July 2011
15 posts
4 tags
Remember that trip?
One of the fun, sometimes horrible things about writing a memoir is hearing from people it mentions. “Wanderlust” elicited a nice update from Noah, a flatmate from Auckland, with news of his wife, kids, travels, and this:
“I am sad that our acid trip on Wharariki Beach that New Years and our hot rock sauna with Ginger Beer steam didn’t make the edit…”
It...
4 tags
From the mailbag:
“I have been living in Argentina for the last year and a half after meeting the woman who conquered my heart.”
-Torey
Dating tribulations.
reihan:
Reihan’s Bullshit...
3 tags
From the mailbag: "A curse that many of us can...
From Rachel in Los Angeles:
“…I am 22 years old. I’ll skip the exhaustive bio, but here are the basics: Graduated from USC 6 months ago, where I spent 4 years learning Arabic, chasing jobs in the State Department / CIA, studying international politics and economics, and studying abroad at the American University in Cairo. Not to mention my insatiable curiosity for the...
4 tags
Me on Paul Theroux on Rebecca West
To my great shame, I’ve never read Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” I am, however, meandering my way through Paul Theroux’s new “The Tao of Travel,” which is a kind of cheat sheet on great travel books, and it’s bumped West back up to the top of the list. All 1150 pages of it. Theroux writes:
“One of my favorite...
3 tags
Scenes from the old girls' network: I meet the...
So I’m standing in the elevator lobby leaving work yesterday, and there’s this other woman leaving her work. We’re in newspapers. And she’s all like, “you’re Elisabeth, you worked in that Seattle peepshow.” And I’m like “yeah.” And she’s like, “I’m Sheila, I worked in these Times Square peep shows.” And I’m...
6 tags
Do your parents wonder why you travel?
This is from another letter I got:
“I am from Barcelona, Spain, and I am currently living in Toronto, Canada…
“My mom has always felt I’ve needed to get away from home because she did something wrong, like it was her own fault. Although I keep trying to explain to her that is not the case, and it’s just for a love of adventure and travel itself, I feel your...
4 tags
You don't have to go to Xinjiang to get Uighur...
I few weeks back I went to the summer night market in Richmond, just across the river from Vancouver. It was the first time I came across food from Muslim China since—well, since I was in Muslim China, and that was a long time ago. The barbecued beef and tofu were rich and delicious.
3 tags
"My long-distance boyfriend is Swiss..." Tell me...
Since publishing Wanderlust I’ve been getting emails from people—mostly young women—in which they tell me about their travels. This is turning out to be one of the three most gratifying parts of the whole book-writing shebang. (The other two are getting nice reviews and the actual writing. The rest of it pretty much sucks.) This is from a note from Diane:
“I’m 24 and...
Sleeping arrangements at the motel psychedelic.
Have you ever wanted to stay in a room in which the ceiling looks like a giant coconut pie, with stalactites of cream hanging above you as you sleep? Me neither. But now you can! A dear friend who is getting married in the Catskills next summer urged me to hurry up and book my room already, because that’s how weddings roll these days. She directed me to the Roxbury Motel. And, well. Turns...
2 tags
How to get high at Disney World
I came across a wonderful travel essay from the New York Times Magazine via Longreads, which, to digress, is about my favorite source of iPad reading, barring the obvious. It was the kind of piece that made me look up who the author was—John Jeremiah Sullivan—so that I might read more of his work. I thought at first that it must come from the NYT travel section, which surprised me, so...
Journalism (and PR) 101: The trend story is your...
Journalists and self promoters—sometimes we are the same people—love trend stories. For reporters, they’re opportunities to subject your readers to dubious theses that began as dinner party bon mots and probably don’t hold up in the bright light of day. For self promoters, they’re opportunities to get yourself written up in zeitgeisty stories when you alone are...
