Travel Blog
2012 Travel Writing Conferences
by Jim Benning | 02.06.12 | 2:22 AM ET
Spring and summer are fast approaching, and that means warmer days, Major League Baseball and, yes, travel writing conferences. Gadling recently noted several upcoming conferences. Among them:
Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX)
The annual travel blogger gathering created by Kim Mance lays claim to being “the world’s premiere and largest conference of travel bloggers, writers, and new media creators.” Discussions and workshops explore the art and business of travel blogging, including ethical considerations and social media best practices. For many, it’s a reunion, of sorts: Bloggers who’ve been tweeting at one another for the last year can finally catch up in person. This year’s conference takes place June 15-17 in Keystone, Colorado. (Luasanne, Switzerland will also host a TBEX gathering in October.)
The Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference
Co-founded by veteran travel editor Don George, the four-day Book Passage conference just north of San Francisco has focused on great writing and photography for 20 years. It features panel discussions, specialized learning tracks, readings, dinners and convivial nightly gatherings. Faculty members in recent years have included Tim Cahill, Spud Hilton, David Farley and yours truly. This year, Susan Orlean will be on hand. It takes place Aug. 9-12 in Corte Madera, California.
Also worth noting:
Travel Classics Writers Conferences
These conferences are open only to professional writers and feature editors from a number of glossy magazines. Writers must submit an application to attend and show they’ve been published in at least three magazines in the last year-and-a-half. The next conference takes place June 7-12 in Cardiff, Wales.
Wondering which conference is right for you? Vagabondish has a useful guide.
Finally, if you want to hone your writing skills but don’t want to travel to a conference, consider taking a travel writing class at a local bookstore or university.
Spots are open now in David Farley’s two upcoming classes in New York City—one beginning Feb. 10 at Idlewild Books, and the other beginning Feb. 9 at NYU.
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Yahoo! BuzzNATJA Announces 2011 Winners
by Eva Holland | 02.03.12 | 4:36 PM ET
The complete roster of North American Travel Journalists Association award winners was announced this week. National Geographic Traveler took the grand prize for top travel publication, while Andrew McCarthy and Jill Schensul were named the travel journalists of the year.
Several World Hum contributors were also among the winners. Larry Bleiberg took Gold in the Historical or Hobby Travel category, while Daisann McLane received a Gold award for Cultural, Educational or Self-Improvement Travel. Lola Akinmade Akerstrom received two Gold awards—one for Personality and Profiles and one for Culinary Travel—and Wayne Curtis also received a Silver award for Culinary Travel.
Congratulations to all the winners.
‘Downton Abbey’ and the Art of the English Library
by Jim Benning | 02.02.12 | 3:17 AM ET
Like so many people, I’ve been glued to PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and the scheming and backstabbing unfolding in Highclere Castle. Here, series creator Julian Fellowes discusses his favorite room in the castle: the library. I love his take on it. The French have their drawing rooms. The Austrians have their ballrooms. Libraries, he says, are the rooms the English get right.
Watch Downton Abbey: Julian Fellowes on a Favorite Room at Highclere on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.
Looking for the Old Hippie Trail
by Eva Holland | 01.31.12 | 9:44 AM ET
At Old World Wandering, Iain Manley has a long, worthwhile post on the classic overlander, mixing his personal experiences as a “novice traveller” on the route with a history of the trail’s literature, from “Across Asia on the Cheap” all the way back to the Romantics of the 1700. Here’s a taste:
I knew something of the old Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks making their way out east - “like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures” - on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He thought “the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee,” and had “no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?” Theroux, propped up on his first-class berth “like a pasha,” consulting Nagel’s Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, “like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee,” was too much of a prig to characterise the hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did that “somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
Video: Eric Weiner on his new Book, ‘Man Seeks God’
by Jim Benning | 01.30.12 | 1:03 PM ET
We recently published The Inner Nightclub of Everlasting Joy, an excerpt from Eric Weiner’s new book, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Here’s Weiner discussing the book and his travels with Lisa Napoli earlier this month at a Live Talks Los Angeles event. It’s an engaging, humor-filled conversation.
Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli from Ted Habte-Gabr on Vimeo.
‘Afterglobe,’ ‘Ingesticulate’ and 28 Other New Additions to the Travel Lexicon
by Eva Holland | 01.30.12 | 7:58 AM ET
Andy Murdock has been brainstorming some much-needed new travel words. For instance, “comeuppants,” a noun for those times when “an obnoxious person loses their luggage and has no change of clothes.” Or “trambunctious,” possibly my favorite of the bunch, an adjective describing someone who is “overly excited by riding trains, funiculars, and other forms of public transport.” Funny stuff all around.
The Rumpus Talks Truth in Memoir
by Eva Holland | 01.27.12 | 3:17 PM ET
This is a favorite, much-kicked-around topic of mine, as relevant to travel writers as to more stationary memoirists. Earlier this week the folks at The Rumpus added a fresh contribution to the debate.
Messing With Memoir is an essay about the author’s efforts to revise her out-of-print memoir, years after she’d written it, and the ethical issues she grappled with in doing so. Here’s a taste:
I was a much better writer now. Why let that raw, earnest, adverb-friendly, long-sentenced version of myself linger? With e-books and Print on Demand (POD) as a garrote, I could quietly, efficiently off her. In her place I would seat that wiser, more skilled self.
But was it ethical? I had never heard of anyone tampering with their memoir. A memoir is not only an account of your life, it is specifically an account of your remembrances of your life. So now I would be telling that same story fifteen years later. I was re-remembering a memory.
Even more important, a memoir is a reflection of who you are at the time of writing. But now I would be peering backwards at myself from a new vantage point. Isn’t there a different author (older, wiser me) now? And haven’t I now changed my main character by writing her with this new hand? Did this matter?
Touching on the same theme in one of his “Daily Rumpus” emails a few days back, editor Stephen Elliott wrote about “the only true rule of memoir”:
You cannot knowingly tell a lie. In other words, you can be wrong, you can write things you consider to be true that other people consider to be untrue. In fact, it’s impossible to do otherwise. Most truth is not factual; most truth is subjective. But to state a something as fact when you know it is not, ie. I spent this much time in jail, is to break the cardinal rule.
I think that gets it about right. For more, check out Tom Bissell’s essay on truth and travel literature, Truth in Oxiana.
Gawker Goes on a Vegas Press Trip
by Eva Holland | 01.27.12 | 2:10 PM ET
And lays the snark on thick in a dispatch, Among the Junketeers. Here’s a taste:
Though the Hilton was not objectively dirty, it was permeated by a certain sort of gloom that is the result of mixing dim lighting and snack bar food and huge television screens and losing betting slips together in close proximity and marinating for 20 years or so. “I think I’m a smart sports bettor, but I always lose,” said the TSN reporter to Kornegay at one point, obviating the need for a longer discussion here of how sports books in Las Vegas make their money.
Off to lunch at The Barrymore, a newly renovated spot with stylish wallpaper and mirrored walls and a ceiling made entirely of movie reels. On the way over we drove by Occupy Las Vegas, a grim collection of tents huddled on a cracked asphalt lot, like an obstinate little Hooverville. We did not stop. The manager at The Barrymore, shirt opened to the third button, came over to greet us. We had an entire room to ourselves. They filled the table with calamari and thinly sliced pork and every other appetizer on the menu, something which would be repeated in nearly every restaurant where we ate. The journalists had a bunch of cocktails, something which would also be repeated in nearly every restaurant. I neither drink nor eat meat, so I sat there eating my French onion soup and drinking coffee like a human sign reading “PARTY POOPER.” This would also be repeated in nearly every restaurant. The French onion soup was very good.
The press trip issue has been chewed over plenty (see: this, this, or, say, this), but I enjoyed this first-person, on-the-ground addition to the genre.
