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The following quote — which appears to infer that Richard Nixon dreamed up a kind of Ur-Internet in the early 1970s — appears on page 483 of The Book of Lists #2, which I have been reading off and on in Baja.
What I find especially fascinating is that this Ur-Internet scheme appeared in the book under a heading called “Six Outrageous Plans That Didn’t Happen” — implying that, in 1980 (when The Book of Lists #2 was published), editor David Wallechinsky was oblivious to the potential usefulness of inter-linked personal computers.
Indeed, Nixon and H.R. Haldeman’s “Wired Nation” scheme is listed alongside such wacky plans as G. Gordon Liddy’s attempt to kidnap anti-war leaders in anticipation of the ’72 GOP convention in San Diego; the CIA plan to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out; and the Nixon-era “Huston Plan” to increase domestic spying on US citizens (which sounds to me like a kind of Ur-”Patriot Act”).
Anyhow, here’s the quote:
“In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H.R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events.
James Carson of Boston recently asked:
“I’m planning a long trip through Europe and Asia. As I’m keeping the route open-ended, obtaining visas ahead of time is impractical. How might I obtain a visa for say, Turkey, while I’m already abroad in France?”
This is what I told him:
“This is a good question — and it’s also a fairly easy one to answer, since procuring visas en route is easy to do as you travel. All you have to do is drop in at the embassy or consulate of your destination country in whatever major city you happen to be in. In Paris, for example, you should easily be able to pick up a visa for Turkey at the local Turkish embassy. Just check your guidebook to see where this embassy is located in Paris (and also check to make sure you need a visa at all; when I visited Turkey five years ago I just picked up an arrival visa at the border).
“Ostensibly, you could get visas for just about any country in the world from just about any national capital in the world. I’ve gotten Mongolian and Russian visas in Beijing, Chinese visas in Seoul, Indian visas in Tel Aviv, Syrian visas in Cairo, Laotian and Cambodian visas in Bangkok, Vietnamese visas in Phnom Penh, and Brazilian visas in Buenos Aires. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an overseas visa in the United States (save my original Korean work-visa years ago). Any good guidebook will inform you as to visa requirements for any country (and many countries don’t require them at all), as well as embassy locations for any capital.
“Anyhow, I’m glad to hear that you are keeping your travels open-ended. Once you’re on the road you’ll realize how easy type of travel can be — and you’ll end up thanking yourself for allowing the kind of flexibility and spontaneity open-ended vagabonding provides.”
“Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You’ve got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you’re never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you’re traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You’re never going to see anything; you’re never going to meet anybody; you’re never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you.
“Whereas traveling alone, everything happens. And also traveling alone puts you in this position where you will do almost anything to make contact with other people. My experience of traveling with somebody else is that you just hang around with them. Half the point of traveling alone is that you get so lonely you need to talk to other people.”
–Jonathan Raban, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)
This spring, I blogged about the debut of Young Pioneers, a ‘zine that covers the world of independent travel; this week, I learned that it has been nominated for a 2004 Utne Independent Press Award, which recognizes excellence in alternative and independent publishing. Utne
Over at the Vagabonding.net Q&A, a New Jersey high school teacher named Doug wrote to tell me that he’d read Vagabonding and was inspired to return to the road for a long-term journey. The only problem, he told me, has been keeping inspired as he works to pay off his debts.
“As I sit in the faculty room listening to trivial complaints about life and money,” he writes, “I worry that my excitement will not last the year. I know you mentioned that viewing the world in a different way can make you an outsider, but can you offer advice on keeping up my drive? Can you recommend any inspiring sources? Books? Poems? Movies? People?”
Naturally, I am going to tell Doug to read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, if nothing else for the wonderfully inspirational poem Song of the Open Road. I have some other ideas as well, but first I’d like some input from you readers in the travel and blogging world. What should Doug read? What should he watch? Who should be talk to?
The Bootsnall Vagabonding forum already has some great recommendation threads regarding books and movies, but I am curious if anyone else has ideas.
So: What keeps you inspired to travel? Post your input below…
My old editor and mentor Don George recently wrote to inform me that that Lonely Planet has just posted a new humor story competition on its web site. To read about the competition and enter a travel story or stories, click here.
The subject and setting of the stories are completely open; the only requirement is that the travel tales be funny and be of high literary quality. Submissions must be original, unpublished stories of from 1,000 to 3,000 words, and must be received by Nov. 30, 2004. Winning entries will be announced and published on LonelyPlanet.com. All entries will also automatically be considered for publication in Lonely Planet’s humor anthology, By the Seat of My Pants, which will be published in the fall of 2005.
As Oliver Stone’s new film Alexander nears theatrical release, I wanted to reveal some more facts about the historical Alexander the Great, from the pages of Robin Lane Fox’s eponymous book. Today’s entry deals with Alexander’s nominal homosexuality:
“In ancient Greece moderate homosexuality was an accepted companion of sex with wives and prostitutes. It was a fashion, not a perversion, and the Persians were openly said by Herodotus to have learnt it from the Greeks, just as
The Best American Travel Writing 2004 anthology, which was guest edited this year by Pico Iyer, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin. Notable writers chosen for this year’s main selections include John McPhee, Tim Cahill, Adam Gopnik, Joan Didion, Peter Hessler, Thomas Swick, Mark Jenkins, and Patrick Symmes (who landed two essays in the anthology this year). As is tradition for Houghton Mifflin’s “Best American” anthologies, the series editor (Jason Wilson) selected 50-100 outstanding articles from hundreds of periodicals, and the guest editor (Iyer) narrowed it down to the twenty or so best selections.
In this year’s introduction, Iyer writes that his counterintuitive selection criterion “was to find travel pieces that would be interesting to people who have no interest in travel.” One big benefactor of Iyer’s tastes was World Hum, which had two stories among the main selections this year (including a Tanzania tale by Frank Bures).
For the fifth year running, I had a story short-listed for the anthology: The Hidden Valley, a Laos adventure tale that ran in Cond
“I’ve always felt that travel is a serious subject whose rewards go well beyond that of entertainment and recreation. The average magazine or newspaper editor looks upon travel as a subject of trivia, as something that you engage in to relax from stress, to reinvigorate you. I’ve never believed that.
“We all tell ourselves that we’re stressed out, that we’ve gotta have a vacation. We dream of going to a Caribbean island and just lying on the beach for two weeks and relaxing and getting away from the rat race. We go to the Caribbean and we lie down on the beach and after one hour we begin to fidget. We’re already as well rested as we ever need to be, and then we’re looking for something more profound to do. But of course by that time there is nothing else to do.
“I believe that travel is one of the finest methods of self-education, that travel pursued properly expands your horizons. I have always tried to emphasize that goal and to make explicit that the best form of travel is a learning approach.
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
