Sunday, September 21, 2008

David Foster Wallace

IDEAS & TRENDS

The Best Mind of His Generation

Suzy Allman for The New York Times

CONSIDER THE AUTHOR David Foster Wallace in 2006.

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 20, 2008

Reviewing a biography of Jorge Luis Borges in The New York Times Book Review a few years back, David Foster Wallace attacked the standard biographical procedure of mining the lives of writers for clues to their work, and vice versa. Borges’s stories, he insisted, “so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.”

What’s true of writers’ lives is also, surely, true of their deaths. The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace’s suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted. But the strength of the temptation should nonetheless be acknowledged. Mr. Wallace was hardly one to conceal himself within his work; on the contrary, his personality is stamped on every page — so much so that the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous.

Beyond this, Mr. Wallace was the kind of literary figure whose career was emblematic of his age. He may not have been the most famous novelist of his time, but more than anyone else, he exemplified and articulated the defining anxieties and attitudes of his generation.

Mr. Wallace’s vibrant body of work — reportage and criticism as well as two novels and three volumes of shorter fiction — pursued themes that in retrospect look uncomfortably like portents. His last book of stories was called “Oblivion,” and an earlier collection included the stories “Death Is Not the End,” “Suicide as a Sort of Present” and “The Depressed Person.” Even his most exuberant explorations of absurdity are edged with melancholy. “Infinite Jest,” the enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition, is, for all its humor, an encyclopedia of phobia, anxiety, compulsion and mania.

The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose style that characterized both his journalism and his fiction — crystallized an unhappy collective consciousness. And it came through most vividly in his voice. Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware (and nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words) — it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first time. It was — is — the voice in your own head.

Or mine, at any rate. When, as an undergraduate with a head full of literary theory and a heartsick longing for authenticity, I first encountered David Foster Wallace, I experienced what is commonly called the shock of recognition. Actually, shock is too clean, too safe a word for my uncomfortable sense that not only did I know this guy, but he knew me. He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways and ahead. It was impressive enough that he could do philosophy — the mathematical kind, not just the French kind. But he also played tennis — Mr. Wallace, in fact, had competed seriously in the sport — and could quote lyrics from bands you only pretended you’d heard of. Without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else.

All this shone through Mr. Wallace’s fiction. He had the intellectual moves and literary tricks diagrammed in advance: the raised-eyebrow, mock-earnest references to old TV shows and comic books; the acknowledgment that truth was a language game. He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

Another way of saying this is that Mr. Wallace, born in 1962 and the author of an acclaimed first novel at age 24, anchored his work in an acute sense of generational crisis. None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if it’s too late? What am I supposed to do now?

This is a common feeling for those of us born in the 1960s (for the record, I’m four years younger than Mr. Wallace). If you were, let’s say, a faculty brat in the 1970s, living in a provincial college town — Champaign, Ill., in Mr. Wallace’s case or Chapel Hill, N.C., in mine — you felt a weird post-traumatic vibe from many of the adults you met. And, if, as an adolescent or an undergraduate, you found your way into books, you kept seeing — on syllabuses, at the campus bookstore, on your parents’ shelves — the monuments of the previous era, most intriguingly the masterworks laid down by brave exemplars of experimentalism, iconoclasts who disassembled the worn machinery of the novel and put it back together in crazy, ingenious ways: William Gaddis and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. These guys — and most were guys — pointed the way forward.

But they also blocked the path. Mr. Wallace knew this very well. He regarded the lions of postmodernism as heroes, but also as obstacles. “If I have an enemy,” he said in the early 1990s, “a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.” That’s a lot of fathers for one Oedipal struggle, and Wallace expended a lot of energy trying to assimilate and overcome their influences.

But he was not only preoccupied with staking out a position in relation to other writers. Again and again, he returned to a basic, perhaps the basic, philosophical question facing anyone with a blank screen and a story to tell. What am I going to say? How am I going to say it? It’s never an easy question, but perhaps no one illustrated its difficulty with so much energy, good humor and conceptual rigor. In the story “Octet,” a section begins “you are, unfortunately, a fiction writer” and then proceeds, hilariously and infuriatingly, to diagram the dimensions of that misfortune. One long, brilliant, crazy footnote ends: “None of that was very clearly put and might well ought to get cut. It may be that none of this real-narrative-honesty-v.-sham-narrative-honesty stuff can even be talked about up front.”

And yet Mr. Wallace never stopped trying. Even when his subject matter took him outside himself — into the world of lobsters, tennis players, cruise-ship vacationers or presidential campaigners — the fundamental problems of writing remained in the foreground. I suspect that Mr. Wallace’s persona — at once unbearably sophisticated and hopelessly naïve, infinitely knowing and endlessly curious — will be his most durable creation.

“Infinite Jest” is a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric. The other big books published since by members of Mr. Wallace’s age cohort — “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon — are more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to. They are family chronicles, congenial hybrids of domestic melodrama, immigrant chronicle, magic realism as well as the more traditional kind. Not easy books, necessarily, but not aggressively difficult, either.

In their different ways, though, these novels and their authors — along with other itchy late- and post-boomer white guys like Richard Powers, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers — stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow. Not because his version of their generational crisis was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous. In some ways, the figure he resembles most is Ezra Pound. Not the loony, ranting figure Pound eventually became, but rather the innovative and uncompromising modernist he was in his prime. Pound, in the teens and 1920s, understood the literary logic of modernism, with its poetics of difficulty and allusiveness, more clearly than any of his contemporaries. He pushed his insights further, into an extreme, enormous, all-but-unreadable book — the “Cantos” — that is to high modernism what “Infinite Jest” is to late postmodernism.

Outside of graduate classrooms, not many readers swallow the “Cantos” whole, and a similar fate may lie in store for “Infinite Jest.” Mr. Wallace is likely to remain available to general readers in the smaller, less daunting doses of his stories and journalism. He will also survive as an ally and an influence, a link between the giants who inspired and enraged him and whoever comes next. But he will be terribly missed by those of us who were lost with him in the maze of self-consciousness and self-doubt that defined our peculiar destiny. He illuminated the maze brilliantly, even if he couldn’t show us the way out.


What's On My Other Blogs today: (click blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Tiny Homes

I'm headed this way soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/travel/20070216_TINY_FEATURE/blocker.html

The Next Little Thing?

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE FREEWAY Jay Shafer took his 90-square-foot house on tour this summer, rolling along a Los Angeles highway.

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By STEVEN KURUTZ
Published: September 10, 2008

IN his 20s, Michael Janzen made pottery and lived in a cabin in rural California that he estimates was “about the size of a two-car garage.” After he married, he went into Web design for a bank, and now at 40 has all the trappings of a successful homeowner: in-ground pool, maid service, a yard landscaped with Japanese black pine bonsai trees. His 1,800-square-foot home in Fair Oaks, Calif., a one-story model by Streng Brothers, midcentury builders in the Eichler mold, is of a kind coveted by fans of modern design.

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Related

Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed (September 11, 2008)

Dot Earth: Small (Car, House) Is Beautiful (September 10, 2008)

Think Small (February 16, 2007)

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Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

THE LILLIPUTIAN LIFE Some homeowners are using their new little houses as offices or retreats, like the 80-square-foot one owned by Michael Janzen.

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Karie Hamilton for The New York Times

Others choose to actually live in theirs, like Dee Williams, whose 84-square-foot knotty-pine house has a tight but cozy interior.

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Karie Hamilton for The New York Times

So why has Mr. Janzen spent the summer building an 80-square-foot “tiny house” out of free stuff he found on Craigslist?

There he is on nights and weekends, designing a floor plan whose dimensions are measured not in feet but inches, nailing scavenged wood pallets together for the frame, or fixing up an old trailer to serve as the foundation. The initial reaction from his wife, Julia: “Is this a Unabomber building?”

Not exactly. According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”

Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.

“It’s a very exciting moment,” said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of “Little House on a Small Planet” (Lyons Press, 2006), “because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called ‘Bigger is Better.’ I’m not the Gallup poll, but I hear the same story over and over: We got rid of that big house, and now I have time to see my husband. Before, we used to work all week and then we’d spend the weekend on the house.”

