danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

So, it occurs to me that I didn’t give a detailed account of the trip to South Carolina since I returned last week, so, here goes.

The Westin hotel at Hilton Head Island is nice enough.  The room was pleasant, with a large, comfortable bed, and a couch near a sliding glass door that opened to a balcony overlooking a courtyard with oak trees and a small pond with a fountain.  To the left was a small circular pool, and slightly obscured by shrubbery was a hot tub.  Beyond still more trees was the main pool, which was constantly in use by the children of guests.  There was a cabana with yellow towels to the right, which guests used both at the pool, and at the beach which was to the left of our room, beyond the dunes.  The beach access was via a boardwalk, and the sand at the end was white and deep, and at the shore a bit grittier, with bits of crushed shells.

We took a long walk the first evening, down the strand to where it curved out of sight to the west.  North of the hotel were private homes, many of which had their own boardwalks over the dunes of sea oats to the beach.  I was surprised by how wooded the beach was, with tall pine trees in several places coming right up to the sand.  I have watched for years as Atlantic hurricanes head invariably toward the Carolina coast.  It would seem, however, that this particular stretch of shore has been spared.  The large beachfront homes had, in many cases, enormous unprotected windows.  I wondered how expensive it would be to ensure these structures.

At a point far to the northeast of the hotel (visible at the bottom left of this satellite image), the shore curves sharply to the north by northwest, and marks the end of the island, and the opening of a channel into the inter-coastal water way.  It was just past that point, at some wooden pilings driven into the sand, that we turned around and headed back to the hotel.

That evening we went to a local shopping center to pick up some supplies to get us through our stay.  I bought Hawaiian Punch, which I love.  That night, and each night thereafter I watched the Olympics on TV, though I was surprised and disappointed by the small low-def television in our room.

The next morning I attempted to begin reading Robinson Crusoe on the deck down by the pool, but the shouting and cavorting of children made it so that I couldn’t concentrate.  The weather in the morning was overcast, and surprisingly cool, so that it felt and looked like Florida in the winter.  Miriam had the afternoon off, so we went exploring the island, stopping first to have lunch at a barbecue place, which was tasty.  Miriam had picked up a map from the concierge desk, and she had an idea to check out an area on the southwest part of the island which supposedly had a lighthouse.  It was terribly disappointing, however, as we found that this was all merely stagecraft.  The “lighthouse” was not a real lighthouse, but just a three or four story round structure built for show above some lame gift shops selling garbage nobody could possibly need.  There were some large yachts in the marina there, and some smaller vessels for hire to wealthy vacationers wanting to fish for sharks.  I say wealthy, because the fees were in the several hundreds of dollars per trip.  Seeing how every structure on the island (except the fake lighthouse) was painted in one of only about three or four drab colors, and how entirely void of culture and imagination this whole place seemed to be, we went back to our hotel bitterly disappointed.  It could not escape my notice that the whole Hilton Head enterprise seemed to rely on a type of caste system, in which every person I saw at leisure was white, and, almost without exception, every servant and laborer was black or Mexican.  Some of the personnel at the front desk of the hotel were white, as was an employee of a bookstore I went to.  But every person doing actual work was a minority, and it depressed me to realize how society there depended upon this social stratification.  That isn’t to say that Oprah or Tiger Woods wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms.  Rather, what was so depressing to me was the observation that, for many scores of children living in Hilton Head, or visiting regularly, this hierarchy might reinforce the notion that it is the privilege of rich people to have endless leisure, while people of color exist to serve.  I have traveled around the country, and to other parts of the world, even, but never had I seen such a degree of what was referred to in Samuel Johnson’s time as social “subordination”.  As someone who lives in a diverse community, I found this to be shocking, and dispiriting.  Vacation is obviously something that requires a certain amount of disposable income, and for many working poor, there is far less income to be alotted to liesure these days.  But, in spite of its total lack of culture, inspiration and imagination, Hilton Head, South Carolina attracts a far less varied spectrum of society than Walt Disney World.

So, finding there to be only one worthwhile attraction (the beach), and finding the next two days of our stay spoiled by rain, I spent all the remainder of my time either in my room reading, or in the lobby watching the Olympics and drinking delicious lemonade.  I am sorry to say that free lemonade was the best thing about Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Filed under: Rantings, Travel on August 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Now that HDTV is almost everywhere, standard-definition TV can be seen for what it is: horrible.  Many people, of course, still have standard sets at home, but by now everyone has seen an HDTV in action, and it’s hard not to be impressed.  The Bits blog today discusses how the last four years have really seen the format rise to prominence.  Eric Taub cites the number of hours of HD coverage at the Beijing games versus those held in Athens, and it’s clear that high-def is now standard.

I watched tons of coverage of the Athens games, but I doubt a second of it was in high-def, since I didn’t know anyone at the time with an HD set.  Apparently, in Athens, NBC’s high-def coverage was entirely separate from their network coverage, with different camera angles and announcers.  This year, every second of the games is being broadcast in HD, and the quality is really outstanding if you can see it.  While in South Carolina last week I didn’t have access to an HDTV (which is surprising considering that the much less expensive Hyatt Park Place near O’Hare had a gigantic plasma screen, and this fancy-pants Westin in Hilton Head didn’t), so I had to make do.  But knowing what I was missing made it less enjoyable.

