NOTES: The Practice of (My) Everyday Life

It’s surprisingly busy in St Ives at the moment. The Seafood Cafe on Fore Street was full on Tuesday night. The taxi driver at the station (the one who took pity on me and gave me a lift from St Erth in the cold rain after the last branch line train had gone and her booking didn’t turn up) said she thinks there are a few coach trips. The two holiday flats in the square have been empty since I moved in, but the one across the way in Fore Street has had guests since last week.

There seem to be a lot of holiday lets around the Square. I couldn’t see anybody elses’s rubbish out when I put mine out to be collected last week. In some ways, this is a bit sad. It’s very quiet at night, and I can feel the emptiness. Sometimes it’s reassuring to know that there’s somebody, just though the wall. There are people who live over the arch into the square, as I’ve seen lights sometimes, but I haven’t seen them. I haven’t seen any lights on in the buildings that back on to my house. Although, I thought I heard a baby crying faintly through the wall in the early hours once.  The emptiness is also a joyful thing; when I want to listen to my records loudly, I’m glad that I’m not bothering anyone. At least, I don’t think so. I’m sure someone will let me know.

It’s been a really busy week, with not much sleep owing to my apparently unfortunate luck with airbeds. After breaking the valve in the first one, and failing to fix it, I wearily bought a replacement airbed. Luckily, Colenso’s Hardware, run by the deputy Mayor, sells pretty much everything I can think of needing that isn’t edible or wearable. The new one was blissfully comfortable for almost a week. Then it also started to slowly go down in the night, eventually lowering me to the floor before six o’clock in the morning.

I only moved in two weeks and one day ago, but living here has had a surprisingly immediate effect on my research. As I’d been in to Colenso’s every day last week with my tales of airbed woe, requiring vegetable peelers, gaffer tape and tape measures, picture hooks and wire, I got chatting to Colin, the Deputy Mayor of St Ives. As well as running the shop for the last forty five years, and being Deputy Mayor, he also sits on the board of trade and commerce, of which his wife is chair, and he has a great deal of interesting things to say about the town. He also agreed to be interviewed, which I look forward to once I’ve pinned him down.

I went to Lanhams to drop off the spare keys that I’d borrowed to get a sofa delivered last Friday (a relief to have something other than the floor to sit on, which is a story in itself. The second-hand furniture shop in St Ives is run by extremely nice people) and lovely Bev, (Special Constable and lettings agent) had a long list of people that she suggested I interview. There followed much discussion on stories and gossip in St Ives, which was fascinating. I’m intrigued by the goings-on in Piazza-Barnaloft, and one-eyed Tony, and things I’m not going to repeat here. I imagine I may not be able to use some of these interviews for ethical reasons, but I’ll certainly enjoy the process of interviewing. It’s interesting to build up a picture, or diagram, of the connections (and disconnections) between people and places, the way that community works (and doesn’t work) here.

 

BOOK: The Tourist, MacCannell 1976 [1999]

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Oh, the passenger/He rides and he rides /He sees things from under glass/He looks through his window’s eye/He sees the things he knows are his/He sees the bright and hollow sky/He sees the city asleep at night/He sees the stars are out tonight/And all of it is yours and mine/And all of it is yours and mine /So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride…

The search for the authentic experience of a place is, perhaps, a search for ownership, a kind of personal colonisation. It’s a search for the both the unfamiliar and the things-in-common, a moment of belonging in an alien place, where, in that moment, that place belongs to you, and you to it. You will leave it behind when you go home, hanging in the air on the beach at sunset, or in the dregs of your cocktail in that bar, looking at the stars. But you will also take that memory back home like a souvenir, where that place is filed away in the imaginary place-memory maps of the brain.

p. 4

MacCannell’s aim in The Tourist is to create an ‘ethnography of modernity’ via the study of international sightseeing. ‘[...] everywhere on the face of the Earth, searching for peoples, practices, and artifacts we might record and relate to our own sociocultural experience.’

p. 5

Actually, self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of our civilization [...] What begins as the proper activity of a hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organised group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British ‘gentleman’), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist).

[...] By following the tourists, we may be able to arrive at a better understanding of ourselves. Tourists are criticised for having a superficial view of the things that interest them – and so are social scientists. Tourists are purveyors of modern values the world over – and so are social scientists. And modern tourists share with social scientists their curiosity about primitive peoples, poor peoples and ethnic and other minorities.

p. 6

Wherever industrial society is transformed into modern society, work is simultaneously transformed into an object of touristic curiosity. In every corner of the modern world, labor and production are being presented to sightseers in guided tours of factories and museums of science and industry. In the developing world some important attractions are being detached from their original social and religious meanings, now appearing as monumental representations of “abstract, undifferentiated human labor,” as Karl Marx used to say. The Egyptian pyramids exemplify this. Sightseeing at such attractions preserves still important values embodied in work-in-general, even as specific work processes an the working class itself are transcended by history.

