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Comment by 就是冷門 on October 10, 2021 at 10:19pm

During all this time Nathan and I are playing or rather trying to play table tennis. The uneven tick-tack of the hollow ball on the wooden table-board is akin to a broken metronome, and a metaphor for interrupted interpersonal communication. Although we try, we are not successful in establishing stable patterns of communication: as gusts of wind interfere in intra-traveller communication, physical reality and the reality of the social are entwined. This holds true for our interrupted interpersonal relations outside the domains of poetry and tourism – I have not been able to establish communication with Nathan, and our once close ties are severed for a number of year.

Perhaps due to frustration at our ineffective attempts at playing-communicating, I recall (by way of psychological compensation) other journeys we had enjoyed, in more or less the same familial composition. These trips were held some 15years earlier, during the late 1970s. In those trips we did not end our journey in

Eilat, but rather crossed it on the way proceeding southward, to the famed beaches of Sinai. The Sinai Peninsula was conquered by Israel in 1967 and evacuated by in 1982. In the late 70s, when it was still under Israeli occupation, it played a unique role as a truly liminal tourist space (Cohen, 1987; Lavie, 1990).

Sinai’s primordial landscapes, imbued with mythical significance in the national memory, and its spectacular beaches, had been popular destinations and places of escape for many. This is wherefrom the memories originate. The legendary red-and-white striped air mattress, about which we often reminisced years later (and about which I wrote several poems), and the nude colony: so new, fascinating and shocking for me (nudity was always strictly prohibited in Israel, cf. Lavie, 1990: 7–26).

Recollecting our earlier travel experiences introduces yet additional spaces and times. It suggests that the present excursion to Eilat is hued by our individual and shared (familial) travel biographies and recollections thereof, stretching from the time Nathan and myself were young children; from the time Nathan was still living in Israel, and his younger brother and sister – Ophir and Naomi, not yet born. And, crucially, these memories stretch from the time Nathan was well, prior to the eruption of his chronic illness. In other words, the tourist family’s retrospection is colored by major events that have transpired on the family’s stages. Our memories of our childhood excursions to Sinai amount toa story within a story, a trip within a trip, a distance within a distance. Memories of spaces are unfolding within each other, generating a disoriented, post-colonial impression.

Within the context of tourism, remembering is performative. As Edensor (1998: 137) reminds us, ‘[c]ollecting memories is part of the common-sense understanding of what holidays are for’. Indeed, this is true of all tourists: their accumulated tourist biographies both unfold and expand with every trip (Neumann, 1992, 1999). On this occasion we did not pursue the Sinai experience, but halted our trip in Eilat. Although we travelled south, we chose not to ‘break through to the other side [of Israel]’, as it were, to places that generated memories of nearly mythical quality for us, and stopped short at the southmost point under Israeli sovereignty.

Comment by 就是冷門 on October 10, 2021 at 10:17pm

Down south, beyond and ‘under’ the borders of national sovereignty, the present, and the social taboo, the ‘tourist body’ is powerfully present (Crouch & Desforges, 2003). It primarily takes the form of a naked Scandinavian male body, with what then seemed to me to be a huge flaccid penis, next to two nude

female companions (I realize in hindsight, that it was the first un circumcised penis I ever saw, as well as the first vulva). The physical proximity to a foreign and adult male body left me shocked, and aroused pre-pubertal anxiety: I remember how concerned I was with the thoughts, ‘when will my aunts wake up? Something must be done about this.’ The blurring of social borders in this heterogeneous space – between the normative and the transgressive, the clothed and the unclothed, the Bedouins (native), the Israelis and the Europeans, was of a liminal quality and left a powerful imprint in my memory (Noy, 2007b). Other memories had a more latency-period type of content, such as the striped airmattress, on top of which Nathan and I lay, snorkeling the truly amazing reef sat Dahab for hours, getting serious sunburns on our pale backs.

