Pico Iyer interview at World Hum

There are several notable passages in this interview with Pico Iyer over at World Hum, but here are just a few quotes that resonated with me as someone who is interested in travel and writing.

“When I wrote ‘Video Night in Kathmandu’ I would say, ‘I am walking down Clinton Avenue in Iowa City and I am seeing the House of Aromas and then I am seeing the Iowa Old Capital Mall and then I am seeing this,’ and I would take and register everything in a kind of bombardment of images. And somewhere in the back of them all, there is a person playing the saxophone, maybe I would have said then. Now, I would cut everything away and just go right into that person playing the saxophone and make a very different kind of scene or texture out of it.”

“A travel writer has to rethink what discovery means, and exoticism and movement. That’s why, having done a lot of descriptions of other countries, I went and spent two weeks in the Los Angeles airport as a way to claim it as a different kind of destination. Of course, you could do the same with a shopping mall or a hotel or a hospital. And all that I regard as travel writing.”

Take some time and read the interview in full over at World Hum.