Travel Blog
Do We Bond Over Books the Way We Do During Travel?
by Jim Benning | 06.05.12 | 9:44 AM ET
Bryan Basamanowicz observes that people bond over mutually beloved books much the way they bond with fellow travelers in a far-flung place.
If we try to extend this “traveler’s comparison” to other narrative mediums—television programs, movies, plays—it can often lose some of its steam. Why is this? Relative limitlessness in physical and emotional sensory potential is the privilege and burden of the reader. The book, more so than any other form of narrative media, rings true, more synonymous, with the limitlessness and loneliness to be found while facing the open road or holding a one-way airline ticket to Azerbaijan. In my hypotheses, it is the loneliness quality in particular, physically and intellectually inherent to the act of reading, that lays the bedrock for the powerful social bonding achieved through literature. The limitlessness is critical too, as it promises a bounty of fertile avenues for conversation, but it’s the loneliness of the reader—or, as Rainer Maria Rilke might say, it’s how “two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other”—that assigns to a very special category those friendships formed over books.
I’ve had much the same experience. Though I’ll never forget meeting a young Canadian traveler in a lonely village in western China. When she learned I liked the band Rush, she literally jumped up and down with joy and ran over to give me a hug. You never know what, exactly, will float another’s boat.
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Yahoo! BuzzWhat Do Guidebooks Say About America?
by Eva Holland | 06.04.12 | 1:57 PM ET
The Atlantic’s Max Fisher dug through several USA guidebooks to get a sense of what they’re telling the world. The results? He found a heavy emphasis on politics, food and dining customs, and punctuality, punctuality, punctuality.
I especially liked his observations about the complications of U.S. utensil etiquette:
You might say that global food cultures tend to fall into one of two categories: utensil cultures and finger cultures. The U.S., somewhat unusually, has both: the appropriate delivery method can vary between cuisines, and even between dishes, and it’s far from obvious which is which. Baked chicken is a fork food, but fried chicken a finger food, depending on how it’s fried. If you get fried pieces of potato, it’s a finger food, unless the potato retains some circular shape, in which case use your fork. And so on. Confused yet?
Fisher also notes that the books illustrate the expectations and habits of many outsiders as clearly as they do Americans:
In many ways, the tour books say as much about the world as they do about the U.S., by highlighting the ways in which American practices and standards deviate. Anyone who’s traveled widely, particularly in the developing world, will understand why these books are so emphatic about, for example, punctuality, personal space, and the unreliability of our trains.
Indeed. (Via Frank Bures)
Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’: Now Oprah-Approved
by Eva Holland | 06.04.12 | 12:31 PM ET
After being put on hold for two years, Oprah’s Book Club is back—and the first new pick is Cheryl Strayed’s hiking memoir, Wild. Here’s what Oprah had to say:
“I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web. In fact, I love this book so much and want to talk about it so much, I knew I had to reinvent my book club.”
This is the first time the club has focused on a travel narrative—it’s leaned heavily on modern fiction over the years—and it’s likely to make “Wild” the most popular travel memoir since “Eat, Pray, Love.” Here’s hoping the pick leads to more travel narratives making their way into the mainstream.
26 ‘Chinatown Bus’ Operators Shut Down
by Eva Holland | 06.01.12 | 10:09 AM ET
A few years back, we posted news that the cheap and occasionally safety-challenged Chinatown buses—cult favorites among budget travelers in the Northeastern U.S.—were reportedly cleaning up their act. Turns out the effort fell short. After a year-long investigation, federal safety officials have closed down 26 carriers operating in the busy Northeast corridor—16 based in New York, and 10 in Philadelphia.
So R.I.P. Chinatown buses. But never fear, budget travelers—BoltBus is still kicking.
New Music: Sigur Rós’ ‘Voltari’
by Jim Benning | 05.30.12 | 10:51 AM ET
The Icelandic band, whose ambient, ethereal sound evokes the cool, steaming landscape of its native country, has released a new album, Valtari.
Most reviews find the album to be a lot like the band’s other stuff. As the Washington Post put it: “Ultimately the band’s commitment to pleasant but forgettable ambient soundscapes represents a sort of Rorschach test for listeners. One person’s transcendent experience is another’s somnambulant snooze.”
Funny the critic used “snooze.” For me, Sigur Rós has always made music to wake up to.