Gradually, from the evocation of the marching band to the childhood memories of our trips to Sinai, the ‘tourist present’ is becoming richer with echoes, shades and shadows. Furthermore, as I write these lines it occurs to me that Quiet Eilat is a piece in a string of descriptive travel poems which revolve around my relationship and interaction with Nathan in different spaces and times: from the backyards of apartment buildings in the towns of Herzliya and Kfar-Saba, though the beaches of Sinai in our childhoods, to the wide and alienated avenues of Los Angeles in our young adulthood.

Day excursions: Hindsight, reflexivity Although Nathan ‘is excited with the beach’, that is with the mundane, perhaps ‘secular’, recreational Eilatian experience, after a couple of days near the beach we decide to drive westward, spiraling up and away from Eilat and from the beach, into the granite mountains soaring behind the town. Like disciplined tourists, we favor a day with a guidebook in the mountains, rather than the ‘shallow’ experience of/on the beach, searching for a small spring. In this daytrip, we leave the urban setting of Eilat for the mountains, wandering off into the barren and rocky wilderness. Again, at stake is an excursion within an

excursion, a ‘second order’ trip. The major destination – Eilat – is transformed into a temporary home from which we depart to experience nature. A star shaped type of itinerary emerges: tourists depart from and return to the major destinations repeatedly, each time to a different mini-destination (Löfgren, 1999; Noy, 2005: 130).

These mini- intra-trip excursions supply an opportunity for an excursion-typeof reflexivity. By this term I mean that the tourist can view the destination froman additional perspective, by which she or he can then tell stories and recollectionsabout it, about leaving Eilat and returning to it. As the travellers ‘practice’repeated departures and returns in their trip, reflexivity and narrativity emerge,and tourists tell stories of the excursions they undertake. This is the same reflexivitythat underlies the tourist photography mania: taking pictures requires but alsoconstructs a symbolic, ontological distance between the tourist and the attraction.

It creates reflexivity, or a narrative distance between the viewer and theviewed (Sontag, 1990). From a narrative perspective, taking a picture meansone can now tell a story about the attraction. Looking (or overlooking) back atEilat from the mountains, our eyes have become photographic [as Handelman (2003) observes of television viewers].

Comment by 就是冷門 on October 10, 2021 at 6:06pm

Although we traveled by ourselves, with no guides to direct or confine us, the family is complied closely with the requirements set by the tourist role. While Nathan enjoyed the beach and wished to stay near it, the rest of us felt we needed to fulfill an obligation which is to checkmark a ‘day-excursion’, and so we left to the mountains. We followed closely a ‘tourist bible’ of sorts, which told us that somewhere in the mountains a spring exists, of which exact (scientific) volume is that of ‘four cubic meters’. It is as though we were making the following argument (before Nathan): ‘tourism is hard work. We cannot stay here by the beach, doing nothing, wasting valuable time. We need to engage in something more dramatic, something about which we can later tell stories; we need to accumulate more travel-related knowledge; we need to be on the move

perpetually.’ In this hypothetical utterance, the family assumes the authoritative plural voice (the authority imbued in the ‘we’), while Nathan is regarded in the single person and occupies an oppositional position.

Returning home(s)

The next move the poem describes concerns the return home, which is both a concrete and a symbolic gesture that bounds the time and the space of the trip. As we are northbound, heading back to the heartland, we stop and rest on the sides of a torturously long, dry and mind-numbing road leading from Eilat, through the Arava Desert to Jerusalem. Different tourists have different homes, and different senses of what home means for them and what the sphere of everyday life that is associated with it means. Hence heading back home, and heading back to one’s everyday spaces, means different things to different travellers. It was mentioned earlier

that Nathan and his family were no longer living in Israel. They emigrated to the United States in 1980, a transition which was quite traumatic for the small family.

At the time they emigrated, leaving Israel was a near taboo. Emigrants were notoriously referred to as ‘descenders’ (yordim), individuals who deserted the national Zionist ideal and the spaces in which it was embodied. Although Israeli emigrants established large and lively communities abroad, leading social and cultural Israeli exilic lives, alienation colored and problematized cross Atlantic communication (Shokeid, 1988). Hence, when we leave Eilat and ‘head back home’, we are actually heading to different homes, located in different continents; and the everyday divides and distances between us sadly re-emerge.

