Travel Blog: Literary Travel
Postcards From China
by Julia Ross | 01.26.09 | 1:03 PM ET
Journalist James Fallows, who has been writing from China for The Atlantic since 2006, is just out with a new book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square. It collects some of his best China essays, covering Chinese politics, technology and culture. In the introduction, Fallows says if there’ s one thing he’s learned in two years as a China correspondent, it’s this: “No one can sensibly try to present the ‘real story’ or the ‘overall picture’ of this country. It is simply too big and too contradictory.” Amen.
For more of Fallows’ thoughts on China, see this recent Q&A with the ChinaBeat blog, or visit Fallows’ own blog for The Atlantic.
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Yahoo! BuzzBritish Man Jailed for Mutilating Antique Maps, Travelogues
by Eva Holland | 01.22.09 | 4:10 PM ET
A wealthy British book collector has been sentenced to two years in prison for stealing from the British Library. Farhad Hakimzadeh had used a scalpel to slice pages and maps out of more than 150 rare books, most dating to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. His subject matter of choice? “The engagement by West European travellers with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire—roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh.” A British Library staffer called Hakimzadeh’s actions “an attack on the nation’s collective memory of its own past,” and added that he had damaged “our historical record with how this country has engaged in that part of the world.”
Sadly, cases of high-profile book vandalism and theft aren’t uncommon—but they never fail to shock me. (The theft, also from the British Library, of some of the first-ever maps of Canada a few years ago hit especially close to home.) I don’t want to get too Orwellian here, but something about the theft and destruction of irreplaceable historical documents, the literal dismantling of our physical historical record, strikes me as deeply sinister. It’s a relief to hear that there’s now one less perp running loose in the stacks.
Chinua Achebe (Briefly) Returns to Nigeria
by Eva Holland | 01.21.09 | 12:33 PM ET
The renowned author of Things Fall Apart returned to his home country recently to deliver a lecture, after almost two decades spent overseas. As This Day Online notes, “all previous efforts to bring Achebe home, who was highly critical of the Olusegun Obasanjo government, had failed until now.” (Via The Book Bench)
Robert Louis Stevenson: Internet-Bound
by Eva Holland | 01.15.09 | 1:49 PM ET
A new website is in the works for the “Treasure Island” author, in an apparent effort to revive his fading legacy. (As Book Bench blogger Katherine Ryder puts it, “he’s been left out of various editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature; worse, “Treasure Island” has been adapted by Hollywood so many times, even Kermit the Frog has a version.”) When it comes online in 2010, the site will make Stevenson the latest travel-esque literary heavyweight—after George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway—to find a new home in cyberspace.
While we’re waiting, Ryder recommends reading Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers. “He’ll remind you of a vision of life that our teachers warned against,” she writes, “that aimless days are just as important as work days, that staring out the window is also learning, that unadulterated bliss is found with your feet up ... He may even convince you to take a vacation, or at least demand more of one.”
Cuba’s Hemingway Museum Goes Digital
by Eva Holland | 01.05.09 | 2:58 PM ET
American Hemingway scholars don’t have to wait for a lifting of the Cuba travel embargo to gain more insight into the writer’s work: The island’s Hemingway Museum is digitizing large chunks of its invaluable collection, reports the Cuban News Agency.
When the author died in 1961, he left behind thousands of pages of manuscripts, maps, letters and photos at his farm outside Havana—all of which were apparently donated to the newly minted Cuban government by his wife. Government preservationists have already digitally reproduced more than 3,000 of the roughly 15,000 documents in the bequest.
(Via The Book Bench)
‘Beyond the Great Wall’: Exploring China’s Edges
by Julia Ross | 01.05.09 | 11:53 AM ET
Inspired by a recent New Yorker profile of the food writer/adventurer couple Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, I ordered a Christmas present for myself this year: the duo’s wonderful cookbook and travelogue, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China. It’s an affectionate look at the cultures and foodways of China’s outlying regions, including Tibet, Yunnan and Xinjiang.
