World Hum

New Music: Sigur R�s’ ‘Voltari’

2012-05-30T14:51:23+00:00

The Icelandic band, whose ambient, ethereal sound evokes the cool, steaming landscape of its native country, has released a new album, Valtari.

Most reviews find the album to be a lot like the band’s other stuff. As the Washington Post put it: “Ultimately the band’s commitment to pleasant but forgettable ambient soundscapes represents a sort of Rorschach test for listeners. One person’s transcendent experience is another’s somnambulant snooze.”

Funny the critic used “snooze.” For me, Sigur Rós has always made music to wake up to.

From the new album:

A Personal History of Travel Snapshots

2012-05-30T14:19:20+00:00

Rolf Potts looks back at tourist photos he has taken over the years and considers how photography shapes and reflects our experiences.

Here’s a taste:

Pictures of scenery were not the only travel images that improved when I traveled to Greece with a digital camera. I also wound up with better pictures of both my travel companions and myself. Each shot of a person was, in a sense, a negotiation: An unspoken code compelled us to delete unflattering photos of each other from our memory-cards and retry a given shot until we all looked handsome and happy and at ease. We weren’t photographing our travel experience as it was, but as how it should have been. Each photo we retained on our memory-cards stood as a correct answer to some Platonic inquiry about what we might ideally look like as we sailed through Greece.

“We learn to see ourselves photographically,” Susan Sontag wrote in the days before digital photography. “To regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.” In the digital age, making oneself attractive has become a recursive feedback loop—a simple matter of patience, persistence, and real-time editing.

In one shot from the sailing excursion, three of my female friends look particularly radiant: Tanned and relaxed, smiling unselfconsciously, they’re clearly enjoying their holiday. Their blissful gaze rests not on a Greek vista, not on the sailboat, but on an image of themselves—in Greece, on the sailboat—captured on the display screen of their digital camera.

Detained in the Sahara

2012-05-30T13:47:36+00:00

It was night. Soldiers ordered Bill Donahue from the vehicle. Would they administer primitive justice?

David Byrne on NYC’s New Bike-Share Program

2012-05-30T03:02:18+00:00

iStockPhoto

The former Talking Heads frontman and cycling enthusiast is pretty excited about New York City’s new bike-share program, which launches this summer and will lead to more than 10,000 additional bicycles on city streets.

People who live and work in New York will be able to travel quickly and cheaply between many neighborhoods. This is major. It will make New Yorkers rethink their city and rewrite the mental maps we use to decide what is convenient, what is possible. Parks, restaurants and friends who once seemed beyond plausible commuting distance on public transportation will seem a lot closer. The possibilities aren’t limitless, but the change will be pretty impressive.

How serious is Byrne about cycling and cities these days? He mentions that he just got back from a Latin American tour—“not a music tour, but a series of discussions about bikes and transport.”

If you haven’t read it, his unconventional travel memoir, Bicycle Diaries, is well worth a read.

Music Video: ‘Paul Theroux’s My Hero’

2012-05-26T16:16:15+00:00

Because there just aren’t enough songs about reading travel books.

The things you stumble across when you’re waking up, randomly searching for a video of Paul Theroux talking about his new novel.

It’s a nice little ditty. More of the uke-player’s ouvre, including a song about the first dog in space, can be found here.

R.I.P. Paul Fussell, Scholar, Travel Writing Critic

2012-05-24T15:21:13+00:00

The Pasadena-born scholar, who died yesterday at the age of 88, wrote more than 20 books on a wide range of topics, including war and class. He’s revered in travel-writing circles for his 1980 book, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. It seems a rather obscure topic for a book that would spur debate among travelers and writers for decades, but Fussell was an opinionated critic who took aim at modern tourism and its effect on travel writing.

World Hum contributor Tom Swick reflected on the book and its influence today:

It was like a course no college ever taught—British Travel Writing 101, my first introduction to a distance university. The scholarship was rugged, eclectic and sweeping; the writing authoritative, engaging and witty. With chapters titled “L’Amour de Voyage” and “The New Heliophily,” the book reinforced the image of travel writing as a romantic endeavor, but it also championed it as an art. Here, it said, is an overlooked genre that has been practiced by some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Here is a literature worthy of academic regard.

The second of these ideas turned out to be the more prophetic. Travel writing continues—despite Fussell’s assertion that tourism killed it—but without the participation of the day’s great novelists. At the same time, academic papers and conferences on travel writing keep proliferating. It is ironic that the book that announced the death of travel writing gave birth to the field of travel writing scholarship.

Of modern tourism, Fussell wrote: “Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism required that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. Tourism can operate profitably only as a device of mass merchandizing, fulfilling the great modern rule of mediocrity and uniformity.”