Comment by 就是冷門 on October 2, 2021 at 11:12am

Aunt Meira returns home to her one bedroom apartment in Tel-Aviv (which looks like a crowded family museum), I return home to my parents’ spacious apartment in Jerusalem, and Nathan and his family return home to their suburban home in the San Fernando Valley, where they have been living since they emigrated to the Unites States.

For our family, tourist spaces and activities are important places where we meet and spend time together. Somewhat paradoxically, but perhaps typical of the lives of modern families, we often meet only to travel more, and to spend time and place together outside our everyday times and places. The literature on family tourism accords with this observation. Following Smart and Neale’s(1999) work on ‘fragmented families’, Haldrup and Larsen (2003: 26) discuss the roles reflexivity, narrative, and photography have in ‘performing family’ in tourist contexts. They observe that tourism ‘becomes a drama of acting-out and capturing photographically conventional scripts of the “perfect” family in an era of “fragmented families”’ (see also Johns & Gyimothy, 2003).

Furthermore, while Urry’s (1990) gaze is directed at ‘material worlds’, Haldrup and Larsen observe that ‘the “family gaze” is concerned with the “extraordinary ordinariness” of intimate “social worlds”’ (2003: 24). While the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ does not refer explicitly to photography, it lends itself to the photographic eye and imagination. One can easily imagine a picture of Nathan and myself playing table tennis near the hotel’s pool (then empty), or a picture of the family walking pleasurably at night on the promenade, or a panoramic picture with the view of the Gulf of ‘Aqaba from the mountains. In these instances we are indeed‘ choreographing tourism places into theatres of family life’ (Haldrup & Larsen,2003: 32). Although travel writing is a verbal medium, under the semiotics of tourism it is also a visual or at least a vision-inducing medium. The verbal form, then, should not be confused with the medium, which is context-related: a poem describing a trip can supply a visual, picturesque experience by which it may actually be construed as a visual medium.

On the way back our mood is joyous. We are satisfied because everything during the excursion to Eilat proceeded well and no eruptions had occurred. In other words, we are content because we fulfilled the tourist role successfully. We did whatever was expected of us: playing table-tennis, strolling together on the promenade, reminiscing, and doing a day excursion, and we can now claim the cultural capital embodied in travel for ourselves as individuals and as a family. Perhaps we are also pleased that Nathan’s illness has not broken out or otherwise hindered the trip in any explicit fashion. Stopping at Yotvata on our way back, and engaging in one, last tourist pleasure, suggests Yotvata’s famous chocolate and mocha drinks are a dessert

for us. Stopping for sweet drinks further symbolizes – this time gastronomically –that the trip is indeed soon to end. After all, sooner or later after serving dessert, diners eventually leave the dinner table. In performative terms, diners/tourists end their performance and recede or continue from the tables or the stages of their social performances into their mundane lives. In this vein, the stop at Yotvata in both directions (to and from Eilat) amounts to passing through a culinary gate, functioning as the entrance to the departure from a space of tourist recreational consumption.

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 28, 2021 at 11:31pm

Concluding translations and transformations While the trip ends, the poem does not, and further translations and transformations take place. In the concluding stanza, which is meta-performative (dealing with the very process of composing a performance in the form of a poem), a different type of distance is described. It is an experiential distance that lies between the ‘narrated events’, embodied in the spaces and times of the excursion to Eilat, and their poetic and performative evocation. As noted by Edensor:

Selected sights and moments from holidays are recorded so that they can fit into personal life-stories, and provide stimulating and satisfying memories . . . . They are acts of recording, concerned with the compilation of memories that will be used at a future date. (Edensor, 1998: 137)

Travel literature concerns precisely the processes of ‘recording’ and ‘compiling’, which Edensor discusses. The recordings supply shared biographical ‘substance’, on which people – in this case our family – can later reminisce and romanticize. In the words of Haldrup and Larsen (2003: 39), tourists ‘desire to arrest time and make memories’. These memories ‘fit’ – to use Edensor’s term, into personal life-stories in many different ways, as the poem demonstrates.

