January 18, 2023 • 50 mins
Brendan visits Japan on a trip that puts the “junk” in junket. Then he speaks with Marius Kociejowski, author of The Serpent Coiled in Naples, an immersive plunge into the Italian city where skulls are worshiped and blood soaks into the stones. Plus comedian Jessi Klein answers your questions about parent-child separation on planes, and opines about her favorite travel activities: sitting near the ocean and drinking.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin the furthest the way I've ever been from home
was when I went to Japan. A popular travel website
that helps people temporarily run out their homes asked me
to make a podcast pilot about the positive experiences people
(00:35):
had using their service. Since I needed the money and
not lost wasn't off the ground yet, I agreed. I
told my friend Laris about it over drinks one night,
and he flagged a potential problem. The thing is, the
only stories people really want to hear about from a
company like that is what went wrong. The hardest stories,
you know, the guests that left the door unlocked and
(00:58):
the bear wandered in. The homeowner who set up a
secret camera. The renter who was looking for Q tips
and found a box of nail clippings. That last example
seemed a little too specific, but I was too scared
to ask if he was making it up. Of course,
(01:19):
the company didn't want to highlight horror stories. Instead, the
list of suggestions they sent was filled with charming anecdotes
about how their service had enhanced people's lives. One was
about an adopted woman who rented a place in another
state that turned out to be the home of her
biological sister. Heartlifting, sure, but also a bit like the
(01:41):
beginning of an A twenty four horror film. And that's
how I found myself on a business class flight to Japan.
If I was going to get paid to tell happy stories,
I might as well make the most of it. Book
a ticket for the most interesting destination on their list
(02:01):
of ideas. First stop was Tokyo, but my ultimate destination
was Nagoya, the fourth most populous city Japan. The story
I was tracking down came from a man named Kenzo.
Kenzo was a self described businessman who was raised in Nikoya.
His elderly parents were struggling financially when he heard about
(02:23):
the company's service. Years ago. His parents had bought an
old farmhouse in the country where allegedly Samurai once trained.
Now the family rented out the house on the company's website,
and Kenzo's mother had become a thriving entrepreneur, like an
elderly Japanese Gwyneth Paltrow or a pre prison Martha Stewart.
(02:48):
Upon arriving in Nogoya, I met up with Ko, a
local journalist who I had ranged to have translate for me.
As we wandered around the city. I felt a kinship
with the place as a native of Philadelphia. A gritty,
second tier industrial city kind of spoke to me on
some level. We stopped for lunch and had chicken cutlets
drenched in Nagoya's preferred ingredient, a red soybean paste made
(03:10):
of hatchamso venito stock and sugar. It's oozy, salty tang
reminded me of Philly's preferred ingredient, cheese whizz. After lunch,
we met up with Kenzo, a tall, youthful fifty one
year old wearing a brand new putty colored winter vest,
stylish sweatpants, and Gucci sneakers. They sent you here from
(03:31):
New York, he said, quizzically. I said yes, a half
smile across his face. Then he disarmed the alarm in
his Audie and we piled in. The tiny gray buildings
of industrial Nagoya gave way to the earth colored hills
covered with cedar trees and dotted with rice paddies. After
(03:53):
driving for an hour, we pulled into a tiny village
ten buildings in a valley. We drove up to the
biggest house in town. It's silhouette, classically Japanese, big broad
walls with dark, swooping roofs of Japanese tile. It was
an impressive base, but immediately I noticed something was amiss.
(04:15):
The doorways to the house were pretty narrow. I'm not
sure an average American could walk straight through. Let a
loan a big samurai wearing armor and a katana. A
commotion came from a small building adjacent to the farmhouse,
which looked to be a servants quarters. Kenzo exhaled deeply
and asked us to stay put as he rushed away.
(04:38):
Ko and I walked around the grounds and saw, incongruously
a modern patio with the barbecue in two adirondic chairs.
A few minutes later, Kenzo emerged holding the arm of
an elderly woman wearing a cleaner's onesie with a handkerchief
in her hair. There was a smudge on her face,
along with a look of both defeat and defiance. Brendan,
(05:01):
this is my mother, Mazuko. I said hello and bowed slightly,
and presented her with a little box of chocolates I'd
picked up a nagoya after Ko told me visitors in
Japan were expecting to bring gifts. Uzuko lightly nodded her
head in my direction and avoided looking at the gift.
Kenzo took it from me. Ah, dark chocolate, my favorite.
(05:24):
Uzuko walked away, muttering something in Japanese. What did she say?
I asked Iko? Time for me to make your damn lunch.
Iko said, giggling. Come let me give you a tour
of the property, said Kenzo. His gold watch flashed in
the sun as he pointed out the wired fence they'd
(05:45):
put up to keep out wild boars, and he was
careful not to get his Gucci sneakers muddy near the
chicken coop. He told me about how, as an only son,
he was obligated to take care of his parents, and
even though he was successful and able to do it,
he felt that just giving money to his parents depressed
his mother. That she had wanted to contribute in some way,
but entering the workforce now after being out of it
(06:07):
for so long, would be difficult for her. Thanks to
the new company, the company that had sent me business
class from NYC to record this conversation, his mother's suppression,
according to Kenzo, had lifted. My mother says I saved
her life, Kenzo said, pushing his highlighted hair to the side,
of his forehead. Your company saved her life, I winced.
(06:32):
It was a moving story, but a little on the nose.
It reminded me of the countless interviews I've done with
actors where their publicist is in the room, one talking
point after another. I would usually not use those interviews
for their lack of honesty, But in the world of
Spankan that's sponsored content for the morally pure among you.
We're all actors parting out talking points with a few edits.
(06:56):
This chat with Kenzo would make for a great scene.
After a tour of the grounds, we sat for lunch
on pillows around a long, low wide table. Zuko brought
out bowls and slashed miso su open to them with
a wooden label. When she served Kenzo, it splashed up
and left a dot on his putty puffy vest. He
muttered under his breath. Mazuka said something back, and then
(07:19):
they both raised their voices and quickly moved to the kitchen,
where I could hear them continue bickering while they were
out of earshot. Iko told me that she spoke with
Mazuko while Kenza was giving me a tour. I think
things are a little different than we thought. She said.
Mazuku told Iko that she missed living in Nagoya and
that the only reason she was at the Samurai House
was because Kenzo pressed her to move back here and
(07:41):
take care of the house so he could make money
renting it. Meanwhile, Kenza was living the bachelor life back
at the family apartment in Nagoya. So maybe this would
be a horror story after all, or at least a
dark A twenty four style family drama. Kensa returned, apologized
(08:03):
for his absence, and announced he needed to head back
to Negoya. Iko and I were to spend the night
to Samurai House and he'd be back to pick us
up late the next morning. The next day, I woke
up early and asked Iko to interpret for me as
I recorded an interview with Mazuko over a cup of tea.
Mizuko told me about how our husband had found this
old farmhouse decades ago on a road trip to get
(08:26):
some fresh air. Kenzo was their only child. While Mazuko's
husband painstakingly restored the home, Kenzo would pass summers pretending
he was a samurai playing in the countryside. After graduating
high school, Kenzo went to get an mba in the
United States and returned and worked for a company in Tokyo,
(08:46):
but things went poorly, and one day he returned home
to Nagoya and moved back in with them. He seemed depressed,
and there he lived for a while without working, and
then he learned about the website that allowed people to
temporarily rent their homes for money. He told Mazuko and
her husband that they had to do it. Besides, he
(09:07):
was too cramped with all three of them in the city,
and so since he was her only son, she obeyed him.
It was a lot of work for an old lady,
and she was growing exhausted, but she supposed it was
worth it to support her son. After our chat, I
took one more walk around the grounds to record some
(09:29):
ambient sounds. As I was about to hit record, I
clicked back to my recording of Kenzo the day before
and listened as he talked about all the good he
had done for his family. I then stopped the recorder.
I rewounded to the beginning again and recorded over it. Now,
instead of him talking about how grateful his mother was
(09:50):
for him and the company, it was all bird song
and trees rustling in the distance. When I got back
to New York. I told the company about the unfortunate
incident about losing the tape of Kenzo's story, but I
also I told them not to warry. I had a solution.
(10:12):
Instead of a story about a mother converted into an entrepreneur,
I would tell the story of a mother who loved
her son so much she did all she could to
help him. And that's what I did. I'm not really
sure what the company made a bit. They didn't provide
a lot of feedback, and as far as I know,
the story has never seen the light of day. I
(10:32):
did get paid, though. When I received my check, I
took my friend Laaras out for drinks again, and I
told him about how the story I've been sent to
get turned out to be different. Once I was there,
I told him about Mazuko and how I taped over
my conversation with Kenzo, and I told him that someone
should open a lunch truck that makes cheesesteaks with hacho
miso paste. Lara sipped his beer. Yeah, but the story
(10:57):
about how you had to override the story, that's the
best story of them all. You should do stuff like
that on your show when you finally get one and
so that's what I did. Brendan Francis Nunham, everybody, and
this is not Lost Chat, my series of conversations with
(11:18):
fellow travelers. On today's episode, we speak to a writer
who does the opposite of parachute into a place to
tell a preconceived story for his latest book, The Serpent
Quote in Naples. Poet and travel writer Marius Kajakowski lived
in Italy City of the Sun, and then shares what
he learned. And after that, TV writer Sas and comedian
(11:40):
Jesse Klein tells us about her preferred mode of visiting places.
