Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Welcome to the Baghdad Country Club
by Eva Holland | 12.27.11 | 2:41 PM ET
In The Atavist, Joshuah Bearman tells the fascinating story of the Baghdad Country Club, the only bar in the capital city’s fortified “Green Zone.” The bar was built and run by a mysterious British ex-military type, a contractor identified only as James. What intrigued me about the bar was the way in which it was both an escape hatch from the war and, at the same time, a place that was inextricably shaped by its surroundings. Here’s a taste:
In addition to tending bar alongside several Iraqi Christians, Heide manned the wholesale bottle shop that James and Ajax ran out of a guard shack on the property. The shelves stocked the finest spirits the pair could find, which sometimes meant actual quality, alongside gift-store items—T-shirts, mugs, and hats emblazoned with the BCC logo and motto: “It Takes Real Balls to Play Here.”
...Danny quietly managed the place: greeting patrons, dealing with staff, and running the kitchen. James wanted the menu to be good, which wasn’t easy. Whereas much of the food in the Green Zone was processed, packaged, shipped, and reconstituted, Ajax got fresh produce and meat for the kitchen. Danny got along well with Iraqis, and he made sure to serve the national dish of masgouf—fish with onion and pickles—alongside Western-style bruschetta, salads, and steaks. He brought in a chef named Dino to come up with recipes and marinades. Good fish was difficult to come by in Baghdad, but James knew a guy who knew a guy who could sometimes get trout flown in on Delta Force choppers. And Ahmed’s regular shipments of spirits kept the bar stocked for proper cocktails.
“We never hoped to get a Michelin star,” Danny says. “But we managed to give people the one thing you don’t have in Baghdad: a choice.”
The full (long) story is available for purchase from The Atavist—it comes in a variety of e-book formats. The Atlantic has a meaty excerpt. It’s a great read.
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Yahoo! Buzz‘Before Sunrise,’ ‘Before Sunset’ and Aging
by Jim Benning | 12.20.11 | 12:38 PM ET
I often read Nathan Bransford’s blog about the publishing industry. I liked his recent post about the now classic travel films “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.”
Bransford recently re-watched both films, and he writes about how his perspective on them has changed as he has aged. I know many of us can relate.
What’s amazing about these movies is that because they’re set nine years apart they thoroughly embody this passage of time and maturation that we all go through, while at the same time retaining that essential magic between Jesse and Celine. Life moves on, we change, we age, and yet something essential remains.
And that’s the amazing thing about art. These movies haven’t changed at all since I saw them last, that essence hasn’t moved a bit. But I have changed, the world has changed, and how we all respond to works of art evolves.
The movies may be the same but they mean something different than they used to and they’ll continue to change while remaining exactly the same.
The entire post is worth a read.
As we noted recently, director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are plotting a third installment in the series.
R.I.P. George Whitman, Shakespeare & Company Owner
by Jim Benning | 12.15.11 | 12:25 PM ET
It’s hard to imagine Paris without Shakespeare & Company, and George Whitman, who died yesterday at the age of 98, owned the famed Left Bank bookstore for years.
He took its name from the original shop owned by Sylvia Beach.
“For decades,” the New York Times notes, “Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.”
Travel writer Erin Byrne profiled Whitman several years ago, noting that he had “fashioned a life for himself that brings together the two things he loves most in all the world, books and people. It is this combination that makes him tick. Old age without loneliness is unusual; George always has a house full of friends. Fragility without weakness is seldom seen; this man is thin and frail, but his presence is noble.”
His daughter, Sylvia, discusses her father and the store’s history in this terrific video:
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Before Sunrise 3’?
by Eva Holland | 11.21.11 | 8:54 PM ET
Big news for fans of the “Before Sunrise”/“Before Sunset” movies: Director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are plotting a third installment in the series. Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are co-writers on the films, which, of course, revolve around two young travelers in Europe.
According to Hawke they’re about ready to get started on a new script. Says Hawke: “All three of us have been having similar feelings that we’re ready to revisit those characters. There’s nine years between the first two movies and, if we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again so we’ve really started thinking that would be a good thing to do. We’re going to try write it this year.”
I know, I know. Everybody cringes when a fave flick gets the sequel treatment—and yes, the “Sunrise”/“Sunset” movies are among my all-time favorites. But for me the first sequel, “Before Sunset,” doesn’t just match the original: It betters it. So I’m not about to write off a third movie as overkill. I want to see what happens next—even if Hawke and Co. did leave us, last time, with one of the greatest movie endings of all time.
