[Update: My podcast episode about Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming, featuring journalist and critic Michael Weinreb, is now online.] Noah Baumbach, whose new movie Marriage Story (starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver) debuts this week, is one of the most respected American indie-film writer-directors of his generation. His cinematic vision has evoked comparisons to auteurs like…
In light of the (now possibly passé) “OK Boomer” meme bouncing around the internet in recent weeks, I’ve seen a number of social-media references to a 2017 Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope,” which contained this startlingly relevant (for me, at least) piece of cover art containing pop-culture…
1) On the sheer economic power of tourism In gross economic power [tourism] is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture. At least one out of every ten people around the world is financed by the industry, according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labour Organization, who told me that the figure…
Friends and vagabonders, As 2019 nears its end, I wanted to check in and recap some of the things I’ve done and places I’ve traveled this year. From traversing the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as well as Sri Lanka, Dubai, and the Republic of Georgia), to speaking at the Kazakh equivalent of TED Talks, to…
Long after you have swung back away from me I think you are still with me:you come close to the shore on the tide and nudge me awake the way a boat nudges the pier: am I a pier half-in half-out of the water? and in the pleasure of that communion I lose track, the…
1) On the difficulty of writing about music Writing about music is like describing the color blue. You can try to explain what you see when you see blue, but it is unlikely that a blind person will picture the exact shade you mean. Similarly, you can write about music all you want, but the…
My very first vagabonding trip – which was one of the single greatest journeys of my life (if nothing else because it was my first) – happened 25 years ago, in 1994. My friend Jeff and I spent nearly eight months traveling around North America by van, and the two of us reminisce about the…
By Michael Mewshaw First presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans, October 28, 2004 (an excerpt) I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I…
1) On the deepest source of wanderlust I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what. 2) On the intoxicating joy of long-term travel The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so…
Note: The following interview appears in the paperback edition of Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Rolf Potts: In the book you say that “travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more about how complicated the world is.” It struck me that this is also…
The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the “Readings” section of the July 2004 issue of Harper’s. [Cliches] STRANGELY FAMILIAR From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted “too frequently” to Strange Horizons, an online magazine of “speculative fiction.” The document was compiled…
