Shipping Out Magazine Article Discussion Article 1: Shipping Out?attached as file? question: ?answer with complete sentences and write as much as you can?

Shipping Out Magazine Article Discussion Article 1: Shipping Out?attached as file?

question: ?answer with complete sentences and write as much as you can?

1) Wallace’s essay “Shipping Out” was originally published in Harper’s Magazine. Before you read his essay, go to Harper’s website (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and read about its history. Based on how they describe themselves, what they publish, and any other details you notice, who do you think is Harper’s intended audience? Describe this audience’s concerns, interests, and assumptions, education level, and socio-economic status. Avoid broad stereotypes!

2) As you read “Shipping Out,” list as many conventions of travel writing as you can identify from the beginning of the essay to the end. Make sure to note page numbers and quote as needed.

3) Now that you’ve finished reading the essay, consider its rhetorical effects on the audience. How does Wallace’s use of conventions (identified (in #2) affect his audience (described in #1)? What specific response(s) do these conventions elicit from this audience?

4) What is Wallace’s message? What is his purpose for writing? How does this intended response (explained in #3) from the audience serve Wallace’s purpose?

Article 2: The Great Pleasure Project (link “The Great Pleasure Project” (Links to an external site.)

questions??answer with complete sentences and write as much as you can?

5) Neville’s essay appears in Ski Magazine. Go to their website (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and explore its features. Based on what they publish, how it’s designed, and any other details you notice, who do you think is Ski Mag’s intended audience? Describe this audience’s concerns, interests, and assumptions, education level, and socio-economic status. Avoid broad stereotypes!

6) As you read “The Great Pleasure Project” list as many conventions of travel writing as you can identify from the beginning of the essay to the end. Make sure to note paragraph numbers and quote passages as needed.

7) Now that you’ve finished reading the essay, consider its rhetorical effects on the audience. How does Neville’s use of conventions (identified (in #6) affect his audience (described in #5)? What specific response(s) do these conventions elicit from this audience?