Gregory Paul Johnson, a founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, said that the notion of very small houses becoming popular was “an absurdity” five years ago. “But there are so many powerful forces at work right now,” he added, “like rising energy costs and the mortgage crisis. I think people want small homes because they cost less to purchase, maintain, heat.”

In July, Mr. Johnson, who lives in a 140-square-foot house made by the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company of Sebastopol, Calif., took to the road to promote his vision of living small, along with Jay Shafer, Tumbleweed’s founder. The two men drove from Victoria, British Columbia, to San Diego, pulling Mr. Shafer’s house behind them on a trailer. (Tiny houses, which rarely have foundations, are often built on trailers.)

Along the way they stopped to hold workshops and give (very brief) home tours. Some events drew hundreds of people. “It seems like everybody is fascinated by the idea of living in a tiny house,” said Mr. Shafer, who started Tumbleweed eight years ago. “But for a long time, I was just selling the dream.”

His business is still modest, but in the past year Mr. Shafer has sold five houses and 50 sets of plans, up from a yearly average of one house. The houses range in size from about 70 to nearly 800 square feet, cost $20,000 to $90,000 to build, and resemble birdhouses: boxy shape, wood siding and high, pitched roof.

Other builders also report increased demand. Brad Kittel, owner of Tiny Texas Houses in Luling, Tex., said he had built 10 homes this year, up from four in all of 2007.

In recent years, small dwellings have begun to get the high-design treatment, which could attract more people. The London-based designer Nina Tolstrup built the 388-square-foot Tiny Beach Chalet, which has drawn attention on design blogs. One of the stars of the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit on prefabricated houses is the Micro Compact Home, a 73-square-foot cube by the British architect Richard Horden.

“When you build small you can spend money on higher-quality materials,” said Jared Volpe, a Web designer in North Ferrisburgh, Vt., who runs the blog smallhousestyle.com. Mr. Volpe said he is often amazed at how aesthetically pleasing many of the latest small homes are. In the year since he started his blog he has received increasing numbers of e-mail messages from people interested in small homes — a trend he attributes in part to the poor economy. “People will need to heat their 3,000-square-foot house this winter, and it’s going to cost double of what it did a few years ago,” he said.

For Mr. Janzen, a tiny house is not an immediate solution to his frustrations with large-scale living; he has no intention of cramming his wife and young daughter into 80 square feet. Instead, he plans to use the structure as an office, or park it on his in-laws’ farm as a weekend retreat, a more traditional use for tiny houses. But he will treat it as an “intellectual exercise,” he said, that will allow him to develop “an idea of the other extreme of size.”

“I’ll have a sense of where the balance is,” he added — a sense that he hopes will help his family decide on a reasonable goal for downsizing, something he is eager to do soon. “We bought this house, I think, for prestige,” he said, sounding chastened.

But while Mr. Janzen is dabbling with tiny living, others are plunging in. Tara Flannery, a 25-year-old college student in Seattle, plans to move within the next few months from the Craftsman-style two-story house she shares with roommates into a Tumbleweed house. The decision was largely financial.

“I wanted to buy my own place by 30, and the way the housing market is going that’s not going to happen,” she said, referring to the tightening credit market and the fact that home prices remain high in Seattle, despite the mortgage crisis.

In a way, Ms. Flannery’s tiny house, which will be about 100 square feet with a sleeping loft and will cost roughly $40,000, is a modern twist on the starter homes of the 1950s suburbs; it offers her a way into home ownership, of a sort, without the debilitating costs. “I can spend my money traveling instead,” she said.

It’s an unencumbered lifestyle that Dee Williams, a hazardous waste inspector an hour away in Olympia, Wash., has embraced. Four years ago, she sold her 1,500-square-foot bungalow in Portland, Ore., and downsized to an 84-square-foot house made of knotty pine that she built herself for $10,000 and parked in a friend’s backyard, where she lives free in exchange for helping her friend with chores. (She bathes in the friend’s house because her bathroom doesn’t have a shower, though most tiny houses do have both a shower and a toilet.)

