It is a good thing to have people who understand the way you’re wired. On Monday, I got in touch with some of them and said, “If I don’t get outta town — are you home?”
“When do you arrive?” they all responded. Off I went, under-packed but with a ukulele. I have seen many shuttered diners, eaten some good road food, chatted with strangers, stood outside a gas station at a crossroads watching the semi-trucks blow past, transited genuine cowboys and Indians territory, listened to Mexican radio, looked out over fire ravaged forest, inhaled the mist from a waterfall, had a few good cocktails, spent the night in a not-quite-empty-but-nearly hotel, and generally cleared my mental buffer of the noise inside my head.
Whew. That’s better.
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I’ve spent the last few weeks prairie dogging in and out of a report about travel media. I interviewed a bunch of media hotshots — that was great, wow, what nice folks across the board, Plus, I’m not gonna lie, when the CEO of a major media company says things you’ve had a gut feeling about for a while it’s so satisfying. My point is that my head was well in wonk-space when I found this post. Take over for me, Kerry, because I am tired of grinding this axe, and you do such a good job of it.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] do think blogging is a good thing for writing and for thought; the fact that it’s really easy to set up your own space on the internet and start publishing your writing, without having to go through a gatekeeper, means more voices can not only be heard but can speak to each other directly, which is great. In questioning the use of travel blogging as a kind of WordPress-based frequent-flyer credit program, I definitely don’t mean that barely disguised classist thing of, ‘well, there are travel writers, who read Freya Stark and Paul Theroux and have opinions about Elizabeth Gilbert and go to Book Passage*, and there are travel bloggers, who go on comped group tours and take selfies at Angkor Wat and can’t even write properly, the uneducated poors.’
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Speaking of prairie dogging, ages back I worked at Microsoft on a product called Trip Planner. That bit of software eventually became travel giant Expedia, spun out to live on its own and offer some of the worst customer service I’ve ever received, I still won’t book anything via their site. Anyway, I was a fact checker and spent all day every day confirming hours for restaurants in Fort Lauderdale or prices for attractions in Montreal or whatever. It was tedious work but my office mates were terrific company. One of them was — is — quite an accomplished poet and through the magic of Twitter, he appeared in my timeline recently with this lovely piece.
[dropcap]Even[/dropcap] though we’ve already been dead,
in a secondhand store in Missoula
I found two trays of Grateful Dead tapes,
concerts bound in the stasis of cassette,
their plastic cases scarred and cracked
like old scuba goggles, some with the delicate
peg that lets the door swing open,
broken, maybe falling from a van’s sliding
door to bright, cold pavement.–Read the whole thing: Ed Skoog, Grateful Dead Tapes on Poetry Daily
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Speaking of Twitter, I follow Wilco on Twitter because Wilco! Twitter! They posted a Spotify link (because technology!) to their Wilco’s Favorite Releases list and I promptly clicked it because coffee! Sunday morning! And there I found this voice with this groovy beat and these crazy lyrics and this gorgeous profanity laced pop tune just feels very right. Adron’s website is here or you can get the whole album on Amazon (Organismo)
Pam,
It is easy to try to make life and careers less complicated, but it rarely works. Some people are both travel bloggers and travel writers. Ex. Robyn Eckhardt has a brilliant blog called Eating Asia (http://eatingasia.typepad.com/), and she also just wrote a travel piece for the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/travel/28hours.html?_r=0). So not every travel blogger is out to get a free trip, just as not every traditionally published travel writer does superior work and is above reproach.
I hope you read Kerry’s piece because of course we both know this, that some folks are doing both things well. Kerry’s talking about a certain approach that has so little to do with writing well, something Robyn does, and you do, and that I strive for first, before anything else.