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“What we learn of the world is never simply a result of how often or how far we travel. It is just as intimately related to how sincerely we receive strangers amongst us.”
–Erve Chambers, “Can the Anthropology of Tourism Make us Better Travelers?”, NAPA Bulletin 23 (2005)
Newley Purnell recently posted his annual Bloggers’ Favorite Books listing, which includes favorite 2005 reads from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Boing Boing, Instapundit, and MoorishGirl.
Newley also queried me about the most intriguing books I read in 2005, and this is what I told him:
Three of the most enjoyable books I read in 2005 were Michael Bamberger’s Wonderland, J. Maarten Troost’s The Sex Lives of Cannibals, and Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen. Bamberger’s book, which recounts a year in the life of a Pennsylvania high school, was a pleasure to read — not only in its engaging nonfiction storytelling, but also in its empathetic, non-sensationalistic take on what it’s like to be an American teenager in the 2000’s. Troost’s book is the account of two years he spent with his NGO-worker wife on the Equatorial Pacific archipelago of Kiribati — and its take on the idiosyncrasies of life on an isolated atoll makes for the funniest travel reading in recent memory. Less engaging — but even more fascinating — was Ridley’s examination of evolutionary psychology, using examples from the animal kingdom to show how all creatures (including humans) have developed their various social and sexual idiosyncrasies.
Elsewhere in the realm of nonfiction, I spent some time this year delving into readings on the role of social class in the United States. I was inspired to do this after reading Bill McKibben’s April Harper’s article about alternative agriculture in Cuba — which was thematically identical to a project proposal I submitted with my failed Pew Fellowship application in 2003. McKibben is a terrific writer, and I didn’t suspect him of stealing my idea — but I was irritated that the Pew Fellowship had rejected a proposal that would have scooped McKibben’s Harper’s story by a year; instead giving away a majority (70%) of the fellowship slots to (what I considered unremarkable) projects by candidates with Ivy League credentials. As a person who was making $3.35 an hour threshing wheat in Kansas when I was a considering collegiate options at age 17 (i.e., Ivy League schooling was never a consideration), I was flabbergasted that the Pew Fellowship would give most of its financial and professional assistance to people who obviously hailed from a background of social and economic privilege. Indeed, as successful as I’ve become as a freelance writer over the years, I have yet to receive a single financial grant or fellowship — most of which go to candidates whose only financial shortcoming would seem to be student-loan paybacks to elite universities.
Hence, I vented my frustrations by delving into a literary examination of the American class system, digging into titles such as David Brooks’ humorous (if occasionally over-generalized) Bobos in Paradise, and Paul Fussell’s snarky-yet-astute Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Also compelling (if not always fully articulate) was Jim Goad’s angry Redneck Manifesto — which, while at times lacking in even-handedness, made a strong case for the fact that poor, white, rural Americans receive little assistance or sympathy from the powers-that-be on both sides of the political spectrum.
As for fiction in 2005, many of the novels I read this year were intriguingly experimental in form — including Milan Kundera’s Immortality and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. My favorite was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which tantalizingly toyed with the line between fiction and nonfiction, and examined the dubious accuracy of memory in storytelling.
Finally, I re-read in 2005 a number of books that have been favorites since I was a teenager, including John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (which is possibly my favorite book ever). Just as it’s nice to occasionally revisit old friends in various corners of the world, it was a keen pleasure to reacquaint myself with Doc, Mac and the Boys, and Lee the Grocer in depression-era Monterey — as well as Yossarian, Major Major, Natley’s whore, and various other characters off the coast of Italy in the waning days of WWII. I’d reckon in another couple years, I’ll afford myself the pleasure of visiting them again.
For the full list of bloggers’ favorite 2005 books, click here.
Some of the questions I get from travelers end up being too esoteric for my “Ask Rolf” column at World Hum, so I’ve taken to answering these queries (as I used to) at Vagabonding.net. A interesting recent question came from a Sean in Louisiana, who wrote:
I got your book Vagabonding and am enjoying it thoroughly, if only for the validation of my wife’s and mine own decision to chuck it all in a couple of months for our own year and a half of traveling around the world. I have question, though. What are your thoughts on retirement savings? At the tender ages of 32 and 30, my wife and I have been dutifully plugging money into our IRAs and 401Ks for quite a few years, but wonder how others handle the topic while traveling. Any thoughts?
Here’s what I told Sean:
My first instinct was to tell you to not sweat it for those 18 or so months; that your investments will be fine if there’s a brief break in incoming money. Since I am not an investment expert, however, so I posed your concern to a couple of financial advisor friends.
They told me that you might want to place the money into some type of “asset allocation fund” (which is a fund that diversifies into different investments all within one plan) and then just forget about it while you’re away. A more conservative option would be to put your money into a CD or some type of fixed investment. This would earn low interest but there will be no risk. Finally, my financial advisor friends add that if long-term finances are a major concern for you, a good goal when you return from vagabonding would be to double up what you normally save to try and catch up a little.
Whatever you decide to do, your goal should be to arrange things so that you don’t have to dwell on long-term finances as you travel. The more you can keep yourself “in the moment” as you travel, the richer that travel experience will be.
“The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.
–Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2003)
In the United States and England, the four suits in playing cards are ‘diamonds’, ‘hearts’, ‘clubs’ and ‘spades’. According to an entry on Adam Jacot de Boinod’s blog, however, other languages interpret these symbols differently.
The French for clubs, for example, is “trèfles”, meaning ‘clover’ (which makes more sense to me than ‘clubs’). In Italian, spades are known as “picche”, or pikes. In Malay, clubs are given the name “kelawar”, which means (of all things) ‘cave bat’.
A reader adds the following Cantonese equivalents, which I found interesting:
This month, I am the subject of an interview in the online travel magazine e-Marginalia. Reported by Nana Chen, the Q&A touches on such diverse topics as why I dedicated my book to two teachers, what I read growing up, why I kept my 1999-2001 vagabonding journey centered on Asia, how I balance reading and writing, how I plan to travel when I one day have a wife and kids, where I recently set up my USA home base, and what travels I have planned for the future.
The full interview can be found online here.
Below are a few outtakes:
On pacing oneself on the road: “Pace should be done according to personal style. Some people like to stay in one place for months, while others like to keep moving. My only specific advice is not to get too ambitious with your travels—like, say, trying to pack five continents into a year. It’s better to take one continent at a slow pace than to try and cram all those countries into a single trip. So I’ve found that slower is better when vagabonding. Just so long as you don’t waste away for too long in one place when there are so many great places out there! You can always go back to the places that captured your heart.”
On travel as an escape: “Vagabonding and escapism always dovetail a little bit, but I encourage people to travel as a way of living real life rather than escaping it. In the case of a death or a divorce, vagabonding might make for good therapy, and a chance to get away from that trauma. For milder types of escape—say, getting away from a crappy job or unsatisfying family life, I encourage people to get away from the negative aspect of their travel impetus and just enjoy the road for what it is. Better to seek fresh new epiphanies on their own terms each day than be constantly comparing things to your life back home.”
On other travelers’ reaction to the fact that I’m a travel writer: “First, I often don’t identify myself to others as a travel writer, because it makes people treat me in a different way than normal (usually just through people’s exaggerated notion of what I should know about traveling in certain places). Second, I find that dozens of people on the road identify themselves as travel writers, whether they are doing it professionally or not. That is, in a room of a dozen people, maybe six people will call themselves travel writers, even if they only write for a blog or a mailing list. And I think that’s fine. …I usually don’t get any hostility. Perhaps sometimes from younger travelers, who think it’s unfair that I get to be a travel writer because, say, they are spending less money than me, or having wilder adventures. I just shrug and tell them that it’s the writing itself that makes you a travel writer, and not necessarily the travel or adventures you have.”
My thanks to Tamara from San Francisco, who recently alerted me to the fact that someone might have cribbed my ideas for a Surfer Magazine story, entitled “The Art of Vagabonding: How to Put the Endless in Your Summer”.
Happily, I was able to tell Tamara that I wrote that article for Surfer myself (it’s just hard to read my by-line over the photo).
If you’re interested in ideas for surf vagabonding, check out the “Surf Tip” section in Surfer‘s latest issue. As I say in the teaser:
“What could possibly be better than taking off a couple weeks to live the surf trip of your dreams? Try taking off a couple years to live the surf trip of your dreams. Contrary to popular belief, taking months or years off to travel the world doesn’t require that you be rich in money; it only requires that you use what money you have to make yourself rich in free time. Here are a few tips to make global surf vagabonding a reality, without needing corporate sponsorhips or a massive bank account.”
My five vagabonding tips for surfers are as follows:
For the full article, hit your local newsstand and check out the January 2006 issue of Surfer.
[Above: Hit the road, pal.]
Last month, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham announced his retirement after nearly thirty years on the job. I’ve been an enthusiastic Harper’s subscriber for over a decade, but I’ve always found Lapham’s monthly “Notebook” column to be the most irritating part of the magazine. Pompous, frequently contemptuous, and dripping with purple overstatement, Lapham’s front-of-the book essays always spew some variation of the same, alarmist jeremiad: The powers-that-be are evil; the vulgar masses are little more than hoodwinked automatons; the end is near for anyone with the intellectual jam to recognize it as such.