The transformations described in the poem are threefold: first, a transformation of events into experiences in the particular form of hindsight recollection takes place. By narrativizing the memory of the excursion, the experience is reconstituted as a biographical ‘event.’

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 27, 2021 at 3:18pm

（Continue from above）A third transformation occurs when the written strip assumes a performative form, one which is audience-oriented. This is the second half of Edensor’s ‘acts of recording’ (1998: 137). For sometimes things are recorded in order to be retrieved. ‘Quiet Eilat’ was initially written for Nathan, as a present for his 21st

birthday, which was never delivered. The poem-as-souvenir was written in the aim of being a present that brings our family’s lives and life stories closer. In this regard the act of writing is an act of concretization, transformation of the mental into the material within the context of tourism. Yet I never felt the (material) poem was complete, and therefore I never introduced it to Nathan.

Somewhat akin to our interrupted table-tennis games in ‘Winter-time Eilat’, outside the excursion too we do not communicate. As a text then, the souvenir is akin to a postcard or a letter that has not been sent, but is nonetheless open for re-readings and reinterpretations (Derrida, 1987).

Akin to the Yotvata chocolate milk factory, located on the way to Eilat, these three transformations serve as gates on the journey back from the excursion. This is to say they are symbolic passages leading from the spaces of the excursion-memory, to the ‘present’. With every successive transformation, an ontic step is made away from the ‘raw events’ (‘fun’), in direction of the ‘present’ (whenever that is).  （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 26, 2021 at 11:23am

Epilogue

Because ‘tourism’ takes place in spatiotemporally distinct places and times, the tourist experience inherently and inevitably involves processes of representation that, together with transportation, serve to compensate for distances and discontinuities (symbolic as well as concrete). These processes supply what sociologist Erving Goffman termed ‘ritual access’ or ‘symbolic access’, which afford access to the desired spheres of tourism, concrete as well as symbolic (Goffman, 1981: 187). Through their dislocation from ordinary places, recollections of tourist moments and places have a particularly enduring and memorable effect in and on the biography of individuals, families, groups and communities (Noy, 2007a). This is true of representations of the trip to Eilat, which, in popular Israeli culture, is commonly viewed as a liminal and paradoxical place: ‘a virtual “abroad” in Israel’, as Azaryahu (2006: 121) puts it.

In and through this autoethnography I set out to explore and to critically expand on Cohen’s early notion of the ‘tourist experience’ (Cohen, 1979). Yet from a performative perspective, the paper asks of tourist representations of experiences not what they are but what are they for; not what they mean (subsequently conceptualizing intricate typologies thereof), but how are they (re) employed or (re)mobilized. It is here that the crucial moment of representation and performance arises. As mentioned earlier, the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ – a ‘piece’ or artefact of tourist discourse – was written with the aim of being presented as a present.

Through this act of writing, an instance of contextualized textualization, I cashed or materialized on the tourist memories we share, with the aim of reconnecting with my dear relative. The spaces and practices of tourism emerge as resources for shared experience, an experience that is accessible only vis-à-vis representation, usually in the form of memories. In this vein, tourism scholars are encouraged to adopt more constructivist rather than essentialist orientations, and thus consider conceptualizing tourists’ expressions of motivations, desires, experiences and reminiscences in performative frameworks.  （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 25, 2021 at 8:55pm

Reading the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ both commences and concludes with language concerns, and specifically with the notion of translation which is an embodied movement and (e)motion between different languages, senses and spaces. While the interpretation commences with addressing the language of the poem – ‘tourism English’, it ends with a discussion of the various transformations and translations that travel writing embodies and evokes: between memory (past) and re-enactment (present), event and narrative, personal, familial and public spheres, tourism and hominess, and more. Metonymically, the poem offers a tourist space in and of itself, a textual self-made souvenir into which readers enter and from which they exit. As indicated in the Introduction section, translation and travel (auto)ethnography are construed as media of communication in

and of themselves (Bhabha, 1994; Clifford, 1997). Indeed, these are transformative media, which afford the traveller/reader access to something alien (Clifford, 1997: 182). As texts, (auto)ethnographies are ‘translations and not descriptions’ (ibid: 183). From this perspective, ‘Quiet Eilat’ is not primarily a representation of a tourist experience, but part of the tourism (experiential) world.

