January 2012
15 posts
2 tags
Strikes, hookers, opera, trade shows, multiplexes,...
I came across this description of @LivePaola’s home town. The loving attention to ugly detail charms me totally. Here’s an excerpt:
Double- and triple-parked cars; public transport strikes; sidewalks eviscerated to hide fiber optic; the aquifer rising, cellars flooded when it rains. Hookers gain control of some streets at night, in waves, in fads: Brazilian boys; then Nigerian...
4 tags
Richard Burton did it all. Where are today's...
All those Victorian explorers — they did it all. Now most of us only get good at one or two things in life, if that. Why? Is it because there was less competition back then? Or because bodies of knowledge grew, and so everything became more time consuming to learn?
This is from Lesley Blanch’s “The Wilder Shores of Love,” on Richard Burton:
“In our time, one man...
4 tags
"...as much in love with the adventurous life as...
On Isabel Burton, wife of Richard Burton, from “The Wilder Shores of Love” by Lesley Branch:
“She was, without realizing it, as much in love with the adventurous life as the adventurer. There are frequent references [in her diaries] to Richard’s enviable vagabondage, and how well suited she would be to such a life. ‘A dry crust, privations, pain, danger for him I...
10 tags
Should you reward good government when you travel?...
My feelings about top-ten travel lists generally range from skepticism to annoyance. In response to something I said to that effect, someone at EthicalTraveler.org emailed me about their own top-ten list and urged me to change my mind. They rank developing countries on environmental protection, social welfare, and human rights, to come up with a list of the 10 nations most deserving of your...
6 tags
From the mailbag: "NY is the one place that can...
From C in Brooklyn:
After 10+ years of trans-oceanic wanderlust as a translator and interpreter, having climbed an active volcano in Guatemala, lost my passport in Korea, picked up a parasite in Indonesia, and eaten my own weight in cheese in Switzerland, I’ve had this nagging need to come back home to the US, and picked a brick wall in Brooklyn on which to hang my backpack and bike ...
4 tags
Isabelle Eberhardt's "flight from inaction and...
I’m reading about Isabelle Eberhardt, who after an anarchist upbringing, left her native Geneva for Algeria and spent the rest of her days riding horseback in the desert, smoking kif, writing, cross-dressing, and having affairs. This is from one of her diaries, as cited in “The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt” by Cecily Mackworth.
“If the strangeness of my life were the...
4 tags
"They break the hearts of kith and kin, and they...
Somehow I had never heard of the Robert W. Service poem “The Men Who Don’t Fit In” until a reader brought it to my attention. This despite having had to read Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” in high school. This one soars. I’m pretty sure it’s not in copyright, so I reprint it in its entirety below. (Heads up: The ending is depressing and if...
3 tags
"I...wonder what I am doing in this stationary...
I love it when people send me their own tales about wanting to take off, and the tension that desire can generate. Here are some favorite responses to my Sunday Modern Love column:
From Paul, whereabouts unknown:
“I have also been on a very peripatetic path, and can relate to the difficulties of trying to stay still. I think I probably wake up every morning and wonder what I am doing...
3 tags
Eat. sleep. surf: Two men's journey.
My brother, who finds the damnedest things, gave me a documentary for Christmas called “Eat, Sleep, Surf: Cycling Banda Aceh to Bali.”* Two Australian guys in their early 20s, neither particularly athletic, get it into their heads to cycle 3,000 miles through Indonesia, body surfing along the way. They get sick. They get hurt. They take shortcuts. They visit various aid workers and...
3 tags
A Place to Lay My Heart
From my Modern Love column, which ran yesterday in the New York Times:
But his geographic dilemma and its lack of resolution discouraged me from considering romance. I was settled in New York and had just accepted the kind of job where they expect you to show up every day. He was a freelance writer, flitting around the world. I reminded myself that wanderers were bad bets. I had reason to...