I do love to sit near the ocean and drink
and that makes her perfectly qualified to help me help
you with your travel questions. So stick around, but first
we need to keep the lights on at Pushkin. My
(12:09):
first guest today is Marius Kaziovski. He is a poet, essayist,
travel writer and now after reading him and researching him
my role model and after you hear him, I hope
you'll understand why. Marius was born in Canada to an
English mother and Polish father. He then moved to London,
(12:30):
where he wrote and made a living in the rare
book trade. But he first came on the scene as
a poet. His first collection of poems won the Cheltenham Prize,
which is an honor he shares with such luminaries as
Kazio Jaguro and Hilary Mantle Pretty nice company. And his
first prose works were travel writings, primarily on Syria, which
(12:51):
is a country he really came to love after spending
time there. Of late, Marius has developed a new geographic
paramore Naples. Primarily, he focuses on the people that live there,
the merchants, the musicians, the landlords, and he gets to
know them by living there. He embeds himself into these
communities and immerses himself in research. His most recent book
(13:15):
is called The Serpent Coiled in Naples, and The New
Yorker put it on their list of best non fiction
books of twenty twenty two, which could be part of
the reason it was really hard to find. I looked
at the Strand in Manhattan. I looked at Pals in
Portland and Elliott Bay and Seattle. No Dice finally was
able to finagle a copy. Anyway, I was very excited
(13:39):
to finally dive into it. He is such a wonderful
guide and That's what I asked him to do when
we started our conversation. I asked him to take me
and you listeners on an imaginary tour of his Naples. Right. Well,
if we're walking, I think we would go up from
the Bay of Naples, up the Via Roma and towards Spaccanopoly,
(14:05):
which is the old bit of town. And I usually
stay in an area called Forchella. You go from Spaccanopoly,
you cross the Via Duomo and you're in the crime zone.
Even when I talk to Neapolitans and they asked me
(14:25):
where I'm staying, they can't believe it. Fortella, It's real.
I like the people. I have a wonderful landlady called Milannia,
who has just you want a picture where we are, Yes,
we're getting. Where I'm leading you to is to Milannia's ankle,
(14:47):
upon which she has a serpent tattooed. Now that's entirely coincidental.
She didn't put the serpent there in order to fit
the theme of my book. Milannia lives in this rather
rickety apartment block, which is held together with wooden beams,
and has been that way for decades. Ever since the
(15:12):
earthquake of nineteen eighty. So the building could topple at
any time, I suppose, But then so could the whole
of Naples. It's complex, and you do such a marvelous
job bringing your reader into the maelstrom of history and
ideas and characters. The Serpentine that's on the foot. Also,
(15:38):
the title of your book came before you encountered her.
It seems the Serpentine of Naples. It did you. The
quote I believe is um never fear Rome. The serpentine
lies coiled in Naples. Yes, my Tomo Romata atracellato anopoly,
don't fear roam. The serpent laws coiled in Naples. As
(16:03):
soon as I read that, and even without knowing exactly
what it meant, there was my title, The serpent coil
to Naples. I've never done that before. I've never gone
into a situation or to a place we've already made title.
But it was a gift, as it were. Yeah, and
(16:24):
you spend the book unpacking that title. But there's another quote.
If you open all the doors of Naples, Rome disappears
to situate what Naples means in the mindset of Italians.
And I would broaden it to say Europeans talk about
that crosstown rivalry and what Naples represents. I mean, there is,
(16:44):
of course a constant rivalry between the North and South
of Italy, and of course you see this exemplified particularly
at football games. You know they're really out to kill
each other. But there is something else which distinguishes Naples
(17:04):
from any other big city in Italy, which is I
think hugely important. If you go to Venice, if you
go to Florence, you go to Rome, the old centers
of those places have now been given over to tourism, restaurants, whatever,
(17:27):
else whereas in Naples you're still looking at a center
which is occupied by the original people, and that makes
it unique. I had this beautifully illustrated for me a
few years ago when a lady showed me a stretch
(17:48):
of pavement and she said, take a look at this
groove in a stone, you know, a simple, shallow groove,
and she said, and follow it and it led to
a fishmonger, and she said, that groove is centuries old,
and as you'll see, the fishmonger is still here. That
(18:13):
it was. What are the most invaluable lessons I had
about Naples? Right, that's such a striking moment. There's water
that's been dripping from this fishmonger's cart and shop for centuries,
which caused that groove. You know, it also reminds me
at one point you write blood tears and semen have
seeped into an ooze from every crack of this old
(18:35):
town center, which I think does get across the kind
of dankness and richness of these impoverished quarters of Naples,
to pick one of those. You talk a lot about
blood in this book. It's ever present. Can you explain
that a little bit? Yes, yes, blood. Well, when I
wrote that line, I was thinking in particular of the
(18:59):
great composer Jaswaldo, who discovered that his wife was having
an affair and came home late one night, caught the
madd it and stabbed both of them to death, and
(19:21):
had their bodies dragged out onto the pavement, where they
lay for about a week. But of course that that's
just one form of blood. There's also the gangs. Indeed,
there is one zone in the north of a part
of Naples called Scampia. The police don't go into that zone.
(19:43):
It's one of the most well, it is the most
violent area in the whole of Europe. You know, you
can go out on the street and never be sure
whether you're looking at a regular citizen or a killer.
And of course it's very sad. They say that if
(20:05):
you go into any cafe and you buy a espresso,
a percentage of the price of that espresso will finally
end up in the Camorra's pockets. There are also all
kinds of other contradictions in that in recent years Naples
(20:25):
has become a much safer place to visit. Why is
that because the Camorra have put out the message to
leave the tourists alone. Why have they done that because
they own a good bit of the tourist industry, so
(20:45):
they would like it to be a safe place for tourists.
And I've never in my time they're experienced any trouble.
That said, all of that is now being threatened. Naples
is becoming more and more of a popular tourists destination,
(21:05):
and there is gentrification moving even into Fortella, the tough
zone where I stay. And so it's always with a
certain amount of hesitation that I recommend places that I love.
You know, tourism is in so many ways the enemy
(21:31):
of all that one loves about a place yes, and
there's Seventeenth century churchman and historian Thomas Fuller said that
travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse.
(21:51):
And unfortunately you see more fools than wise men on
the streets. You know, you know, you're you're putting your
finger on I think something in a much smaller way,
I've struggled with, but the burden, for lack of a
better word, of a travel writer, which is the compulsion
to share, yes, to really take an X ray on
(22:12):
a place and pass that information along. And yet the
closer you get to your subject, the more you want
to protect it. Yes, And so how do you reconcile
that tension? What makes you decide to go for I haven't.
I haven't yet reconciled it. I don't know if I
ever will. You know. In the final chapter of my book,
(22:33):
I write about going to a particular festa on the
slopes of Vesuvius, and it took me months to get
onto that, and it was the most wonderful experience for me.
But in writing about it, my deepest fear is that
(22:54):
I've exposed it. Yes, And I'm thinking to myself, you know,
suppose one day a tourist boss goes up that slope
and tries to join in with a festa. Yeah, I
have to say I would feel incredibly guilty. Mm, But
you still wrote it. I still wrote it. You still
(23:17):
That's the contradiction you're talking about, and it's the one
I have not yet resolved myself, and I wonder if
I ever will. Writing is my passion, and you know,
falling in love with a place is in a sense
a kind of romance, and one wants to be true
to what one sees. You said at one point an
(23:38):
old joke, someone's on a train and they ask the
conductor when do we arrive in Naples? And he said,
hold up your wrist to your eye, look at your watch,
and look at the minute hand. And when your watch disappears,
you're in Naples. Yeah. I'll let that fall on your head,
not mine. You've got to walk down from the streets.
(23:59):
I mean, they have to go through some pretty tough
neighborhoods get to me, right, they might give Naples a
run for his money. Well, it's interesting the preamble when
you're described described as a poet, an essayist, and a
travel writer. And I don't I don't really see you
as a travel writer in that you've written about Naples previously,
You've written books about Syria, Damascus, and that's another place
(24:23):
you're talking about love that you it seems you fell
in love with and you really steep yourself and into
these cultures, right, both intellectually as well as physically. So, Yeah,
do you see any distinction between between yourself and what's
considered a travel writer? Um? I think it's fantastic that
(24:46):
you raised this question, because I think I constantly disqualify
myself as a travel writer. The reason I'm called that
occasionally is so they know where to put me in
the bookshops, you know. And I think the main reason
for that being that I don't travel through places so
(25:10):
much as I do through the lives of people. And
my thinking is that if you get close to someone
that sooner or later that person will reflect his or
her surroundings. I enjoy people, I enjoy their stories, and
(25:32):
what their stories tell me is really about the place. Yeah,
it seems you consult. You do consult with both the
living and the dead. So who helps you more the
living or the dead. When you're kind of trying to
figure out a place Naples like nowhere else I've been.
The dead are always with you, They're with the Neapolitans.
(25:56):
I had somebody criticized me for saying, oh, you don't
talk correctly about the dead, and I said, look, it's
not me, it's them, you know, it's Neapolitans addressing the dead,
and the dead addressing them. When Naples won the World
Cup with the Great Maradonna, people rushed to the cemetery
(26:22):
to tell the dead, you've no idea what you missed.
