February 2012
14 posts
2 tags
What makes a perfect airport?
A few days ago an editor at a magazine read by engineers contacted me and wanted to know what I thought made the perfect airport. I quickly realized that I had strong feelings on the subject. Number one: Seamless access to fast and efficient public transportation. Enough room for the volume of humans. Copious security checkpoints. Aesthetically pleasing spaces. Cleanliness. What else?
5 tags
All the pages were blank.
Some time ago, maybe 12 years, I bought a copy of “The Honorary Consul” by Graham Greene from a second-hand bookstore. It was a mint-condition hardcover with a deckle edge, graced with a photo of an orange sunset over a river, set against a plain white background.
I began to read, and was just becoming absorbed in the intrigues of Dr. Plarr when I turned a page and found the next one...
3 tags
"Pay, pack, and follow."
-Richard Burton in a message to his wife Isabel upon being dismissed from his position as British Consul to Damascus in 1871.
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Making words to inspire making art #worthtelling...
Artist Erik Sanner invited me to participate in a show called “Worth Telling.” The idea: He asked nine writers to submit short passages and is matching each one with an artist. The artist will then create a work inspired by the writing. At the show, viewers get to see if they can match the words with the works they inspired. I submitted this outtake from “Wanderlust:”
He...
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From ethereal to gritty, black and white images...
I came upon this photographer, Julian Wainwright, while researching Laos. More beautiful stories from Bankok, Bali, and beyond are here.
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So apparently Robert Frost didn't mean what I...
A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend who had reread Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” after his recent separation. He said that his interpretation now, with life experience under his belt, was totally different from the one he’d been taught in high school. In his new understanding, the poem isn’t telling us to get off the beaten track. It’s...
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USPS wisdom.
Post Office Guy: Are you getting married?
Me: Yes.
POG: Why?
Me: Ha.
POG: Where are you going on your honeymoon?
Me: Mexico.
POG: Be careful!
Me: Can I have my stamps?
POG: Have fun.
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The geographical cure, circa 1878, as executed by...
Having been recommended to leave home, in April 1878, in order to recruit my health by means which had proved serviceable before, I decided to visit Japan, attracted less by the reputed excellence of its climate than by the certainty that it possessed, in an especial degree, those sources of novel and sustained interest which conduce so essentially to the enjoyment and restoration of a solitary...
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Feels like the first time.
I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.
—Beryl Markham, “West With the Night.”
3 tags
"We always talk of selling our cars and house and...
From a blog post by Sandi in Nebraska, about her own wanderlust and “Wanderlust” the book:
Tim has the wanderlust bug too. We both do. And we think we need to really do something big. I don’t want to speak about what we have in mind it because I am afraid I might jinx it, so we’ll see. We’ll see what kind of money we can scrounge up. We always talk of selling our cars and house and...
1 tag
Did you like this country? Fill out a survey.
A little while back I spent a few days in one of the more frayed corners of the Bahamas, Lucaya on Grand Bahama island. An open-air duty free mall offered the only street life. I was served an inedible yet eye-poppingly expensive salad. I left for the airport in a huff.
When I entered the departure lounge, three young women from the national tourism board waved me over and asked if I would fill...