Ms. Williams, 45, said that before the move, “I was an environmentalist, but not a very dedicated one.” She built her house, which she outfitted with solar panels and propane heating, both to “walk the talk” of eco-consciousness and “to unshackle myself from a mortgage and doing repairs.” Although last year, like most Americans, she saw a sharp rise in her monthly energy bill, the increase — from $4 to $8 — didn’t exactly bankrupt her, she said.

Mr. Janzen, meanwhile, worries that an activist like Mr. Shafer, the Tumbleweed founder, “would look at someone like me and say I’m only taking a half-step.”

Asked if that were the case, Mr. Shafer said he doesn’t advocate for everyone to live as he does. “I know 100 square feet is too small for most people,” he said, including his new bride, who lives next door to Mr. Shafer in a 700-square-foot house (although he is planning to build her a 300-square-foot replacement). Instead, he wants to be a living example encouraging people to downsize, even if it’s only to a moderately smaller home.

The Janzens plan to do just that, as soon as the housing market bounces back and they can sell their current home without taking a loss. The couple wants to move back to Mendocino County, where early in their marriage they lived in that 450-square-foot cabin. “I think I would have eventually said, do we really need all this?” Mr. Janzen said. “But it probably wouldn’t have happened until retirement. Now I hope my 40s will be about having free time and doing the things I want to do.”

More Articles in Home & Garden » A version of this article appeared in print on September 11, 2008.

Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed

Jamie Rector for The New York Times

HOME EXTENSION Small prefabricated sheds are gaining in popularity. Ryann and Dylan Perlstein play outside the one in their Los Angeles backyard. Their parents let them use the shed as a playroom for now, and their mother, Christina Simon, calls it “cool.”

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By MICHAEL CANNELL
Published: September 10, 2008

THREE years after renovating their 1903 brownstone in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Greg and Cheyenne Morris turned their attention to their backyard, which contained an odd assortment of disused items — sinks, toilets, Virgin Mary statuettes, wheels from street vendor carts and a moldering stucco garden shed. They cleaned up the yard, made preparations to demolish the shed and asked an architect to draft plans for a free-standing studio to be used as a bedroom and office.

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The Next Little Thing? (September 11, 2008)

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Michael Falco for The New York Times

AB PREFAB Cheyenne and Greg Morris, (with Jimmy), installed a Kithaus K4 aluminum shed in their Brooklyn backyard.

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Michael Falco for The New York Times

The Morris's Kithaus K4 aluminum shed.

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Jamie Rector for The New York Times

UTILITY ROOMS Christina Simon, right, and her husband turned their Modern-Shed unit in Los Angeles into a play space.

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Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

Marie Delahaye tucked her Modern Cabana shed behind her ranch house in Walnut Creek, Calif., to use for meditation and as an art studio.

The plans were drafted, but faced with the prospect of more construction, they chose to buy a Kithaus K4, an 11-by-17-foot prefabricated room designed by Tom Sandonato and Martin Wehmann. It arrived within three weeks of their mailing a deposit check, and took a week to assemble, without the hassle of permit applications or unexpected construction costs.

By late July, it sat handsomely beneath maple and pine trees at the end of the yard, a miniature modern pavilion. They celebrated on the evening of its completion by stepping inside to eat popcorn and watch “Freaks,” the 1930s cult classic.

“It was expensive,” said Mr. Morris, a photographer, who spent $76,000 for a Kithaus with a bathroom, ipe wood deck and louvers, “but it was worth it to not have any more contractors and electricians traipsing through my house.”

Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago. So far, the market is still small, though a tipping point of sorts may have been reached this year, when Design Within Reach began selling the Kithaus, along with furnishing packages to turn it into an instant office, bedroom, pool house or den.

“In terms of popularity, these sheds are roaring ahead, in part because of their innate simplicity,” said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefab homes. “They’re mobbed whenever they’re exhibited at design shows.”

In fact, the shed threatens to upstage full-scale modernist prefab homes, which have begun to lose their bargain appeal after years of hype. According to Mr. Sylvester, the most popular cost from $250 to $400 a square foot including installation, which is more than a frugal consumer would pay for a home built by an architect and contractor.