These monthly screeds (which will continue, despite his retirement from other magazine duties) might be more compelling if Lapham demonstrated a shred of reportorial energy or curiosity. Instead, they bear the unmistakable stamp of the armchair essayist: Broad generalizations are presented as unquestionable fact; rhetorical nuance and uncertainty are utterly absent; Enlightenment philosophers are quoted at length. Indeed, nobody in contemporary letters has such a talent for sounding convincingly erudite and utterly clueless at the same time (a fact evidenced in 2004, when it was revealed that Lapham’s column savaging the speeches of the Republican convention was written a full two months before the convention was held).
In recent years, no individual has been the focus of Lapham’s scorn more frequently than George W. Bush — which is ironic, since the two men are practically twins: Both of them come from blue-blood and old money; both received elite preparatory schooling and graduated from Yale; both have demonstrated an inability to helm a profitable business (for much of Lapham’s tenure, Harper’s has been bailed out to the tune of $2 million each year by the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation); both profess to know what’s best for the kind of common Americans they’ve certainly never met; both display an alarming self-satisfaction and lack of curiosity for anything that falls outside of their own ideological rubric.
In fact, while Lapham’s opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, he would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker — someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.
This in mind, I have drafted the following letter to Mr. Lapham, in the hope that he might use his retirement to broaden his horizons.
Dear Mr. Lapham,
Congratulations on your retirement from Harper’s. You’ve had a fine tenure; your creation of the Harper’s Index was a masterstroke in and of itself. I often refer to various front-of-the-book “Readings” from Harper’s on this blog, and I’ve quoted your apt musings on media here in the past. You have plenty to feel good about from your time as an editor.
Now that you’ll have some free time, however, I have a suggestion for you: Pack your bags. Hit the road. Get lost. Do a little open-ended travel — and let it expand your worldview.
By this, I don’t mean you should head to Europe on a lecture tour with Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. This would be pleasurable for you, I’m sure, but I doubt it will do much to challenge the prejudices you have accumulated in a career that has never strayed from the most elite social settings. After all, to borrow something you once said about your own writing, travel “is about inquiry; it’s not about the promulgation of the truth, it’s about a search for the truth” — and I doubt your search will yield anything new if you confine yourself to the company of left-wing public intellectuals (and the sycophants who line up to hear them lecture).
Hence, once your bags are packed, I suggest you strike out solo for the American heartland — that gaping, dimly perceived synapse between New York and San Francisco — to meet new people and have new experiences.
I know for a fact that you are desperately under-traveled in the inner U.S., because you frequently advertise it as a sign of intellectual purity. In your May 2005 column, for example, you wrote that President Bush flaunts “his ignorance as proof of his virtue, claiming that America can rule and govern a world about which it chooses to know as little as possible.” This assertion might have carried some rhetorical weight had you not smugly boasted your own cultural-geographical ignorance earlier in the same essay (“My travels seldom took me anywhere except to California,” you quipped, “and although I heard rumors of the religious enthusiasms roaming the American plains, I chose to regard them as preposterous”).
Thus, just as I would implore President Bush (and his ilk) to humbly explore other countries until his passport is dog-eared and tattered, I encourage you to visit places that were never on your radar when Hotchkiss and Cambridge and midtown Manhattan were shaping your perception of the world. Go to places like Idaho, or Alabama, or my home state of Kansas. Drink beers with guys who weld for a living. Spend a week working (with your fellow retirees) as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Sit in with kids in classrooms where “Intelligent Design” threatens the science curriculum.
Odds are — after a few months of earnest wandering through “flyover country” — you will find a level of humanity, local wisdom and social complexity that will allow you to write your “Notebook” column with a little more nuance and a little less bombast.
Your readers, I believe, will share in the discovery as you make your world bigger.
Yours optimistically,
Rolf Potts
http://rolfpotts.com
My longtime friend and former Thailand elephant polo diva Diana Moxon recently made her debut as a radio reporter for BBC 4. Her story, which ran on the language-oriented program “Word of Mouth” last Friday, is an examination of a Shakespearian-style English dialect that is still spoken on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
An online audio version of the broadcast can be found here, and requires a RealPlayer plug-in. Diana’s report from North Carolina starts about eight minutes into the show.
It’s once again winter holiday season, and once again I’m getting feedback from readers who are buying copies of Vagabonding as Christmas presents. I think that’s great, and I’ll reiterate that Vagabonding makes a great holiday gift for:
To pick up copies of Vagabonding as stocking-stuffers, hit your local bookstore, or try the following online services:
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