And and you know, the whole belief system with the
skull of cults, which is probably the reason why I
went there, is that there is this sort of communication,
you know, this flow between the living and the dead,
(26:43):
such that there is no barrier left between them. Yeah,
you're right of going into, for example, the volcanic quarries
underneath Naples, and and and they're packed with skulls, when
some of them are shiny, burnished, almost like a like
a polished shoe, because they're touched so often. Yes, for
(27:04):
your good luck, yes, indeed indeed. And and of course
the skull cult there is rather different than that which
you will find in Mexico. You adopt a skull, you
take care of it, keep it clean, dust it off,
you know now and then the spirit possessor of that
(27:27):
skull will come to you in dreams and you can
ask questions. But you know, the Neapolitans, being Neapolitan, they
tend to ask for the lot for the lottery ticket
numbers or the used to used to one point, you say,
any place one chooses the map is unmappable, And so
(27:50):
I ask you why mapp it? Why? Why? Why take
a crack at this? Well, I'm always cautious when it
comes to talking about let's say, in the journeys I've
or year half British. Yeah, I always I always felt
that's a load of nonsense myself. You know, one one
goes to learn, one goes to see. But in terms
(28:13):
of that great revolution in the soul that's supposed to
take place, I mean, have you ever heard of anything
so vain? I mean, it's awful, and I think it.
I think that very notion has contaminated a lot of
travel literature. And I always tell people, you know, go
(28:40):
go to a place with modesty and curiosity, but don't
go in the expectation of altering the state of your soul.
You know, respect and intelligence as a way to approach
any place, And of course, in that respect, I've always
(29:00):
maintained that the puffballs of peace are sometimes worse than
the missiles of war. Tourism is the soft weapon which
is destroying so many places. I was really shocked when
I went to a Malfi for the first time, where
every square inch of the center of Amalfi it's given
(29:25):
over to tourism, whether it's postcards, ice creams, or souvenir shops.
I just found it incredibly depressing that you have this
beautiful city in the middle of the most beautiful landscape,
and yet it's been completely ruined. The very reason that
(29:46):
people went there in the first place was to see
the magic. The magic is long gone. I think that's
I think that might be a good place to end.
I'm going to encourage you never to listen to my
podcast if you don't like personal journeys blended with your travel.
But I think you'll find that my curiosity and interest
in true local folks and what they have to say
(30:09):
is at the heart of my project. Thank you for
taking the time to chat with me this evening. My
great pleasure, My great pleasure. Marius Kachaovsky his latest book
is called The Serpent Coiled in Naples, and I encourage
you to check it out. We hardly scratched its surface here.
(30:31):
It's a really, really rich book. And honestly, I was
hoping that Marius and I would become best friends forever
after our conversation, but I kind of have a feeling
after he hears me naval gazing in front of Leonard
Cohen's house in Montreal, Hill want nothing to do with me.
That's okay, Maybe I'll just stare in front of Marius's
house in London at some point in the future. But
(30:53):
fortunately for me, after the break, I'm going to be
joined by another naval gazey writer, Jesse Klein. She's also
a comedian, and I have a feeling she's gonna like
my style. That is nice, a man with a sports
coat with that inner pass that is kind of a
not Lost. We'll be right back, all right, We are
(31:20):
back here at Not Lost Chat. I am coming to
you today from Manhattan. I live in Brooklyn and I've
been commuting more and more here to Manhattan to help
make this show. And I've noticed that people are walking slower,
like maybe half a mile per hour slower and that
(31:40):
might not seem like much, but it does make a
difference when you are walking in the streets every day,
and I've been walking these streets for years. It's an
interesting shift. You can sense it when you're on the stairwell,
when you're moving around town. And whether it's related to
like post COVID lockdown disorientation or something else, I don't know.
(32:03):
I mean, actually I do know everyone is staring at
their phones. But anyway, whatever the reason, it really adds
this feeling I've had for the past few months that
I don't remember really how to behave around people like
I did before COVID, and arguably I didn't even really
know how to behave around them then. So to help
me refresh my memory and help other folks who might
(32:23):
be in the same boat, I've decided to invite a
World Savvy guest each week to help answer questions about
moving and traveling through the world, And this week I'm
joined by the TV writer, essayist and comedian Jesse Klein.
She is probably best known for her work on the
show Inside Emi Schumer, but she's also written for a
ton of other shows, like Transparent. She's a consulting producer
(32:46):
on the Netflix show Big Mouth, and she writes books too.
Her most recent book is called I'll Show Myself Out,
essays on midlife and motherhood. And with so much going
on in her life, I asked if she even has
time to travel. I think an illusion has been created
because I'm actually not. I'm I currently I am a
(33:07):
little bit unemployed, but I'm not that prolific. I think
because of the pandemic, certain things got slowed down that
would have like kind of come out along various different years.
And then because of COVID and have you heard of it?
Who's this virus we heard about in New York? Did
you get it there? Anyways, a bunch of things came
(33:29):
out at once, and it made it seem like, Oh,
who's this girl who's just endlessly working? But all of
these things took like five years of development. And anyways,
I don't take vacations because I'm working that hard. It
strikes me that you wouldn't be someone who takes a
vacation with like a coconut with a straw in it
kind of vacation, because I'm not that type of person either. Well,
(33:54):
I do think about, like, what's my ideal vacation. I
do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Okay,
I don't go in it a ton of sharks, but
to be near it, looking at it and drinking like
a cold sense sir. I don't know something if it's
(34:14):
in a coconut, sure, as long as it's But I
feel like I could only do that for so many days.
I do like walking through a beautiful city. Okay, I
am craving right now, some kind of maybe a forest okay,
forest bath or just farest walk. I guess I think
at this point in life now just if you're in
(34:35):
a forest, you're taking a forest bath. And if you're
hearing sounds or in a sound bath, well, okay, it's
just baby. I don't know. I think that's just the terminology. Now,
what separate is walking through a forest from a forest bath.
I think you pay someone named after a noun one
hundred and eighty dollars to take a forest bath, to
bathe willow. Willow's going to take me on my forest
(34:58):
bath exactly. Okay, that's helpful. So when I was preparing
to chat with you, I was reading some interviews you
did when your book came out about half a year
ago now, Yes. And in one of them, you talked
about Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Eat, Pray, Love, Yes, and you
said that you've read it a ton of times. I have,
And I mean I've interviewed Elizabeth Gilbert a couple of times.
(35:20):
She's brilliant. I think she's wonderful, so brilliant. But there
are only so many books in the world. Why would
you want to read that one more than once? That's
a really good question, I mean, especially when that book
came out, I think I was like exactly the strike
zone for it and just covers I think a lot
of human experience in a lovely smart way. I know
(35:44):
there was kind of a little bit of a backlash
to that book because I think for reasons that were
unrelated to the book or to Elizabeth Gilbert, it became
a little bit labeled like with sort of a basic
bitch brush that I don't think that's really super fair
to it. Having read your earlier book of essays, being
familiar with your work with Amy Schumer and other things,
(36:06):
you don't strike me as someone who would want to
go to Bali and kind of like find yourself and
get like Hannah tattoos. But maybe I'm wrong. Uh, definitely
not into the Hannah tattoo. You know, with travel the
day there's a teleporter, I'll go most places, but um,
I am at my core are a little lazy. So
(36:30):
the really really long flight really intimidates me. It's so dumb.
Why miss out on beautiful things in the world because
you don't want to go to the airport and began
a plane that long. It's dumb. So it's it's not
the basic bitch stuff that makes me anxious about it.
It's not being in the back of a moped that stuff,
totally okay, it's just the actual trip. The trip. I
get intimidated by the trip. I am actually, especially as
(36:53):
I creep towards just getting older and older and older
and older. I'm very into the woo woo finding yourself stuff.
I would absolutely do that. Have you read the book
called Yoga by Emmanuel Carrera. It's like the hot book.
That's what people are reading in New York in the
sub Okay, please help please. That's one of the things
(37:15):
I miss about New York is knowing what like, yeah,
you really are like what should I read? And you
look around and you're like, this is what people are
reading what's that rat? Reading? What pizza at? Pizza? What's
pizza at? Dragging pizza? Reading yoga yoga at uh. Anyway,
part of it is a guy who goes to this
meditation resort. He's been doing those things for years and
he has to be silent for ten days. Okay, Yeah,
(37:37):
silent is a no for me. I wouldn't do that.
And I also I'm realizing, like I want a caveat
finding myself. I will not be quiet and I won't uh,
and I can't. I can't. I won't meditate. Okay, So
you are obviously a jet setter. You love to be
(37:57):
in a plane, you know. Ye the drop of the hat,
you will cash in your travel points and go somewhere.
So you're perfectly qualified to help um some of my
listeners with their etiquette questions. I would I would love
to help ken. This first one comes from Anna from Wyoming.
She writes, this is because I've watched so many Real
(38:18):
Housewives strips and a big group how do you assign
rooms in a vacation house? Who gets the smallest room?
This is the cause of a lot of stress with
big group trips where there's a mix of singles and
couples also on Bachelor at weekends. Oh that's a really
really good question. That would stress me out. I'm picky
(38:39):
as hell, and I think at this point I would
probably be one of the people creating the problems. But
I agree with you. I would scope the entire joint.
