This week, a new travel essay of mine went online at World Hum. It’s entitled Lost in the Translation — and it humorously describes how the U.S. Army’s new electronic translation device will result in all kinds of confusion once it lands in the hands of independent travelers. “If there’s a bright side to the language gap,” I observe at one point in the essay, “it’s that we as travelers have never really needed technology to help us communicate. Indeed, language is rarely precise — even when shared between lovers or siblings — and sometimes the very charm of communication comes from its hopeful uncertainty. Just as a conversation with a stranger at a nightclub carries a host of interpretations in your own hometown, a phrasebook-aided (or pantomime-aided) cross-cultural conversation can be filled with untold possibilities that arise only when you’re unable to say exactly what’s on your mind.”

Full essay online here.

As part of a continuing series, here are two informational science articles by my nephew Cedar, who is four years old:

(All the quoted written material above has been transcribed directly from Cedar’s oral narratives — all texts are unrevised and unedited.)

“Travel has woken me up, in many ways. It’s taught me how provincial I and my assumptions are. It’s expanded my sense of what is possible among human beings and in terms of human kindness (and at times its opposite). And it has shown me a whole other way to live, without a steady prop, not hemmed in by familiarity, and living according to the principles and challenges I most respect. Best of all, it’s helped me see all of life as a travel, and as an occasion for writing (in order to make sense of it). A few years ago my house burned down, and I lost everything I owned; all my notes, all the books I hadn’t yet completed, all my photos and hopes and letters. And yet traveling helped me see this as a liberation: to live more at home as if I were on the road, to savor the freedom from a past and from possessions, and to think back on all the people I had met, in Tibet and Morocco and Bolivia, who would still have thought of my life as luxurious. Most of the people one meets while traveling deal with more traumas every day than the privileged among us meet in a lifetime. That’s how traveling humbles and inspires.”
–Pico Iyer, from his RolfPotts.com interview (2003)

I just tallied up all the books I read last year, and (counting only the books I completed in their entirety), my grand total was 38 — a pretty healthy year of book reading for me. Here’s a look at the rundown:

Travel narratives and essays

Hold the Enlightenment, by Tim Cahill
Road Fever, by Tim Cahill
Notes from a Big Country, by Bill Bryson
Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need, by Dave Barry
From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple
Playing the Moldavans at Tennis, by Tony Hawks
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer
Route: 66 A.D. , by Tony Perrottet
Beyond the Last Village, by Alan Rabinowitz
Somebody’s Heart is Burning, by Tanya Shaffer
Facing the Congo, by Jeffrey Tayler
The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux

Travel scholarship and commentary

America in an Arab Mirror, by Kamal Abdel-Malek
Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex, by Ian Littlewood
The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton
God’s Dust, by Ian Buruma
A Season in Heaven, by David Tomory

Assorted nonfiction

Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard
Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
The World’s Most Dangerous Places, by Robert Young Pelton
Sex and Death to the Age 14, by Spalding Gray

Fiction

My Life in Heavy Metal, by Steve Almond
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer
The Honorary Consul, by Graham Greene
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Mr. Foreigner, by Matthew Kneale
Never Mind Nirvana, by Mark Lindquist
Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Damascus Gate, by Robert Stone
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

[Above: A tricked out commuter bus in Panama City]

It’s been almost a month since I finished my transit through Central America, but I did want to share some photos of the experience. Each text link below pops into its own window containing the picture described.

Right now I’m in Cusco, Peru, getting ready to head to Chile. Check the DATW blog for a general idea of what’s been going on with our expedition in South America.

