Travel Blog: Literary Travel
Kerouac: ‘I Rode Around This Country Free as a Bee’
by Eva Holland | 07.17.09 | 2:31 PM ET
In a new Poetry Foundation essay, Aram Saroyan looks back at his time with the Beats. “God, man, I rode around this country free as a bee,” he remembers Kerouac saying of his “On the Road” days. “We had more fun than five thousand Socony Gasoline Station attendants can have.” (Via The Book Bench)
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Yahoo! BuzzGay Travel Book in Translation Trouble
by Eva Holland | 07.15.09 | 4:04 PM ET
Long-time Frommers writer Michael Luongo’s “Gay Travels in the Muslim World” has become the first gay-focused English language book to be translated into Arabic. The only catch? Every instance of the word “gay” has been translated to read “pervert.” Luongo had planned a Middle Eastern promotional tour, but, as he told Page Six, “this has thrown a wrench into the plans. Imagine standing in front of a crowd declaring yourself a pervert. So far I have avoided real fatwas, though I’ve been told the Taliban produced a Web site condemning the book. But with this new title, who knows?” (Via The Book Bench)
John Cheever: Summer Vacation, 1954
by Eva Holland | 07.08.09 | 1:29 PM ET
The Book Bench bloggers spent last week looking back at some favorite New Yorker fiction of summer vacations past. All their selections are worthy, but this excerpt from John Cheever’s “The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well” really resonated with me. Here’s a quick teaser:
In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” ... The perfect days—and there had been hundreds of them—seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.
J.G. Ballard’s Shanghai vs. J.G. Ballard’s London
by Michael Yessis | 07.02.09 | 10:49 AM ET
Reason looks at the life and legacy of J.G. Ballard, comparing the dueling influences of Shanghai and London on his life.
In Shanghai fear and hunger and violence were right in front of him; there were dead bodies lying in the streets where he bicycled. As an adult in the comfortable London suburb of Shepperton, by contrast, Ballard had to look under the surface to find the darkest parts of the human psyche.
Bulwer-Lytton and the Art of Bad (Travel) Writing
by Michael Yessis | 06.30.09 | 11:00 AM ET
It’s Bulwer-Lytton time again. The winner of the best intentionally awful opening sentence of a novel this year is David McKenzie, who sets his scene off Nantucket Sound:
Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.
Among the other winners with a travely vibe, Dr. Sarah Cockram, who won the Historical Fiction category:
The Cunard “Carinthia” glided through the starry waters of the Bering Sea, 843 passengers aboard, including Harriet Dobbs, resignedly single for over a decade, while a nautical mile due west slunk the K-18 submarine, under the command of lonely Ukrainian Captain First Rank Nikolai Shevchenko: ships that passed in the night (although the second technically a boat).
Joe Dykes took a dishonorable mention for this description of a train ride:
I awoke in my sleeper on the way from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, my nightmare riven by a train of thought that abruptly stopped me in my tracks with cataclysmic, explosive, and yet equal and opposing force, like a train on its way from Rotterdam to Amsterdam; then I realized I was on the wrong train and headed for Rotterdam, instead of Amsterdam.
Eric Stoveken’s portrait of post-snowstorm Manhattan was victorious in the Purple Prose category:
The gutters of Manhattan teemed with the brackish slurry indicative of a significant though not incapacitating snowstorm three days prior, making it seem that God had tripped over Hoboken and spilled his smog-flavored slurpie all over the damn place.
Here are all the horrible winners.
More Postcard Stories from Geist Magazine
by Eva Holland | 06.29.09 | 9:20 AM ET
Once again, Geist has announced the winners of the annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest—in which writers submit very short stories inspired by vintage postcards. First prize went to Mark Paterson’s Spring Training, a compact piece about a boy not traveling to Florida for pre-season baseball every year.
The Critics: ‘Fordlandia’
by Alicia Imbody | 06.18.09 | 2:08 PM ET
Greg Grandin’s new book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, analyzes the surprising history behind the brilliant car mogul’s disastrous attempts to transplant the American way of life into a remote Amazonian village. Ford is credited as the father of America’s consumer culture, but his utopian plans to capitalize on new sources of rubber resulted in one of the greatest failures of his distinguished career. The critics are chiming in on the man behind the story and the modern day implications of exporting Americanism.