Of course, at the moment, my two year old HDTV is dying a painful death, and is basically unwatchable.  It was the first high-def set I saw for under $500, and since it looked so much better than the standard-def sets that were still the most commonly available at Best Buy at the time, the “Insignia” was what we bought.  But what remorse!  The top third of the picture is about half again as bright as the bottom two thirds, and above a very distracting line across the screen the picture is extraordinarily distorted, so that a round shape (like, say, a human head) is stretched into a long oval, and parallel lines curve inward toward some unseen horizon.  It’s enraging.

So we clearly need a new television, and, obviously, HD is the only way to go.  On one hand, prices for televisions seem astonishingly high compared to a decade ago.  But that may be because in 1998 most people only had a TV of thirty inches or less.  I remember when a thousand dollar TV was automatically a gigantic appliance that took up about ten square feet of floor space.  Now that same thousand dollars will buy you a pretty large flat screen HDTV that may even mount on the wall.  So, while the average American household now probably spends twice what they did a decade ago on their TV sets, they get something much better.

Filed under: Sports, Technology, Television on August 19th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Olympic sports can be divided into two categories: ones which I could not conceive of doing myself (gymnastics, platform diving, etc.), and ones which are more relatable, even though I know I’d never have the skill (archery, rowing, cycling, etc.).  Running is of the latter variety, insofar as I know what it is to run, and even race against another person.  The difference, naturally, lies in the level of talent.  I cannot run a hundred meters in ten seconds.  That is simply incredible.  Olympic track events are, to me, the essence of athleticism.  The footrace is sport in its purest form.  And since I know what it feels like to run, and since I know I couldn’t run a 26 mile marathon in two days–much less two hours–I am in awe of these athletes.

Filed under: Musings, Sports on August 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

I freely confess that I am no expert on gymnastics, either men’s or women’s.  But I do know one thing: if you don’t stick the landing, the performance is much less impressive, whatever else came before.  So it is frustrating for me to see so many gymnasts fail to land squarely on two feet, and, somehow do better than the few gymnasts who can stay still.  I hear that gymnastic routines are more technically difficult than ever before, and I don’t know enough to deny that.  To the contrary, I watched an athlete on the still rings a few days ago who powered his body above his head in such a way as to not only defy all laws of physics, but according to the television announcer, to be the first gymnast capable of said maneuver.  It was impressive.

But, while all these routines are becoming more challenging, the gymnasts simply cannot land without taking a big step, hop, or falling down entirely, even when it seems like that would be the least complicated aspect of their sport.  And it is troubling to see an athlete who does stick the landing score lower than one who doesn’t, marked down instead for not attempting some element that is supposedly more difficult, but which my eyes are too inexperienced to distinguish.

Meanwhile, the obviously underage Chinese gymnasts and the ridiculous new method of score tabulation has sullied, to me, what is an otherwise fantastic Olympic sport.  My proposals: let’s see some birth certificates; and let’s go back to a system in which a “10.0″ is perfect.  Everybody understands that.

Filed under: Current Events, Sports on August 15th, 2008 | No Comments »

The rain this morning is preventing me from doing some things I’d like to do, like ride my bike down to the post office and check out Goering’s to see if they’ll give me a decent price for a couple books I’d like to sell back.  If not I’ll sell them on Amazon, but if they come close to the prices I see for the same books on Amazon, I’ll sell them to Goering’s and buy some more books I’ll need for the coming semester.  Plus, it may be that students from my Age of Johnson class have sold back their copies of Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, a book which we covered very briefly at the end of the semester, which I didn’t buy at the time because of the $18 price tag.  However, if some of my fellow students have sold back their copies to Goering’s, I might be able to pick it up for $9 or so.  Also, other literature students may have sold back copies of some books I’d like to pick up as well.  I still need Richardson’s Clarissa (which is over 1,500 pages!) for my upcoming Eighteenth Century Novel course.

In a related story, I went to Barnes and Noble this week, where they have their own line of classic novels, but was disappointed in them.  It wasn’t for the price, since bundled as they were three or four novels to a volume they were quite inexpensive.  But I noticed that they had few, if any, endnotes, and at least one novel–it may have been one of Victor Hugo’s–was abridged.  I am becoming quite fond of the editions in the Penguin Classics series, the Oxford World’s Classics series, and the Norton editions.  I have been reading the Penguin edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and I must say that in older literature, it is helpful to have some degree of editing for spelling or punctuation (these books frequently have words spelled different ways from one chapter to the next, for some reason), and footnotes for allusions that are made or geographical references.

In a less related story, I see that NBC is set to have a Robinson Crusoe television series this fall.  I predict swift cancellation.

Now, as I hear it raining still harder I am beginning to suspect that I won’t be able to get out today.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Meteorology, Television on August 14th, 2008 | No Comments »