Travel Blog
The Critics: ‘The Lower River’ by Paul Theroux
by Jim Benning | 05.21.12 | 10:37 AM ET
Paul Theroux’s new novel, The Lower River, is about an American named Ellis Hock who returns to the African nation of Malawi nearly four decades after working there in the Peace Corps. The book got mixed reviews over the weekend. The New York Times critic liked it:
“The Lower River” is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Theroux exposes the paternalism of Hock’s Peace Corps nostalgia, his “sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership.”
The Los Angeles Times’ critic was less impressed, finding the story “predictable, peopled with stock bit players, and disappointingly familiar.”
Theroux spoke about the novel on NPR over the weekend. The six-minute segment is worth a listen:
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Yahoo! BuzzVideo: Lisa Napoli in Conversation with Eric Weiner
by Jim Benning | 05.18.12 | 2:01 PM ET
World Hum contributors Lisa Napoli and Eric Weiner spoke in front of a live audience recently in Santa Monica. Napoli, of course, is the author of “Radio Shangri-La,” about her experience in Bhutan. Weiner wrote “The Geography of Bliss” and “Man Seeks God.” Their wide-ranging discussion touched on Bhutan, happiness, authenticity and spirituality, among other things. This 30-minute video has some highlights.
Walter Kirn: In Defense of Texting While Hiking
by Eva Holland | 05.17.12 | 2:47 PM ET
The author of travel novel-turned-movie “Up in the Air” has a confession: He likes to text while hiking, and he also likes to bring his iPad to the beach. He’s torn down the barriers between technology and wilderness, and—as he writes for Outside—he thinks that more of us should do the same. Here’s Kirn on his moment of revelation:
After three months of writing cooped up indoors, with only a square patch of sky framed by my window, I drifted outside one day into a field frequented by herds of pronghorn antelope and set up an improvised writing desk on an abandoned, weathered wooden spool that had once held telephone wire. I opened my laptop, powered by a battery, set my cell phone beside it so I could handle work calls, and rigged up a little iPod stereo with speakers that looked like Lucite tennis balls. Above me, in the immense blue August sky, gray cumulus clouds fattened and roiled and towered, blocking the sun, and between them neat white contrails unfurled, tracing the curvature of the vast planet as jets bore their passengers between great cities. The sight was evocative and monumental, and it would have been lost to me, locked up as I was in my office. The novel took on an extra dimension then—broad, expansive, melancholy. Unless I’d brought my computer onto the prairie, I never would have caught the scene.
Not Your Usual Spring-Break-in-Florida Story
by Eva Holland | 05.17.12 | 12:42 PM ET
This essay from the NYT, about Alessandra Stanley’s mother-daughter vacation, is causing a stir—no huge surprise, I suppose, when it starts with a line like this: “One of the good things about divorce is that you get to see less of your children.” Stanley and her daughter spent a less-than-idyllic spring break at a super-luxury resort on a private island near South Beach. Here’s a taste:
I imagined sunrise walks on the beach, giggly mother-daughter spa treatments and intimate candlelit meals during which Emma would lean in and at long last tell me what college was like besides “fine.”
I failed to anticipate that exam-rattled 18-year-olds sleep long past noon and then stay up all night (I get up around 6 and am asleep easily before 10). Nor had I known that embedded in the ethos of this particular private island is a class system that places short-term guests below the salt.
Refreshingly honest? Privileged and self-indulgent? The Times commenters are weighing in bare-knuckled. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Paul Theroux on ‘Multilayered and Maddening’ Hawaii
by Jim Benning | 05.14.12 | 10:43 AM ET
Paul Theroux lives in Hawaii but finds aspects of the archipelago’s culture to be mysterious and nearly impenetrable. When he set out to talk with natives about local traditions, he was met with silence and monosyllabic replies, even when he turned up with gifts of honey from his own bees.
I had never in my traveling or writing life come across people so unwilling to share their experiences. Here I was living in a place most people thought of as Happyland, when in fact it was an archipelago with a social structure that was more complex than any I had ever encountered—beyond Asiatic. One conclusion I reached was that in Hawaii, unlike any other place I had written about, people believed that their personal stories were their own, not to be shared, certainly not to be retold by someone else. Virtually everywhere else people were eager to share their stories, and their candor and hospitality had made it possible for me to live my life as a travel writer.
(Via @nerdseyeview)
Video: Luis Alberto Urrea on the U.S.-Mexico Border
by Jim Benning | 05.09.12 | 12:22 PM ET
Luis Alberto Urrea has written a number of great books—fiction and non-fiction such as “The Devil’s Highway”—about the U.S.-Mexico border and life in the two countries. He appeared on Moyers & Company recently, where he discussed migrant deaths, book-banning in Tucson, growing up in Tijuana and a San Diego suburb, and a range of related topics. Great stuff. Here’s the hour-long show:
Video: Lavinia Spalding’s TEDx Talk on Travel Writing
by Jim Benning | 05.01.12 | 12:00 PM ET
The editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Park City, Utah, delivering an eloquent argument for the power of travel stories to reveal our shared humanity.
