowing Holland (and which structure traffic, commerce, &c. in Amsterdam and beyond). With…
See the original post on Jackson’s Great Ideas Tour Blog. The (Western) Canon Following the footsteps of the grand tourists of yore, yr. correspondent and his associate closed their G.I.T. in Rome. For 17th c. aristocratic travelers, the Italian capital was somewhat of a fixation; for, it made manifest a key itinerant aim: exposure to the…