The hiatuses mentioned above illustrate the complex, multi-varied nature of the tourist experience, a nature which, in the capacity we are (also, sometimes) laymen tourists, we often deny. In the capacity of conducting a ‘guerilla warfare against the repressive structures of everyday lives’ (Denzin, 1999: 572, and above), and in appreciating the fact that tourism is indeed part of everyday life, this paper also wished to shed light on the emotional downside of the tourist experience. Following the poem, the autoethnography too is hued with shades of aloneness and nostalgia, which it sets to explore. This is partly because Nathan’s chromic illness did not simply disappear as we crossed the thresholds dividing the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ – as capitalist commercial ads would have had it, and partly because we arrived in Eilat in the winter.

In ‘Quiet Eilat’, tourism spaces are not only recreational resources. Rather, they are both concrete and symbolic spaces – circumstances, perhaps – that offer vocabulary and syntax of a complex of experiences, memories, denials and emotions; ‘a combination of the material and the metaphorical’ (Crouch, 2002:208). They offer a language wherein experience – whether it is individual or familial – is reflected, reciprocated and reverberated by the surrounding. In this capacity the paper shows how disciplined tourists’ notions are of the ‘in’ places and times in which leisure can be consumed. This discipline does not allow the expression of alienated sentiments. （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 24, 2021 at 10:39pm

Finally, following recent advances in ethnography, and in feminism and postcolonial studies, reading ‘Quiet Eilat’ raises issues concerning the discourse of tourism studies, that is writing about tourists and tourism. Although the poem was written naïvely, the question as to what is naïveté and whether there is indeed such an objective, ‘naïve’ perspective rises poignantly. Consider the power matrix that underlies the triadic relations between (1) the people who are described in the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ (who traveled to Sinai in the late 1970s and to Eilat in the early 1990s) – mainly Nathan and myself; (2) the person who wrote the poem (in 1994); and (3) the person who wrote the academic text – the autoethnography, about the poem (in 2006–2007). Power relations and inequalities between the researcher, the writer and those represented in the text (the ‘field’), are clearly at stake here, complicated by the particular arrangement of power relations within the family.

By way of epilogue I wish to return to the interconnection between professional life and disciplinary academic socialization, on the one hand, and personal life and familial relationships, on the other, an interconnection which is characteristic of autoethnographic inquiry (Ellis, 2007). In the professional sphere, writing an autoethnography amounts to an empowering and emancipating act, because it assumes a public state (i.e. publication). It positions the scholar within a particular field or sub-discipline, ties her or him to a particular social network etc. The autoethnographic text assumes, beseeches, and cultivates a particular type of (academic) readership, which can radically change the discursive and interpretative practices of academic writers and readers.

On the personal sphere, I have not been in touch with Nathan in the last few years. He has refused the invitations which I extended before and during a post-doctorate year spent in the US in 2001. Yet my invitations were admittedly sparse: coping with Nathan’s severe illness is difficult for me, and I had and still have other needs to satisfy – my own growing family and my academic career.

I was initially furious with my relative, blaming his refusal to receive therapy (and recurrent institutionalizations) for the continuous deterioration in his health and for causing a deep divide in our relationship. I guess this is what psychologists call the ‘denial phase’. Only quite recently, and as a consequence of writing this autoethnography, I came by way of self-reconciliation to view Nathan’s crude rejections as expressing perhaps an agentic decision to avoid contact with me in this period of his life, or to establish a different type of relationship, one which is yet to be conceived. （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

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