The crew over at Gap Adventures is running a new photo contest called “sense appeal.”

They invite you to submit your best travel photograph in one of five categories—sight, taste, smell, sound and touch. The Grand Prize winner will receive a US$1,500 travel voucher from Gap Adventures and a MatadorU Photo Scholarship. They’’ll also choose a runner up who will receive a US$250 travel voucher.

How It Works

The contest is hosted by Gap Adventures and sponsored by MatadorU. It runs from August 23, 2010 – September 26, 2010.

Winners will be notified by e-mail no later than September 30, 2010. Once a winner has been notified by e-mail of their win, he or she will have two weeks to contact the Gap Adventures reservations team who will require all of their contact details and review the procedures for claiming a prize / booking a trip.

For full contest details and to enter, please use this entry form at Matador Network.

Image source: National Library of Scotland

OVER THE LAST few weeks we’ve been seeing some really interesting new travel narratives, and we decided to to run a contest.

The winner gets $300 plus free enrollment to the travel writing program at MatadorU [worth $350]. The winning story, along with honorable mentions will be published here at the Traveler’s Notebook.

Even if you’re a professional writer who doesn’t necessarily need classes, consider this about the U: you get lifetime access to our forums and Market Blog, with leads and writing opportunities researched and curated by Matador editors, along with all future Pro Modules we publish on new media strategies, branding, SEO, and other areas of continuing education.

TRANSPARENT NARRATIVE

Part of the focus of this contest is to encourage “transparent” writing. This is a prose style where the narrator narrates events / scenes as he or she perceived them at ground-level. Example:

Disposing of my boxers in the bathroom garbage can, I free-balled through the rain . . .

This is opposed to language that attempts to explain or justify something, or suggest the reader feel a certain way about a place or culture:

I’d always dreamed of indulging in the diverse cuisine of India.

Transparent narration may be thought of as the opposite of codified writing, which we defined and analyzed here at the notebook last month in notes on codification.

All of this said, the form of your story , the structure, is completely up to you. It can be a series of notes or scenes. It can be a kind of virtual postcard or letter. It could be a bit of memoir. The most important element however is that the narrator tells what happens in a transparent style.

DETAILS

1. Stories can be any length, and super condensed sketches may be submitted, however, somewhere 500-1,500 words seems to work well.

2. Travel writing reveals a person’s relationship with a place. So that said, you don’t have to be traveling to submit a story. The stories themselves don’t have to be travelogues. They can be about something happening right now in your hometown, or something that happened in the past.

3. Deadline for submissions: 5pm EST Sept. 10, 2010

4. Multiple submissions are ok.

5. Stories previously published on your personal blog are welcome; stories published in other magazines or websites will not be considered.

HOW TO SUBMIT

There are three steps:

1) We’ll be announcing the winner at Twitter, so make sure you follow us @MatadorNetwork so we can get in touch.

2) a. Let us and others know you’re entering the contest by tweeting the following:

b. Also, please “like” this post if you’re on Facebook.

3). Submit your story to david@matadornetwork.com with:

a. “Submission: Transparent Narrative” and the title of your story in the subject line
b. a link to your tweet / Facebook “like”
c. a short (2-3 sentence) bio
d. your story either attached as a .doc or pasted directly into the email.

What Is MatadorU?

MatadorU is an online education center for the advancement of travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers. From writing and photography skills to social media, personal branding to preparing work for publication, our community of students and teachers offers support and guidance for those looking to begin or advance their careers as writers, photographers, and new media professionals.

Community Connection

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.

Photo: jrandallc

FULL DISCLOSURE: This post is in response to a request from reader G.B.S.N.P. Varma, who wanted me to write on the “Ladder of Abstraction” in the context of how it pertains to and can be used by travel writers.

NOTES:

1. The “Ladder of Abstraction” is a concept originally popularized by S.I. Hayakawa half a century ago in a now classic text : Language in Thought and Action.

2. An interesting note: Hayakawa added a preface to the 1949 edition of the book which contained the following warning:

The original version of this book, Language in Action, published in 1941, was in many respects a response to the dangers of propaganda, especially as exemplified in Adolf Hitler’s success in persuading millions to share his maniacal and destructive views. It was the writer’s conviction then, as it remains now, that everyone needs to have a habitually critical attitude towards language — his own as well as that of others — both for the sake of his personal well-being and for his adequate functioning as a citizen.

3. The ladder of abstraction is a hierarchy for language based on its “concreteness” or specificity.

In the example at right, as you move up the ladder it goes from specific, concrete, to more general, abstract.

Notice how the most specific element, the “M16A2 Rifle” may or may not be identifiable depending on one’s background, whereas the second most specific “rifle” would be almost universally recognizable.

Contrast this with how the most abstract concepts such as “Instrument of War” and “Material” would be universally recognizable as concepts, and yet without any identifiable traits / properties, they remain open to one’s interpretation as far as meaning.

4. Whereas less-skilled writers tend to move up and down the ladder of abstraction in big shifts (often starting at the bottom – a specific incident / anecdote – then staying near the middle for most of the story before shifting to some big abstraction / generalization / moral at the end), the most skilled writers continuously move up and down the ladder throughout the story–shifting in every paragraph and even sentence.

The following is taken from one of my favorite travels stories of all time, David Foster Wallace’s “Shipping Out,” an account of being a passenger aboard the mega cruise ship Nadir, originally published in 1996 at Harper’s:

Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphobe, because just about everybody else gets off the ship and goes ashore for Organized Shore Excursions or for unstructured peripatetic tourist stuff, and the m.v. Nadir’s upper decks have the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks’ house when you’re home sick as a kid and everybody else is gone. We’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico. I’m on Deck 12. A couple guys in software-company T-shirts jog fragrantly by every couple of minutes, but other than that it’s just me and the zinc oxide and hat and about a thousand empty and identically folded deck chairs.

5.(a) Note how DFW moves up and down the ladder of abstractions, using more general terms (such as “deserted quality” of “your folks house”) to convey a situation (being aboard a luxury cruise) that may be unrecognizable to many people.

(b) He also juxtaposes and plays with different layers of the ladder (“We’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico.” vs. “I’m on Deck 12.”) to express the various layers of reality and his dislocation, isolation, and insulation from them.

(c) Bonus “assignment” – identify 5 places DFW shifts up and down the ladder of abstraction in this paragraph.

6. In several pieces here at Matador including:

*Notes on Codification and Commodification in Travel Writing
*How to Discern Fallacious Arguments
*3 Writing Styles that Kill Authenticity [Note: In retrospect this seems like a really suck-ass title.]

I have tried to recognize / analyze common patterns in travel writing, particularly the pervasiveness of generalizations, cliches, abstractions (the top of the ladder), as well as rhetorical constructions and other ways in which travel writing is codified. In general I have encouraged concrete language–using precise words and names for things–as a starting point for transparency in one’s narration style.

7.(a) A more effective analysis however, might begin with understanding not just concrete language but its overall place on the ladder of abstraction. For example, a very common characteristic of many travel stories is beginning with settings which, in their attempt to “start off with a bang,” use such specific language that they end up sounding, ironically, like abstractions or cliches, and may alienate the reader. These are the stories that begin like:

“Sharwa Nuktpa gave me a third cup of yak-milk as the tuk tuk bounced along the windswept road to Dhulikhel.”

(b) Returning to the story that led to G.B.S.N.P.Varma’s comment / request for me to write on this subject, I began pretty much at the center of the ladder:

I’ve never seen him in town.

(c) I slowly got more concrete in my descriptions:

He always has something in his hands or over his shoulder: a bushel of kale, a wheelbarrow loaded with carrots, a hose, a water pump, a shovel, a roll of bailing wire, a machete, a stack of fenceboards.

(d) It’s worth noting that all of these things, while concrete, are still generally recognizable.

(e) I don’t actually get to a super concrete “explanations” until the second section:

Since we’ve moved here¹ eight months ago the fields have been divided up for future neighborhoods.

¹ El Bolsón, Patagonia, Argentina

(f) I end the story in the same place on the ladder as I began it.

(g) I didn’t actually think about the ladder of abstraction as I wrote this story, but just wrote it as closely to the way I perceived the actual events at ground level as possible.

8. One last note is that while nouns (person – place – thing) naturally fit on the ladder, consider verbs / verbal phrases as well: danced salsa>>danced>>>stepped.

In conclusion, I don’t think about the ladder of abstraction in any terms of right or wrong, but more in the context of its application, of understanding how concrete vs. abstract language affects the reader.

Community Connection

Thanks G.B.S.N.P.Varma for requesting I write on this.

Here’s an additional resource for learning about Ladder of Abstraction: http://gangrey.com/12

I GREW UP IN MARIETTA, Georgia near the Chattahoochee River. Like most places, there was a rich history to everything–the woods we played in, the stores where we bought our food, the roads we drove our cars and road our bikes on–although as is usually the case , it wasn’t something readily accessible or spoken about. They were just woods and roads and stores. Few people knew where their names came from or what their stories were.

Only now after having grown up and seen the place change over 30 years, do I realize how unique this particular corner of the world really is.

The following photo essay shows 21 iconic places with photos taken a century ago compared to present day. In some places, the changes have been dramatic. Others seem to have changed little at all. As you look through the photos, think about where you came from and how it’s changed in your lifetime, and over the last century.

Shanghai

Shanghai, China is the host of 2010 World Expo. Once a fishing and textiles town, it became a gateway for commerce and trade between the East and West. In 2005 it became the world’s largest cargo port. Photos by stevechasmar and cuellar.

The Pyramids of Giza

The Giza Necropolis pierces the sky on the outskirts of Cairo. The three Great Pyramids have been photographed innumerable times making them a photographic icon. Photos by The New York Times photo archive and timkelley.