(Via @mikebarish)
The Concerto Inspired by Tahrir Square
by Jim Benning | 01.25.12 | 6:12 PM ET
Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz watched the uprising in Tahrir Square on TV a year ago today. As he looked on, with the volume off, he began composing a piece of music. “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra,” now complete, is “the first movement of what will eventually become a concerto in three movements,” according to a fascinating report on PRI’s The World.
You can hear the movement in its entirety below, but the radio segment is well worth a listen, particularly Fairouz discussing the various facets of the uprising he was trying to evoke through the music.
Travel Movies Go to the Oscars
by Eva Holland | 01.25.12 | 6:00 PM ET
It’s Oscar time again. The nominees were announced this week and a pair of travel-themed movies are up for the big awards. Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s tale of a Hollywood screenwriter (played by Owen Wilson) who visits contemporary Paris and finds himself time-traveling back to the glory days of Hemingway and Picasso. It’s nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Art Direction.
On the other side of the planet, The Descendants stars George Clooney as a Honolulu lawyer who takes his children to see land held in a family trust on Kauai. It received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Clooney), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.
Of the two, I’ve seen only “Midnight in Paris,” which I liked—as a confirmed 1920s Paris nerd I laughed at the inside jokes and enjoyed the scenery. “The Descendants” is on my To Do list. It won Best Picture (Drama) at the Golden Globes last week, and Clooney won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, too, so it has to be considered a favorite come Oscar night.
Shit Travel Bloggers Say
by Jim Benning | 01.20.12 | 4:08 PM ET
I guess this was inevitable, given the wildly popular meme. My room is comped, right?
What’s the Etiquette for Abandoning Ship?
by Jim Benning | 01.17.12 | 9:48 PM ET
As we’ve heard, the evacuation of the Costa Concordia didn’t go well after the ship ran aground last week off Italy. Slate asks: What’s the etiquette for abandoning ship? Are there maritime laws that must be followed?
In short, yes. They were issued by the International Maritime Organization.
If an evacuation alarm sounds, cruise-ship passengers are supposed to proceed to the loading area and board a lifeboat that was assigned to them based on their cabin numbers. Some evacuations are far more chaotic than that, and the crew just loads whoever is ready to go. In those emergency situations, men sometimes step aside for the women to go first, but it’s not a matter of maritime law, nor is the tradition observed in many parts of the world.
Audio From the Costa Concordia Disaster*
by Jim Benning | 01.17.12 | 9:17 PM ET
In this newly released audio, the Italian Coast Guard appears to order the Costa Concordia captain back on board the ship after it ran aground Friday off Italy. According to the latest Cruise Critic report, 11 people have died and 24 are still missing.
* Update (Wednesday, Jan. 18): Today’s New York Times reports that a quote from the audio—from Coast Guard Capt. Gregorio Maria de Falco—has “already become an icon” in Italy:
The behavior of the two captains, the journalist Aldo Grasso wrote in the newspaper, contrasted the “two souls of Italy”—one of them represented by a “cowardly fellow who flees his own responsibilities, both as a man and as an official” and the man who tries to bring him back to his responsibilities. A sentence loosely translated into English as “Get back aboard! Damn it” that Captain De Falco shouted in Schettino’s ears has already become an icon in Italy, emblazoning T-shirts for sale on the Web.
What’s in a Long Sentence?
by Jim Benning | 01.17.12 | 8:57 PM ET
Apparently some copy editors have taken issue with Pico Iyer’s use of long sentences. In the Los Angeles Times recently, the World Hum contributor makes an eloquent case for them (while employing them often), explaining that he uses them “as a small protest against—and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from—the bombardment of the moment.”
We live in a world of sound bites and bumper stickers, he writes.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions—or that at least is the hope—and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).
In excerpting this, I suppose I’m perpetuating the same sound-bite world that Iyer is protesting against. McLuhan was right. The medium is the message. But nothing is stopping you from reading the piece in its entirety, right?
‘Did You Read That Thing in Mother Jones?’
by Jim Benning | 01.17.12 | 8:32 PM ET
In case you haven’t seen it, a pretty brilliant scene from “Portlandia.”