It is only by making a fetish of of the work of others, by transforming it into an “amusement” (“do-it-yourself), a spectacle (Grand Coulee), or an attraction (the guided tours of the Ford Motor Company), that modern workers, on vacation, can apprehend work as part of a meaningful totality. The Soviet Union, of necessity, is much more developed along these lines than the industrial democracies of the capitalist West. The alienation of the worker stops where the alienation of the sightseer begins.

My interest here is not to examine St. Ives and its creative community and histories entirely through the lens of the tourist, or as framed by the art historians’ view of it by looking at its visual representations. The intersection of these with the local community (a look at how both ‘colony’ and ‘local community’ could be defined is overdue and I will rectify this very soon) is much more useful. The artist would argue that he is not a tourist, and the tourist might argue that she is a visitor, such are the connotations of the idea of the Tourist, as MacCannell acknowledges. Each believes that it is their search that is truly authentic, and they have little in common with the tourist.

Another note, reflecting on MacCannell’s Marxist fetishization of  work and the transformation of labour into a tourist attraction, it is not only the fishermen mending their nets and bringing in the catch, or the artists who paints them that the tourist can see in St. Ives. There was a pilchard factory, mentioned in one of the guide books of 1877 for being responsible for the unpleasant smell, that was turned into a factory by Alec Walker, founder of Crysede, who produced hand-made wood block printed silks in the interwar years. Crysede, like the Ford Motor Company, also offered guided tours of their factory, enabling visitors to see the processes and people involved in producing the silk and sewing the dresses.

NOTES: Travel Guide Books

I am developing an obsession with guidebooks. I’m particularly fond of the little fold out maps. They contain opinions and advice on the nature of place and encounters with place.

The idea of sites for painting becoming sights for people to come and look at through the circulation and distribution of images is interesting. A site is somewhere artists come to paint, the site becomes a scene, tourists come to see the site of the scene, the scene becomes a picture postcard, more tourists come to see the sights/sites. This is something pointed out by Lubbren, that the art colony is a precursor to the holiday resort, where artists make a place known for its particular beauty, then the images of that place become known, which attracts people to visit. In turn also, the presence of the artists mean the development of facilities to meet their needs, which are developed further to accommodate the needs of tourists.

Denys Val Baker suggests this too in his book about the St. Ives artist community:

Thus that one scene, perhaps one moment, of local life, might be translated into a series of other moments, many of which would later be sent out into the world, to be hung in galleries, reproduced in books, and so on. And because of seeing those results, all kinds of people might be tempted to visit the place that inspired them.

Denys Val Baker, Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea 1959 p.22

So, back to the guidebooks. The images of Cornwall and St. Ives produced by artists which in turn attract other visitors are interesting, but a textual version of these images come in the form of the guidebook. The earliest one that I have stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop in London is Black’s Guide to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Published in 1877, its tenth edition, it pre-dates the first ideas of art colony in the county. The theory that it is indeed the artists which establish place as tourist site/sight, endowing a place beauty, making it attractive/attraction, is perhaps best illustrated by the short piece on St. Ives from Black’s:

The position of St. Ives, [...] is one of picturesque and uncommon beauty,; and it is to be regretted that the favourable impression which at first the tourist necessarily forms should be dissipated on his entrance into the town by its accumulation of nastiness. The streets are narrow and crooked; the shops mean and squalid; and everywhere pervades a fishy smell, “most tolerable, and not to be endured”.

Black’s Guide to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, 1877

As David Tovey points out in his survey of early guides in St Ives Art Pre-1890: The Dawn of the Colony, visitor accounts refer to St. Ives as being disorderly and putrid-smelling, and some even recommend avoiding the town completely. 1877 is the year that the branch line is completed, during a decade which sees the beginning of a decline in the fishing and mining industries.

BOOK: Designing the Seaside, Gray 2006

p. 7

Western seaside resorts are multilayered places, redolent with meaning for the present and memory of the past.

Seaside architecture, combined with a multiplicity of images related to the seaside, define its meaning and consumption.

p. 36

Discussion of arguments surrounding the perception and consumption of nature. Can nature be consumed? If not, how is it used, experienced, represented, perceived?

John Urry: The tourist gaze.

The visual sense was increasingly hegemonic in the sensing of the natural world, and nature, including the sea, was transformed in to an overridingly visual spectacle. In turn , the fundamental process of tourist consumption became capturing the gaze, each one of which could ‘literally take a split second’. Everything else in the tourist experience and tourist services was relegated as subsidiary.

p. 53

Once the middle and working classes were able to holiday by the sea, one persistent conflict revolved around whether resorts were select and respectable or popular and open to all comers. … A higher social tone could be attempted, for example, by resisting the the freeing of restrictions on bathing, entertainment and transport that might lure working class visitors and opposing the development of facilities, including piers in the second half of the nineteenth century and holiday camps in the  interwar period of the next century, thought to endanger a resort‘s reputation by making it more popular.

p. 65

Buying a room in a hotel, a ticket for a seaside attraction or simply sunbathing on a beach [also] involves buying into a more general idea of the seaside or a particular resort. We consume a reality and an image, and the two may not match.