If there's one genre you have to read before you die it's the travel book
Standard guidebook: "Should you be caught up in a frenzied riot during your time in Jakarta, make your way immediately to your country's embassy. Once inside, relax with one of the native beverages, and think about what a great story you'll have to tell Andy and Rhona on your return."
Hip guidebook:"Should you be caught up in a frenzied riot during your time in Jakarta, consider yourself fortunate to witness the valid cultural expression of a wonderfully passionate race. Feel free to hurl a Molotov cocktail at the riot squad." (via Jorn>
posted by caddis
on Dec 11, 2009 -
27 comments
I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.
Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and
Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 6, 2008 -
17 comments
What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s,
William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the
United States, in
India, and in
Europe, and filling
notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the
daily chores of unemployed
coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in
Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney
was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy.
Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.
posted by matteo
on Apr 27, 2005 -
11 comments
Discovering Japan. As a
perennial outsider at loose in Japan,
writer Donald Richie captures the
joyous freedom of being foreign. The foreign observer is likely to be happy only if he sees his foreignness as an adventure, and recognizes that he has given up a sense of belonging
for a sense of freedom, traded the luxury of being understood for that of being permanently interested.
Richie, the philosopher-king of expats in Asia for the past half-century, arrived in Tokyo in 1947 as a typist with the U.S. government and never really left,
writing dozens of books ,
on Japanese movies,
temples, history and
fashion, while enjoying himself as an actor, musician, filmmaker and painter.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is a monument to the
pleasures of displacement. Richie watchers can observe, more intimately than ever, a man who is generally happiest observing. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 9, 2004 -
12 comments