Rejection Notes for Famous Authors: ‘I Don’t Dig This One at All’
by Eva Holland | 11.21.11 | 7:41 AM ET
The Atlantic has a fun round-up of rejection notes received by some now-famous authors, before they made it big. Among them: Peter Matthiessen and Jack Kerouac, whose “On the Road” is dismissed by a Knopf editor as “huge sprawling and inconclusive.” Said another editor: “I don’t dig this one at all.”
Meet Carolyn Hopkins, aka the Airport Voice
by Eva Holland | 11.17.11 | 7:20 AM ET
CBS offers a fun look behind the travel curtain: an introduction to the woman whose voice we all know from airports, train stations and beyond. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
2011 Lowell Thomas Award Winners Announced
by Eva Holland | 11.10.11 | 12:58 PM ET
This year’s Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award winners were announced this week. Rick Steves was named Travel Journalist of the Year; he also received awards for his video and audio work, as well as his blog. Budget Travel took the gold award for travel magazines. The Los Angeles Times won gold for best travel section in a newspaper with a circulation of 350,000 or more, and the San Francisco Chronicle was named the best newspaper travel section with a circulation under 350,000.
A number of other World Hum contributors were among the writers honored at the awards: Daisann McLane and Nathan Myers received gold awards for individual stories, while Wayne Curtis and Andrew Evans landed bronze awards. Congratulations to all.
The ‘Airport’ Movies: The ‘Best Kind of Guilty Pleasure’
by Michael Yessis | 11.07.11 | 7:12 AM ET
Gerardo Valero finds the cheesy disaster movies of the ‘70s had something important to say.
There’s nothing quite like the movies if you want to learn what people’s hopes and dreams were during the period in which they were made. Take for instance the recent “Up in the Air”. In the present when air travel has turned into something to be endured, George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham showed us how it can become an enticing way of life. The same subject was also portrayed extensively, under a very different light, some forty years as the “Airport” movies dealt with our fears of dying in new and horrible ways, while glamorizing our dreams of flying first-class, surrounded by a movie star in every seat. As the trailer for one of these features once put it: “on board, a collection of the rich and the beautiful!” They also marked the advent of a new genre (the Disaster Film) as well as the “Ark movie” which Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary defines as “mixed bag of characters trapped in a colorful mode of transportation”. How many films can claim to this kind of impact?
I made a similar point in my look back at the 25th anniversary of “Airplane!”
How Does Travel Blogging Fit Into the Travelogue Tradition?
by Michael Yessis | 10.27.11 | 2:25 PM ET
Iain Manley offers his perspective:
Travelogues progressed along a more or less linear path in the twentieth century. Although aeroplanes brought a new kind of fragmentation and the size of the travel industry ballooned, great writers continued travelling and, in magazines, a new, glossy format for descriptions and photographs from a journey was found. The twenty first century has been far more disruptive. The first blogs led quickly to the first travel blogs, instead of the first online travelogues. It was a new medium and perhaps it made sense to use a new name, but instead of marking an upward progression, the phrase travel blog is associated with a feeble form of one of the world’s oldest narrative traditions.
This prejudice is, in the majority of cases, completely justified. Too many travel blogs are facile when they are not fatuous. Blogs that function like letters to friends and family should, perhaps, be excused - even if some of the most readable travelogues of the past two centuries started life as a series of letters - but there are now well over a thousand travel blogs that actively seek an audience, and most of them are depressingly poor. They describe interactions with the travel industry instead of the larger world and are, as a result, like reading badly edited, first person Lonely Planet guides. They are self-reductive, confining their narratives to keywords popular on Google, like solo, solo female, family travel, eco-travel and round the world, which is aptly abbreviated to RTW, because most of these whistle stop gallivants are themselves extremely abbreviated. They are light on history, politics and context in general, but heavy on technically proficient but clichéd photography and vacuous best-of lists. The worst are self-congratulatory and patronising, written with enough gall to inform readers that they too can travel, usually along the same dismal beaten track as the blogger. Most of all - and most of the time - travel blogs are badly written. To capture an audience that browses instead of reading, blog posts must be short, easy to consume and frequent. As a result, there are both good and bad writers with insipid and tedious travel blogs.
R.I.P. Lynn Ferrin
by Eva Holland | 10.24.11 | 7:09 AM ET
The travel writer and long-time editor of the AAA magazine for Northern California died recently at 73. Over at Gadling, Don George has a lovely tribute to his friend and colleague, and to the power of great travel writing:
[Lynn] infused her pieces with the wonder that was at the core of her life’s journey, with the big-heartedness, big-mindedness and sense of limitlessness that graced her days—and that graced all of us who knew her. She brought these gifts to her writing, she dared to reach far and dream big in her stories—she dared to write about the meaning of life. And because she did so, she touched all of us in big, and deep, ways.