Fussell has been cited on World Hum a number of times over the years. A few highlights:

Non-Places and the End of Travel by Frank Bures
The Trouble with ‘Smile When You’re Lying’ by Rolf Potts
Not a Tourist by Tom Swick
No Place Exists That’s not Worth Writing About by Tom Swick
China: Not a ‘Psuedo-Place’ by Eva Holland
‘Fussel Was Right. We Are All Tourists’

The Critics: ‘The Lower River’ by Paul Theroux

2012-05-21T14:37:34+00:00

Paul Theroux’s new novel, The Lower River, is about an American named Ellis Hock who returns to the African nation of Malawi nearly four decades after working there in the Peace Corps. The book got mixed reviews over the weekend. The New York Times critic liked it:

“The Lower River” is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Theroux exposes the paternalism of Hock’s Peace Corps nostalgia, his “sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership.”

The Los Angeles Times’ critic was less impressed, finding the story “predictable, peopled with stock bit players, and disappointingly familiar.”

Theroux spoke about the novel on NPR over the weekend. The six-minute segment is worth a listen:

Video: Lisa Napoli in Conversation with Eric Weiner

2012-05-18T18:01:38+00:00

World Hum contributors Lisa Napoli and Eric Weiner spoke in front of a live audience recently in Santa Monica. Napoli, of course, is the author of “Radio Shangri-La,” about her experience in Bhutan. Weiner wrote “The Geography of Bliss” and “Man Seeks God.” Their wide-ranging discussion touched on Bhutan, happiness, authenticity and spirituality, among other things. This 30-minute video has some highlights.

Walter Kirn: In Defense of Texting While Hiking

2012-05-17T18:47:16+00:00

The author of travel novel-turned-movie “Up in the Air” has a confession: He likes to text while hiking, and he also likes to bring his iPad to the beach. He’s torn down the barriers between technology and wilderness, and—as he writes for Outside—he thinks that more of us should do the same. Here’s Kirn on his moment of revelation:

After three months of writing cooped up indoors, with only a square patch of sky framed by my window, I drifted outside one day into a field frequented by herds of pronghorn antelope and set up an improvised writing desk on an abandoned, weathered wooden spool that had once held telephone wire. I opened my laptop, powered by a battery, set my cell phone beside it so I could handle work calls, and rigged up a little iPod stereo with speakers that looked like Lucite tennis balls. Above me, in the immense blue August sky, gray cumulus clouds fattened and roiled and towered, blocking the sun, and between them neat white contrails unfurled, tracing the curvature of the vast planet as jets bore their passengers between great cities. The sight was evocative and monumental, and it would have been lost to me, locked up as I was in my office. The novel took on an extra dimension then—broad, expansive, melancholy. Unless I’d brought my computer onto the prairie, I never would have caught the scene.

Bali Belly and the Zombie Apocalypse

2012-05-17T17:17:37+00:00

When Linda Watanabe McFerrin fell ill, all the travel meds in the world couldn't keep the undead away

Not Your Usual Spring-Break-in-Florida Story

2012-05-17T16:42:35+00:00

This essay from the NYT, about Alessandra Stanley’s mother-daughter vacation, is causing a stir—no huge surprise, I suppose, when it starts with a line like this: “One of the good things about divorce is that you get to see less of your children.” Stanley and her daughter spent a less-than-idyllic spring break at a super-luxury resort on a private island near South Beach. Here’s a taste:

I imagined sunrise walks on the beach, giggly mother-daughter spa treatments and intimate candlelit meals during which Emma would lean in and at long last tell me what college was like besides “fine.”

I failed to anticipate that exam-rattled 18-year-olds sleep long past noon and then stay up all night (I get up around 6 and am asleep easily before 10). Nor had I known that embedded in the ethos of this particular private island is a class system that places short-term guests below the salt.

Refreshingly honest? Privileged and self-indulgent? The Times commenters are weighing in bare-knuckled. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Paul Theroux on ‘Multilayered and Maddening’ Hawaii

2012-05-14T14:43:30+00:00

Paul Theroux lives in Hawaii but finds aspects of the archipelago’s culture to be mysterious and nearly impenetrable. When he set out to talk with natives about local traditions, he was met with silence and monosyllabic replies, even when he turned up with gifts of honey from his own bees.

I had never in my traveling or writing life come across people so unwilling to share their experiences. Here I was living in a place most people thought of as Happyland, when in fact it was an archipelago with a social structure that was more complex than any I had ever encountered—beyond Asiatic. One conclusion I reached was that in Hawaii, unlike any other place I had written about, people believed that their personal stories were their own, not to be shared, certainly not to be retold by someone else. Virtually everywhere else people were eager to share their stories, and their candor and hospitality had made it possible for me to live my life as a travel writer.

(Via @nerdseyeview)