Eating Europe

Jon Volkmer

Description

Jon and Janet’s European adventure is shattered by world events—not the trip itself, but the telling of it. In a harsh post-9/11 world, the once glib travel writer finds he must take the long road to truth telling, and to rediscovering a woman he thought he knew.

Sujets

• Travel
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602358508
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Writing Travel
Series Editor, Jeanne Moskal
The series publishes manuscripts related to the new field of travel studies, including works of original travel writing; editions of out-of-print travel books or previously unpublished travel memoirs; English translations of important travel books in other languages; theoretical and historical treatments of ways in which travel and travel writing engage such questions as religion, nationalism/cosmopolitanism, and empire; gender and sexuality; race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the history of the book, print culture, and translation; biographies of significant travelers or groups of travelers (including but not limited to pilgrims, missionaries, anthropologists, tourists, explorers, immigrants); critical studies of the works of significant travelers or groups of travelers; and pedagogy of travel and travel literature and its place in curricula.
Books in the Series
Eating Europe: A Meta-Nonfiction Love Story , Jon Volkmer
Vienna Voices: A Traveler Listens to the City of Dreams , Jill Knight Weinberger


Eating Europe
A Meta-Nonfiction Love Story
Jon Volkmer
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2006 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Volkmer, Jon, 1956-
Eating Europe : a meta-nonfiction love story / Jon Volkmer.
p. cm. -- (Writing travel)
ISBN 1-932559-69-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-70-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-71-X (adobe ebook)
1. Europe--Description and travel. 2. Volkmer, Jon, 1956---Travel. 3. Travel costs--Europe. I. Title.
D923.V66 2006
914.04’5610922--dc22
2006025925
“Retro Map of France” © 2005 by Nick Belton. Used by permission.
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


For Janet


Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1 Golden Tulip Bar: $7.89
2 L’Indochine: $60.74
3 Puri Mas: $69.43
On Cartography and the Sublime
4 AC Restaurants: $22.62
5 Restaurant le Luxhof: $37.20
6 Maison D’Issler: $22.56
7 Tropic Ice: $17.64
8 L’Auberge Alsacienne: $56.97
9 Le Grand Duc: $22.06
Part Two
On Pilgrimage and Tourism
10 Le Felibre: $36.76
11 Petit Casino: $52.31
12 Bautezar: $4.41
13 Les Moissines: $58.53
14 Les Remparts: $14.70
15 Avignon: $51.47
16 Le Clos de la Violette: $236.28
17 Domaine de Janet
18 Cassis: $114.41
19 Wancourt: $7.94
About the Author


Series Editor’s Preface
Parlor Press’s book series, “Writing Travel,” seeks to publish the best works in the field of travel studies. This field has been given new urgency by debates about globalization and terrorism, by fresh dialogue between practitioners and scholars of travel writing, and by emerging insights from many disciplines (postcolonial studies, gender studies, literary studies, geography, religious studies, and anthropology) about the ways in which travel and travel writing engage such questions as religion, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and empire; gender and sexuality; race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the history of the book, print culture, and translation. Our list will include original travel writing; editions of out-of-print travel books or previously unpublished travel memoirs; English translations of important travel books in other languages; biographies of significant travelers or groups of travelers (including but not limited to pilgrims, missionaries, anthropologists, tourists, explorers, immigrants); critical studies of the works of significant travelers or groups of travelers; and pedagogy of travel and travel literature and its place in curricula.
Eating Europe: A Meta-Nonfiction Love Story by Jon Volkmer raises the curtain on often-hidden portions of the travel experience: who pays the bills and how travel affects our relationships. Many travel writers give the impression that they are independently wealthy by omitting any mention of who pays the bills. But Volkmer’s narrator—like Volkmer himself, an English professor—receives a prestigious but limited grant from his college to travel in Europe. Canny about the federal tax provisions for food-and-beverage business expenses, the narrator (or is it the author himself?) saves nineteen restaurant receipts to file for reimbursement from his grant. The receipts, in addition, prompt his poignant and funny meditations on topics ranging from European currency –he traveled in “the millennial year, the twilight of the guilder and the franc,” when “some receipts also put the price in Euros, in small print, a harbinger”—to a translation of the nineteenth-century experience of the sublime into present-day idiom: “The nuclear power of the Alps being fed into the substation of my heart through the two-dollar extension cord of my eyes.” Thus Volkmer brings to bear on the experience of travel both the administrative realities and the love of books that shape life in today’s academia.
Love, too, plays its part, as the narrator traces the ramifications of one missed opportunity to affirm his travel companion’s vitality. This opportunity takes place at a store—a key venue for travelers’ shaping their new identities for themselves and for the folks at home—as his companion pauses to buy some small memento of the trip. Volkmer’s unfolding of this missed opportunity illuminates the subtleties of both souvenir-buying and the vicissitudes of love.
This book will appeal to anyone who has ever ended a trip by sorting through those pesky receipts and wondered—simultaneously—what gets reimbursed and what to make of the fact that travel has unexpectedly opened us to evanescent snatches of love and connection.
—Jeanne Moskal
Series Editor, Writing Travel




Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ursinus College and the Pearlstine Family Faculty Fellowship Fund for encouragement and support. Thanks also to Diane and Paul, Eric and Madeline, Margot and Rob, Daniel, Carol, Patti, Ted, Judy, Annette, Laura, Francine, Beth, Jane, David G., Richard G., Richard K., Rick D., Roger, Shawn, Jane and Scotty. Special thanks to Jeanne and to David, whose literary vision transcends category, genre and marketability. Most of all thanks to Janet, for her contributions on pages 176 to 178 and 193 to 200 and for her inspiration everywhere else.
Parts of chapters 5 to 8 and 12 appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “An Ugly American in Paris” appeared in The Bucks County Writer.
Everything in this book is true, except the parts that admit to ambiguity, imagination, or deceit. Most of the names have been changed in consideration of privacy.


Introduction
So the college got this villa in Provence. Many bedrooms, heated pool, middle of a vineyard, two minutes from a perfect village called Rognes. The gig was for art history and French professors. I’m an English professor, but thanks to a couple of deluded newspapers, I’m also a travel writer, so I figured I had a shot, if I could come up with a good research proposal. “Travel Writing,” looked a bit thin, so I tossed in an allusion to Graham Greene, added a colon, and my project became: “Old Colonials vs. New Economies: Blurring Borders in the Post-modern Post-Nation State Euro-Transitional Era.”
A week later the phone rang. It was Dean Isaacs. “Congratulations,” she said.
“Thank you.” I said it warily. That greeting from a dean is usually followed by something like, We’d like you to chair the campus-wide committee and write a very long report assessing how our technological infrastructure is keeping up with the demands of higher education in the twenty-first century . But this time it really was good news. Not only had I earned a week’s stay at the villa in Provence, but my proposal so intrigued the committee that I had been awarded a Pearlstine Grant in the amount of $1,000 to help defray research expenses.
“Hey, that’s great,” I said.
“You will need to submit receipts of your expenses, have a visible product by September 1, and give a Baden lecture in October.”
“It will be an honor.”
“What’s a visible product?” Janet asked, when I told her the good news.
“It’s whatever I write,” I replied, not at all defensively.
“You didn’t back yourself into a corner with a bunch of crap about postmodern this and postmodern that when you have no idea what you mean, did you?”
I gave her a look of innocent bewilderment.
“I thought so.” She shook her head sadly. “And what are research expenses?”
“