A Whole New Old World

Dan spent all weekend writing a research paper on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project which, disappointingly enough, isn't about one man's attempt to play every coin-operated Ms. Pac-Man in America in the span of a year, but rather 19th century covered passageways in Paris.

Although I'm learning a lot about historical materialism by proofreading Dan's work, I'm also really grateful that I'm no longer in grad school and thus free to watch a Gilmore Girls marathon while eating brownie bites. I do still make an effort to flex my poetry muscle on a daily basis. I can't help but think metaphorically about booking Carnival cruises and enjoy coming up with slant rhymes for Air Tran. (Oh Air Tran/now under Southwest reign.)

From Oct 23-30, I'll be at Disney World researching the parks and blogging daily on everything from my American Idol audition experience at Hollywood Studios (I'm singing "Black Velvet") to the fish and chips portion size at Epcot's Rose and Crown Pub. I hope to explore the Disney zeitgeist and our polemical engagement with materialism that inevitably capitulates under the subconscious weight of magical abandon. Um, and ride Space Mountain like twenty times.

While Dan has been tying cultural criticism to the current trend of disjunction in poetry, I've been relating it to Disney. We both just read poet Tony Hoagland's essay entitled "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment," which contrasts novelty (an obsession of Benjamin's) and experience. Hoagland opens with the assertion that embedded in newness is the seed of obsolescence. Nothing can stay new forever, despite the poet's attempt at innovative form or style. Convention is ineluctably "conventionally tired." But Mickey Mouse never seems tired, even prototype Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, who was pretty much either always at the ship's wheel or peeling potatoes.



I think what makes Disney so compellingly mythic is its ability to reinvent itself while maintaining a firm foothold in the old. Disney is neither dated nor slickly modern. The parks age, yet somehow they don't. It's no coincidence that you won't find a newspaper inside the Magic Kingdom.

I grew up with a Fisher Price Record Player and oodles of vinyl-- Mousercize and Disco Duck and the soundtrack to the animated Robin Hood featuring the twangy vocal stylings of Roger Miller. I used to cart my equipment down to the lake and DJ for the neighborhood boys who fished for brim, spinning hits like "Feed the Birds" and "Never Smile at a Crocodile." Can you believe my first date wasn't until college? I can.



The point is, my relationship with Disney runs deep. I think each one of us has a private history with the parks that refuses to be supplanted by any amount of revamping. We create emotional memories rooted in the unchanging aspects of Disney. It's the big picture -- mouse ears, Cinderella castle, music -- that emerges from the fog of childhood. The past is a record on repeat. (Is it unfortunate when this record is Mary Poppins? Maybe.)

Birnbaum's Official Guide to Walt Disney World touches on the seemingly reductive and inauthentic nature of Epcot's World Showcase: "You won't find the real Germany here -- rather, the country's essence, much as a traveler returning from a visit might remember what he or she saw." The countries at World Showcase, then, aren't reductive at all. They're meant to represent what we as travelers remember once we're home again. It's the "essence" of recollection.

At 33, what I love about Walt Disney World is its vague fluttery core, a heart-warming abstraction that has the effect of intensifying feelings of attachment.


(panel from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics)