Cultural criticism/personal essay: Rolf reflects on the journals he kept between 1984 and 1986 – a time when he played D&D, bicycled everywhere, and pretty much watched the same movies as the boys in Stranger Things.
9 Outtakes from Matt Kepnes’ “Ten Years a Nomad”
1) Travel allows one to stop acting like a new person and to start becoming one The unfamiliarity of travel jolts you out of your familiar patterns. Who we are on the road is different from who we are at home. I don’t know if who we are on the road is closer to our…
6 more arguments for the relevance of popular genre fiction
1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win…
A Phone Call to the Future, by Mary Jo Salter
1 Who says science fiction is only set in the future? After a while, the story that looks least believable is the past. The console television with three channels. Black and white picture. Manual controls: the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven. You have to get up and walk somewhere to change…
9 Outtakes from Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel”
1) On what travel can reveal about the way we live If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardor and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might…
Cultivating Loneliness: Why travel writing is more important than ever
By Robert D. Kaplan Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (an excerpt) Knowing the future is easy, if only we were willing to see the present. In the 1980s, it was one thing to learn about Afghanistan through fleeting and sporadic news reports; it was another to watch with a…
9 strategies to consider when revising a screenplay
1) Allow healthy separation between you and the first draft A bit of separation between you and your script is healthy. After a few weeks, you might even forget every word that you wrote. That is a good thing. It’s important to look at your script with fresh eyes, as a new reader would. Reread…
To World War Two, by Kenneth Koch
Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafés. It was a time of general confusion Of being a body hurled at a wall. I…
9 Outtakes from Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams”
1) On the way empathy requires inquiry and openness Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” 2) On the…
Notes on the flâneur
“The time-honored tradition of the flâneur is when the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it.” –Will Self, interviewed in World Hum “He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of…
Roads Less Traveled: Why so much travel writing is so boring, by Thomas Swick
(an excerpt) Why is so much travel writing so boring? Why on Monday morning do people talk about an op-ed piece they read in the Sunday paper, or a sports column, or a magazine essay, or a feature profile, but rarely a travel story? Why do the travel magazines, lavish with tips and sumptuous photographs,…