Flowers at the beautiful volcanic Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

Old men relaxing in the village of Santiago de Atitlan, Guatemala

The market at Santiago de Atitlan, Guatemala

An old Mayan woman selling wares in the Antigua, Guatemala market

DATW team members entertaining the locals at the Guatemala-El Salvador border

Sunset at Sunzal beach, near La Libertad, El Salvador

Kids diving into the river at the El Salvador-Honduras border

Kids at the Honduras-Nicaragua border

A colonial building in Granada, Nicaragua

Sunset over the city of Granada, Nicaragua

A cute kid in Granada

Butterfly at Mombacha Volcanic Reserve, Nicaragua

Chanda Baggarly playing jacks with kids at the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border

DATW Land Rover parked with safari tent at Nosara Beach, Costa Rica

Making way for cattle on the road in Costa Rica

The streets of Panama City’s Old Town

Travel writer Paul Theroux made the shortlist for the annual Bad Sex Awards, which humorously honor bad and overwrought depictions of sex in fiction. The excerpt comes from Theroux’s recent novel, The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, and can be found (along with other shortlisted winners) here.

Due to the popularity of the last book my 4-year-old nephew Cedar wrote for me, I am now publishing some of his new work. While his first tome had a decidedly philosophical-theological slant, this new, more poetic work revolves around meterology, fashion, and the surreal. I include only the last three pages, since the first two pages are mainly about running around naked (a common activity for four year-olds) and might embarrass him when he gets a bit older.

Here are the new excerpts:

(illustrations include various strange creatures in the rain)

(illustrations include a dragon-like creature, plus a number of “sting-bugs,” plus a person getting stung)

(illustrations include several people, a cat, and a bird)

In other news from north-central Kansas, Cedar’s momma (and my big sister) Kristin has recently published a few articles on back-to-the-land living in national publications (including CounterPunch, and the Hartford Courant) as part of the Prairie Writers Circle. Check out her latest, from AlterNet, here.

I was astonished to discover today that singer-songwriter Elliott Smith died in an apparent suicide late last year. I’m not sure how I missed out on the news before; I guess you miss these things when you’re traveling full-time.

I first saw Elliott Smith when he was fronting the punk-influenced band Heatmiser in Portland, Oregon in the early nineties. In fact, Heatmiser opened the first show I ever went to at Portland’s legendary X-Ray Cafe. My friends and I had gone to see the Sup Pop band Sprinkler, but were blown away by Heatmiser’s opening set. This was back when they had just formed; before they’d ever released an album. I went on to attend Heatmiser shows regularly when I was in college in Oregon, and I still listen to their Mic City Sons album all the time.

Some years later, I was living and working in Korea, and my friend Steve Fuller played me an album of haunting, whispery Nick Drake-style guitar-folk songs that sent chills up my spine: It was Elliott Smith’s eponymous solo album on the Kill Rock Stars label. That album and his later Either/Or kept me company on plenty an introspective Korean afternoon, and I’ve been a big fan ever since.

News of his death is saddening, and it is with bittersweet anticipation that I look forward to the posthumous release of his final album, From a Basement on a Hill. Rest in peace, Elliott Smith. You’ve made many people’s lonesome afternoons more bearable.

“An adventure is never an adventure when it

Being on the road in South America, I don’t have any time to check up on web readings, but Mike Marlett recently sent me a link to “The American Canon Of The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” by Matthew Collison and Chris Mccoy, which recently appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. This satire shows how the works of various classic authors (such as Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller) would appear if written in the style of “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” children’s books. I’ll share the Jack Kerouac portion here:

A Selection from the Recently Discovered Jack Kerouac Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Bop Affirmation, c. 1955

You’re trudging in the riverbottom sand when zoooom, there goes a flatbed truck and you’re suddenly on the back of the truck with two Nebraska farm boys and you’re weeping, ‘Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-s,’ yes to the blue swing swing of the Bird, yes to Charlie Parker, that shimmering saxophone, yes to the original mind, yes to this uncompromising romp through the heartland, you who labored on the railroad with crimson sun on your back, you who know the palabra, you who look right into the blowin’ breeze and cry and moan and shout

AND…

a. Discover a rainbow.
b. Go off to pick oranges with the Mexican girl.
c. Sing in a rising crescendo, ‘Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s.’

…In real-world Kerouac news, the 120-foot scroll on which the Beat author typed the first draft of On the Road is now, well, on the road. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who bought the manuscript two years ago for $2.43 million, plans to take the famous scroll on a 4-year, 13-city tour to museums and libraries around the United States. Full story online here.