The recipes, for simple dishes like Ginger and Carrot Stir-Fry, are surprisingly low maintenance. But my favorite sections are Duguid’s and Alford’s recollections of traveling in China in the mid-1980s, when the country was just opening up to foreign tourists. Alford, who taught English in Taiwan in 1982, remembers the mystique China held for Westerners at the time:
“Every once in a while I’d hear a story about someone visiting ‘the Mainland,’ traveling independently, but it seemed very hard to believe. The rumor was that a visa could be arranged in Hong Kong from a travel agent in Chungking Mansions, a low-life building full of bottom-end hostels, Indian restaurants and drug deals. It all seemed a bit unlikely—it was ‘Communist China,’ after all.”
New Year’s Resolutions, Kerouac-Style
by Eva Holland | 01.05.09 | 11:47 AM ET
In a sea of predictable New Year’s resolutions (yup, I’m headed back to the gym more often, too), Nerve.com’s Scanner blog offers something different: 30 pieces of advice straight from Beat legend (and World Hum favorite) Jack Kerouac. They’re largely aimed at writers, but they contain plenty of wisdom for travelers, too.
Couldn’t we all resolve to “believe in the holy contour of life” or to “keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning”?
The Three Literary Capitals of the World?
by Eva Holland | 12.22.08 | 12:00 PM ET
Conde Nast Traveler has chosen Berlin, Dublin and Boston as its three best cities for bookworms. They’re all worthy choices, but still, I have to ask: Was this list originally titled, “Three Best Cities for Bookworms, Not Counting Paris and London”?
Happy 100th Birthday, Claude Levi-Strauss
by Jim Benning | 11.25.08 | 2:01 PM ET
The great structural anthropologist celebrates the big 1-0-0 on Friday in Paris. Travel lit readers know him in part from his 1955 travel memoir of sorts, Tristes Tropiques, which begins with the memorable line, “I hate travelling and explorers.” More importantly, as NPR points out, Levi-Strauss “changed the world’s perception of so-called ‘primitive’ tribes in Asia, Africa and America.”
Gary Shteyngart in Seoul: ‘A Megacity With Endless Incongruities’
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.08 | 10:42 AM ET
Here’s another compelling piece from the author of “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Absurdistan” in the latest issue of Travel + Leisure. He writes: “Korea is a country with one of the unhappier histories the world has known, a present that amounts to the frenzied tapping of the fast-forward button and a future that may already be here.”
Saving Chekhov’s Yalta ‘White Dacha’ Home
by Jim Benning | 11.20.08 | 11:00 AM ET
The unusual house where Anton Chekhov lived and wrote for several years was turned into a museum in 1921, but it’s now falling apart, and territorial issues aren’t helping matters.
Says the scholar who has launched the Yalta Chekhov Campaign: “[The dacha] is in a strange position. The Russian government didn’t want to fund the restoration because the house is in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian government didn’t want to pay to promote a Russian author.”
Among the actors supporting the effort: Kenneth Branagh and Ralph Fiennes. Classy gents.
90 Years Later: Searching for Wilfred Owen
by Eva Holland | 11.17.08 | 11:14 AM ET
The 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War just passed, and The Times of London’s travel section marked the occasion with a powerful essay by Chris Haslam, who traveled around France in the footsteps of war poet Wilfred Owen. Haslam’s search covers several battlefields, and ends at the forest cottage where Owen spent his last night.
Neil Gaiman Pens Travel Book
by Michael Yessis | 11.11.08 | 7:53 AM ET
The title: “Monkey and Me: China and the Journey to the West.” The genre-hopping writer has turned to travel writing in part because, as he tells Splash Page, he’s “always loved travel books.” He continues:
Jack Black to Star in Movie Adaptation of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
by Michael Yessis | 11.07.08 | 9:58 AM ET
Variety describes the updated tale: “Story centers on Lemuel Gulliver, a free-spirited travel writer who, on an assignment to the Bermuda Triangle, suddenly finds himself a giant among men.” With Black in the title role and a screenplay co-written by the director of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” this will be a lot funnier than the Ted Danson version.
Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs on 1940s New York
by Eva Holland | 11.06.08 | 12:05 PM ET
After years of legal wrangling, a collaborative novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs—written years before either of them found fame—has finally been published. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a crime story, had remained in limbo for decades because it was based on the real-life murder of one of Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s acquaintances.
