From The New Yorker, June 17, 2002 (an excerpt) In the summer of 1977, I saw Star Wars twenty-one times, mostly by myself. I was thirteen—that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me, impatient to get to my favorite seat. All twenty-one viewings took place at the Loews…
Every so often university students interview me about my travel-writing career — particularly its origins — and some of these exchanges are worth publishing here, since these questions are relevant and worth making public for the sake of other aspiring writers. The exchange below was initiated in 2018 by Marleigh Love, a creative writing student…
There is this sense from Before Sunrise that life, when it adds kinds of completeness and continuation, never equals the potential those youthful moments once contained.
An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums.
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, May 1965) My widowed mother’s name is now “Memère”— nickname for Grandma in Québecois—since her grandson, my nephew, calls her that. It is 1957. I am still an itinerant; Memère and I are going from Florida to try to settle down in San Francisco, our meager belongings following us slowly…
Reporter Thomas Bird interviewed me by email last month for a South China Morning Post article called “Digital nomads adjust to living in one place rather than traveling.” What follows is the full text of our exchange on the topic of how travelers are adjusting and finding opportunities amid new global realities. Do you think…
1) On the essential hardship of travel in the ancient world As late as the end of the fourth century BC, travel in and around Greece was neither easy nor particularly pleasant. Those who went by sea depended on the sailings of merchant-men, put up with casual accommodations once abroad, and worried about pirate attacks…
1) A reader of books is a reader of himself Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself…
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand,…
From The Guardian, September 19, 2009 (an excerpt) Last year, on a visit to the Mani in the Peloponnese, I went to visit the headland where Bruce Chatwin had asked for his ashes to be scattered. The hillside chapel where Chatwin’s widow, Elizabeth, brought his urn lies in rocky fields near the village of Exchori,…
Literature is created on both sides of the frontier that divides fact from fiction, and it is crossed by writers quite casually. But it is a border that should be defended. Orginally published in The Guardian, November 16, 2002 (an excerpt) For much of my life, I have worked on frontiers. Night, fog, armed guards,…
