2006: The Year in Rolf

[Above: Rolf gets an aboriginal welcome in East Arnhem Land, Northern Territories, Australia, November 2006.]

Before we get too far into 2007, I should probably try to sum up my 2006. It was really a nice year for me, in terms of travel and writing, as well as life in general. I visited a number of countries for the first time: Grenada in January, the Dominican Republic in May and June; Luxembourg, Sweden, and the Czech Republic in August; Australia in October and November. I spent six weeks in Paris (four of them teaching my writing class at the American Academy; two of them just writing and wandering in the Latin Quarter); two weeks revisiting Korea (and writing about it for Slate); and six days in New York and New Jersey. I accumulated two weeks of travel time in post-Katrina New Orleans, including a stint at Mardi Gras. For the first time ever, I landed essays in both Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Travel Writing 2006, and Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing 2006 — as well as winning a Lowell Thomas Gold Award (for an Outside article about Greece) from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Destinations and statistics aside, here’s a rundown on some other things that happened for me in 2006:

• In January I traveled to Florida as a special guest of the Key West Literary Seminar. Despite all my years of travel writing (and teaching), it was my first stint at a formal writer’s conference — and I enjoyed meeting longtime literary role models like Pico Iyer, Tim Cahill, and Dervla Murphy.
• While in Kansas, I also got to spend some quality time with my nephews. Cedar is in the second grade now, and wrote a book review for me in 2006. Luke turned five, and will start kindergarten later this year.
• I broke some new personal publication ground in 2006, including (after many years of querying), my first big features for Outside and Islands. My old feature about Diu, India, which had been in editorial limbo for five years, finally found a home in the San Francisco Chronicle. I also wrote a story about Kansas for the latest Lonely Planet literary anthology, Tales from Nowhere. Just as enjoyable as penning these travel pieces was my recent foray into popular literary criticism, as my essays on Ur-Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s travel writing and the current relevance of Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” landed in different issues of The Believer.
• From a writing standpoint, the weirdest experience of the year was writing a weekly column about independent travel for Yahoo! News. In terms of content, of course, there was nothing all that strange about my Yahoo stories: They straightforwardly examined various travel issues, and a couple of them even merited links from my favorite literary blog, Arts & Letters Daily. What startled me about Yahoo! News is the sheer number of people who read it — and the alarming percentage of people who don’t read it very carefully. It wasn’t just the folks who left comments who didn’t read closely (although the commenters certainly had their moments); it was in fact the greater world of media that seems to have missed the point. When I wrote up a top-10 list of USA attractions in July, for instance, publications like the Lawrence Journal-World and Kansas Traveler came out with articles touting the fact that the Kansas Flint Hills had been listed “by Yahoo.com as the number 5 ranked attraction in America.” This might have indeed been cause for excitement, had I not very clearly stated that my ten USA attractions were strictly a matter of personal opinion, listed in west-to-east (not best-to-worst) order. In the end, my Yahoo gig has taught me that — at least in terms of the mass online readership — the general public will conclude whatever they want from your writing, regardless of what you actually write.
• I typically have eclectic reading habits, but 2006 was a particularly idiosyncratic reading year, as the most memorable books I read were not travel books (though I did enjoy Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones and Jeffrey Tayler’s River of No Reprieve), but titles like Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life, and Neil Strauss’s Jenna Jameson tome, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. I also renewed my enthusiastic appreciation of pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman, tearing through Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (sample quote: “If you feel betrayed by culture, it’s not because you’re right and the universe is fucked; it’s only because you’re not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because — in all likelihood — you hate those other people anyway. You are being betrayed by a culture that has no relationship to who you are or how you live.”), and re-reading his 2003 book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.
• In other pop culture news, I celebrated this year when (thanks to the success of The Squid and the Whale) Lionsgate finally released a DVD version of Noah Baumbach’s first movie, Kicking and Screaming. If you’ve never seen Kicking and Screaming (which starred Josh Hamilton, Olivia D’Abo, Chris Eigeman, Eric Stoltz, Carlos Jacott, Elliott Gould, and others), you missed out on one of the best movies of the 1990s — a very funny and truthful movie about the painful existential reinvention has to happen right after you finish college. Quentin Tarantino has remarked that re-watching your favorite movies can be like hanging out with a group of old friends — and it was fun to again spend time with Baumbach’s charmingly delusional male characters.
• In the TV realm, I finally finished watching (on DVD) the final seasons HBO’s Six Feet Under, a show I got addicted to while living in Thailand some years ago (it culminated in an intense ending, but the first season is still by far my favorite). In 2006 I also got addicted (via DVD and iTunes download) to the American version of The Office, after years of having avoided it out of respect for the original British version. Music-wise, my iPod saw a huge rotation of new music (including merengue and reggaeton tracks from the Dominican Republic), though Gillian Welch’s “Revival”, the Dandy Warhols’ “Come Down”, Beck’s “Guero”, and “Beggar’s Banquet” by the Rolling Stones saw particularly heavy rotation. By the end of the year, Sufjan Stevens’ “Seven Swans” had become a new favorite.
• On a final note, I lost a trademark identifying-trait late in 2006. Anyone who’s met me in the past eight years or so will know that I’ve had two large-ish brown discolorations on the left side of my lower lip (visible in this shot from Greece). I’d always assumed they were sunspots, but on the advice of a few concerned people I went to a dermatologist to get them checked out. In order to save the trouble of a biopsy, the doctor treated the spots with liquid nitrogen. If the color came back, he reasoned, we’d take a biopsy. As it turned out, the color never came back; I officially have normal pink lips again.