And for homeowners drawn to the kind of warm, willfully friendly modernism put forth by Design Within Reach, the new sheds represent a chance for flirtation without commitment. Buyers who would not choose to live in a full-scale prefab home might indulge in a small-scale fantasy of the California-modern lifestyle such houses represent.

Beyond that, there are plenty of practical reasons for the shed surge. As of 2004, more than 20 million Americans worked at least partially from home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a 2006 Census study showed that more than five million Americans did so full time; for some, the shed provides an instant office at a convenient remove from household distractions.

“People are comfortable with the idea of working from home in a way that they weren’t just a few years ago,” said Ryan Grey Smith, founder of Modern-Shed, a small Seattle-based firm that has sold 130 room-size structures since it was founded in 2003, half of them in the last year. “Houses built 50 years ago don’t work for us that well today. People need offices more than they need, say, formal dining rooms.”

Whether homeowners use the shed for work, guest lodging or cocktails, the add-on space may be preferable to the dubious prospect of trading up in a housing slump.

There is also an element of immediate gratification. Sheds generally do not need foundations, and almost all are less than 120 square feet, which means they do not require permits in most states. Buying one is more like buying a car than a house.

But the new sheds have an appeal that goes beyond the practical: Like architectural follies in the Victorian garden, they draw people away from the distractions of home life to the tranquillity of the backyard. “It’s transformative,” said Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “You cross a threshold into another realm just a few steps from your home.”

The high-design shed appears to hold particular appeal for women, who rarely have much dedicated space of their own in the American home (unlike men, who have historically laid claim to home offices and dens). Roughly 60 percent of Modern-Shed’s customer inquiries, for example, come from women, according to Mr. Smith.

“The women are left out,” said Casper Mork-Ulnes, a founder of Modern Cabana, a San Francisco firm that has sold roughly 60 sheds in four years of operation, more than half to women. “They need a space away from the kids and television.” Nearly 80 years after Virginia Woolf described the need for a room of one’s own, these miniature buildings may be starting to address it.

Two years ago, Marie Delahaye bought a $15,000 shed from Modern Cabana as a personal retreat, tucking it behind the ranch house in Walnut Creek, Calif., that she shares with her husband and two children. “My husband isn’t consciously aware that he’s doing it, but he’s claiming more and more space in our home,” she said. “It was hard for me to even maintain my stuff in a corner.”

She got the shed a few months after turning 50, which she says was not a coincidence, and uses it for meditation and as a studio for art projects with friends. “It beats getting divorced,” she said.

For certain buyers, the shed may be an outlet for baby boomer remorse. Encumbered by mortgages and 5,000-square-foot homes, some Americans of means are looking for ways to reconnect with lost values of simplicity, sustainability and forthrightness — values that seem to be embodied by the sheds’ basic materials and designs. “For people my age, in their 50s, the dreams of their youth didn’t hold up, but now they have some resources and a little bit of land,” said Will Bruder, a Phoenix architect whose small, lightweight structures were one inspiration for today’s modernist sheds. “It’s about what could have been,” he added, “or what should have been.”

For others, though, the allure of modernist shed all comes down to looks. “From the moment I saw the pictures I fell in love with it,” said Christina Simon of the 12-by-16-foot Modern-Shed she and her husband installed behind their Los Angeles home last year. They ended up using it as playroom for their children, ages 5 and 8. But, she said, “we could have turned it into anything. What matters is that it’s cool, and we love looking at it.”



What's On My Other Blogs today: (click blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
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Sunday, September 07, 2008

Being A GOOD Traveler

Lessons From the Frugal Grand Tour
Illustration by Ingo Fast Slide Show: Highlights »
Three hundred years ago, wealthy young Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the upper crust of the Continent. No one knows who came up with it, but their adventures soon had a perfectly appropriate name: the Grand Tour.
This summer, I embarked on a Grand Tour of my own, reinventing the classic European journey as a budget-minded, modern-day jaunt. Where the original Grand Tourists carried letters of credit granting them access to riches, and letters of introduction to society figures, I had just 100 euros a day (about $160 when I began, but more like $150 today) and the e-mail addresses of several friends of friends. As I faced 13 weeks of travel, I was feeling somewhat less than grand.
Nightmarish visions of doner kebabs and seamy hostels flashed through my head. Would I dine solely on supermarket bread and cheese? Do midnight battle with mosquitoes in un-air-conditioned attics? Would my only companions be 22-year-olds obsessed with cheap booze and Dutch “cafes”?
The Gay Pride Parade in Amsterdam. Slide Show: Highlights »
But as readers of my blog learned this summer, I didn’t have to hold back. In Calais, I slept in the artistic luxury of the Cercle de Malines bed-and-breakfast. In Malta, I plucked capers from the roadside, feasted on braised rabbit and dove into crystalline Mediterranean waters. I watched “Giselle” in Edinburgh, “The Tin Drum” in Gdansk, and the Gay Pride Parade in Amsterdam. I courted composers in Rome and flâneurs in Bucharest, and tracked down my ancestors in Lithuania. I even gambled the night away at the 007-worthy Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco.
Along the way, as I journeyed across a final tally of 16 countries, I discovered that the high life was easily within the Frugal Traveler’s reach — as long as I followed a few simple guidelines:Think like a local
Everyone wants to shop like a Parisian, eat like a Roman and party like a Berliner. The trick, I learned over a summer spent trying to absorb European culture, is to ignore the guidebooks and magazine articles, and to simply adopt the persona of a local.
For starters, locals don’t stay in hotels with other tourists; they rent full-fledged apartments through local real-estate Web sites like PAP.fr (France), Kamernet.nl (the Netherlands) and VivaStreet.it (Italy).
Video
That’s how I found my cute studio in Paris. (If you don’t read French, Dutch or Italian, there’s always Craigslist.) Not only did it help me pretend that I was a local, but it was larger and cheaper than any hotel I found online. My pad cost 350 euros a week, and lay in a corner of the 10th Arrondissement that was nameless but filled with character. One block away was a bustling immigrant enclave where halal butchers hacked lamb shanks, folk music warbled from Turkish cafes and low-key bars catered to the late-night hipster crowd.
In the other direction was the Canal St.-Martin, a broad waterway connecting the Seine to the countryside. A decade ago, friends told me, this was a no-go drug zone. Today, its banks are home to spontaneous Ping-Pong and pétanque matches, arthouse cinemas and cozy waterside bars. This is also where amateur artists sketch scenes atop bridges and where firefighters run drills in “Battlestar Galactica”-style helmets. One thing you won’t see is a tourist. Still, the Louvre was just a 15-minute walk away (five minutes if you take advantage of the Vélib free-bicycle program; www.velib.paris.fr).
A frugal house-warming party in Paris. Slide Show: Highlights »
Having your own pad has another benefit. Yes, you can save money by cooking some of your own meals, but you can also throw a lavish but frugal dinner party, as I did chez moi on the final Sunday of my weeklong sublet. Shopping at the Marché d’Aligre and Franprix, a supermarket known for its low prices, I whipped up a well-received zucchini soup, Charentais melon with prosciutto, rotisserie chicken and even duck confit for an ad-hoc group of 20 friends and friends of friends — all for about 50 euros. Needless to say, it was B.Y.O.B.
At the end of my Parisian “stay-cation,” I felt like a true (if temporary) denizen of the 10th. But I also wondered: which neighborhood to conquer next? The far edge of the 20th, where all the artists were moving? The industrial areas along the Seine in the 13th? The seedy but gentrifying Faubourg St.-Denis? The great thing about being tourists rather than actual locals, I realized, is that on every visit, we can pick a neighborhood to suit our mood, and for a short time become whoever we want to be.Make yourself useful