From the new album:
A Personal History of Travel Snapshots
by Jim Benning | 05.30.12 | 10:19 AM ET
Rolf Potts looks back at tourist photos he has taken over the years and considers how photography shapes and reflects our experiences.
Here’s a taste:
Pictures of scenery were not the only travel images that improved when I traveled to Greece with a digital camera. I also wound up with better pictures of both my travel companions and myself. Each shot of a person was, in a sense, a negotiation: An unspoken code compelled us to delete unflattering photos of each other from our memory-cards and retry a given shot until we all looked handsome and happy and at ease. We weren’t photographing our travel experience as it was, but as how it should have been. Each photo we retained on our memory-cards stood as a correct answer to some Platonic inquiry about what we might ideally look like as we sailed through Greece.
“We learn to see ourselves photographically,” Susan Sontag wrote in the days before digital photography. “To regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.” In the digital age, making oneself attractive has become a recursive feedback loop—a simple matter of patience, persistence, and real-time editing.
In one shot from the sailing excursion, three of my female friends look particularly radiant: Tanned and relaxed, smiling unselfconsciously, they’re clearly enjoying their holiday. Their blissful gaze rests not on a Greek vista, not on the sailboat, but on an image of themselves—in Greece, on the sailboat—captured on the display screen of their digital camera.
David Byrne on NYC’s New Bike-Share Program
by Jim Benning | 05.29.12 | 11:02 PM ET
iStockPhoto The former Talking Heads frontman and cycling enthusiast is pretty excited about New York City’s new bike-share program, which launches this summer and will lead to more than 10,000 additional bicycles on city streets.
People who live and work in New York will be able to travel quickly and cheaply between many neighborhoods. This is major. It will make New Yorkers rethink their city and rewrite the mental maps we use to decide what is convenient, what is possible. Parks, restaurants and friends who once seemed beyond plausible commuting distance on public transportation will seem a lot closer. The possibilities aren’t limitless, but the change will be pretty impressive.
How serious is Byrne about cycling and cities these days? He mentions that he just got back from a Latin American tour—“not a music tour, but a series of discussions about bikes and transport.”
If you haven’t read it, his unconventional travel memoir, Bicycle Diaries, is well worth a read.
Music Video: ‘Paul Theroux’s My Hero’
by Jim Benning | 05.26.12 | 12:16 PM ET
Because there just aren’t enough songs about reading travel books.
The things you stumble across when you’re waking up, randomly searching for a video of Paul Theroux talking about his new novel.
It’s a nice little ditty. More of the uke-player’s ouvre, including a song about the first dog in space, can be found here.
R.I.P. Paul Fussell, Scholar, Travel Writing Critic
by Jim Benning | 05.24.12 | 11:21 AM ET
The Pasadena-born scholar, who died yesterday at the age of 88, wrote more than 20 books on a wide range of topics, including war and class. He’s revered in travel-writing circles for his 1980 book, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. It seems a rather obscure topic for a book that would spur debate among travelers and writers for decades, but Fussell was an opinionated critic who took aim at modern tourism and its effect on travel writing.
World Hum contributor Tom Swick reflected on the book and its influence today:
It was like a course no college ever taught—British Travel Writing 101, my first introduction to a distance university. The scholarship was rugged, eclectic and sweeping; the writing authoritative, engaging and witty. With chapters titled “L’Amour de Voyage” and “The New Heliophily,” the book reinforced the image of travel writing as a romantic endeavor, but it also championed it as an art. Here, it said, is an overlooked genre that has been practiced by some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Here is a literature worthy of academic regard.
The second of these ideas turned out to be the more prophetic. Travel writing continues—despite Fussell’s assertion that tourism killed it—but without the participation of the day’s great novelists. At the same time, academic papers and conferences on travel writing keep proliferating. It is ironic that the book that announced the death of travel writing gave birth to the field of travel writing scholarship.
Of modern tourism, Fussell wrote: “Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism required that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. Tourism can operate profitably only as a device of mass merchandizing, fulfilling the great modern rule of mediocrity and uniformity.”
Fussell has been cited on World Hum a number of times over the years. A few highlights:
- Non-Places and the End of Travel by Frank Bures
- The Trouble with ‘Smile When You’re Lying’ by Rolf Potts
- Not a Tourist by Tom Swick
- No Place Exists That’s not Worth Writing About by Tom Swick
- China: Not a ‘Psuedo-Place’ by Eva Holland
- ‘Fussel Was Right. We Are All Tourists’
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:
Video: 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:
