Heard on the radio this morning that Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, creators of the World Hum’s No. 7 and No. 6 greatest fictional travelers respectively, share a birthday today. Twain was born on this day in Missouri in 1835; Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. While in Ireland last week, I saw an early 19th century edition of “Gulliver’s Travels” at the Dublin Writers Musuem. The page in the photograph was surreptitiously taken there. 

Disney may have given up on Mark Twain, but not everyone has. Random House has just published a new edition of Life on the Mississippi, Twain’s reflection on the four years he spent as a Mississippi riverboat captain. The book is Twain’s “most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work,” according to Random House. “It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write.”

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In Orientalism, Edward Said took to task many Western writers for their accounts of Islam, and particularly many travel writers. But Said didn’t get it right, writes Algis Valiunas in a lengthy essay in the Claremont Review of Books. 

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Out: Tom Sawyer and books. In: Jack Sparrow, movies, video games and, yes, vertical integration. Last October, Disneyland fans were wondering whether park officials would ditch Tom Sawyer for Jack Sparrow, turning Tom Sawyer Island, which was designed by Walt himself and opened in 1956, into a “Pirates of the Caribbean"-themed attraction. Or, as one observer put it, “Will Disney abandon book-lovers for Pirates 2.0?” Absolutely, Disney officials announced today, though they’ve slyly kept the island’s original name. On Friday, Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island will debut, timed, not coincidentally, with the opening of the latest “Pirates” film, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

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That’s the question Robert Niles poses at Theme Park Insider, reacting to word that Disneyland officials are apparently considering closing Tom Sawyer’s Island, a half-century-old fixture at the theme park, to build another Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. “[A]s much as I love Pirates, it is entertainment, not art,” Niles writes. “In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain created the most compelling, debated and beloved characters in all of American culture. If today’s kids do not know of them, why, that’s a pretty damning indictment of the rest of us, as parents, educators and artists. That Disney’s failed these characters, and their story, by allowing Tom Sawyer’s Island to fall into decay does not speak to an inherent lack of appeal in the characters, but to a lack of foresight by Disney.”

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In an interview in The Independent, William T. Vollman reveals that he’s working on a book about riding freight trains across the United States. The notoriously on-the-edge author tells Matt Thorne, “It’s really fun to think about the connections with the Beats, rereading Jack Kerouac, but also Jack London and Mark Twain, travelling fast through the country, that solitary, wild American experience.”

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1869
Territory covered: Europe and the Holy Land
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad marks a turning point for both the author and American travel writing. In 1867, Twain boarded the ship the Quaker City for a five-month Journey through Europe and the Holy Land, and he convinced the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, to pay him $1,250 to file letters from abroad for publication. He sent 51, and those, along with a few others written for newspapers in New York, comprise “Innocents Abroad.” The dispatches, followed by lectures he delivered based on his travels, helped establish Twain’s voice as an American original. During Twain’s lifetime, “Innocents” was his most popular book, and today it remains perhaps the most celebrated travel book by an American writer. Some critics credit its longevity to its fresh approach: It was written from a different angle than most travel books of its time. As Twain writes in the preface:

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Crass as it might seem, Potts writes in his latest Yahoo! column, “disaster tourism” is a time-honored travel tradition. “Thomas Cook started taking British travelers on tours of American Civil War battlefields in 1865; a couple years later, Mark Twain and his cohorts famously toured the war-torn city of Sevastopol (where Twain chided his travel companions for carrying off armfuls of shrapnel as souvenirs),” Potts writes. And a lot of travelers are now heading to the Lower Ninth Ward, the district in New Orleans that took the brunt of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina last year. 

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I visited Key West for the first time in 1991. I had been in Florida, working as a travel editor, less than two years, and driving with the window down in January to a literary seminar on travel writing seemed a dual blessing. John Malcolm Brinnin—another unjustly forgotten writer—gave a keynote address that I still quote from in travel writing workshops (the hair on my neck never failing to rise). I interviewed Calvin Trillin, who invited me to lunch at the Pier House with Alice. And I interviewed Jan Morris, who impressed me as the most considerate famous person I had ever met. (A role Pico Iyer seems to be filling admirably.) One morning near St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, I ran into Jan power walking down Duval Street. No matter; she stopped to chat. I told her that in my travels I often attended service at the local Anglican church. “You can sometimes meet interesting people there,” I said. She looked doubtful, saying she preferred the company of pagans. And with that she regained her loping stride.

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Mark Twain the travel writer seems to be a relatively hot commodity these days. National Geographic Society has published a new edition of “Following the Equator,” Twain’s reflection on his 1895-1896 around-the-world trip. And The Lyon’s Press just released Mark Twain on Travel, a collection of some of Twain’s travel writing.

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Mark Twain fans will be interested in a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times. The story focuses on how the discovery of a cache of letters written by Twain’s daughters has prompted new theories about the role of women in his life and work. 

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In my admittedly nerdy fantasy world, where books are cool, MTV isn’t the cable channel featured in the anthemic Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing.” It’s Book TV. As in (cue the Mark Knopfler riff and Sting vocals): “I want my Book TV.” A guy can dream. Anyway, I check out the weekend schedule often, and this weekend, the channel has a few shows that might interest World Hum readers.

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