Everest Base Camp: Now With 3G
by Eva Holland | 04.28.12 | 11:40 PM ET
Outside’s Grayson Schaffer is spending two months blogging from base camp—and, as he notes in one of his early posts, he’s doing so without the use of a spendy satellite connection:
Until the 1970s and ‘80s, most Everest expeditions included two porters who did nothing but run mail dispatches from Base Camp to the nearest village. No longer. This year, multiple climbers at Base Camp are snapping photos on their iPhones and sharing them through Instagram and Facebook in real time.
That’s possible because of Nepal’s dominant cell phone service, Ncell. In 2010, the provider announced plans to bring 3G coverage all the way to Mount Everest. Now it’s here.
Just one more sign of our inexorably shrinking planet.
Chicago Tourism Song Declared a Catastrophe
by Jim Benning | 04.27.12 | 12:41 PM ET
Or something close to that. The promotional song, recently released by the city’s tourism organization, is getting slammed, especially in comments on the song’s YouTube page. One example: “It’s like the theme song from an ‘80s sitcom, probably starring Tony Danza, only it’s the muzak version of that song. A milestone in war crime level banality.”
You almost have to wonder if the whole thing is a put-on, made intentionally bad to draw more attention to the city. I mean, it is getting Chicago a lot of press. You be the judge:
Mapped: America’s Unofficial State Borders
by Eva Holland | 04.27.12 | 9:59 AM ET
Pop vs. soda vs. Coke. Yankees fans vs. Red Sox fans. Over at The Atlantic Cities, Samuel Arbesman and a team of colleagues have used data from cell phone records, sports broadcast blackout zones and more to track some of the country’s informal, internal boundaries. The result is a fascinating selection of maps.
Jon Krakauer: Writing is like Rock Climbing
by Eva Holland | 04.26.12 | 9:51 AM ET
This week I’ve been making my way through a collection of interviews called The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. It’s an interesting read. The writers—everyone from Gay Talese to Eric Schlosser and Susan Orlean—describe how they work, from story idea through interviewing to writing and editing.
In one section, Jon Krakauer explains his use of outlines. It involves a lot of hand-written scenes pinned to his office wall in sequence. The book’s author, Robert S. Boynton, asks him where he got the technique.
Here’s Krakauer’s reply:
Rock climbing. When you embark on a really big climb like, say, the Salathé wall of El Capitan, which rises three thousand vertical feet from the floor of Yosemite Valley, the enormity of the undertaking can be paralyzing. So a climber breaks down the ascent into rope-lengths, or pitches. If you can think of the climb as a series of twenty or thirty pitches, and focus on each of these pitches to the exclusion of all the scary pitches that still lie above, climbing El Cap suddenly isn’t such an intimidating prospect. By following an outline I can focus on the chapter that’s in front of me… It makes writing a book much less terrifying.
Travel TV Movie Watch: ‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’
by Jim Benning | 04.24.12 | 7:43 PM ET
For those of you who just can’t get enough Ernest Hemingway in your life (and, really, love him or hate him, who can ever get enough?): HBO is behind a new film about the romance between Papa and Martha Gellhorn. It premieres on HBO Monday, May 28, and stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. And hey, isn’t that Metallica’s Lars Ulrich in the trailer, talking about people heading to Spain? Why yes (thanks, IMDb).
Cue Ulrich’s anthem to landmine wounds?
Amanda Hesser’s Advice for Aspiring Food Writers
by Jim Benning | 04.18.12 | 10:14 AM ET
What does the former New York Times food writer and editor say to aspiring food writers who ask her for advice?
I can no longer responsibly recommend that you drop everything to try to become a food writer. Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer, and I think it’s only going to get worse.
Hesser talks salaries and freelance budgets, and she offers other suggestions for those still interested in pursuing food writing.
So what happens now if someone comes to me wanting to become a writer? I don’t totally crush their dreams. I just step on them a bit—before trying to help the aspirant re-imagine his or her future in a whole new way.
If all that’s too depressing for you, check out this photo of falafel and tzatziki on the same site. It’s pretty, and it won’t step on your dreams. Its only purpose is to delight you.
‘Paris Was the Landscape of What I Wanted to Be’
by Eva Holland | 04.12.12 | 12:51 PM ET
In the latest essay in The Rumpus’ “The Last City I Loved” series, writer Rebekkah Dilts looks back on her time as a foreign student in Paris. Here’s a taste:
Speaking and being spoken to in French, this language that’s like a song, opened a new vein of cognition and a different sensibility in me. Paris was the landscape of what I wanted to be: I wanted to have a history that I believed in fiercely, I wanted for art and words to be acknowledged, but also for softness and aesthetics to be appreciated. And I was embraced by a family again; to feel tenderness and a sense of belonging in the setting of so incredible a city was the greatest gift I could have been given. I felt a unique and profound freedom.
Travel Writing: ‘Almost as Over-Romanticized as Bacon’
by Jim Benning | 04.10.12 | 11:08 AM ET
Every spring I teach a travel writing class at New York University. Within the first five minutes of the first class, I tell my students the bubble-bursting secret: that being a travel writer is almost as over-romanticized as bacon, Brooklyn and Italy. Not that I’m necessarily complaining. Sometimes on the road, we can experience glimpses of a decadent life of Hemingwayan proportions, but when we get back home, the cash-strapped reality sinks in as quickly as it takes to boil a packet of Top Ramen. Travel we most certainly do; money we most certainly do not make.
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