As much as I love city life — restaurants, galleries, bars, shopping — it can also feel dull and consumerist, not to mention hard on the wallet. As an antidote this summer, I turned to Wwoof-ing — that is, participating in World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (http://www.wwoof.org/), an international program that places volunteers on farms everywhere from Australia to Arkansas to the Alps. For a small membership fee (15 euros in France, for example), you can tend goats in the Jura, fix stone walls in Provence or, as I did, grow vegetables south of Toulouse — with lodging and meals completely free.
The farm I worked on for five days was owned by Dominique and Cyril Sarthe, who’d run a pizzeria near Toulouse for 13 years before opting for the rural life. They lived in a big, quirky, crusty old farmhouse with a library of French comic books, a friendly black dog named Loute and a Lamborghini (a Lamborghini tractor, that is).
Fresh vegetables from the farm. Slide Show: Highlights »
Every day, I would get up early to help them in the garden: pulling weeds, transplanting lettuces, carrying buckets of grain to feed the rabbits. Sure, it was manual labor, but it wasn’t too strenuous, and besides, I was out in the French countryside, with the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees visible in the distance, sky-spanning crimson sunsets every evening and fine, huge lunches every afternoon (oh, I miss that chicken-and-chickpea tagine with homemade harissa!). Some people pay thousands of dollars for this kind of experience, but I got it for next to nothing — and improved my French to boot.
Wwoof-ing, I also learned, is not the only way to enjoy a “working vacation.” At the marina in Monaco, I met Ryan, a young Algerian, who told me it was easy to get jobs on the dozens of megayachts that dock in the principality. No experience necessary. Simply approach the captain and ask for work; if he likes your face, Ryan said, you might land a berth on the high seas — and 100 euros a day. Talk about frugal travel! When was the last time you took a vacation and actually turned a profit?
Go beyond the Eurail Pass
For many travelers planning long-term excursions in Europe, the Eurail Pass is the obvious solution to the problem of getting around. There’s just one other problem: it’s expensive. A pass covering France and Italy, where I spent the first five weeks of my trip, would have cost 327 euros — more than I spent buying separate tickets. I’m not saying the Eurail Pass is a bad deal. For the particularly itinerant, it may save a lot of money. But there are many other options. For starters, airlines — and not just the low-cost carriers that link virtually every town in Europe. In spite of high oil prices, competition has driven prices down on many routes. Air Malta, which I flew from Rome to Malta, and then from Malta to Cyprus, offered fairly low rates (62 euros for the first leg), and that second leg (157 euros) was a code-share operated by Emirates, an airline not exactly known as a budget traveler’s favorite.
Less visible, but possibly the best deal in Europe, was the Eurolines network of buses, which claims to serve 500 destinations daily, from Madrid to Tallinn to Istanbul. I took the overnight bus from Vilnius, Lithuania, to Gdansk, Poland, a route that’s served by no direct trains. The trip cost 135 Lithuanian lita (about $62 at the time) and was utterly uneventful — exactly how you want it to be when you’re trying to sleep in a standard bus seat.
Of course, there is one way of getting around that’s even cheaper. It’s …Rely on the kindness of strangers
Picture a sweaty young American, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and white newsboy cap, standing at the side of a dusty highway in the implacable Mediterranean sun, arm in the air, thumb outstretched. That was me in July, as I attempted to hitchhike from Nicosia, the divided capital of the island of Cyprus, to the tip of the Karpaz Peninsula, 100 miles away across the Turkish-ruled north. Low on money but high on the thrill of the open road, I put myself at the mercy of the island’s population, crossing my fingers they would pause to help a wanderer in need.
Luck, however, was unnecessary. Over four days, I snagged 14 rides, from a pair of artists drinking coffee in a Nicosia bookstore to a harpoon fisherman who delivered me right to the entrance of the Oasis Hotel, a small, stunning, isolated resort on the northern side of the peninsula. Only once did I have to wait more than 10 minutes for a ride, and then only because I was standing on a particularly small side road.
The restaurant at the Oasis in Cyprus. Slide Show: Highlights »