8) What is Neville’s message about skiing in North Korea? What is his purpose for writing? How does this intended response (explained in #7) from the audience serve Neville’s purpose? F 0
0
On the (nearly lethal)
comforts of a
luxury cruise
BY oAUIO FOSTER IllALLA[E
THE FOUR-COLOR
I
have now seen sucrose beaches and water a
very bright blue. I have seen an all-red
leisure suit with flared lapels. [ have smelled
suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hor
flesh. I have been addressed as “Man” in
three different nations. I have seen
500 upscale Americans dance the
Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets
that looked computer-enhanced.
I have (very briefly) joined a
conga line.
I have seen a lot of really big
white ships. I have seen schools of
little fish with fins that glow. I have
seen and smelled all 145 cats inside
the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key
West, Florida. I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen
fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses
BROCHURE,
PART I
and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel
drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a
woman in silver lame projectile-vomit inside a
glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically
. at the ceiling to the two-four beat of
the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.
I have learned that there are
actually intensities of blue beyond very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than
I’ve ever eaten, lind done this
during a week when I’ve also
learned the difference between
“rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching”
in heavy seas. I have heard a professional
cruise-ship comedian tell folks, without irony,
“But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits
David Foster Wallace is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent novel, Infinite Jest, will be published by Little, Brown in February. His last piece for Harper’s, “Ticket to the Fair,” appeared in the July 1994 issue.
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and pink sport coats and maroon-and-purple
warm-ups and white loafers worn without
socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to clutch your
chest. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens
ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether
snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether
the trapshooting will be held outside, whether
the crew sleeps on board, and what time the
Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise
mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and
a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in
n nearly
one week, been the object
have see
of over 1,500 professional
a lot of peop e
smiles. I have burned and
peeled twice. I have met
nake
t to have
Cruise Staff with the
prefer nO
1
monikers “Mojo Mike,”
na~e
“Cocopuff,” and “Dave
seen near y
the Bingo Boy.”
I have felt the full clothy
weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a
dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-ofthe-gods-like sound of a cruise ship’s -hom. I
have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg and
learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own cabin toilet. I have
now heard-and
am powerless to describereggae elevator music.
I now know the maximum cruising speed of a
cruise ship in knots (though I never did get
clear on just what a knot is). I have heard people in deck chairs say in all earnestness that it’s
.the humidity rather than the heat. I have seen
every type of erythema, pre-rnelanomic lesion,
liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, pot belly,
femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants
that have not taken-Le., I have seen nearly
naked a lot of people I would prefer not to have
seen nearly naked. I have acquired and nurtured a potentially lifelong grudge against the
ship’s hotel manager (whose namewas Mr. Dermatis and whom I now and henceforth christen
Mr. Dermatitis I),an almost reverent respect for
my table’s waiter, and a searing crush on my
cabin steward, Petra, she of the dimples and
broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse’s
starched and rustling whites and smelled of the
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1 Somewhere he’d gotten the impression that I was an investigative journalist and wouldn’t let me see the galley,
bridge, or staff decks, or interview any of the crew in an
on-the-record wa)’, and he wore sunglasses indoors, and
epaulets, and kept tLJ1kingon the phone for long stretches
of time in Greek when I was in his office after 1’d skipped
the karaoke semifinals in the Rendez- VOllS Lounge to
make a specialappointment to see him, and 1 wish him iU.
H
H·RrER’~
IAl;AZINE
I JA,:UARY
cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed
bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my
cabin within a centimeter of its life at least ten
times a day but could never be caught in the actual act of cleaning-a
figure of magical and
abiding charm, and well worth a postcard all
her own.
I now know every conceivable rationale for
somebody spending more than $3,000 to go
on a Caribbean cruise. To be specific: voluntarily and for pay, I underwent a 7-Night
Caribbean (7NC) Cruise on board the m.v.
Zenith (which no wag could resist immediately
rechristening the m.v. Nadir), a 47,255-ton
ship owned by Celebrity Cruises, Inc., one of
the twenty-odd cruise lines that operate out of
south Florida and specialize in “Megaships,”
the floating wedding cakes with occupancies
in four figures and engines the size of branch
banks.? The vessel and facilities were, from
what I now understand of the industry’s standards, absolutely top-hole. The food was beyond belief, the service unimpeachable, the
shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the
tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and white
it looked boiled. The western Caribbean’s
blue varied between baby-blanket and fluorescent; likewise the sky. Temperatures were
uterine. The very sun itself seemed preset for
our comfort. The crew-to-passenger ratio was
1.2 to 2. It was a Luxury Cruise.
All of the Megalines offer the same basic
product-not a service or a set of services but
more like a feeling: a blend of relaxation and
stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic
tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of
the verb “to pamper.” This verb positively studs
the Megalines’ various brochures: ”
as you’ve
never been pampered before,” ”
to-pamper
2
Of the Megalines out of south Florida there’s also
Commodore, Costa, Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess,
Royal Caribbean, Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line,
Holland America, Cunard, Norwegian Cruise Line,
Crystal, and Regency Cruises. Plus the Wal-Mart of the
cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to
sometimes as “Carnivore.” The present market’s various
niches-Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest,
Corporate, Party, Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury-have all pretty much
been carved and staked out and are now competed for viciously. The TNC Megaship cruiser is a genre of ship all
its own, like the des troyer. The ships tend to be designed
in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia,
and both captained and owned, for the most part, by
Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting,
since these are the same peoples who have dominated sea
travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned
by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships’
smokestacks isn’t an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a
Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk.
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yourself in our Jacuzzis and saunas;’ “Let us pamper you,” “Pamper yourself in the warm zephyrs
of the Bahamas.” The fact that adult Americans
tend to associate the word “pamper” with a certain other consumer product is not an. accident, I
think, and the connotation is not lost on the
mass-market Megalines and their advertisers.
PAMPERED TO DEATH, PART I
ome weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a half
~ gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship. The
news version of the suicide was that it had
been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad. But I think part of it
was something no news story could cover.
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury
Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and
complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on
board the Nadir (especially at night, when all
