in search of the absurd: fiction & nonfiction

January's Theme: Far-off Places

(Back to catalogue of other earlier themes)

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except for heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those." - Mark Twain

Let's just pretend for a moment that we wanted to write a piece of travel writing.

We wouldn't really know how, because we haven't read that much of the stuff, because we always stop reading it right before we start. We always read, for example, the New York Times on Sunday, but skip the "Travel" section, unless it talks about some place we're about to go, and then it's still only interesting if there's a really easy-to-use table of cheap restaurants or something.

We've read Paul Theroux, who others have called "the greatest living travel writer." But he's such a pompous jerk, so arrogant, so no-fun. He has a British accent even though he grew up in Massachusetts, he somehow thought he could avoid recrimination for avoiding the Vietnam draft by publishing an essay called "Cowardice" where he said he was too scared to go and fight, and, worst of all, he never seems to like any of the places he visits and then tells us about. We don't really want to read any more of his stuff.

Maybe for our anti-Theroux-vian travelogue we'd start with some example of a foreign custom and show how it seems unfamiliar at first. We'd go through some meaningless drivel experiences before letting the reader know (GASP!) that the once-strange-looking custom is just like the American practice of X-Y-Z and we're not so different after all. We might tell you the word in some Javanese dialect for "grapefruit" and expect that to drive the story.

But then we'd probably stop writing. Why write about people or things that aren't so different? Maybe it's to show others one more example of the fact that "we're all in this together" or "we're all the same." But why do we think other people will care about that, and why do they have to know that we ate fried eggs at a rickety stall in Borneo to know that we're like the guy who drives the bus in Shanghai?

BUT, funny things do happen to people when they travel--especially to self-deprecating people who write well. Those are the people, we hope, who will tell their stories here. They'll be the vanguards of the travel writing revolution.

Bon-voyagee and we remain, as ever, your humble servant,

the raging face