This is what we all need to do as travel writers, I think now. We need to dream big, think big, fling out filaments that tie our travels to a wider perspective. Our work matters only as much as we make it matter, and we need to write pieces that matter. We need to honor ourselves and our readers in this way. We need to honor the act of writing and the act of connecting—connecting with the world when we travel, and connecting with our readers when we write. In the same way that we look for the interlocking pieces of the whole, we also need to be those pieces—we need to interlock, article to article, reader to reader, becoming a part of the vast puzzle we seek to understand and replicate.
It’s a high and daunting calling—and thank god for that. Why waste our days aiming low and taking no chances?
World Hum Writers Honored in ‘The Best American Travel Writing 2011’
by Eva Holland | 10.17.11 | 7:01 AM ET
I picked up my copy of the latest in the “Best American Travel Writing” anthology series this week and was thrilled to see some familiar names listed. Four World Hum stories were included in this year’s notable selections: The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa, by Frank Bures; A Pilgrimage to SkyMall, by Bill Donahue; Lover’s Moon, by Pico Iyer; and The Sexual Lives of Sri Lankans, by Hannah Tennant-Moore.
World Hum contributors Peter Hessler and Tom Swick were also included for stories published elsewhere. Congratulations to all.
Food as Instructive Historical Document
by Michael Yessis | 10.14.11 | 11:48 AM ET
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of the excellent Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, looks at how food illuminates history. From the Asia Literary Review:
When the tides of empire ebb, returnees and counter-colonists travel with them. So Britain has become, in the post-colonial era, a springboard for the worldwide projection of Indian food. The Netherlands has played a similar role for Malay dishes and France for those of the Maghrib and Vietnam. In the same period, globalisation, long-range mass tourism and worldwide migrations have demonstrated that the West is highly receptive to exotic innovation, while beyond the Middle East, the peoples of the eastern and southern extremities of Asia are far harder to wean onto alien cuisines.
McDonald’s and Starbucks buck this trend - though one doubts whether their popularity has much to do with their food. Their customers in India, Japan and China seem rather to be choosing a “lifestyle option”. In the West, by contrast, even the most introspective food cultures - those of France, Spain and Italy - have failed to resist the intrusion of cuisines with which they have few or no imperial links, such as those of Lebanon, Thailand, Japan and Turkey, from where the kebab has become a global rival to the burger and the burrito. Western food has registered no comparable counter-coups - apart, arguably, from the Irish pub, which seems to be a concept with an infinitely elastic range - although I hear there is a Bauernstube in Beijing and one of the best views of Tokyo is to be had from The Peak Lounge at the Park Hyatt Hotel, which bills itself, rather unconvincingly, as an English tea lounge.
‘I Was Writing a Guidebook to a Country That No Longer Exists’
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.11 | 9:08 AM ET
Kate Grace Thomas updated the Lonely Planet guidebook to Libya just before the Arab Spring. As the country turned violent, the book was quickly put on hold. Yet Thomas found herself itching to return to Libya. She writes about her experiences in Guernica:
War is not my beat. I knew that. But Libya, somehow, was. I went in December to tell its stories—stories of nascent tourism and marvelous ruins, stories of deserted beaches and drinking sugary tea in the winter wind. And now, there were more stories to tell.
(Via @writinginpublic)
The Paris Review: ‘Sin Entered the Map’
by Eva Holland | 10.10.11 | 7:04 AM ET
In The Paris Review, Avi Steinberg considers the messy complications of Google Street View—a map that shows us so much more than lines on a grid. Money quote:
A person seeking directions to Starbucks generally does not want to be told to “take a left at the homeless child.” To truly use the country as its own map, it turns out, involves weaving discomfiting images of the country directly into the fabric of the map. The result is not a tidy diagram of the world abstracted onto a blank slab—as nearly all maps since Mesopotamia have been—but rather a patchwork that chronicles, among many other things, the troubling process by which the map was composed.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
World Hum Contribs Launch VelaMag
by Jim Benning | 10.05.11 | 9:33 AM ET
World Hum senior editor Eva Holland has teamed up with several other writers to launch VelaMag.
The site, whose masthead includes World Hum contributors Sarah Menkedick and Lauren Quinn, will feature writing “by six emerging writers who also happen to be women, and who frequently write about travel or use travel as a lens, frame or motif in their work.”
It launched with a story by Menkedick about Oaxaca called The Revolution.
It looks promising. We’ll be reading.