Mirror Lake, Yosemite

Carleton Watkins made the first famous photograph of Mirror Lake circa 1861. In it, one particularly tall conifer stands prominent against the sky between Mt. Watkins and Cloud’s Rest, and in the near-perfect reflection on the lake’s surface. Over the years, similar views have been made in a variety of visual media by such luminaries as Albert Bierstadt, Charles Weed, Eadweard Muybridge (“the father of cinema”), and Ansel Adams.

In all but the fantastical painting by Bierstadt, there is that same tree, ever taller and more ragged as time wears on. Some things have changed. In 1910, the total number of visitors to Yosemite National Park was 13,182. A century later, the number had climbed to 3,737,472. The lake is now a dry meadow for most of the year, thanks to the quantity of sediment delivered annually by Tenaya Creek, and will soon disappear entirely.

The lake is now accessible only on foot. A stone jetty, of sorts, has been built on the west shore of the lake to accommodate tripods. The tree, reports park archivist Linda Eade, is “probably a Ponderosa Pine.” —David Page begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting [Photos by George Fiske and David Page]

Kabaa, Mecca

One of the Five Pillars of Islam requires every Muslim to perform Hajj, make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca at least once in his or her lifetime. During Hajj, millions of devotees walk the Kaaba, circling the cube seven times. Muslims across the globe pray towards one of the world’s most sacred cities. Photos by Bless sins and omar_chatriwala .

Lhasa, Tibet

The birthplace of Tibetan Buddhism and the one-time residence of the displaced HH the 14th Dalai Lama, Lhasa sits in the cradle of the Himalayas at 11,450 ft. Although the Chinese occupation of Tibet has left Lhasa bereft of its God King and some would argue, its soul, many travelers are rightfully eager to look upon the white walls of the Potala Palace. Photos by public domain and rajarajaraja

Alexandria, Eygpt

Founded by Alexander the Great to serve as a portal to the verdant Nile Valley, Alexandria remained Egypt’s capital for nearly a thousand years. Today the port town is the second largest city in Egypt at 4 million. Photos by public domain and eutrophication&hypoxia.

Taj Mahal

When Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s favorite wife died he built a marble mausoleum that now stands as one of the new seven wonders of the world and one of the most photographed places on the globe. Photos by public domain and premasagar.

Lower East side Manhattan

One of the most densely populated places, Manhattan has such rich culture and diversity that you have to see it for yourself to believe. public domain and heypatrick.

Stockholm, Sweeden

The well in the center of Stockholm was the original water source for the old town until it dried up in 1856. It was later relocated, but then brought back and is now connected to the city’s municipal water supply. Just a few meters below the town square are the remains of cobblestones and poles which have been carbon dated back to 1066. Photos by Oscar Halldin and IK’s World Trip.

Jerusalem

Control of Jerusalem has changed throughout history, from Biblical days (King David, King Solomon) to the Arab Empire, to the Ottoman empire, with several other groups claiming control at certain times. In 1910, Jerusalem was still under control of the Ottomans, who surrendered it to the British in 1917. Throughout the 20s, 30s, and the post WWII, waves of Jewish immigrants began settling in Jerusalem, and after the UN approved plans for separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, a war for control of Jerusalem broke in 1948, with the British withdrawing from the area later that year.

Afterwards, Jerusalem was divided in two halves, with the Old City (pictured above) annexed by Jordan. In 1967, Israeli forces took control of East Jerusalem and the Old City in the Six Day War. This led to the present day control of Jerusalem as part of modern day Israel.

Photos by unknown and David Shankbone.

Pioneer Square, Seattle

Pioneer Square is the birthplace of Seattle and was once the epicenter of debauchery, filled with brothels and hash houses. Boom town and way point on the search for Yukon gold, Seattle has always seen its fair share of travelers. Photos by Seattle Municipal Archives and iwona_kellie.

Beijing, China

Few cities have endured as a seat of power for as long as Beijing. Sounds like a good place to lose your travel virginity doesn’t it?
Photos by ralphrepo and Ben Burkland/Carolyn Cook.

Sydney

Sydney Australia appears to have been inhabited by indigenous Australians for at least 30,000 years. In 1788 the first fleet of ships to establish the penal colony of English convicts landed in what is now called Sydney, and began exploring the massive continent.

Photos by State Records NSW and dicktay2000.

The Great Wall

“>Supposedly over a million people died during the construction of the first 3,000 mile section of China’s Great Wall. It remains one of the world’s most iconic sites. Photos by Herbert Ponting and d’n'c.

Bøyabreen Glacier, Norway

Like most glaciers, Bøyabreen is steadily receding. Now is the time to visit some of the worlds great ice sheets before they vanish completely. The diminishing glaciers have caught he attention of the world and have spawned a new breed of tourism in the face of a warming planet. Photos by Fylkesarkivet i Sogn og Fjordane and Trondelarius.

Pisa

From 1173 on, the leaning tower of Pisa has been tilting southwest. In a country filled with awe inspiring architecture, Pisa’s famous bell tower may have been overlooked by travelers were it not for the signature construction flaw.
Photos by Brooklyn Museum and manelzaera.

The Tower Bridge, London

Straddling the river Thames, London’s tower bridge is one of the most recognizable bridges in the world. Completed in 1894 the tower bridge provides thousands of shutterbugs with a regal subject. Photos by Library of Congress and dirac3000.

Montreal

The second largest city in Canada and one of the five biggest French speaking cities in the world, Montreal has a reputation for cleanliness and culture. After New York, Montreal has the highest number of restaurants, per capita, in North America.
Photos by Zanastardust and lynch.

Dublin

Established by the Norse around 841, Dublin has endured the centuries and is now a tourist hot spot and the birth place of that delicious black brew, Guinness.
Photos by Michiel2005 and Jacobo Tarrío.

Vienna

In 2005 Vienna tied with Vancouver for first in an Economist Intelligence Unit study of the quality of life 127 world cities. So what makes life in Vienna so grand? I guess you are going to have to ask a local or make a visit yourself.Photos by Michiel2005 and Jen SFO-BCN

Parc Monceau, Paris

The landing site of the first silk parachute jump, Parc Monceau has an interesting and sometimes bloody history. In 1871 the park saw the massacre of Communards at the hands of the Versailles troops and in 1876 Parc Monceau was painted by Monet.Photos by George Eastman House and darek rusin.

Community Connection

What other places have changed dramatically (or stayed relatively the same) in the last century?
How has your home places changed?

Please let us know in the comments.

Photo: L*U*Z*A

1.

I’VE NEVER SEEN him in town. I’ve never seen him anywhere except walking to or from the fields. Either that or working in his yard. He never stops working. He always has something in his hands or over his shoulder: a bushel of kale, a wheelbarrow loaded with carrots, a hose, a water pump, a shovel, a roll of bailing wire, a machete, a stack of fenceboards.

Even New Years, standing with his sons drinking beer by the fire, it was like he was just waiting to fix something, to tie up the dogs if they kept chasing firecrackers, to twist one more loop of wire around a broken table leg.

2.

Since we’ve moved here¹ eight months ago the fields have been divided up for future neighborhoods. Two roads have been cut. A windbreak of 100 foot-tall poplars was chainsawed. (When they first started falling, everyone came out of their houses to watch, then later it just became part of the noise and activity in the barrio). Somebody from Buenos Aires started building the first apartment complex. Six of Abuelo’s grandkids and two of his kids moved out of the house, and so he portioned off that side, gave it its own entrance, and started renting it out to a woman who sweeps her concrete stoop wearing sweatpants and has taken in a stray dog with three pups that keep escaping through the bottom of the fence and crying for food at our door.

3.

Today I saw him walking back from town. I saw him from a long ways off. I recognize his walk. He’s super thin, super small, but seems very strong and walks with this super straight back. He had on hemmed bluejeans. He wasn’t wearing his mud boots. He had on a light coat that I’d never seen before. He had his hand in his coat as if warming it. As we got closer though I thought I saw a bit of white bandage around the hand that was in his coat. I thought: “He’s just come back from the hospital. That’s the only time he goes into town. Damn, what happened to his hand?”

But as if I needed to cover up what I was thinking, I just said “Que tal?” and then quickly added, “Pretty cold isn’t it?”

“Pretty cold,” he said. “Bastante frio.”

But it wasn’t that cold really. It had actually warmed up and seemed like it was going to start raining again.

I never really know what to say to Abuelo Colque.

But I use “usted” when I talk to him.

_________________________

¹ El Bolsón,  Patagonia, Argentina

Community Connection

For more narrative travel writing, check out Notes from the Road.

Image:  inti

IN THE CENTER of the plaza is a statue of General J. A Roca,¹ his face tagged with pink and green paint. Two pot-leaves are stenciled on his jacket, and the word “GENOCIDIA” is written in all caps across his horse (whose balls and eyes and nostrils are also pink). Spraypainted on the base of the statue, the side facing the wind, are the words “PUEBLO MAPUCHE.”

In what tense do we remember?

White headscarves, symbols of the Madres of Plaza del Mayo² are stenciled in a circle around the plaza. There are different messages by each scarf. One translates “we’ll never forget you.”

In what tense are we remembered?

Near the statue, a man has a Saint Bernard on a chain. Attached to the dog’s collar is a little whiskey barrel. They close in on two Asian-looking tourists. He says something and the dog hops up on a bench, then the tourists squeeze in by the dog. The man steps back and takes their picture. Nearby, along the top of a low stone wall, my daughter is walking, balancing (“both manos!” she always says when she wants to do this) and Lau is holding her hands.

How do you define “connection to place?”