the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and
gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair”
is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious
word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to
what people call dread or angst, but it’s not
these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to
die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of
knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and
going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to
jump overboard.
I, who had never before this cruise actually
been on the ocean, have for some reason
always associated the ocean with dread and
death. As a little kid I used to memorize
shark-fatality data. Not just
attacks. Fatalities. The Albert
Kogler fatality off Baker’s
Beach, California, in 1963
(great white); the USS Indianapolis smorgasbord
off
Tinian in 1945 (many varieties, authorities think mostly
makos and blacktip P, the
mos t-fa ta 1ities- a ttr ibu tedto-a-single-shark
series of
incidents around Matawan/
Spring Lake, New Jersey, in
1926 (great white again; this
time they netted the fish in
Raritan Bay and found human parts in gastro-I know
Shaw as Quint reprised
the whole incident in 1975’s
Jaws, a film, as you can imagine,
that was like fetish-porn to me at
age thirteen.
3 Robert
which parts, and whose). In school I ended up
writing three different papers on “The Castaway” section of Moby-Dick, the chapter in
which a cabin boy falls overboard and is driven
mad by the empty immensity of what he finds
himself floating in. And when J teach school
now I always teach Stephen Crane’s horrific
“The Open Boat,” and I get bent out of shape
when the kids think the story’s dull or just a
jaunty adventure: I want them to suffer the
same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial
nada, bottomless depths inhabited by toothstudded things rising angelically toward you.
This fixation came back with a long-repressed
vengeance on my Luxury Cruise.t and I made
4 I’ll admit that on the very first night of the TNC 1
asked the staff of the Nadir’s Five-Star Caravelle
Restaurant whether Icould maybe have a spare bucket
of au jus drippings from supper so that I could try
chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck,
and that this request struck everybody from the maitre
d’ on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed,
and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux
pas, because I’m almost positive the maitre d’ passed
this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it
was a big reason why Iwas denied access to places like
the ship’s galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous
scope of this article. It also revealed how little I understood the Nadir’s sheer size: twelve decks up is 150
feet, and the au jus drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water,
with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or
excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably
looked like a pushpin from that height anyway.
such a fuss about the one (possible) dorsal fin I
saw off starboard that my dinner companions at
Table 64 finally had to tell me, with all possible tact, to shut up about the fin already.
I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t
mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for
whom their own mortality is something more
than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies
to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in
various stages of disintegration. And the ocean
itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing
speed-rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw
some real horrors in port, local boats that looked
as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid
and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by
what they float in.
Not so the Megalines’ ships. It’s no accident
they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly
meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of
capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea. The Nadir seemed to have a
whole battalion of wiry little Third World guys
who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Writer
Frank Conroy, who has an odd little essaymercial in the front of Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC
brochure, talks about how “it became a private
challenge for me to try to find a piece of dull
bright-work, a chipped rail, a stain in the deck,
a slack cable, or anything that wasn’t perfectly
shipshape. Eventually, toward the end of the
trip, I found a capstan [a type of nautical hoist,
like a pulley on steroids] with a half-dollar-sized
patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a
roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as
he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and
walked away with a nod.”
Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from
unpleasantness, and since consciousness of
death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem
weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But
on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of
triumph over just this death and decay. One
way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery,
Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to
which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the
Nadir is an unsubtle analogue. But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this
regard the 7NC’s constant activities, festivities,
gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It
makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent.> The hard-play
option promises not a transcendence of deathdread so much as just drowning it out: “Sharing
a laugh with your friends” in the lounge after
dinner, you glance at your watch and mention
that it’s almost showtime ….
When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the
talk among your companions turns to, ‘What
next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little
dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in
the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck?
After discussing all your options, everyone
agrees: ‘Let’s do it alll'”
Dante this isn’t, but Celebrity Cruises’
brochure is an extremely powerful and ingenious
piece of advertising.
Luxury Megalines’
brochures are always magazine-size, heavy and
glossy, beautifully laid out, their text offset by
art-quality photos of upscale couples’? tanned
faces in a kind of rictus of pleasure. Celebrity’s
brochure, in particular, is a real two-napkin
drooler. It has little hypertextish offsets boxed in
gold, with bites like INDULGENCE BECDMES EASY
and RELAXATION BECOMES SECOND NATURE and
(my favorite) STRESS BECOMES A FAINT MEMORY.
The text itself is positively Prozacian: “Just
standing at the ship’s rail looking out to sea has
a profoundly soothing effect. As you drift along
like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life
is magically lifted away, and you seem to be
floating on a sea of smiles. Not just among your
fellow guests but on the faces of the ship’s staff
as well. As a steward cheerfully delivers your
drinks, you mention all of the smiles among the
crew. He explains that every Celebrity staff
member takes pleasure in making your cruise a
completely carefree experience and treating you
The Nadir’s got literally hundreds of cross-sectional
maps of the ship on every deck, at every elevator and
junction, each with a red dot and a YOU ARE HERE. It
doesn’t take long to figure out that these are less for orientation than for reassurance.
5
6 Constant references to “friends” in the brochure’s text;
part of this promise of escape from dread is that no cruiser is ever alone.
7 Always couples, and even in group shots it’s always
groups of couples. I never did get hold of a brochure for an
actual Singles Cruise, but the mind reels. There was a
“Singles Get Together” (sic) on the Nadir that first Saturday night, held in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, which after an
hour of self-hypnosis and controlled breathing I steeled
myself to go to, but even the Get Together was threefourths established couples, and the few of us Singles under like seventy aU looked grim and self-hypnotized, and
the whole affair seemed like a true wrist-slitter, and I beat
a retreat after half an hour because Jurassic Park was
scheduled to run on the TV that night, and I hadn’t yet
looked at the whole schedule and seen that Jurassic Park
would play several dozen times over the coming week.
,
,
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HARrER’S~IAGAZIi’iEI)ANL’ARYl
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