I would do some calculus in my head and try
to get the best room possible without feeling like a jerk. Yeah,
I mean, I would say it feels like if there's
dedicated organizer to the trip, I would say, like, maybe
(39:03):
you're just like I'm going to assign those rooms. Everyone
knows in advance, so there's not that scramble. Yeah, you know,
I think you're I think having a leader like I
even I'm someone who's pretty picky, but if I know
I'm in good hands. As long as it's been thought about,
I could be in a less than excellent room because
I'm like some justice has been administered here, there's been
(39:24):
some thought to it. I don't like a free for
all because I feel guilty because I will win. But
then I want to join myself. Or I'll go the
other direction and take the worst room as like some martyr.
I'll be my mother and my father. Basically yeah, and
that doesn't feel good. A free for all is so
anxiety inducing, so Anna, I don't know if we answered
find a strong organizer and secretly lobby that organizer on
(39:48):
the side. Yes, okay, we have another question from Nicole
Nicole from New Jersey. Due to planes no longer guaranteeing
you to sit together unless you pay, do you agree
to give up your prepaid seat so that a parent
can sit with their child. Oh a hundred percent. Okay,
that's just karma points, you're well, I do it for
(40:10):
just like a healthy couple. No, no, no, no, get
healthy thriving couple, like two people who want to canoodle
the whole flight long. Absolutely not. But for a parent
and a kid, that's like, you got you gotta, you gotta.
I'm with you on this. As somebody who doesn't have
(40:30):
a kid, I still think that's a pretty mean, curmudgeingly
thing to do, to not give up your seat. I
will say, though, now any parent listening will not have
to prepay because they're just going to assume people will
give them their seat. Can I say, on the flip
side of all of this, if you are the parent
who was not able to get your seats together, and
(40:52):
someone is doing this kindness for you, and you are
showing up at that airport knowing you're going to have
to ask this. You better have some kind of a
gift card a I'm serious, like, have a thing, like,
have something to to offer as a thank you, because yeah,
the presumptuousness of it. Yeah, I think you got to
(41:14):
have some kind of little gift card in your pocket
for the place at least make the effort and then
the person should not accept it in a way, but
you should do the little dance of like I'd like to. Yeah.
It's it's not fair, but it's right. Um. So the
Peanut Gallery. I shared this with the Peanut Gallery for
asking this question, and one parents said, I love the
(41:35):
idea of dropping my kid off with a stranger. Good luck,
Like if they won't give up their seat, good luck,
Like have have fun with my five year old. Yeah,
have at it. Yeah, have ad it, buddy. They're going
to be screaming and freaking smash goldfish falling out of
your clothes. Okay. This question comes from Coco from Miami.
The question is is it weird to take your shoes
(41:56):
off on the plane? It's weird to take your shoes
off and not have on a sock. Okay, I'm okay
with a shoe off. If you're in a sock, I
can't even imagine who's going to have a barefoot on
a plane. But I mean, you can't imagine you've flown
in America ly well? I mean I was. I was
(42:16):
thinking of the person who I saw openly clipping their
nails on a openly clipping their nails. I was like,
are we on the L train? What are we doing?
I mean, that really happened. That sound is like the
opposite of a meditation app is not snip, It's like
the opposite of the clip of a t But shoes,
(42:42):
if you have socks, okay, if you have socks, okay,
not ideal, but permitted. I have a question. Okay, you're
on a plane, you arrive at your destination, you enter
your wherever you are, your hotel, room, your house, whatever
it is. How much time expires between walking through the
door and silkwood showering and getting out of what you
were wearing. Oh that's interesting. I mean, I'm a pretty
(43:08):
clean dude, but I don't I don't rush into the
shower like rapped with tears thinking about what just went
down in the airplane. Really yeah, I think I'm more
likely or like sit on other things in the place
you're staying and in the clothes you were just on.
Oh plane. When I enter a hotel room, I take
(43:29):
off the top comforter and pillows. I mean, come on,
that's table stakes. Will you remove the pillows? The top
pillows like, oh yeah, exactly next to the comforter. Let
time go by. I'd let time go by, sure. Like
my first concern is like, can I just get a drink?
(43:50):
Can I just like get like I want to get
it back into life. I want to be around a friend,
like I want to like be in the world again
mentally mental high teen is my my high priority. Okay, okay, okay,
this is mightave of a couple of things. I'm obsessed
with this question and many guests of answer is on
the airplane, what do you wear? Comfort or something else?
(44:12):
What is your what is your strategy for the airplane?
I mean obs comfort, but within limits. I mean, here's
like a thinker for the ladies, Like the most comfy
thing is a jumpsuit, Like you're kind of in a
onesie and it's very comfortable. However, if you're in a
(44:34):
jumpsuit when you go to that bathroom you're doing you're
you're in a tits out pee, which just doesn't feel great,
Like you really are vulnerable. You're vulnerable and that tits
out people. But you're trading that off for being in
like your comfious outfit. So it's tough. But then when
you burn upon arrival, I'm not wearing it again. No, no,
(44:56):
I mean, I can't be clear. I'm not repeating the
clothes that touch the seat of the plane. Wow, I
believe it's only in like a good sports cut. Are
you dressing up for air travel like we're in the sixties?
A little bit? A little bit because it's so dehumanizing
to go through TSA and to wait for five hours
to get um, you know, a bagel with egg, salad
(45:18):
and iceberg lettuce or whatever for twenty dollars that I
feel like looking kind of like dialed in makes me
feel calmer, you know what. I want to address what
you're saying, because it's very valid. I when I say
I'm addressing for comfort, I'm not doing like, you know,
like a juicy sweatsuit where you're just like, fuck you everyone. Yeah,
(45:38):
I'm I'm clipping my nails where I want to. Yeah,
I don't want to look like I've fully given up. Yeah,
I think, yeah, that's the line. But but but on
the blazer, on the sports coade, Yeah, I do feel
like it has protective powers, Like I don't care if
it wrinkles, like I beat it to hell. I use
the pockets. I throw my passport in it, and for me,
(45:59):
that feels a little bit like armor. And then when
I am at the hotel or if I go out
to dinner afterwards, I'll like take it off and I
feel like it kind of like that's kind of what
protects my situation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, inner pocket looks so
great with the passport in it. People people love it. Yeah,
that is nice. A man with a sports coat with
(46:20):
that inner past that is kind of a hot moment. Yeah. Yeah,
that's a sophisticated man. I have a jacket that I
bought as my production jacket. It has six pockets on
this jacket. It's like a utility and I bought it
for set because it was like a headset pocket, a
purel pocket, your mask pocket, your phone pocket, but for
(46:43):
travel it's equally. It's also just like all this shit,
I've got completely so many pockets. Now again, this is
why Robert Altman War One, and this is why Romancing
the Stone Michael Douglas War One. Like all those pockets
needed in both those scenarios. But you have your hand sandy,
you have your passport, your sandy. Yeah. And if you're
in one of those uncomfortable situations where sometimes I put
(47:05):
myself in where I'm like, I just jump in the
seat because I feel like I don't know when I'm
when I'm getting into the plane itself, a lot of anxiety,
a lot of people angry, a lot of people throw
in suitcases up tough. So I just want to get
in there. I like have knowing that if I just
have to hop in the seat, it's all in my pockets.
I'm all good, It's all in your pockets. So is
there a better feeling in this world than that moment
(47:26):
where you've made it to your seat and you butt
down and you bag up and you're just like, I'm
in the seat. There is there should be a German
better feeling when my doors close and there's no one
sitting next to suspense delicious sense and then you wide
(47:47):
until take off so no one will get any ideas,
and then you're an easy straight after that. Yeah, you
gotta wait till that take off to you, that's true. Yeah,
that's a really good feeling too. Um. Jesse, thank you
so much for coming by and sharing your travel secrets.
Thank you. That was Jesse Klein. The latest book is
(48:10):
called I'll Show Myself Out, essays on midlife and motherhood.
It's kind of like Eat, Pray Love, but she's married,
has children and doesn't really go anywhere. So that's it
for this edition of Not Lost Chat. If you have
travel questions that you went answered in a future episode,
you can email them to me at not Lost at
Pushkin dot fm or ping me at b F Newnham
(48:33):
on Twitter. Please send them along. Not Lost Chat is
produced by Jordan Belly, who flew from the Bahamas to
La to be able to help assemble this episode. I
hope Jordan allows me into the Platinum Club Centurion Lounge
if we ever traveled together. The show is written and
hosted by me Brendan Francis Nunham. True story. I recently
(48:54):
rented an Airbnb in Montreal for the holiday break, but
I was too busy to make the trip didn't cancel
in time, so I had to pain full. But I
did get a good review from the host. She said
I left the house in good shape, so there you go.
Someone who is much better at making plans and keeping
them is Laura Morgan, who helps book our show. This
(49:16):
episode was edited by Sarah Nix with assistance from the
Chillist managing producer in the game, Jacob Smith. Our mix
engineer who also provides additional production support is Sarah Brugere
Not Lost is a co production of Pushkin Industries, Topic
Studios and iHeartMedia, who was developed at Topic Studios and Yes.
This show has some executive producers including me Brendan Francis Newnham,
(49:40):
Christy Kressman, Maria Zuckerman, Lisa Langang and La Tom Mullott.
As always, if you dig what you here, please tell
a friend, tell the seat mate on your airplane if
they look like they want to talk with you. You
can also make a comment an Apple podcast, spread the word.