The Great Guidebook Retail Showdown
by Eva Holland | 06.18.09 | 11:48 AM ET
Who knew the world of guidebooks-in-bookstores could be so fraught with conflict?
Last week came the news that WH Smith—a large British bookstore chain found in most of the country’s airports and major train stations—had reached an exclusive deal to sell only Penguin-published guidebooks (namely DK Eyewitness and Rough Guides) from its shops. According to the Guardian, the chain reasoned that travelers “are often pressed for time and want to have a straightforward range of travel guides to choose from.” Michael Palin and Margaret Drabble are among the big names opposing the move. Arthur Frommer also has a predictably furious response, calling the deal “an unthinkable act of literary censorship and corporate greed.”
Happy Bloomsday!
by Michael Yessis | 06.16.09 | 3:47 PM ET
A few links from around the internet to commemorate Bloomsday:
- AFP Reports that, despite the global recession, thousands of James Joyce fans streamed into Dublin today to celebrate.
- In the Guardian, Declan Kiberd explains just why Dublin has come to embrace Bloomsday, calling Ulysses “modernism’s most sociable masterpiece.”
- Colum McCann wrote a touching piece in the New York Times about how Ulysses provided him with comfort and connection to his late grandfather.
- Of course, on Twitter you can follow @StephenDedalus and @LeopoldBloom.
James Franco Reads Jack Kerouac
by Michael Yessis | 06.16.09 | 11:23 AM ET
He bites off an excerpt from “On the Road,” which will appear in Lapham’s Quarterly’s summer issue simply titled, “Travel.” It’s a solid reading, but, alas, as you can hear below, he’s no Jack.
A Flight Attendant’s Bookish Ethical Dilemma
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.09 | 12:35 PM ET
J.T. from Georgia posed this question to the New York Times ethicist, Randy Cohen:
I am a flight attendant. I was working a flight from Europe when I recognized Michael Connelly, my favorite author, on board. I told him I was reading his novel “Brass Verdict,” and he kindly offered to autograph it. The catch: it is a library book. Must I return the signed book to the library, or can I replace it with a new copy in a suitable jacket?
The answer is entertaining, and not just because of the line about what Cohen would do if he met “the ghost of Jane Austen on the D.C. shuttle.”
Truman and Khrushchev: Gone to Look for America
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.09 | 11:16 AM ET
Some Cold War travel memories bubbled up this weekend in the Washington Post. Christopher Buckley favorably reviews Matthew Algeo’s Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure, a chronicle of Truman’s post-presidency road trip in the summer of 1953. And Peter Carlson follows the journey of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who accepted an invite from President Eisenhower to “road trip through the wonderland of ’50s America.”
In Praise of the Book Exchange
by Eva Holland | 05.29.09 | 10:36 AM ET
As I’ve mentioned, I loved nearly everything about my visit to Bequia, in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, last week—but today, finding myself craving a nice, lightweight paperback novel, one particular memory from the island stands out.
The book exchange was ubiquitous there. I’m used to seeing them around hostels and budget guesthouses, but in Bequia, they were everywhere—from my hotel lobby to the restaurant where I ate lunch one day, it seemed there was a shelf full of paperbacks waiting for a trade in every corner.
Aspen to America: We’re a Major Literary Destination!
by Eva Holland | 05.28.09 | 4:59 PM ET
When most people think of Aspen, Colorado, I doubt if the words “literary pilgrimage” pop all that promptly into their heads. But that’s going to change—at least if Aspen.com’s Brandon Wenerd has anything to say about it.
The Book Bench: ‘Let’s all Move to Berlin’
by Eva Holland | 05.04.09 | 3:01 PM ET
I’ve had a longtime fascination with the Parisian expat writers of the 1920s. Books like “A Moveable Feast” or “That Summer in Paris” never fail to make me wish I was sitting in a Left Bank cafe, making a cup of coffee last for hours while I wrestle with a short story or pause to chat with other struggling writers who’ve wandered by.
Of course, Paris is hardly the place for impoverished creative types anymore, but—say the New Yorker’s Book Bench bloggers—there’s a viable European alternative if I ever decide to attempt a modern-day recreation of my Hemingway daydreams: Berlin.