The wind keeps gusting hard, the lake forming large surf. It seems about to snow. I ask the girls if they’re ready. On the way out I think about how Nazis³ used to live here and probably still do. If I had the chance to meet one, would I say anything? Would I paint PUEBLO JUDIO across his face? Just then a car speeds through a stone archway where we’re about to walk.  The driver honks at us.  I flick them off.  Beside the archway, at the exit, I see a cannon. Someone has jammed a plastic bottle into the barrel.

There are all kinds of war.

We walk holding hands across town to the movie theaters. We see Toy Story 3. After the movie it’s raining hard outside. We find a merry go round that’s inside a small wooden building. There’s a lot of music and noise, and when Lau says “back at the plaza you were muy ______,” I don’t fully hear / understand the last word but interpret it as distracted. In 20 minutes the bus is leaving for El Bolsón.  Tomorrow we’ll have to go up in the mountains somewhere. Over the sound of the merry go round, I hear Lau say: “She needs her papi. She need you to introduce her to the world, sabes?”

_______________________

¹Argentine army general and president, most famous for his “conquest of the desert” in the late 1800s, an extensive military campaign to “subdue” indigenous people from the pampas to Patagonia.

²Women whose children were “disappeared” by Argentine Military Operatives during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s and 80s.

³Including SS Officer Erich Priebke who was once the rector of the German School of Bariloche.

Community Connection

Have you ever tagged and/or ‘defaced’ a place?
Do you feel like dogs (and other animals) being used as props for pictures is a form of exploitation?

For more on Argetnina, please visit our Argentina focus page.

Commodification Shitstorm. Image: obknoxious

Commodification

com·mod·i·fy (kə-mŏd’ə-fī’)
tr.v. com·mod·i·fied , com·mod·i·fy·ing , com·mod·i·fies

To turn into or treat as a commodity; make commercial: “Such music . . . commodifies the worst sorts of . . . stereotypes” (Michiko Kakutani).

[ commodi(ty) + -fy .]
com·mod’i·fi’a·ble adj. , com·mod’i·fi·ca’tion (-fĭ-kā’shən) n.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Codification

cod·i·fy (kŏd’ĭ-fī’, kō’də-)
tr.v. cod·i·fied , cod·i·fy·ing , cod·i·fies

1. To reduce to a code: codify laws.

2. To arrange or systematize.

cod’i·fi·ca’tion (-fĭ-kā’shən) n. , cod’i·fi’er n.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

CODIFIED LANGUAGE is always interchangeable.This is why I feel I can invent the following example (just interchanging a few words) and still sort of claim it as the sentence I read recently at [name withheld] magazine:

I sent this sentence and some of the following notes to the editorial team at Matador, asking if anything about commodified language was brought up at TBEX (it wasn’t).

From there it sort of evolved into this piece.

One point brought up was the potential for misunderstanding and/or conflation of different kinds of travel writing, each with its own intended purpose and audience.

In other words, I should delineate who this article is for.

With this in mind, here’s a second sentence, also slightly changed. This was part of a travel narrative submitted recently:

Now that these two examples are out there, here are the theses of this article:

1. Travel writing – regardless of form, intention, or intended audience – is often codified in a way that can have negative consequences.
2. This codification is predicated on describing place, culture, and experience in terms of commodity.
3. This creates a cyclical effect: Because codification enables a “common frame of reference” for people, it can cause them to describe place / culture experience not as they perceived it, but as they believe their experience is “supposed to sound.”
4. This kind of “commodified thinking” is the real “issue” as it can ultimately change / influence one’s perceptions of and relationship with place.

Notes on the sentences above:

1. Codification begins when a narrator suggests something without actually declaring anything or referring to anything that exists in concrete reality (concrete reality being the real world in time/space). For example, in the first sentence, “art lovers” is only a suggestion, not an actual group that exists (as opposed to, say, “the sophomores at Savannah College of Art and Design.”)

2. Therefore the key to recognizing codification is carefully examining the narrator. Oftentimes the narrator in codified writing uses a kind of “detached” / “objective” voice. In straight up marketing / ad-copy, this detached voice is usually combined with a kind of “casual 2nd person” point of view, such as “Enjoy miles of perfect white sand. Stroll the beaches at sunset.”

The opposite of this detached narration would be what we call at Matador first-person transparent narration, which simply declares what the narrator sees, feels, hears, perceives in concrete reality, and, in turn, the thoughts, ideas, emotions, that this occasions.

3. Codification functions by reducing what might otherwise exist in concrete reality into abstractions. For example, in the first sentence, the narrator could’ve started by mentioning someone he knew who loves art. Instead, he mentions “art-lovers,” an abstraction. In the second sentence, the narrator could’ve mentioned real places that actually exist. Instead he turns them into the abstraction “one natural wonder after the next.”

4. These abstractions often lead to fallacious or illogical constructions. For example, in the first sentence, how can an abstraction (“art lovers”) actually “know” anything?

5. Codified language invariably contains cliches (see #1, “suggesting something without saying anything.”) In the first sentence, the narrator writes “there’s nothing that tops.” In the second, the narrator uses slightly subtler cliches–but still language that has been codified as “how travel writing is supposed to sound” – “dizzying amount of”, “pounding waterfalls”, and “stare open-mouthed.”

6. Codified stories are often set up as comparisons and/or value judgments. These are almost always fallacious as they exploit readers’ emotional triggers (“what do you mean x is better than y?!) but have no actual context / place in concrete reality. In the first sentence, the narrator is essentially saying that an exhibit is the “best.” But according to whom? To him? If so, then this sentence could only work by declaring that transparently instead of couching it as a kind of quasi-fact.

This usage of value judgments (particularly superlatives), is commonly exploited by travel publishers (of which Matador is included) who “rank” place / people / culture in a non-ironic way. I feel like superlatives both as general practice and as specific marketing (such as claiming to produce “the best travel stories / writing”) tends to exacerbate / propagate the codification of travel writing.

7. Codified descriptions “exist” outside of time. One of the most subtle but powerful elements of codified language is the way it operates outside of temporal context so that events, ideas, or description just seem to “float” – as in the first sentence, on “a warm summer day.” Even in the second sentence where the narrator does mention it’s his “last day in Hawaii,” there’s still this effect of him just being “driven around” and that what he perceived didn’t really occur in “real time.”

This removal of temporal context is a way of obfuscating (either intentionally or unintentionally) the narrator’s relationship to place.

8. The “I-get-what-you’re-saying-factor:” Of course I “get” what the narrator is trying to say in both of these sentences. That’s the whole point of codified language–instead of actually reporting unique perceptions of unique places or experiences, writers are essentially relying on (as well as propagating) a common frame of reference that works something like “when I say a ‘art-lovers’ or ‘a dizzying amount of waterfalls’ or a ‘warm summer day’, people are going to automatically “get” what I’m saying.”

The problem however, is that even though these things may be “known” generally, the specifics such as place name, natural history, local culture, are all obfuscated.

9. The relationship between codification and commodification: Codification is an extension of looking at place, people, culture, or experience within the limited context of its “value” as a commodity or resource. This is obvious in the first sentence. In the second, the commodification lies in the way the “natural wonder(s)” are reduced to things to be observed and in this way “consumed.”

10. Potential negative consequences of commodification and codification: People in the travel industry leverage the same codified language / suggestions of “natural wonders” and/or “memorable experiences.” The traveler / consumer then buys the “promise” of “natural wonders” and/or “memorable experiences.”

In turn, the traveler / consumer may then evaluate place / culture / experience based on the level to which it “delivered on the promise” of providing the scenery / comfort / experiences.

If the traveler / consumer writes about the experience in a codified way, then he/she essentially “completes the cycle” of commodification, serving as a kind of advertisement or marketing (even if the “review” is negative or it isn’t in the form of a review at all) for the commodified experience.

Community Connection

For more analysis of transparency and commodified language, check Material Transparency, Notes on a Writer’s Personal Brand.

Suzanne Roberts on Cotopaxi, Ecuador

Name: Suzanne Roberts

Age: 39

Cultural heritage / Ethnicity: British mother/Jewish father

Languages spoken: English, Spanish

Based out of: South Lake Tahoe, California

Education: PhD in Literature and the Environment, MA in Creative Writing, BS in Biology

Current work / projects: I am currently working on a book of travel poems, a hiking memoir, and a book of travel essays. I am also co-editing an anthology of skiing and snowboarding stories.

Books published / forthcoming: Shameless (Wordtech Editions, 2007), Nothing to You (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), and Plotting Temporality (forthcoming from Red Hen Press)

Writers / Journalists whose work inspires you: I am a big reader, so I could name hundreds, but here are some of my favorites: Rainer Maria Rilke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Contemporary writers I especially admire are Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, Louis Glück, and Ann Carson.

Photographers whose work inspires you: Annie Lebovitz, Ansel Adams, and Catherine Roberts Leach (that’s my sister!). I also like Nevada Photographer Peter Goin’s Black Rock desert work and local Tahoe photographer Corey Rich’s work.

Books / magazines / media currently reading: Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, One More Theory about Happiness by Paul Guest, Black Nature, edited by Camille Dungy, Collected Poems by Lynda Hull, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I always have at least five books going at once. I read the New York Times everyday as well.

Last concert attended: Does a Bassnectar rave at Burning Man count?

[DM] Your work seems to fit somewhere at the intersection of poetry and travel writing. Although it seems like there should be a natural overlap (and audience) when you put these two elements together, it seems divided, at least in the publications I’ve found.

Most literary journals seem to publish certain styles of nonfiction (with “travel writing” often seeming a pejorative term), whereas travel magazines publish other styles, much of it very homogeneous (with terms like “literary”or “poetic,” potentially seen as pejorative). Have you found this to be true? And if so, how have you “bridged” it?

[SR] I find everything you have said absolutely true, and to tell you the truth, I was surprised when I found out that travel writing is seen in a pejorative light. I think that’s because of the nuts and bolts nature of the where to stay/what to do/where to eat-type articles, but these serve a very important purpose for their audience.