It's all really appreciated. And if your inbox is lonely
and whose isn't, you can sign up for the Pushkin
(50:01):
newsletter at Pushkin dot Fm, slash newsletter, and if you
want to listen to back episodes of Not Lost or
other Pushkin podcast us, then there's some great ones, story
of the week, slight change of plans. You can listen
and find them on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or
wherever you listen to your podcast. That is it for
this episode. Thank you everybody, Bamboyage
Pushkin the furthest the way I've ever been from home
was when I went to Japan. A popular travel website
that helps people temporarily run out their homes asked me
to make a podcast pilot about the positive experiences people
(00:35):
had using their service. Since I needed the money and
not lost wasn't off the ground yet, I agreed. I
told my friend Laris about it over drinks one night,
and he flagged a potential problem. The thing is, the
only stories people really want to hear about from a
company like that is what went wrong. The hardest stories,
you know, the guests that left the door unlocked and
(00:58):
the bear wandered in. The homeowner who set up a
secret camera. The renter who was looking for Q tips
and found a box of nail clippings. That last example
seemed a little too specific, but I was too scared
to ask if he was making it up. Of course,
(01:19):
the company didn't want to highlight horror stories. Instead, the
list of suggestions they sent was filled with charming anecdotes
about how their service had enhanced people's lives. One was
about an adopted woman who rented a place in another
state that turned out to be the home of her
biological sister. Heartlifting, sure, but also a bit like the
(01:41):
beginning of an A twenty four horror film. And that's
how I found myself on a business class flight to Japan.
If I was going to get paid to tell happy stories,
I might as well make the most of it. Book
a ticket for the most interesting destination on their list
(02:01):
of ideas. First stop was Tokyo, but my ultimate destination
was Nagoya, the fourth most populous city Japan. The story
I was tracking down came from a man named Kenzo.
Kenzo was a self described businessman who was raised in Nikoya.
His elderly parents were struggling financially when he heard about
(02:23):
the company's service. Years ago. His parents had bought an
old farmhouse in the country where allegedly Samurai once trained.
Now the family rented out the house on the company's website,
and Kenzo's mother had become a thriving entrepreneur, like an
elderly Japanese Gwyneth Paltrow or a pre prison Martha Stewart.
(02:48):
Upon arriving in Nogoya, I met up with Ko, a
local journalist who I had ranged to have translate for me.
As we wandered around the city. I felt a kinship
with the place as a native of Philadelphia. A gritty,
second tier industrial city kind of spoke to me on
some level. We stopped for lunch and had chicken cutlets
drenched in Nagoya's preferred ingredient, a red soybean paste made
(03:10):
of hatchamso venito stock and sugar. It's oozy, salty tang
reminded me of Philly's preferred ingredient, cheese whizz. After lunch,
we met up with Kenzo, a tall, youthful fifty one
year old wearing a brand new putty colored winter vest,
stylish sweatpants, and Gucci sneakers. They sent you here from
(03:31):
New York, he said, quizzically. I said yes, a half
smile across his face. Then he disarmed the alarm in
his Audie and we piled in. The tiny gray buildings
of industrial Nagoya gave way to the earth colored hills
covered with cedar trees and dotted with rice paddies. After
(03:53):
driving for an hour, we pulled into a tiny village
ten buildings in a valley. We drove up to the
biggest house in town. It's silhouette, classically Japanese, big broad
walls with dark, swooping roofs of Japanese tile. It was
an impressive base, but immediately I noticed something was amiss.
(04:15):
The doorways to the house were pretty narrow. I'm not
sure an average American could walk straight through. Let a
loan a big samurai wearing armor and a katana. A
commotion came from a small building adjacent to the farmhouse,
which looked to be a servants quarters. Kenzo exhaled deeply
and asked us to stay put as he rushed away.
(04:38):
Ko and I walked around the grounds and saw, incongruously
a modern patio with the barbecue in two adirondic chairs.
A few minutes later, Kenzo emerged holding the arm of
an elderly woman wearing a cleaner's onesie with a handkerchief
in her hair. There was a smudge on her face,
along with a look of both defeat and defiance. Brendan,
(05:01):
this is my mother, Mazuko. I said hello and bowed slightly,
and presented her with a little box of chocolates I'd
picked up a nagoya after Ko told me visitors in
Japan were expecting to bring gifts. Uzuko lightly nodded her
head in my direction and avoided looking at the gift.
Kenzo took it from me. Ah, dark chocolate, my favorite.
(05:24):
Uzuko walked away, muttering something in Japanese. What did she say?
I asked Iko? Time for me to make your damn lunch.
Iko said, giggling. Come let me give you a tour
of the property, said Kenzo. His gold watch flashed in
the sun as he pointed out the wired fence they'd
(05:45):
put up to keep out wild boars, and he was
careful not to get his Gucci sneakers muddy near the
chicken coop. He told me about how, as an only son,
he was obligated to take care of his parents, and
even though he was successful and able to do it,
he felt that just giving money to his parents depressed
his mother. That she had wanted to contribute in some way,
but entering the workforce now after being out of it
(06:07):
for so long, would be difficult for her. Thanks to
the new company, the company that had sent me business
class from NYC to record this conversation, his mother's suppression,
according to Kenzo, had lifted. My mother says I saved
her life, Kenzo said, pushing his highlighted hair to the side,
of his forehead. Your company saved her life, I winced.
(06:32):
It was a moving story, but a little on the nose.
It reminded me of the countless interviews I've done with
actors where their publicist is in the room, one talking
point after another. I would usually not use those interviews
for their lack of honesty, But in the world of
Spankan that's sponsored content for the morally pure among you.
We're all actors parting out talking points with a few edits.
(06:56):
This chat with Kenzo would make for a great scene.
After a tour of the grounds, we sat for lunch
on pillows around a long, low wide table. Zuko brought
out bowls and slashed miso su open to them with
a wooden label. When she served Kenzo, it splashed up
and left a dot on his putty puffy vest. He
muttered under his breath. Mazuka said something back, and then
(07:19):
they both raised their voices and quickly moved to the kitchen,
where I could hear them continue bickering while they were
out of earshot. Iko told me that she spoke with
Mazuko while Kenza was giving me a tour. I think
things are a little different than we thought. She said.
Mazuku told Iko that she missed living in Nagoya and
that the only reason she was at the Samurai House
was because Kenzo pressed her to move back here and
(07:41):
take care of the house so he could make money
renting it. Meanwhile, Kenza was living the bachelor life back
at the family apartment in Nagoya. So maybe this would
be a horror story after all, or at least a
dark A twenty four style family drama. Kensa returned, apologized
(08:03):
for his absence, and announced he needed to head back
to Negoya. Iko and I were to spend the night
to Samurai House and he'd be back to pick us
up late the next morning. The next day, I woke
up early and asked Iko to interpret for me as
I recorded an interview with Mazuko over a cup of tea.
Mizuko told me about how our husband had found this
old farmhouse decades ago on a road trip to get
(08:26):
some fresh air. Kenzo was their only child. While Mazuko's
husband painstakingly restored the home, Kenzo would pass summers pretending
he was a samurai playing in the countryside. After graduating
high school, Kenzo went to get an mba in the
United States and returned and worked for a company in Tokyo,
(08:46):
but things went poorly, and one day he returned home
to Nagoya and moved back in with them. He seemed depressed,
and there he lived for a while without working, and
then he learned about the website that allowed people to
temporarily rent their homes for money. He told Mazuko and
her husband that they had to do it. Besides, he
(09:07):
was too cramped with all three of them in the city,
and so since he was her only son, she obeyed him.
It was a lot of work for an old lady,
and she was growing exhausted, but she supposed it was
worth it to support her son. After our chat, I
took one more walk around the grounds to record some
(09:29):
ambient sounds. As I was about to hit record, I
clicked back to my recording of Kenzo the day before
and listened as he talked about all the good he
had done for his family. I then stopped the recorder.
I rewounded to the beginning again and recorded over it. Now,
instead of him talking about how grateful his mother was
(09:50):
for him and the company, it was all bird song
and trees rustling in the distance. When I got back
to New York. I told the company about the unfortunate
incident about losing the tape of Kenzo's story, but I
also I told them not to warry. I had a solution.
(10:12):
Instead of a story about a mother converted into an entrepreneur,
I would tell the story of a mother who loved
her son so much she did all she could to
help him. And that's what I did. I'm not really
sure what the company made a bit. They didn't provide
a lot of feedback, and as far as I know,
the story has never seen the light of day. I
(10:32):
did get paid, though. When I received my check, I
took my friend Laaras out for drinks again, and I
told him about how the story I've been sent to
get turned out to be different. Once I was there,
I told him about Mazuko and how I taped over
my conversation with Kenzo, and I told him that someone
should open a lunch truck that makes cheesesteaks with hacho
miso paste. Lara sipped his beer. Yeah, but the story
(10:57):
about how you had to override the story, that's the
best story of them all. You should do stuff like
that on your show when you finally get one and
so that's what I did. Brendan Francis Nunham, everybody, and
this is not Lost Chat, my series of conversations with
(11:18):
fellow travelers. On today's episode, we speak to a writer
who does the opposite of parachute into a place to
tell a preconceived story for his latest book, The Serpent
Quote in Naples. Poet and travel writer Marius Kajakowski lived
in Italy City of the Sun, and then shares what
he learned. And after that, TV writer Sas and comedian
(11:40):
Jesse Klein tells us about her preferred mode of visiting places.
