Travel Blog: News and Briefs
‘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.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe 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.”
Tom Bodett’s ‘Inside Passage’
by Michael Yessis | 01.10.12 | 11:31 PM ET
Brave and amazing storytelling in this Moth podcast by Tom Bodett, who recounts a low point in his life—he nearly blew himself up on a power line—and how he emerged from it with a realization about his father and a beautiful reason to go to Alaska. He writes about telling the story on his blog:
Standing on that stage in Burlington and telling such a personal tale, almost a confessional, in front of 1500 strangers was one of the highlights of my performing life. Until the moment I walked in front of the microphone a big part of me thought I was making a mistake. It was too personal. It was too revealing of a very low point in my character. It would make me choke up.
It was all those things and more and has made me very happy.
Made me choke up, too.
Pico Iyer Can’t Get Graham Greene Out of his Head
by Eva Holland | 01.09.12 | 8:47 AM ET
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, World Hum contributor Pico Iyer writes about a string of odd coincidences, eerie overlaps and echoes between Graham Greene’s writing and traveling life and his own. Iyer writes:
Not long thereafter, I began working on a book on the 14th Dalai Lama, and as I was sitting in Hiroshima one fall afternoon, listening to one of his general addresses, I realized that the perfect way of summarizing his teachings—for non-Buddhists at least—was by quoting Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” A little later, I was staying in a convent on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem and, needing something to read, picked up a book from the library shelves. It was Greene’s late novel Monsignor Quixote, and when I turned to the title page, there was an epigraph, from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
On and on this went… Perhaps—a skeptic might have said—these were no more than surface coincidences; but when there are so many correspondences, across such a wide canvas, you start to imagine that they might speak for connections of a deeper kind.
So often these days we read of travelers taking off “in the footsteps” of Marco Polo or Genghis Khan or many another distinguished forebear, even Graham Greene. But in this case, I didn’t feel I had to pursue Greene, because he was so busy pursuing me.
Iyer’s latest book, The Man Within My Head, was released last week. It explores his strange relationship with Graham Greene in depth, and The Globe and Mail’s Ronald Wright describes it, in a thoughtful review, as “biography, memoir, travelogue, literary criticism and personal meditation.” I can’t wait to check it out.
(Via @iainmanley)
R.I.P. 2011: From Alberto Granado to Christopher Hitchens
by World Hum | 12.30.11 | 11:40 AM ET
We said goodbye to writers, adventurers, musicians—people who had an impact on travel and the way we see the world.
R.I.P.:
- Christopher Hitchens, writer
- George Whitman, Shakespeare and Company owner
- Cesária Évora, singer from Cape Verde
- Joel Deutsch, writer, poet, World Hum contributor
- Lynn Ferrin, writer and editor
- Facundo Cabral, musician
- Patrick Leigh Fermor, writer
- Alberto Granado, travel companion to Che Guevara
- Poppa Neutrino, adventurer
- Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps founder
R.I.P. Joel Deutsch, Writer, Poet, World Hum Contributor
by Jim Benning | 12.29.11 | 8:16 PM ET
I couldn’t let the year end without noting the recent death of Joel Deutsch, an accomplished poet and writer who contributed an essay to World Hum in the site’s earliest days. He was 67.
I met Joel in the late-‘90s in a novel-writing class at UCLA Extension. He was going blind as a result of retinitis pigmentosa and asked whether anyone could give him a ride home. I volunteered. We talked about reading and writing on that first drive across Los Angeles. Over time, we became good friends.
Joel had been a poet before I met him, publishing in literary journals, editing one of his own. He went on to write moving essays about going blind, many of which appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
In 2001, we published his essay Exits and Entrances, about introducing Russian immigrant friends to American life at a Fourth of July picnic. It captured the shrinking-planet sensibility we always like to explore at World Hum. It was the only piece we published of his, but he never stopped following the development of the site.
Shortly before his death, he completed his first novel, “The Book of Danny.” He was seeking representation for it when he died.
He was a good friend. I miss him.
Pico Iyer on Japan’s ‘Sadness That Will Not Go Away’
by Michael Yessis | 12.29.11 | 7:46 AM ET
Like Daisann McLane in her three-part series about Japan in the wake of its triple disaster, Pico Iyer has captured a haunting snapshot of life in the country post-earthquake and tsunami. He writes for Businessweek:
When I went up to the area around the nuclear plant in October, I found myself staying in, of all places, a golf resort by the sea. Many of the locals had left the area after the disaster, I was told. When I arrived, late at night, the big hotel looked like a ghost town. Only a handful of kimono-clad guests seemed to be enjoying the tea lounge and the play area.
Next morning, I awoke early and went into the breakfast room at 6:15—to find every table packed. Dapper golfers from Tokyo were busy scarfing down their eggs, about to head out for their first round, undeterred by pelting rain and the belching factories that surround the seaside course. In some places this could look like recklessness or indifference; in Japan it seemed to stand for fortitude.
(Via @gary_singh)