Poetry is the ideal medium to capture sense of place because of the poem’s imagistic in-the-moment nature, but you are right, the travel journals don’t typically publish poetry. Therefore, I don’t think I have “overcome” or “bridged” the attitudes you suggest.

I have been shopping my hiking memoir around, and one agent told me it would be hard to find a mainstream publisher because I don’t have any real books out—she then said, “You know poetry doesn’t count, right?”

And in the marketplace, poetry doesn’t count unless you are Dante or someone else long dead. We often forget, and I include myself in this, that it is the writing and not the publishing that’s important.

I think most poets finally come to accept this because we have to write the poems while knowing that most likely, they will not find a very large audience. Yet, at the same time, this can be very freeing. In poetry, I often feel like I can write whatever I want, because really, who is going to read it?

In much of the work in your upcoming collection, the narrator is an outside observer to other people’s realities, specifically, poverty in India. The themes deal with distance (the narrator is often looking out on the scene from “the ambassador’s car”) and separation from local people.

As an outside observer to these realities, how do you reconcile creating poetry or art out of them? How do you distinguish what is poetry / art / expression and what is rendering (or even glorifying) guilt or “white man’s burden”?

When I have returned from places, such as India, people have not wanted to look at my photographs; they have said, “Don’t tell me anything sad.” I think by ignoring the sad realities of the word, we make them worse.

My hope is to relay an observation, give an unflinching view of the difficult realities to the reader, and he or she can decide what to do with it.

One of my favorite writers, Chris Abani, says that guilt is a wasted emotion. I think what he means is that we often turn to guilt as a way to make ourselves feel better, which seems paradoxical, but if we can say, “I feel guilty,” then it is enough for us, and we can look away, and move on without really doing anything.

Making poems is my way of not looking away, my way of asking the reader to consider things. Sometimes, the world shows itself to be a cruel place, and I feel helpless, as many people do, and I ask myself, “What can I do?” My answer, I suppose, is to write a poem.

And you are right, I write these poems from the perspective of an outsider looking in, but because I am a visitor, writing the poems any other way seems disingenuous to me. If we think there’s no difference between ourselves and the locals when we visit a place, we are fooling ourselves.

Whenever we are traveling, we are outsiders looking in, no matter how we travel. In some respects, the poet also places herself outside of things because she observes the world from a distance. James Joyce says, ”The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Therefore, in writing about different cultures, that distance is doubled, creating dissonance for both narrator and reader. This dissonance, though, can be powerful in poetry because it is in this place where meaning happens. Carolyn Forché’s beautiful collection The Country Between Us creates an incredible amount of discomfort in the reader, and that’s one of the reasons the poems are so remarkable. No one can forget the human ears pressed to the ground in “The Colonel.”

Do you feel like you write from a developed religious / philosophical / epistemological framework? If so, could you describe it?

Because of my studies in literature and the environment, and before that, biological sciences, my writing is deeply concerned with the natural world, and our human connection to it. I am especially interested in how the ways in which we view and classify nature can reveal cultural values and vice versa.

I dislike didactic writing about the environment, which functions to alienate readers, so I try to stick with observations and let the reader decide what to think.

What is your typical work routine?

I work whenever I can. I am a binge writer, so I prefer long stretches—8 to 12 hours, but I will work on a poem between classes or in a doctor’s waiting room. I also work late at night when I can’t call someone or go out jogging to distract myself. I have gone to writing residencies, and getting away really helps. I would recommend a residency for anyone trying to finish a book project.

How does teaching affect your writing?

I think it depends on what I’m teaching. I am at a community college, so I teach everything from ESL to literature and creative writing, but we often carry a heavy load in composition. Sometimes the grading associated with all the composition courses takes me away from my writing, but at the same time, the interaction with my students inspires me.

I begin every class with a writing exercise, and I write with my students. I have started many of my poems from exercises I give my students. I also believe that I need to stay active in my writing if I am going to teach writing—anything else would make me feel like a phony. I can’t ask my students to develop a daily practice of writing (and reading!) if I am not actively engaged in my own process, so on the whole, I would say that teaching has been good for my writing, especially when I have a fun group of students.

Community Connection

Please visit SuzanneRoberts.org to find more about her work and upcoming projects.

Photo: eonaxon

TWO SEMI-STRANGE things in the last couple days have occasioned me to think more about place than usual:

A. On a call with a group of travel marketing people, an executive said “position place” as in “there are ways we like to ‘position’ place” [doggy-style?]

B. One of my favorite writers posted a bizarre blog post that talked about a country music song and how the lyrics would lead you to think that the guy singing was from “the country, ” but then after researching the singer’s hometown (and posting statistics about education, jobs, median income there), his conclusion was “I’m way more hick than he is.”

Using these two examples (as well as several others that will follow), I’d like to examine some of the common ways people seem to look at place. It should be noted that I don’t look these ways in the context of “right or wrong” but more as reflections of people’s relationships with place that exist in certain points in time. I don’t think anyone looks at place in one of the forms below exclusively, but as a constantly changing and evolving mix.

14 WAYS OF LOOKING AT PLACE

We’ll begin with two main ways of looking at place, mythologizing and commodifying, and from there look at other ways, most of which are combinations of these two.

Mythologizing

Mythologizing place is looking at place as an abstraction. People mythologize place by (a) assigning some kind of abstraction [ex: virtue, nostalgia, chivalrousness, level of 'hickness' ] to it, or similarly (b) assigning some kind of abstraction or quality to themselves because of it (This is what the writer in example B above was doing).

Ex: “The South taught me how to be a gentleman.”

No, your parents did.

Mythologizing is the act of creating illusions about place. These illusions “exist” within the discrepancy between the concrete reality a person experiences in a place (examples: how long he/she has lived there, where he/she lives–downtown, suburbs, outlying areas, his/her role in the local economy, his/her community / friends) versus the “image” he or she has of the place.

Mythologizing often happens when people look back at where they grew up, or lived, or once traveled, and feel certain emotions that didn’t exist when they actually lived or traveled there.

Ex: “I’ve never been in a hotter place than a soccer field in North Georgia in the summer.”

No, actually it was much hotter when you were in Ecuador.

Commodifying [fundamental]

Commodifying (on a fundamental level) is reducing place into a singular context of resources in concrete reality. Examples would be looking at forests as “timber to be harvested” or rivers as “hydroelectric potential.”

Commodifying [common]

There exists however a much subtler and more pervasive form of commodifying where instead of concrete reality, the context of “resources” includes abstractions, associations, “appeal,” or “image.” This is how the marketing lady in the call above was looking at place–as an image which needed to be packaged a certain way, transformed into a product to be “positioned” in the market.

Most people seem to engage in this form of commodifying without ever thinking about it. For example, when I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”

Here’s another example:

In one of Lola Akinmade’s blogs, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”

One of my bros once described San Francisco as having “culture and surf.”

This all reflects how people tend to reduce place into a few resources which may not even be resources in concrete reality, and then evaluate place within this context.

As terrain

This way of looking at place is a specialized form of commodifying that’s prevalent among surfers, mountaineers, kayakers, snowboarders, and other people who “live for” exploring place. The world may be seen in the context of “terrain” to be ascended, descended, surfed.

As “Inspiration”

This ties in both with mythologizing and commodifying: Some people may look at place within the context of inspiration. These are often writers, photographers, poets, filmmakers, artists, and others who travel or move to places because they have a positive effect on their work.

As “Escape”

This is similar to “inspiration”: Some people look at place as a potential “escape” from whatever they are experiencing “at home.”

Symptomatic of Suburbanization

For many who grew up in situations where they watched (as I did) their hometowns transform from semi-rural areas into congested suburban sprawl, it is common to look at place in the context of suburbanization. Examples of this are “evaluating” place on the basis of local economy (“mom and pop” stores) vs. “big box” retailers, and being hypersensitive to signs of suburbanization (Ex: gated communities, McDonald’s) while traveling.

Symptomatic of Environmental Impact

Similarly, many people look at place within the context of environmental denigration vs “purity.”

As Isolation

Some people look at place on the basis of proximity to other people. One may live “way out there” or, conversely, “close to people.” Throughout history, this way of looking at place has been used for setting up prisons, such as the location of prison camps in isolated regions of South Dakota during WWII.

As “First World vs Third World”

Some people look at place on a spectrum of “First World” vs.”Third World.” Once I heard a retired lawyer in Sarasota Florida compare two neighboring countries in South America based entirely on the local people appearing to be “Indian” vs. “white.”

As “One”

Certain people at particular moments (ex: religious or ecstatic experiences possibly involving hallucinogens, or situations of extreme fear / joy, such as witnessing death, birth, or other situations like getting tubed in some monster wave in Tahiti) may transcend “looking at” place and momentarily “fully inhabit” or “become” place. In my own experiences I’ve found certain moments to cause me to feel as if I were “one” with where the experience was taking place.

As “some other way that most of us having grown up in ‘modern society’ probably cannot comprehend”

I feel like all of these ways of looking at place listed above leave out an important other possibility, which is looking at place when you’ve never known anything else besides that place. I’m thinking about people like Indians in the Amazon who’ve never had “contact” with the outside.

It seems like all of the ways of looking at place above imply a disconnection with place. We “look at” place “in terms of” different things–abstractions, commodities–when there’s a layer separating us from being fully “there.”

I can only imagine how it would feel if everything about a place–the plants, animals, terrain–and the people who live there with you (and who’d died there) all share the same context / reality.

Community Connection

What other ways do people look at place?
How has your ways of looking at place evolved / changed over time?

PUBLISHER‘S synopsis:

“Ten Walks / Two Talks updates the meandering and meditative form of Bashō’s travel diaries.