I do love to sit near the ocean and drink
and that makes her perfectly qualified to help me help
you with your travel questions. So stick around, but first
we need to keep the lights on at Pushkin. My
(12:09):
first guest today is Marius Kaziovski. He is a poet, essayist,
travel writer and now after reading him and researching him
my role model and after you hear him, I hope
you'll understand why. Marius was born in Canada to an
English mother and Polish father. He then moved to London,
(12:30):
where he wrote and made a living in the rare
book trade. But he first came on the scene as
a poet. His first collection of poems won the Cheltenham Prize,
which is an honor he shares with such luminaries as
Kazio Jaguro and Hilary Mantle Pretty nice company. And his
first prose works were travel writings, primarily on Syria, which
(12:51):
is a country he really came to love after spending
time there. Of late, Marius has developed a new geographic
paramore Naples. Primarily, he focuses on the people that live there,
the merchants, the musicians, the landlords, and he gets to
know them by living there. He embeds himself into these
communities and immerses himself in research. His most recent book
(13:15):
is called The Serpent Coiled in Naples, and The New
Yorker put it on their list of best non fiction
books of twenty twenty two, which could be part of
the reason it was really hard to find. I looked
at the Strand in Manhattan. I looked at Pals in
Portland and Elliott Bay and Seattle. No Dice finally was
able to finagle a copy. Anyway, I was very excited
(13:39):
to finally dive into it. He is such a wonderful
guide and That's what I asked him to do when
we started our conversation. I asked him to take me
and you listeners on an imaginary tour of his Naples. Right. Well,
if we're walking, I think we would go up from
the Bay of Naples, up the Via Roma and towards Spaccanopoly,
(14:05):
which is the old bit of town. And I usually
stay in an area called Forchella. You go from Spaccanopoly,
you cross the Via Duomo and you're in the crime zone.
Even when I talk to Neapolitans and they asked me
(14:25):
where I'm staying, they can't believe it. Fortella, It's real.
I like the people. I have a wonderful landlady called Milannia,
who has just you want a picture where we are, Yes,
we're getting. Where I'm leading you to is to Milannia's ankle,
(14:47):
upon which she has a serpent tattooed. Now that's entirely coincidental.
She didn't put the serpent there in order to fit
the theme of my book. Milannia lives in this rather
rickety apartment block, which is held together with wooden beams,
and has been that way for decades. Ever since the
(15:12):
earthquake of nineteen eighty. So the building could topple at
any time, I suppose, But then so could the whole
of Naples. It's complex, and you do such a marvelous
job bringing your reader into the maelstrom of history and
ideas and characters. The Serpentine that's on the foot. Also,
(15:38):
the title of your book came before you encountered her.
It seems the Serpentine of Naples. It did you. The
quote I believe is um never fear Rome. The serpentine
lies coiled in Naples. Yes, my Tomo Romata atracellato anopoly,
don't fear roam. The serpent laws coiled in Naples. As
(16:03):
soon as I read that, and even without knowing exactly
what it meant, there was my title, The serpent coil
to Naples. I've never done that before. I've never gone
into a situation or to a place we've already made title.
But it was a gift, as it were. Yeah, and
(16:24):
you spend the book unpacking that title. But there's another quote.
If you open all the doors of Naples, Rome disappears
to situate what Naples means in the mindset of Italians.
And I would broaden it to say Europeans talk about
that crosstown rivalry and what Naples represents. I mean, there is,
(16:44):
of course a constant rivalry between the North and South
of Italy, and of course you see this exemplified particularly
at football games. You know they're really out to kill
each other. But there is something else which distinguishes Naples
(17:04):
from any other big city in Italy, which is I
think hugely important. If you go to Venice, if you
go to Florence, you go to Rome, the old centers
of those places have now been given over to tourism, restaurants, whatever,
(17:27):
else whereas in Naples you're still looking at a center
which is occupied by the original people, and that makes
it unique. I had this beautifully illustrated for me a
few years ago when a lady showed me a stretch
(17:48):
of pavement and she said, take a look at this
groove in a stone, you know, a simple, shallow groove,
and she said, and follow it and it led to
a fishmonger, and she said, that groove is centuries old,
and as you'll see, the fishmonger is still here. That
(18:13):
it was. What are the most invaluable lessons I had
about Naples? Right, that's such a striking moment. There's water
that's been dripping from this fishmonger's cart and shop for centuries,
which caused that groove. You know, it also reminds me
at one point you write blood tears and semen have
seeped into an ooze from every crack of this old
(18:35):
town center, which I think does get across the kind
of dankness and richness of these impoverished quarters of Naples,
to pick one of those. You talk a lot about
blood in this book. It's ever present. Can you explain
that a little bit? Yes, yes, blood. Well, when I
wrote that line, I was thinking in particular of the
(18:59):
great composer Jaswaldo, who discovered that his wife was having
an affair and came home late one night, caught the
madd it and stabbed both of them to death, and
(19:21):
had their bodies dragged out onto the pavement, where they
lay for about a week. But of course that that's
just one form of blood. There's also the gangs. Indeed,
there is one zone in the north of a part
of Naples called Scampia. The police don't go into that zone.
(19:43):
It's one of the most well, it is the most
violent area in the whole of Europe. You know, you
can go out on the street and never be sure
whether you're looking at a regular citizen or a killer.
And of course it's very sad. They say that if
(20:05):
you go into any cafe and you buy a espresso,
a percentage of the price of that espresso will finally
end up in the Camorra's pockets. There are also all
kinds of other contradictions in that in recent years Naples
(20:25):
has become a much safer place to visit. Why is
that because the Camorra have put out the message to
leave the tourists alone. Why have they done that because
they own a good bit of the tourist industry, so
(20:45):
they would like it to be a safe place for tourists.
And I've never in my time they're experienced any trouble.
That said, all of that is now being threatened. Naples
is becoming more and more of a popular tourists destination,
(21:05):
and there is gentrification moving even into Fortella, the tough
zone where I stay. And so it's always with a
certain amount of hesitation that I recommend places that I love.
You know, tourism is in so many ways the enemy
(21:31):
of all that one loves about a place yes, and
there's Seventeenth century churchman and historian Thomas Fuller said that
travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse.
(21:51):
And unfortunately you see more fools than wise men on
the streets. You know, you know, you're you're putting your
finger on I think something in a much smaller way,
I've struggled with, but the burden, for lack of a
better word, of a travel writer, which is the compulsion
to share, yes, to really take an X ray on
(22:12):
a place and pass that information along. And yet the
closer you get to your subject, the more you want
to protect it. Yes, And so how do you reconcile
that tension? What makes you decide to go for I haven't.
I haven't yet reconciled it. I don't know if I
ever will. You know. In the final chapter of my book,
(22:33):
I write about going to a particular festa on the
slopes of Vesuvius, and it took me months to get
onto that, and it was the most wonderful experience for me.
But in writing about it, my deepest fear is that
(22:54):
I've exposed it. Yes, And I'm thinking to myself, you know,
suppose one day a tourist boss goes up that slope
and tries to join in with a festa. Yeah, I
have to say I would feel incredibly guilty. Mm, But
you still wrote it. I still wrote it. You still
(23:17):
That's the contradiction you're talking about, and it's the one
I have not yet resolved myself, and I wonder if
I ever will. Writing is my passion, and you know,
falling in love with a place is in a sense
a kind of romance, and one wants to be true
to what one sees. You said at one point an
(23:38):
old joke, someone's on a train and they ask the
conductor when do we arrive in Naples? And he said,
hold up your wrist to your eye, look at your watch,
and look at the minute hand. And when your watch disappears,
you're in Naples. Yeah. I'll let that fall on your head,
not mine. You've got to walk down from the streets.
(23:59):
I mean, they have to go through some pretty tough
neighborhoods get to me, right, they might give Naples a
run for his money. Well, it's interesting the preamble when
you're described described as a poet, an essayist, and a
travel writer. And I don't I don't really see you
as a travel writer in that you've written about Naples previously,
You've written books about Syria, Damascus, and that's another place
(24:23):
you're talking about love that you it seems you fell
in love with and you really steep yourself and into
these cultures, right, both intellectually as well as physically. So, Yeah,
do you see any distinction between between yourself and what's
considered a travel writer? Um? I think it's fantastic that
(24:46):
you raised this question, because I think I constantly disqualify
myself as a travel writer. The reason I'm called that
occasionally is so they know where to put me in
the bookshops, you know. And I think the main reason
for that being that I don't travel through places so
(25:10):
much as I do through the lives of people. And
my thinking is that if you get close to someone
that sooner or later that person will reflect his or
her surroundings. I enjoy people, I enjoy their stories, and
(25:32):
what their stories tell me is really about the place. Yeah,
it seems you consult. You do consult with both the
living and the dead. So who helps you more the
living or the dead. When you're kind of trying to
figure out a place Naples like nowhere else I've been.
The dead are always with you, They're with the Neapolitans.
(25:56):
I had somebody criticized me for saying, oh, you don't
talk correctly about the dead, and I said, look, it's
not me, it's them, you know, it's Neapolitans addressing the dead,
and the dead addressing them. When Naples won the World
Cup with the Great Maradonna, people rushed to the cemetery
(26:22):
to tell the dead, you've no idea what you missed.