Perhaps surprisingly, hitchhiking in northern Cyprus was extremely safe. I really only needed my Leatherman knife and multitool to tighten the battery leads on a car that wouldn’t start. Still, I often wondered (as did my readers) if this would be safe for women as well, so I asked all I ran into about their own experiences. Giulia and Catherine, two musicians who were staying at the Oasis, said absolutely no hitching in Cyprus or Turkey — they’d already been dealing with stares and come-ons. But at least four other women, Cypriots and American college students, said they hitchhiked all the time with virtually no problems. Prospective thumbers should consult sites like Digihitch.com for advice on safety and cultural issues.
What stunned me about thumbing it in Cyprus was the abundant kindness — a ride was never just a ride. Nicky Zero, a Turkish guy dressed head to toe in camouflage, bought me an iced coffee. The harpoonist gave me a sack of the sweetest plums I’ve ever tasted. And Rifat, a civil engineer visiting Karpaz with his wife, sisters and friends, invited me to a beachside cookout. As we grilled beef and liver kebabs and drank cold beers (which we opened with that Leatherman multitool), I wondered what could have inspired such generosity on everyone’s part.
“It’s just our hospitality,” Rifat said.
Generosity Trumps Frugality
The Dutch are famous for their frugality. So are the Catalans. Does that mean you should visit Amsterdam or Barcelona and expect to find a budget traveler’s paradise? Not exactly. Frugal people make frugal businesspeople. Barcelona tapas bars, for instance, will calculate your bill by counting every single toothpick you used to stab your bacon-wrapped dates. You get what you pay for, no more, no less.
A bowl of gnocchi at a restaurant in Rome. Slide Show: Highlights »
In Rome, and throughout much of the Mediterranean, meals are an opportunity for hosts to demonstrate how much they love their customers. At one restaurant, when my friend Robin asked for a little antipasti to start, the waiter piled his plate so high with thin-sliced prosciutto and marinated vegetables that Robin couldn’t finish. And at the end of the multicourse meal, the waiter simply left a frosty bottle of limoncello on the table. It was up to us to drink as much as we wanted.
In Menton, on the French Riviera near the Italian border, I also uncovered a stunning example of hospitality at the restaurant l’O à la Bouche. After one great meal there — an aioli of cod and fresh vegetables —I asked the owner, José, if I could return to videotape his kitchen. Not knowing I was from The Times, he responded with an offer: if I promised to send him the footage, he’d give me a meal on the house. That dinner — sweet baby clams, linguine with zucchini flowers, mineral-tinged white wine — was one of the best of the summer. It was then that I learned that José was, in fact, from Catalonia. But it was clear from his generosity that he really belonged on the Riviera.
Redefine “Europe”
What is Europe anyway? These days, nobody really knows. Is it the traditional destinations of England, France, Germany and Italy? Is it the ever-expanding European Union? Does it include Turkey? Russia? North Africa?
For frugal travelers, Europe’s flexible identity is a boon. Everything you can find in the traditional — and often expensive — lands of the Grand Tour is also available somewhere else on the Continent for much less.
An exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. Slide Show: Highlights »
Interested in art and architecture? Head, as I did, to Bucharest, Romania, where Modernist and Art Nouveau buildings hide under sheaths of ivy at the ends of quiet streets, and where the 115 Digital Art Gallery and the Rosalb de Mura fashion boutiques are pushing creative culture toward the avant-garde. With lots of hotel rooms under 60 euros a night, you might not mind that Romanian cuisine isn’t quite Roman cuisine.
Craving Old Towns and Hanseatic history? Try Gdansk, the 1,011-year-old city on Poland’s Baltic Sea coast, where — following the advice of you, my readers — I discovered not only a lovingly recreated 16th-century Old Town but also a hip, cosmopolitan region of street-theater festivals, quirky bars and beachside nightclubs.
The shipyards in Gdansk. Slide Show: Highlights »
Cities like Gdansk and Bucharest also offer something you won’t find in France or Italy: the opportunity to observe formerly Communist countries dealing with the legacy of the past and the promise of the future. In Gdansk, the shipyards that birthed the Solidarity movement are inching toward bankruptcy and closure, even as Poland’s overall economy grows stronger every day, and the “milk bars” that once fed the workers now survive as nostalgic tourist destinations.
In other words, get to the New Europe — whatever that may mean to you — soon, before it gets old, well known and far, far from frugal.
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