Mapping 21st century New York, Cotner and Fitch tap their predecessor’s collaborative tendencies in order to construct a descriptive / dialogic fugue. The book combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan and a pair of dialogues about walking—one of which takes place during a late-night “philosophical” ramble through Central Park.”

Notes

1. Getting the book

Getting books in here in Patagonia is sort of magical. The roads are muddy and the special delivery mailman rides a shitty-looking bike. He always comes in the morning when it’s cold. You have to sign something. Then you go back in where it’s warm. You sit back down by your coffee and computer and rip open the package noting the New York address.

2. Opening the package

I looked at the Hiroshige prints on the cover and felt stoked. The book was small (85 pages) and I love little books (all books should be able to fit in your pocket). I looked at the table of contents: “Early Spring, Early Winter, Late Spring, Late Winter.” I read the epigraph by Bashō. I thought: “Damn this is a beautiful little book.” I looked at the the Ugly Duckling Press materials and read how this was part of the Dossier Series: “publications that don’t share a single genre or form. . . but rather an investigative impulse.” I thought: “Damn, I need to send my work to these guys.”

3. Reading the first chapter

The opening paragraph read:

Still spinning out Kristin’s door I decided to change plans. The air stirred gently, made me think of flags. At 9:26 I saw the clean backs of waitresses in a Gee Whiz Diner window.

As I kept reading I thought: “I’m not sure what this is yet, but it’s a really sweet style. I’ve seen those clean waitresses’ backs before. This is what students at the U should read.”

I kept going:

Pigeons spread up sidewalk on Grand, tearing at cinnamon-raisin bagels. I plowed through then felt bad approaching their patron–a compact lady with bags. One mom strained to tie garbage bags without gloves. One squat guy hauled heavy cement-mix bags to a pick-up. Each time he spun back to the vestibule he faced a chic tall mannequins in short denim skirts. He seemed to appreciate this.

I thought “I really like that paragraph–I can see all these people doing these things, but something’s wrong.” I went back and read it again. Then I found the “error” — “cement-mix bags.” I thought “only someone who never worked construction would call them that. It’s not like ‘cake-mix’. If he grew up in the trades he would’ve said ‘bags of concrete,’ but that’s ok.”

4. Finishing first chapter and analyzing

I finished the first chapter, and saw that the next chapter was in a different form.  I was tired and went to bed.  But I felt really excited and like I would learn things studying the style of this first chapter. Later I figured out some of the structures used:

1. Each sentence introduces a new “element” of the narrator’s walk,  whether a character, place, thought, action, or event.  There are occasional instances of a follow-up sentence (or two) continuing to describe the same element (as in squat man loading concrete above) but 90% of the sentences introduce something new.
2. The elements are introduced in an order that seems part chronology of the walks, part reconstructing the walks from memory.
3. There are almost no “smooth” transitions (like a camera panning across a scene, then zooming into something, then zooming out) but elements are grabbed from  all different distances–super close up, super far away–and placed one right after the other.
4. This “disorder” would make the writing hard to read were it not for the short length and repetitive rhythm / structure of the sentences–which in some ways gives it a feel of “taking steps.”
5. This “disorder” also  seems to replicate the feeling of being in an urban area where there are constant stimuli.
6. All elements–from the letters on a kid’s hat to the smell inside an elevator– seem to have the same level of  “importance”  to the narrator.
7. This creates a sense of zen, a mix of alertness and detachment (although not in a dispassionate or uncaring way). You’re just “walking through New York.”
8. Although everything seems equally “important,” the characters described are almost always engaged in some form of action (even a dog lying on the ground is described as “breathing,”) making them seem vital, and making you wonder more about them – who they are, what their stories are – in ways that are sometimes poignant.
9. Except for mentioning certain errands or decisions made spontaneously (such as changing directions) the narrator never explains anything–why he’s taking the walks, what the purpose is.
10. This, combined with the neutral levels of “importance,” makes the walks feel very immediate and “alive” – as if there’s no barrier or layers between the reader and the scenes / characters.  As with the best haiku, everything else disappears, and   “you’re there.”

5. Reading the next chapters

The next day I got sick and was in the bed but was glad I had this book to read. I read through the next three chapters during the day / night as I was going in and out of sleep / fever. The third chapter was another week’s walks written in the same style as above. The other two chapters were transcripts of conversations (including ambient noise) between the authors recorded as they were walking around Central Park, and later, Union Square, W.F. (a natural grocery store).

In some ways the transcripts reminded me of Braided Creek by Jim Harrison and Ted Koosier (a book of hundreds of short poems sent to each other that describe different walks the two poets are taking / things they’re observing.)

But instead of having a conversation through poems, Cotner and Fitch are just kind of vibing, relaxing, having conversations in New York – it’s very transparent (including stutters, grammar mistakes–and one talking over the other) and immediate:

A: You’d you’d mentioned paths to the subway station. Lately I never stop moving walking up or down Manhattan. So long as you stay aware of what the the upcoming light says you can run and make it (although this gets hared [Cough] Holland Tunnel). But I’ll wonder if you find New York walks continuous as they should be say, on the hills of Santa Fe–or has there been jostling, pausing, restarting?

J: No I’ve shared your smooth continuous experience, and I haven’t read much Lyn Hejinian, but she makes the same remark in My Life.

A: About New York specifically?

J: Yes about New, about how this great metropolis provides the sensation of crossing through sheer wildern. . .

A: Hmm.

J: And I’ve noticed . . .

A: That sounds slightly different.

J: even if my path gets blocked by cars or a Don’t Walk sign I can cut to side-streets since I’ll have no destination.

A: I’ll save side-streets as long as I can, so when I need one I’m ready to turn.

J: Sure I love in this city the constant dialogue between drivers and pedestriians. It also. . .

A: And, Let’s say, deliverymen. . .

J: Exactly

(Six more lines of dialogue here, then):

J: Yes you feel this great sense of cooperation.

6. Final thoughts

1. I feel like there isn’t enough experimentation in nonfiction and travel writing forms  (at least what’s being published), and was very stoked and inspired reading Ten Walks / Two Talks. (I’ve already read it through again).
2. That said, the book itself didn’t feel “experimental” necessarily but just written in a style that was different than most other books but very “natural” to these two authors.
3. There are several works (such as Basho’s travel diaries, Braided Creek, also a short story by Talese (I think) that describes minute by minute “happenings” in New York, that have stylistic elements similar to this book. It’s writing that, if you had to categorize it, you’d put (as is on the back of this book) “Poetry / Nonfiction.”
4. I feel like in some ways this is the “kind” of writing I’m trying to promote here at Matador, both what we publish and what we teach at MatadorU–transparency, and recognizing that there can be transcendence, a connection to “the infinite”  in the everyday details of the places you find yourself, the places you travel through.

Community Connection

Please visit Ugly Duckling Presse for more information and to buy this book.

Have you ever read any of the aforementioned books?
What are other examples of books based on daily walks?
Have you ever recorded then written transcripts of your conversations?
Why do “little” books like this one seem “important” whereas “big books’ with massive pr efforts (such as the “Lost Girls” seem “unimportant”?
Do other countries (like Japan? France? England?) have a greater (percentage-wise) readership of books that could be classified as “Poetry/Nonfiction”?
What other publishers besides Ugly Duckling are publishing “Poetry/Nonfiction”?

Artist Cecelia Webber photographed by MFB

SO MANY writers seem entrenched in commodified thinking.

They isolate whatever they’re writing about from its temporal, historical, environmental, and cultural context, thus reducing it to or framing it as a kind of commodity.

I’m always looking out for writers that seem aware of this and are doing something new. I was stoked to find Marcus F Benigno’s website A Sustainable Feast last week.

MFB’s subjects are people and projects that challenge conventional paradigms. Throughout his work there’s always a sense of maintaining a historical perspective, remembering what has been tried (and perhaps failed), but instead of conjecturing about “the future” (an act which often seems to derive from commodfiied thinking), MFB focuses on individuals’ sustainable actions as the necessary, ground-level response.

I immediately wrote MFB asking for an interview. We emailed the following questions / answers back and forth:

Name: Marcus F. Benigno

Age: 24

Cultural heritage / Ethnicity: Filipino-American

Languages spoken: French, Filipino, Arabic, German

Based out of: My 90L Eagle Creek Backpack and cafes with wifi

Palace of Palenque in Chiapas (MFB)

Education: B.A. International Development Studies, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

Current work / projects: 1) Personal travelogue and reports on sustainable constructions worldwide; 2) documentation of youth involved in sustainable/green action (photography, copy)

Writers / Journalists whose work inspires you: Hemingway, André Gide, George Lakoff, Miranda July, among others

Photographers whose work inspires you: Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Jimmy Chin, Balazs Gardi, …

Artists whose work inspires you: Audrey Beardsley, Paul Klee, Olafur Eliasson, Charles Spearin, …

Books / magazines / media currently reading: Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, Rory Stewart’s Places in Between, Twombly’s Frank Lloyd Wright Essential Texts, Monocle

Latest MP3 downloaded: An album called Fónok by Czech duo, Dva

Last concert attended: Mahler’s 5th @ the Hollywood Bowl

[DM]: In your blog’s “about” page you write:

“Jaded by academic discourse and journalist frivolity (with which this author has cavorted and gained much insight), mfb is on a lifelong hiatus committed to the decolonization of self and the exposition of sustainable action across the globe.”

Several phrases in that sentence resonated with me, particularly “decolonization of self.” Can you elaborate on what this means?

[MFB]: Everyday, I make decisions whether they be conscious or routine. The belief that I make these decisions autonomously is an illusion. The rationale that guides my choices is dictated by a sphere of influence external to me as an individual. This system is a naturally occurring, socio-cultural phenomenon that is neither good nor bad.