And and you know, the whole belief system with the
skull of cults, which is probably the reason why I
went there, is that there is this sort of communication,
you know, this flow between the living and the dead,
(26:43):
such that there is no barrier left between them. Yeah,
you're right of going into, for example, the volcanic quarries
underneath Naples, and and and they're packed with skulls, when
some of them are shiny, burnished, almost like a like
a polished shoe, because they're touched so often. Yes, for
(27:04):
your good luck, yes, indeed indeed. And and of course
the skull cult there is rather different than that which
you will find in Mexico. You adopt a skull, you
take care of it, keep it clean, dust it off,
you know now and then the spirit possessor of that
(27:27):
skull will come to you in dreams and you can
ask questions. But you know, the Neapolitans, being Neapolitan, they
tend to ask for the lot for the lottery ticket
numbers or the used to used to one point, you say,
any place one chooses the map is unmappable, And so
(27:50):
I ask you why mapp it? Why? Why? Why take
a crack at this? Well, I'm always cautious when it
comes to talking about let's say, in the journeys I've
or year half British. Yeah, I always I always felt
that's a load of nonsense myself. You know, one one
goes to learn, one goes to see. But in terms
(28:13):
of that great revolution in the soul that's supposed to
take place, I mean, have you ever heard of anything
so vain? I mean, it's awful, and I think it.
I think that very notion has contaminated a lot of
travel literature. And I always tell people, you know, go
(28:40):
go to a place with modesty and curiosity, but don't
go in the expectation of altering the state of your soul.
You know, respect and intelligence as a way to approach
any place, And of course, in that respect, I've always
(29:00):
maintained that the puffballs of peace are sometimes worse than
the missiles of war. Tourism is the soft weapon which
is destroying so many places. I was really shocked when
I went to a Malfi for the first time, where
every square inch of the center of Amalfi it's given
(29:25):
over to tourism, whether it's postcards, ice creams, or souvenir shops.
I just found it incredibly depressing that you have this
beautiful city in the middle of the most beautiful landscape,
and yet it's been completely ruined. The very reason that
(29:46):
people went there in the first place was to see
the magic. The magic is long gone. I think that's
I think that might be a good place to end.
I'm going to encourage you never to listen to my
podcast if you don't like personal journeys blended with your travel.
But I think you'll find that my curiosity and interest
in true local folks and what they have to say
(30:09):
is at the heart of my project. Thank you for
taking the time to chat with me this evening. My
great pleasure, My great pleasure. Marius Kachaovsky his latest book
is called The Serpent Coiled in Naples, and I encourage
you to check it out. We hardly scratched its surface here.
(30:31):
It's a really, really rich book. And honestly, I was
hoping that Marius and I would become best friends forever
after our conversation, but I kind of have a feeling
after he hears me naval gazing in front of Leonard
Cohen's house in Montreal, Hill want nothing to do with me.
That's okay, Maybe I'll just stare in front of Marius's
house in London at some point in the future. But
(30:53):
fortunately for me, after the break, I'm going to be
joined by another naval gazey writer, Jesse Klein. She's also
a comedian, and I have a feeling she's gonna like
my style. That is nice, a man with a sports
coat with that inner pass that is kind of a
not Lost. We'll be right back, all right, We are
(31:20):
back here at Not Lost Chat. I am coming to
you today from Manhattan. I live in Brooklyn and I've
been commuting more and more here to Manhattan to help
make this show. And I've noticed that people are walking slower,
like maybe half a mile per hour slower and that
(31:40):
might not seem like much, but it does make a
difference when you are walking in the streets every day,
and I've been walking these streets for years. It's an
interesting shift. You can sense it when you're on the stairwell,
when you're moving around town. And whether it's related to
like post COVID lockdown disorientation or something else, I don't know.
(32:03):
I mean, actually I do know everyone is staring at
their phones. But anyway, whatever the reason, it really adds
this feeling I've had for the past few months that
I don't remember really how to behave around people like
I did before COVID, and arguably I didn't even really
know how to behave around them then. So to help
me refresh my memory and help other folks who might
(32:23):
be in the same boat, I've decided to invite a
World Savvy guest each week to help answer questions about
moving and traveling through the world, And this week I'm
joined by the TV writer, essayist and comedian Jesse Klein.
She is probably best known for her work on the
show Inside Emi Schumer, but she's also written for a
ton of other shows, like Transparent. She's a consulting producer
(32:46):
on the Netflix show Big Mouth, and she writes books too.
Her most recent book is called I'll Show Myself Out,
essays on midlife and motherhood. And with so much going
on in her life, I asked if she even has
time to travel. I think an illusion has been created
because I'm actually not. I'm I currently I am a
(33:07):
little bit unemployed, but I'm not that prolific. I think
because of the pandemic, certain things got slowed down that
would have like kind of come out along various different years.
And then because of COVID and have you heard of it?
Who's this virus we heard about in New York? Did
you get it there? Anyways, a bunch of things came
(33:29):
out at once, and it made it seem like, Oh,
who's this girl who's just endlessly working? But all of
these things took like five years of development. And anyways,
I don't take vacations because I'm working that hard. It
strikes me that you wouldn't be someone who takes a
vacation with like a coconut with a straw in it
kind of vacation, because I'm not that type of person either. Well,
(33:54):
I do think about, like, what's my ideal vacation. I
do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Okay,
I don't go in it a ton of sharks, but
to be near it, looking at it and drinking like
a cold sense sir. I don't know something if it's
(34:14):
in a coconut, sure, as long as it's But I
feel like I could only do that for so many days.
I do like walking through a beautiful city. Okay, I
am craving right now, some kind of maybe a forest okay,
forest bath or just farest walk. I guess I think
at this point in life now just if you're in
(34:35):
a forest, you're taking a forest bath. And if you're
hearing sounds or in a sound bath, well, okay, it's
just baby. I don't know. I think that's just the terminology. Now,
what separate is walking through a forest from a forest bath.
I think you pay someone named after a noun one
hundred and eighty dollars to take a forest bath, to
bathe willow. Willow's going to take me on my forest
(34:58):
bath exactly. Okay, that's helpful. So when I was preparing
to chat with you, I was reading some interviews you
did when your book came out about half a year
ago now, Yes. And in one of them, you talked
about Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Eat, Pray, Love, Yes, and you
said that you've read it a ton of times. I have,
And I mean I've interviewed Elizabeth Gilbert a couple of times.
(35:20):
She's brilliant. I think she's wonderful, so brilliant. But there
are only so many books in the world. Why would
you want to read that one more than once? That's
a really good question, I mean, especially when that book
came out, I think I was like exactly the strike
zone for it and just covers I think a lot
of human experience in a lovely smart way. I know
(35:44):
there was kind of a little bit of a backlash
to that book because I think for reasons that were
unrelated to the book or to Elizabeth Gilbert, it became
a little bit labeled like with sort of a basic
bitch brush that I don't think that's really super fair
to it. Having read your earlier book of essays, being
familiar with your work with Amy Schumer and other things,
(36:06):
you don't strike me as someone who would want to
go to Bali and kind of like find yourself and
get like Hannah tattoos. But maybe I'm wrong. Uh, definitely
not into the Hannah tattoo. You know, with travel the
day there's a teleporter, I'll go most places, but um,
I am at my core are a little lazy. So
(36:30):
the really really long flight really intimidates me. It's so dumb.
Why miss out on beautiful things in the world because
you don't want to go to the airport and began
a plane that long. It's dumb. So it's it's not
the basic bitch stuff that makes me anxious about it.
It's not being in the back of a moped that stuff,
totally okay, it's just the actual trip. The trip. I
get intimidated by the trip. I am actually, especially as
(36:53):
I creep towards just getting older and older and older
and older. I'm very into the woo woo finding yourself stuff.
I would absolutely do that. Have you read the book
called Yoga by Emmanuel Carrera. It's like the hot book.
That's what people are reading in New York in the
sub Okay, please help please. That's one of the things
(37:15):
I miss about New York is knowing what like, yeah,
you really are like what should I read? And you
look around and you're like, this is what people are
reading what's that rat? Reading? What pizza at? Pizza? What's
pizza at? Dragging pizza? Reading yoga yoga at uh. Anyway,
part of it is a guy who goes to this
meditation resort. He's been doing those things for years and
he has to be silent for ten days. Okay, Yeah,
(37:37):
silent is a no for me. I wouldn't do that.
And I also I'm realizing, like I want a caveat
finding myself. I will not be quiet and I won't uh,
and I can't. I can't. I won't meditate. Okay, So
you are obviously a jet setter. You love to be
(37:57):
in a plane, you know. Ye the drop of the hat,
you will cash in your travel points and go somewhere.
So you're perfectly qualified to help um some of my
listeners with their etiquette questions. I would I would love
to help ken. This first one comes from Anna from Wyoming.
She writes, this is because I've watched so many Real
(38:18):
Housewives strips and a big group how do you assign
rooms in a vacation house? Who gets the smallest room?
This is the cause of a lot of stress with
big group trips where there's a mix of singles and
couples also on Bachelor at weekends. Oh that's a really
really good question. That would stress me out. I'm picky
(38:39):
as hell, and I think at this point I would
probably be one of the people creating the problems. But
I agree with you. I would scope the entire joint.
I would do some calculus in my head and try
to get the best room possible without feeling like a jerk. Yeah,
I mean, I would say it feels like if there's
dedicated organizer to the trip, I would say, like, maybe
(39:03):
you're just like I'm going to assign those rooms. Everyone
knows in advance, so there's not that scramble. Yeah, you know,
I think you're I think having a leader like I
even I'm someone who's pretty picky, but if I know
I'm in good hands. As long as it's been thought about,
I could be in a less than excellent room because
I'm like some justice has been administered here, there's been
(39:24):
some thought to it. I don't like a free for
all because I feel guilty because I will win. But
then I want to join myself. Or I'll go the
other direction and take the worst room as like some martyr.
