Damn the Torpedoes

[Bill_McBride]

Mike,

But the sightseer can recover the Grand Canyon in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service.

It may be recovered by leaving the beaten track. The tourist leaves the tour, camps in the back country. He arises before dawn and approaches the South Rim through a wild terrain where there are no trails and no railed-in lookout points. In other words, he sees the canyon by avoiding all the facilities for seeing the canyon. If the benevolent Park Service hears about this fellow and thinks he has a good idea and places the following notice in the Bright Angel Lodge: Consult ranger for information on getting off the beaten track-the end result will only be the closing of another access to the canyon.

It may be recovered by a dialectical movement which brings one back to the beaten track but at a level above it. For example, after a lifetime of avoiding the beaten track and guided tours, a man may deliberately seek out the most beaten track of all, the most commonplace tour imaginable: he may visit the canyon by a Greyhound tour in the company of a party from Terre Haute-just as a man who has lived in New York all his life may visit the Statue of Liberty. The thing is recovered from familiarity by means of an exercise in familiarity. Our complex friend stands behind his fellow tourists at the Bright Angel Lodge and sees the canyon through them and their predicament, their picture taking and busy disregard. In a sense, he exploits his fellow tourists; he stands on their shoulders to see the canyon.

Such a man is far more advanced in the dialectic than the sightseer who is trying to get off the beaten track--getting up at dawn and approaching the canyon through the mesquite. This stratagem is, in fact, for our complex man the weariest, most beaten track of all.

It may be recovered as a consequence of a breakdown of the symbolic machinery by which the experts present the experience to the consumer. A family visits the canyon in the usual way. But shortly after their arrival, the park is closed by an outbreak of typhus in the south. They have the canyon to themselves. What do they mean when they tell the home folks of their good luck: "We had the whole place to ourselves"? How does one see the thing better when the others are absent? Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see? They could hardly answer, but by saying this they testify to a state of affairs which is considerably more complex than the simple statement of the schoolbook about the Spaniard who discovered the Canyon and the millions who followed him. It is a state in which there is a complex distribution of sovereignty, of zoning.

It may be recovered in a time of national disaster. The Bright Angel Lodge is converted into a rest home, a function that has nothing to do with the canyon a few yards away. A wounded man is brought in. He regains consciousness; there outside his window is the canyon.

The most extreme case of access by privilege conferred by disaster is the Huxleyan novel of the adventures of the surviving remnant after the great wars of the twentieth century. An expedition from Australia lands in Southern California and heads east. They stumble across the Bright Angel Lodge, now fallen into ruins. The trails are grown over, the guard rails fallen away, the dime telescope at Battleship Point rusted. But there is the canyon, exposed at last. Exposed by what? By the decay of those facilities which were designed to help the sightseer.

Mark

I hadn't read or even thought of "Ape and Essence" since I read it in college!  Welcome back Marcus!

[Adam Clayman]

Here's a fun one, that may or may not be germane to this discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

[Eric Smith]

Here's a fun one, that may or may not be germane to this discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Adam, THAT IS (axis of) AWESOME!!!  

[Charlie Goerges]

Adam, that's like a combination of the Davinci code and Nostradamus rolled into one. I think the smoking man might have them "eliminated".

[Adam Clayman]

I wonder what's Golf's four chords?

Ponds, Trees, Rough and length?

[Tim Taylor]

I like to have a peek at the course first. I've rarely been let down by the real thing after viewing pictures. There always seems to be something that the camera can't capture - the severity of slopes, the contours of the greens, the intimate nature of the routing - not to mention to overall ambiance or vibe of the place.

And, yeah, Tom Petty rules.

Tim

[Doug Wright]

Mike,

I've said many times on here on similar threads that I prefer seeing a course without studying it in advance, just as I prefer to see a film without reading the reviews. It's not always easy to do since there is such great information on this website. In any case, for example, I'm avoiding Old MacDonald threads till after I see it in October. 

[Richard Choi]

For me, it depends.

If it is likely that I am going to play that new course once (like many exclusive private courses), I want to know about that course as much as possible before I go. I would love to see all the photos available, and even better, I would love to play that course many times on computer simulation so that I know how the course really plays and I have some idea on where I should aim and what I should avoid.

If it is likely that I am going t o play that new course multiple times (as I will at Old Mac), I don't need to know as much going in as I will figure it out as I go along on multiple replays.

[Niall C]

Can't really say it better than Seans post above. The only thing I would add that this site, and others like it act as a couter balance to the "marketing" and outright rubbish that gets put out there by some course owners.

Niall