A mural at the Casa del Pan in San Cristóbal (MFB)

However, when the sphere of influence mutates into a sphere of imposition and starts to limit the epistemological framework of the individual through conditioned desires and identities, then that individual has been colonized.

Postcolonial critique and a subsequent reappropriation of identity preconquest are no longer sufficient. What is necessary now in an age of globalization in flux is an active attempt to decolonize oneself. Our collective consciousness and education must no longer be contingent on vocation and capital as an end and must be liberated from the polarization of abstractions (gendering/non-gendering, heteronomy/queering, etc).

The goal is not to vivisect the inherent (imposed) drives that impel us but to meditate upon and mediate these forces by acknowledging their inescapable hold on our existence and from there challenging its role on our perception and actions quotidian. Just as the realization of perfection or nirvana is impossible, the decolonization of self in the postcolonial era is an unattainable state that we must continue to seek.

The second part of your bio that resonated with me:

“Cited as a ‘culture vulture’ by an anonymous reader, Marcus F Benigno (mfb) is a professional traveler and expert sciolist who specializes in everything but nothing including print design, social and cultural commentary, urban nomadism, and photography.”

I like how, instead of non-ironically branding yourself as a “freelance journalist” or “photographer,” you’re stating that you do a bunch of different things but there’s still a pattern to it, which seems an increasingly relevant response to new media / writing / photography / design / art. The one thing that seems to underpin everything though: how do you sustain it? How do you make a living?

On a jaunt through Petra a few years ago, I met a Spaniard working at the front desk at the Valentine Inn. The day I hitched back to Amman, I was surprised to find him on my route. Like the travelers who frequent the inn, he was on the move. He had setup an informal, two-week agreement with the inn’s proprietor: labor for room and board.

Months before, he had abandoned all his possessions and his profession as a construction worker in Madrid. With a light messenger bag and the pair of trousers he had on, he left eastward edging the Mediterranean and stumbling onto odd jobs and warm retreats along an undetermined route. He recounted similar experiences like in Italy where he had picked flowers in exchange for refuge and sustenance.

This encounter among others led to my own reliance on where stability can only be sought, in the present. Currently, I am wwoofing for a family outside of Stockholm. And still, there are possibilities of farming in Siberia and Thailand. But who knows?

In a section of a blog post titled “The Art of Travel Writing” you write:

In Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence elaborates the exotic with his interpretation of a Mexican narrative. In classic Orientalist fashion, he probes the Other and suggests nuanced customs like an Indian mindset in which “time is a vague, foggy reality.” Essayists like Lawrence and the contemporary Alain de Bouton have codified the voice of travel literature. Their compositions paint pictorials of whimsical excursions and transitory crossings. Their subjects are accidental and their objectives hedonist.

I see this codification continuing to permeate much of travel writing today. My question though: who was the exception to this? Hemingway, for example–in a Moveable Feast (which your blog title plays off)–would you consider that work codified? What about the travel writing of David Foster Wallace? What about people working right now? Whose writing is “decolonized?”

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is similar to autobiographical works by Gide and Shalamov whose stories forge on a blurring of historical fiction and fact. Their writings compose a cultural memory arguably more valuable than historiographical renderings of social history and the essentialist accounts by travel writers like Lawrence/de Bouton. But in the same vein as my endeavor to self-decolonization, I wouldn’t consider these or any other postcolonial work to be decolonized in their content. Rather, it is a stylistic question of context and genre.

Nic*Rad at the Rare Gallery (MFB) (MFB)

Traveling, learning about people/place/culture, and documenting and sharing these experiences stem from a natural Orientalism, a curiosity of world and culture and the Other.

It is only when one embarks on this exploration from a position of power and superiority, then the “project” is imperialistic and colonial in nature. When I mentioned the stylistic question of context and genre, I am referring to a respective analysis of literature:

Context. 1) For whom is the writer writing/who is the reader? (academia, bourgeoisie, tourists, public, self) What is the writer’s motivation and purpose? (curiosity, capital, science, status/degree, power)

Genre. 2) Where is the writer in the writing? Is the work autobiographical, anthropological, ethnographic? Is the writer estranged from the “subject”?

From your latest blog, you write:

“For the last twenty-eight days and counting, I have flown, trained, bused, rideshared, and walked across Europe. The goal: travel through Eurasia and document urban space, sustainable development and architecture, and people who challenge conventional lifestyles while (re)creating a more viable world for present and future generations.”

Can you list / link some of these people / places / projects that are challenging conventional paradigms?

Soon enough, I’ll be blogging about these encounters. I just haven’t had a reliable wifi connection in rural Stockholm! But the peoples/places/projects include a Berlin-based artist/singer with a project at the La Fayette in Paris, alternative spaces like a coop coffeeshop in Stockholm, a Czech PhD student in sustainable architecture who built a school in the Himalayas, and much more.

What is your current setup for photography / new media production?

The tech’s pretty compact: Canon 50D, MacBookPro, and a Yamaha PocketTrakC24. I left my Lomo at home

Where are you planning to go next?

Helsinki at the end of month, TransSiberian July-August, and then Mongolia and then?

Community Connection

Please visit MFBenigno.com for more.

Photo: courtesy of Matador

[UPDATE 6/01/10 - Congratulations Alina Rădulescu (@Ariko) for winning this week's Twitter contest at MatadorU!!]

MORE STUDENTS continue enrolling at MatadorU, and the student-teacher interaction, work being shared / critiqued, and strength of our community just keeps progressing. We’re in the process of compiling a complete page on what people are saying, but in the meantime, here are a few quotes from students

Still, we’d like for more people to participate, and so we’re having a special enrollment week / Twitter contest this week. Here’s how it works:

Starting today, and running until next Tuesday, at 12:00 pm EST, we’re offering a promotional code at the U that will give you $40 off your enrollment of either the Travel Photography or Travel Writing programs. Register here using the code: TWITTERPROMO

Additionally, you qualify to win FREE enrollment by doing the following three steps (should take less than 30 secs)–

1) Make sure you follow us @MatadorNetwork so we can get in touch if you win.

2) Post the tweet below to your own Twitter account to help us spread the word about the contest.

3) Leave your @twitter_user_name in the comments below, along with the reason why why you want to join MatadorU.

We’ll be looking at the comments over the next week, and choose whoever seems like they’ll benefit most from the course.

HOW DO I KNOW IF I WON?

Winners will be announced next Tuesday at the end of the contest via twitter, and also update here via a post at Matador.

Good luck to everyone, and we look forward to announcing the winner!

Photo: Jesse Kruger

John McPhee is a Pulitzer prize-winning author and pioneer of narrative nonfiction.

The one book of his I’ve read (and really recommend) is Encounters with the Archdruid, which follows environmentalist David Brower as he confronts various ideological enemies of conservation–at one point going rafting with them down the Grand Canyon.

The book (and McPhee’s writing in general) uses these really powerful juxtapositions of place and character to convey complex themes.

In this recent interview, McPhee discusses how he structured this work using the same method he learned in high school. He essentially sits down with his notes and tries to come up with a lead. Then:

Once I’ve written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they’re coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I’m doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card.

The interviewer then asks him how his work on Encounters with the Archdruid began, and how many index cards there were:

..I knew where I was going to start, but I didn’t know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid?

His answer to Floyd Dominy [Bureau of Reclamation commissioner infamous for his initiation of dam-building projects] is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”?

This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table.

Community Connection

How do you work out structure in your narrative nonfiction writing?
Have you ever used index cards?
Do you still use writing lessons you learned in high school or have you evolved your system?
Do you have an actual system / structure you use or does it vary from story to story?

The Titan theme by Themefoundry.

So I’m assuming most of you have WordPress blogs or are thinking about switching over to WP.

For a long time I’ve hesitated really playing with my blog because when I look at code in backend–html and php–I always think the same thing–”I’m gonna kill my blog if I mess with this.”

The thing is, I’ve really wanted to change the typography and look of my blog and make it my own, not just a standard theme. This weekend I found the answer: you make a “child theme.”

What is a child theme?

A child theme is basically a super-miniature theme (it just has a single component, the style.css sheet you create–instructions below) that borrows all the code from a “parent.” This allows you to mess around with whatever elements you want–fonts, colors, spacing, images–just by copying and pasting little snippets of code to your child theme and experimenting with them.

No matter what changes you make to your child theme, you can always erase them and start over, or just save your changes, then switch back to the parent theme so it’s the one that’s “live” after you’re done working. You can then go back and play around on your child theme again later as a work in progress.

I learned all of this from a very good pictorial introduction to making child themes that takes you through how to set one up step by step.

[Note: there's one stipulation for all of this--you have to have FTP access to your WordPress blog to do this. You can't create these if it's just a WordPress.com blog.]

Here’s an outline:

1. Find the directory listing name (caps sensitive) of your theme. For example, my theme is “Thematic” however the directory listing (the listing that’s on my server uploaded via FTP is “thematic”).

2. Copy and paste the following into a text editor (with the blanks filled out according to your info):

/*
Theme Name: name your child theme whatever you want, for example, ‘your remix”
Theme URI: put the url of your blog here
Description: put a description recognizing this as a child theme, ex: ‘child theme for thematic’
Author: your name
Author URI: put your blog url here
Template: the directory listing of your parent theme, for example ‘thematic’
Version: put whatever you want here. ‘1.0′ is a logical first version
*/

@import url(“../thematic/style.css”);

In this example I’m using thematic as the parent theme. For your own blog you have to put in whatever the directory listing is, for example, let’s say your theme is “kubrick,” then the bottom line would read:

@import url(“../kubrick/style.css”);

This bottom line is basically the only code in your entire theme. It’s simply telling WordPress to import all of the styles from whatever the parent theme or “template” you’ve listed.