I'll be my mother and my father. Basically yeah, and
that doesn't feel good. A free for all is so
anxiety inducing, so Anna, I don't know if we answered
find a strong organizer and secretly lobby that organizer on
(39:48):
the side. Yes, okay, we have another question from Nicole
Nicole from New Jersey. Due to planes no longer guaranteeing
you to sit together unless you pay, do you agree
to give up your prepaid seat so that a parent
can sit with their child. Oh a hundred percent. Okay,
that's just karma points, you're well, I do it for
(40:10):
just like a healthy couple. No, no, no, no, get
healthy thriving couple, like two people who want to canoodle
the whole flight long. Absolutely not. But for a parent
and a kid, that's like, you got you gotta, you gotta.
I'm with you on this. As somebody who doesn't have
(40:30):
a kid, I still think that's a pretty mean, curmudgeingly
thing to do, to not give up your seat. I
will say, though, now any parent listening will not have
to prepay because they're just going to assume people will
give them their seat. Can I say, on the flip
side of all of this, if you are the parent
who was not able to get your seats together, and
(40:52):
someone is doing this kindness for you, and you are
showing up at that airport knowing you're going to have
to ask this. You better have some kind of a
gift card a I'm serious, like, have a thing, like,
have something to to offer as a thank you, because yeah,
the presumptuousness of it. Yeah, I think you got to
(41:14):
have some kind of little gift card in your pocket
for the place at least make the effort and then
the person should not accept it in a way, but
you should do the little dance of like I'd like to. Yeah.
It's it's not fair, but it's right. Um. So the
Peanut Gallery. I shared this with the Peanut Gallery for
asking this question, and one parents said, I love the
(41:35):
idea of dropping my kid off with a stranger. Good luck,
Like if they won't give up their seat, good luck,
Like have have fun with my five year old. Yeah,
have at it. Yeah, have ad it, buddy. They're going
to be screaming and freaking smash goldfish falling out of
your clothes. Okay. This question comes from Coco from Miami.
The question is is it weird to take your shoes
(41:56):
off on the plane? It's weird to take your shoes
off and not have on a sock. Okay, I'm okay
with a shoe off. If you're in a sock, I
can't even imagine who's going to have a barefoot on
a plane. But I mean, you can't imagine you've flown
in America ly well? I mean I was. I was
(42:16):
thinking of the person who I saw openly clipping their
nails on a openly clipping their nails. I was like,
are we on the L train? What are we doing?
I mean, that really happened. That sound is like the
opposite of a meditation app is not snip, It's like
the opposite of the clip of a t But shoes,
(42:42):
if you have socks, okay, if you have socks, okay,
not ideal, but permitted. I have a question. Okay, you're
on a plane, you arrive at your destination, you enter
your wherever you are, your hotel, room, your house, whatever
it is. How much time expires between walking through the
door and silkwood showering and getting out of what you
were wearing. Oh that's interesting. I mean, I'm a pretty
(43:08):
clean dude, but I don't I don't rush into the
shower like rapped with tears thinking about what just went
down in the airplane. Really yeah, I think I'm more
likely or like sit on other things in the place
you're staying and in the clothes you were just on.
Oh plane. When I enter a hotel room, I take
(43:29):
off the top comforter and pillows. I mean, come on,
that's table stakes. Will you remove the pillows? The top
pillows like, oh yeah, exactly next to the comforter. Let
time go by. I'd let time go by, sure. Like
my first concern is like, can I just get a drink?
(43:50):
Can I just like get like I want to get
it back into life. I want to be around a friend,
like I want to like be in the world again
mentally mental high teen is my my high priority. Okay, okay, okay,
this is mightave of a couple of things. I'm obsessed
with this question and many guests of answer is on
the airplane, what do you wear? Comfort or something else?
(44:12):
What is your what is your strategy for the airplane?
I mean obs comfort, but within limits. I mean, here's
like a thinker for the ladies, Like the most comfy
thing is a jumpsuit, Like you're kind of in a
onesie and it's very comfortable. However, if you're in a
(44:34):
jumpsuit when you go to that bathroom you're doing you're
you're in a tits out pee, which just doesn't feel great,
Like you really are vulnerable. You're vulnerable and that tits
out people. But you're trading that off for being in
like your comfious outfit. So it's tough. But then when
you burn upon arrival, I'm not wearing it again. No, no,
(44:56):
I mean, I can't be clear. I'm not repeating the
clothes that touch the seat of the plane. Wow, I
believe it's only in like a good sports cut. Are
you dressing up for air travel like we're in the sixties?
A little bit? A little bit because it's so dehumanizing
to go through TSA and to wait for five hours
to get um, you know, a bagel with egg, salad
(45:18):
and iceberg lettuce or whatever for twenty dollars that I
feel like looking kind of like dialed in makes me
feel calmer, you know what. I want to address what
you're saying, because it's very valid. I when I say
I'm addressing for comfort, I'm not doing like, you know,
like a juicy sweatsuit where you're just like, fuck you everyone. Yeah,
(45:38):
I'm I'm clipping my nails where I want to. Yeah,
I don't want to look like I've fully given up. Yeah,
I think, yeah, that's the line. But but but on
the blazer, on the sports coade, Yeah, I do feel
like it has protective powers, Like I don't care if
it wrinkles, like I beat it to hell. I use
the pockets. I throw my passport in it, and for me,
(45:59):
that feels a little bit like armor. And then when
I am at the hotel or if I go out
to dinner afterwards, I'll like take it off and I
feel like it kind of like that's kind of what
protects my situation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, inner pocket looks so
great with the passport in it. People people love it. Yeah,
that is nice. A man with a sports coat with
(46:20):
that inner past that is kind of a hot moment. Yeah. Yeah,
that's a sophisticated man. I have a jacket that I
bought as my production jacket. It has six pockets on
this jacket. It's like a utility and I bought it
for set because it was like a headset pocket, a
purel pocket, your mask pocket, your phone pocket, but for
(46:43):
travel it's equally. It's also just like all this shit,
I've got completely so many pockets. Now again, this is
why Robert Altman War One, and this is why Romancing
the Stone Michael Douglas War One. Like all those pockets
needed in both those scenarios. But you have your hand sandy,
you have your passport, your sandy. Yeah. And if you're
in one of those uncomfortable situations where sometimes I put
(47:05):
myself in where I'm like, I just jump in the
seat because I feel like I don't know when I'm
when I'm getting into the plane itself, a lot of anxiety,
a lot of people angry, a lot of people throw
in suitcases up tough. So I just want to get
in there. I like have knowing that if I just
have to hop in the seat, it's all in my pockets.
I'm all good, It's all in your pockets. So is
there a better feeling in this world than that moment
(47:26):
where you've made it to your seat and you butt
down and you bag up and you're just like, I'm
in the seat. There is there should be a German
better feeling when my doors close and there's no one
sitting next to suspense delicious sense and then you wide
(47:47):
until take off so no one will get any ideas,
and then you're an easy straight after that. Yeah, you
gotta wait till that take off to you, that's true. Yeah,
that's a really good feeling too. Um. Jesse, thank you
so much for coming by and sharing your travel secrets.
Thank you. That was Jesse Klein. The latest book is
(48:10):
called I'll Show Myself Out, essays on midlife and motherhood.
It's kind of like Eat, Pray Love, but she's married,
has children and doesn't really go anywhere. So that's it
for this edition of Not Lost Chat. If you have
travel questions that you went answered in a future episode,
you can email them to me at not Lost at
Pushkin dot fm or ping me at b F Newnham
(48:33):
on Twitter. Please send them along. Not Lost Chat is
produced by Jordan Belly, who flew from the Bahamas to
La to be able to help assemble this episode. I
hope Jordan allows me into the Platinum Club Centurion Lounge
if we ever traveled together. The show is written and
hosted by me Brendan Francis Nunham. True story. I recently
(48:54):
rented an Airbnb in Montreal for the holiday break, but
I was too busy to make the trip didn't cancel
in time, so I had to pain full. But I
did get a good review from the host. She said
I left the house in good shape, so there you go.
Someone who is much better at making plans and keeping
them is Laura Morgan, who helps book our show. This
(49:16):
episode was edited by Sarah Nix with assistance from the
Chillist managing producer in the game, Jacob Smith. Our mix
engineer who also provides additional production support is Sarah Brugere
Not Lost is a co production of Pushkin Industries, Topic
Studios and iHeartMedia, who was developed at Topic Studios and Yes.
This show has some executive producers including me Brendan Francis Newnham,
(49:40):
Christy Kressman, Maria Zuckerman, Lisa Langang and La Tom Mullott.
As always, if you dig what you here, please tell
a friend, tell the seat mate on your airplane if
they look like they want to talk with you. You
can also make a comment an Apple podcast, spread the word.
It's all really appreciated. And if your inbox is lonely
and whose isn't, you can sign up for the Pushkin
(50:01):
newsletter at Pushkin dot Fm, slash newsletter, and if you
want to listen to back episodes of Not Lost or
other Pushkin podcast us, then there's some great ones, story
of the week, slight change of plans. You can listen
and find them on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or
wherever you listen to your podcast. That is it for
this episode. Thank you everybody, Bamboyage
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