LoveSexTravelMusik - Rodge Glass

Subtitled ‘stories for the easyjet generation’, Rodge Glass's new collection of short fiction LoveSexTravelMusik has already been described as ‘beautiful and profound’ by the august Traveller magazine, journal of record for the budget airline industry. This is no glossy piece of escapism, however. The key to the collection can be found in Andre Gide's letter to Jean Schlumberger, which Glass quotes: 'everything that I expected to give me delight and which persuaded me to undertake the journey had disappointed me - but out of that very disappointment, I have acquired an unexpected education'. These stories explore the ambiguities of modern travel, visiting the places where tourism has become cultural imperialism and probing beneath the surface-deep interactions between traveller and destination. As many of Glass's characters find, the very act of observing a place affects the behaviour of the place being observed.

Opening story A Weekend of Freedom chimes most with the easyjet cliche of the hedonistic weekend in a country with a low GDP per capita. The newly unemployed narrator flies to an unnamed Eastern European destination to celebrate his friend Greenie getting a five year contract in Dubai. Once off the plane, the freedom given by relative wealth translates into bad behaviour, particularly towards the women they encounter; they are thrown out of a strip club for groping a dancer, but agree that 'she'd basically been asking for it'. Later, one of their number, a solicitor, propositions the hotel receptionist. Normal rules are suspended, and they reassure themselves that 'the locals expect this kind of thing' - the unspoken assumption is that money will excuse anything. Shopping for souveniers on their final day, the friends turn up relics of Stalin and Hitler in the local market; the faceless, globalised market forces which see tourists descend on the capital are seen as the latest phase in a sequence of agressors seeking to dominate the local culture.

Liberation Street shows the other side of the coin, as female sex tourists flock to Tunisia to bask in the attention of young local men. At home, they are defined by their erotic capital, which is fading; here, the simple fact of their economic capital is enough to persuade the boys to 'ignore the sea of tight shimmering virgins to concentrate on us, the second hand'. As in the 2005 film Heading South, the men are infantilised by the Western women who patronise them, and by extention so is their culture. Michel Houellebecq's Platform presented a sensationalist version of this story, ending with an attack by Islamic extremists. Glass's vision is less flashy, presenting the young men with a choice: emigrate for economic freedom with a Western woman or stay and fight for cultural freedom in the Arab Spring.

Later, After Drink You Can Turn World Upside Down and The Hips on Planet Latina explore areas where local cultures are beginning to synthsise elements of the culture bought by tourists. In the former, a bar in Hong Kong offers a tawdry representation of Western culture, as a band of Filipinos chug through Pink Floyd cover versions for eight hours a night and jaded tourists try to recapture the feeling of home. In the latter, an oven salesman in Tunisia stumbles upon a bar frequented by local workers in the tourist trade, who have created their own version of the experience they serve up in their day jobs. Glass uses a discussion of a pop video featuring a Latin American singer and a rapper, bought together for their cross-continental marketing potential rather than any musical sympathy, to symbolise the awkward attempts of global commerce to fuse disparate cultures into a palatable (and sellable) experience. 

The Monogomy Optician describes a coach tour through Uruguay, in which the guide's questionable claims are blandly accepted by the tourists on board, exposing the shallowness of their interaction with their new environment. The narrator ponders on the difference between reachers and settlers, concluding that the world is full of 'women who don't like their men very much, and men who don't know how to cope with that'. This logic of settling is just as easily applied to international travel; now that international travel is conveniently packaged, planned out in European coffee shops and facilitated by American Express, there is no incentive to reach out and grasp the opportunities offered by modern air travel.

So what is the alternative to these shallow and damaging experiences? Woven into the stories are three 'orientations'. Set in Copenhagen, Rome and the Amazon, these pieces act as sardonic tour itineries, taking the language of the Lonely Planet guide and subverting it. The orientations encourage the tourist to slip through staff entrances, reveal dark local secrets, and force their readers to confront the political and economic situation of the area they have chosen to visit. If tourism offers a phantasmagorical view of the world, these orientations act as a form of psychogeographical dérive, giving an authentic and meaningful experience not normally afforded to travellers.

This idea is developed further in the collection's highlight, Do All Things With Love. Here, a retired 'touroid' and an overworked businesswoman, both widowed although she is younger, are bought into contact by a freak occurance. The tourist, Jeffrey, is walking down the street in Toronto when he begins to bleed copiously from an unseen wound; Amanda is on her way to the office from a coffee shop where she has been flirting with the 'fresh-off-the-boat Italian boys behind the counter', but feels compelled to stop and help him. Initially, she is scornful of the genial former teddy boy, who acts 'like an unelected ambassador for tourists everywhere' with his exagerrated friendliness, but her act of kindness forces her to slow down and contemplate her situation. Before long, she is thinking 'what would really happen if I never went into the office again?' The pair walk back to Jeffrey's hotel, where the bleeding finally stops. They part, but have experienced a genuine interaction, possibly the only one in the entire collection, caused by a one-in-a-million chance.

So what is the profound message hinted at in Traveller magazine? As the quotation from Gide suggests, the stereotypical attractions of budget globetrotting may leave the tourist feeling hollow and jaded, experiencing only an ersatz form of culture. If, on the other hand, travellers are willing to look beyond the images presented to them on arrival, the availability of cheap travel gives almost unlimited opportunities for new experiences and interactions, enriching people on both sides of the tourist/local divide. They must learn from disappointment and embrace the new, the unlikley and the chance occurence. Glass's satirical prose illustrates both possibilities with a wry humour and imagination, making him an ideal tour guide and companion.