3. Once you’ve completed this doc, save it as exactly this: style.css (it has to have a css or Cascading Style Sheet extension).

4. Create a new directory in the themes folder with the name you’re giving your theme, for example “your remix.”

5. Upload the style.css into this folder via FTP.

6. Go to the backend of your blog, then Appearance>>Themes, and, if you’ve done everything correctly, you should see your new child theme (there won’t be a screen shot, but you’ll see the name / info you put in) listed under available themes. Click activate.

7. Because your child theme is simply importing everything from your parent theme, it will look identical. Now you can have fun. Open the Appearance>>Editor, then choose style.css (you should see exactly the same doc you created.) Now go back to the stylesheet of your parent theme (you can download it onto your desktop or just view via FTP) and look for things you want to change. Copy those, then paste them into your child theme stylesheet open here in the editor.

8. If you’re like me and stylesheets just seem like impossible to follow jibberish, you can download a sweet tool for Firefox called Firebug that enables you to click on the elements of a page and then it gives you the corresponding CSS code. This allows you to look at your parent theme in a different window, click on parts you want to change, then copy the CSS code it gives you and paste it into the editor.

All of this stuff is very time-consuming at first, but it feels good to begin modifying your blog and not worrying that you’ll ruin anything.

Please comment below if you have questions or advice.

The author, self-portrait, Lago Inferior, Patagonia, Chile. All photos by David Miller.

• Location: Sendero a Los Hitos, P.N. Lago Puelo, Patagonia
• Total distance covered: 36km
• Time: 2 days, 1 night
• Continuous hours hiking: 8 first day, 10 the second
• Creeks / rivers crossed: 24 (Rio Azul crossed by boat, all others on foot)
• Approx. distance trail itself was essentially a creek: 3 km
• Average temperature: 42 degrees F/ 5.6 C
• Approx. # of hours feet were wet: 15
• Passport stamps: 4 (2 entry / 2 exit, Chile / Argentina)

Km 0.0 - Finished packing. Realized fastex buckle on hip-belt was broken. Looked for replacement (none). Took this as possible bad omen. Visualized being unable to adequately tighten hip-belt and having pack kill shoulders for 2 days. Said “fuck it” then tied loose straps in square knot. Walked out of house. Looked at sky over cordillera (rainclouds). Thought about it raining almost continuously over the past 2 days.

Km. 0.1 - Got picked up by guy in rusted-out Ford Falcon. Took this as possible good omen. Thought about so many times trying to hitch on A.T (Appalachian Trail) when nobody would stop.  Said “gracias,” and the man said “porque?” in a way that didn’t sound like an expression, but literally “why?”

Km. 0.2 - Waited for bus to Lago Puelo. Thought about looking in fly-shop for replacement piece for hip-belt even though I realized shop wasn’t open yet.

Thought “this is how it used to feel ‘interacting’ with towns on the trail–wandering around looking for replacement gear, parts, food, liquor, showers, then hiking back up into the woods where you seemed to belong.

Km 0.8 - Walked from end of bus line at Lago Puelo to park entrance. Saw horses trotting down center of road. Felt urge to take morning shit. Saw that no rangers had arrived at park entrance even though it was scheduled to open already. Rested pack against hut. Bushwhacked 15 meters through mosqueta along roadside. Dug latrine with knife. Defecated. Decided against waiting for park rangers to show up. Entered park without registering / paying.

Km. 1.2 – Walked to edge of dock. Met Javier (boat captain) + kid. Was ferried by kid to other side of delta.

Lago Puelo + boat = huge backcountry access.

Studied three separate crossings that would have to be waded if you didn’t get ferried by boat. Looked at current entering Lago Puelo and threading through dock pilings,  forming last eddy on the Rio Azul. Said this to kid, “El ultimo eddy.”

Km 1.8 – Found campground / house on other side of headland was closed. Petted 3 dogs guarding house. Couldn’t find signage / directions to trail. Noticed footpath going up headland behind house. Climbed .5 km. Realized it couldn’t the trail. Turned around. Crossed campground, creek. Saw the trail on the other side. Felt sense of  “now I’m starting.” Ate dried figs, chocolate.

Km 3.5 - Climbed past sign of trail cut-off to pasarela (hanging-bridge). Made mental note for hike back. Overheated. Took off jacket. Drank water.

Km 4.2 - Entered super dense old-growth Cohiue forest. Crossed several small streams. Noticed very few tracks. Noticed very little birdsound. Wondered why there wasn’t more wildlife.

Thought about Lau and Layla at home waking up, having breakfast. Felt lonely. Thought “I should be ‘documenting’ this.” Stopped and took picture of forest (pictured here).

Saw mossed-over stack of logs. Wondered about the “viejo poblador” (original settler) who must’ve cut them. Felt stoked for some reason.

Envisioned new series on my blog (“things that make me stoked”). Tried to calm mind and just look at trail. Started getting cold. “Created” song in my head (mix of Deerhunter + reggae bassline?) that lasted 30 minutes and helped ascent of next hill. Tried to empty mind again and thought “it’s hard.” Began steep descent towards lake on super wet, loose rock.

Km 4.8 – Arrived at Gendarmeria: two large buildings, white with green roofs.  Saw young Argentine soldiers + paisanos trying to fix small dam that had flooded. Walked inside. Noticed crucifix on wall. Was questioned by an older (late 50s) white-looking officer in distrustful / angry way:  What was my occupation? Do I have family here in Argentina? Was questioned by young Indian-looking soldier who seemed to want to impress officer and began asking things in an aggressive way:  Was I just doing this to renew visa? How long was I planning to spend here?

Thought “jesus dude I’m just out here hiking, sort of.” Looked at pouches under white officer’s eyes. Visualized violent things he might’ve done as a young soldier during the dirty war. Told them: “Che, I’m trying to process my residencia but it’s taking forever for them to send the paperwork.” Thought how people are less alienated when you operate using same social / cultural cues. Thought “they don’t know / care about ‘being a writer,’ but they know about waiting on fucking paperwork.”

Km 5.8 - Continued hiking while thinking about white officer as symbolic of what men fear–not fear in the sense of being afraid of but something you feared becoming–old / soft / angry, trying to hold whatever power you could over others. Thought “let it go.” Thought “empty mind.” Hiked multiple ascents and descents, very steep, with much of trail essentially a flowing creek. Felt socks soaking through.

Reached creek that was too high to cross without wading. Searched upstream / crossed via log + semi-submerged rocks. Noticed sky was darker, but couldn’t tell if it was cloud cover or position of sun. Got cold. Started climbing again, then overheated. Reached higher elevation forest full of caña colihue. Broke off two stalks for walking sticks.

Mouth of Lago Puelo / birth of Rio Puelo.

Km 6.8 – Summited vista overlooking Lago Puelo. Felt lonely / cold. Ate peanut butter and oat cereal + chocolate. Took picture. Started worrying I was moving too slow. Felt feet begin to numb.

Km 8.4 - Reached border crossing / sign that said LIMITE CON CHILE. Thought about taking picture but hands were too cold / energy level too low. Thought about how people like to look at pictures of signs.

Km 9.8 – Reached dangerous creek crossing: water too high to cross in regular spot. Found pair of wet logs upstream spanning a steep constricted drop. Untied pack, threw walking sticks across, and butt-slid on logs. Estimated log-breakage / fall would mean 50% chance of death by entrapment and drowning / 80% chance of severe injury / 100% chance of hypothermia / extreme difficulty recovering gear / building emergency camp / fire.

Km 13.7 - Crossed several minor creeks. Noticed beginning of pain / inflammation in ligaments in left knee. Felt lower pant-legs / long underwear soaking through. Started getting panic feeling of “I’m not going to make it.” Thought “I haven’t really gone that far / what the fuck is going on with my body / am I just turning into an old fuck?” Felt need to defecate but didn’t want to stop / get cold. Passed good campsite, then thought “I should’ve stopped there.” Started feeling dehydrated. Filled up water bottle at creek. Thought “the terrain is brutal but at least the water is all good to go.”

Km 14. 7 – Began limping due to increasing pain in left knee. Continued worrying how I’d make it tomorrow. Wondered about transport options out of Lago Inferior.

Started slipping in various places on trail. Realized I had no energy left. Felt cold but then began long climb and started overheating. Felt uncomfortable pressure in bowels.

Km 15.3 - Reached abandoned farm. Defecated at edge of field. Burned toilet paper. Explored farm. Took pictures of Cerro Aguja Norte + outbuildings. Saw that sky had cleared somewhat. Noticed one outbuilding had dozens of wire hooks in ceiling. Realized this was where they kept sheep that had been butchered.

Set up tent. Took off wet gear. Got in bag. Felt legs / back almost completely immobile. Boiled water for miso soup. Opened wine (could only drink a couple sips). Looked at sunset. Took self-portrait and felt ridiculous.

Thought about having your days/nights “kept track of” in a passport. Checked water bottle (not enough for coffee in the morning). Took 2 ibuprofen + small swig of water. Started falling asleep.

Woke back up. Heard sound, a motor. Thought “someone approaching via motorcycle? (impossible), boat?” Then realized “generator at Chilean checkpoint .” Saw there was still a bit of color in the sky. Tried to lie back down. Heard a stamping sound. Looked out of tent: two horses. Thought “are they wild? (no, their tails are clipped–they belong to someone.)” Thought “isn’t it strange camping here, where a family or families once lived?” Thought “No, what’s strange is how almost every place has these stories, these places where other people once lived, it’s just that most of them have been covered over so long ago you forget you’re living on top of them.”

Woke up in morning to rain-sound on tent. Flexed knee (sore, but at least able to be flexed). Drank water. Fell back asleep again, maybe 30 minutes. Woke back up. Packed. Thought about so many mornings on the trail doing this, and the final move: putting on wet boots / pants/ jacket.

Km 15.6 – Reached Chilean checkpoint. Saw dilapidated structures, chicken house, horses. Walked into the building. Had passport stamped by a young Indian-looking solider. Smiled and felt stoked when I heard his accent.

Km 15.9 - Passed back by where I camped and saw the two horses from last night Felt happy. Stopped at creek below / filled up water bottle. Noted creek was significantly lower. Drank half a liter. Urinated. Noticed piss was very dark. Drank more water.

Km 24.6 – Felt for some reason I’d have trouble at the Argentine checkpoint. Visualized arguments / negative scenarios involving white soldier. Studied terrain / alternative routes for sneaking around if necessary. Noticed right calf / knee beginning to hurt from compensating for left side. Entered checkpoint. Saw paisanos waving at me approaching. Heard one yell out something.

Felt like they were watching me approach (after spending the night in cold / wet conditions) with certain air of respect and / or sense of “crazy gringo.” Had passport stamped by Indian-looking soldier. Saw white officer again, this time out of uniform, his eyes red, his nose watering–he appeared sick. Sensed that now these guys just wanted to talk. Answered their questions about trail conditions (flooded / very bad) and life in the US. Felt strangely relieved + emotional. Thought “why was I so worried about this?”

Km 28.1 - Ascended steeply 500 meters from lake. Reached old-growth forest / felt strangely alone again, same as yesterday. Ate last of cereal. Felt very cold + still. Found it difficult to put pack on + continue hiking.

Km 28.5 - Reached trail cut-off to pasarela. Visualized walking across bridge back into town, calling a taxi or catching a bus home.

Km 32 – Felt relieved that trail towards pasarela seemed to be roadway instead of trail through woods. Thought “it will be easier to follow once it gets dark.” Put on headlamp.

Km 35 – Night-hiked road until it dead-ended at the river. Thought “WTF? No pasarela?” Realized the trail must’ve cut off from the road somewhere but I’d missed it in the dark.

Started walking along bank but it became steep / impossible to follow. Shined headlamp through water and imagined fording at night (suicidal). Visualized camping and trying in the morning. Visualized girls at home (frightened b/c I didn’t make it back). Thought about walking back uphill and looking for missed trailhead but realized it would be impossible to find in dark + I was too tired.

Shined headlamp up slope. Started climbing ridge using animal trails. Continued downstream via animal trails. Ended up at chacra.

Km 36 – Saw hundreds of eyes lighting up in my headlamp beam (sheep). Heard dogs barking. Saw light on in farmhouse. Clapped my hands (in 2-3 clave, 1-2, 1-2-3) like the people here in the campo (no doorbells). Saw man my age come out / tell the dogs to hush. Said “Sorry to bother you. I got lost. I was looking for the pasarela,” then felt sense of flow occurring as he said “you want me to ferry you across here en barco?” Walked down to the river with him and got in a small rowboat. Asked his name (Juan). Watched him rowing us out of the eddy. Felt the boat enter the current. Cut off headlamp. Rested. Noticed for the first time that the sky was finally clear. Heard the sound of the oars in the water. Looked up at the stars.

Community Connection

What’s the strangest border you’ve ever crossed?
Have you ever snuck around a border?
Do you feel like you have to trick border guards or do you just “be yourself?”
What’s the longest you’ve ever hiked with wet feet?
Have you ever crossed a creek / river where you felt like there was a decent chance of dying?
Have you ever felt existential dread about dealing with your passport?

.

Photo: Max-B

Happy Monday, gente.

While working this weekend I tried to ignore the headline “Movie Reveals Seamy Life of Facebook Boss” but eventually caved.

The story was about an upcoming movie based on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and focused on the “seamy” depictions of him “receiving sex in bars, [while his business partner] Parker runs the business.”

What I love about this story, not the actual piece or the movie, but the events / characters they’re describing – is that regardless of what facts are true, part of what people are going to remember about Facebook, the mythology they’re going to create around it (maybe) is that it started with a kid getting dumped and looking for some kind of (most likely sexual) payback.

Which is a cliche, but also makes good movie material because (a) cliches are accepted / expected when there is a core element of “celebrity,” and (b) the image of the protagonist as “tarnished hero” combined with his youth allows the audience to (1) vicariously experience “naughtiness” while (2) still receiving a “payoff” vis-a-vis the hero’s redemption and “coming to terms with” / overcoming his flaws.*

Either way I doubt I’ll watch this movie.

_____

*I’m not sure about this, but it seems reasonable.

Backstory

More than anything, the article made me think about how everyone has a backstory and key events in his / her life, and how these key events impel people (or not) to do different things, make different choices. This seems especially relevant for writers and journalists, but it’s rare to ever learn about these events unless the writer or journo becomes famous / a good interview subject.

Still, how would it change the way we read something from an author if we knew the backstory in his / her life? Or for that matter, the immediate context?

For example, what if there were a kind of disclaimer at the beginning of a “flighty” piece on “20 things I wish I’d known about dating when I was 20″ that said: “I realize the tone of this piece is fluffy, but I had to write it on deadline and the truth is, this was hard for me because I have abandonment issues.”

When the context of writing is a will towards transparency, an act of moving upstream (“Man is a river whose source is hidden.” — Emerson) I feel like almost anything–a user’s profile on Facebook, a “how-to” on ramp-building written by a 15 yr. old skateboarder, a recipe for pumpkin bread–can have “literary value.”

I believe too that this is different than the literary movement ofconfessionalism, although it seems equally facile to dismiss / criticize it with the same argument, which is (paraphrasing from Robert Bly) that it tends to shift one’s attention away from the “suffering of others.”

You could say too that (especially in America), we’re already self-absorbed enough as it is, Facebook perhaps being the greatest emblem and enabler of self-absorption ever created.

But for me really it all comes down to style, to the way the “user” uses his / her account, the way the blogger uses his / her blog.

Facebook “Exodus”

Which brings me to the last point of today’s mashup, the “revolt” against Facebook planned at the end of this month. I’m not sure how to feel about this exactly. It doesn’t seem “heroic” to quit your Facebook account.

The main emotion I felt when reading about this story (and also typing about it right now) is a kind of general disgust at (and yet strangely, empathy with) the editor / writer who chose the word “exodus” to describe people just clicking some account options on their computers.

I wonder how Mark Zuckerman feels about it. I read in the article that he’d had to curtail his birthday celebration in the Caribbean for “crisis meetings.”

But damn, even as I type that sentence I’m already imaging it as a movie scene. Perhaps there would be a parallel montage, jump-cuts between satisfied-looking Facebook users deleting their accounts and a pissed-off-looking Zuckerman staring out the window of a private jet flying back to Facebook Headquarters.

I think the most important question then: What would be the soundtrack be?

Community Connection

Are you going to participate in the Facebook “revolt”?

How do you feel about writers revealing their motivations? Does that kill the story or add to it or neither / both?

Please share you comments below.

GLIMPSE is a worldwide program powered by Matador and supported in part by the National Geographic Society.

Glimpse’s mission statement:

Glimpse believes that independent travelers, particularly those who spend significant time abroad, have a unique and often overlooked opportunity to effect positive change around the world. This begins with bearing witness to place, people, culture, and especially the stories and struggles that might otherwise go unrecorded.

The main focus of Glimpse is the Correspondents Program, which provides travelers, students, and aspiring journalists with a professional platform–including stipends, community support, and one-on-one editorial training–for publishing journalistic work based on their travels abroad.

The Fall 2010 Glimpse Program is now officially open to applicants. To qualify for the program you must be:

• between the ages of 18 and 36
• living, working, volunteering, or studying outside of your home country for at least 10 weeks

Correspondents will receive the following benefits:

• $600 stipend
• One on one support from a team of professional editors
• Guaranteed publication in Glimpse.org and Matador
• Community support and promotion of your project to high-profile editors, schools, and media outlets

Please visit the Correspondents page, where you can read more about the program, check the profiles and work of past Correspondents, and also apply.

Feature Photo: Amy Adoyzie Lam, Glimpse Correspondent

Photo: courtesy of Matador

**UPDATE 5/11/10 Congratulations to @metimisanthropy, who is the winner of of this contest. We look forward to working with you at MatadorU. Thanks to everyone who entered. **

*UPDATE 5/6/10 * The contest is now officially closed. Thanks to everyone who entered and left a comment. We’ll be posting the winner next week.

JUST OVER two weeks ago we launched the Travel Photography program at MatadorU.

The new program comprehensively covers travel photography skills, equipment, and the steps needed to publish work, build an internet presence, and expand your network of colleagues and markets.

In addition to Matador Editors, guest photographers–some who’ve published work in National Geographic and Smithsonian–work with students providing periodic portfolio reviews.

We’ve been really stoked with the initial wave of students who have enrolled and particularly the interaction between students and teachers going on in the forums.

As a way of continuing to spread the word, we wanted to offer a new contest with the prize of free enrollment to your choice of either the Travel Photography or Travel Writing programs.

You can participate in the contest in less than 30 seconds. Here’s how: :

1) Make sure you follow us @MatadorNetwork so we can get in touch if you win.

2) Post the tweet below to your own Twitter account to help us spread the word about the contest.

3) Leave your @twitter_user_name in the comments below, along with the reason why why you want to join MatadorU.

HOW DO I KNOW IF I WON?

Winners will be announced at the end of the contest via twitter, and also update here via a post at Matador.

Good luck to everyone, and we look forward to announcing the winner!

Photo: kafka4prez

HAPPY MONDAY everyone. Over the weekend I thought a lot about the concept of “narration” within the context of control.

How to remember what “framing” is

A few years ago I saw a documentary that explained the concept of “framing an issue.” It showed a picture of a young couple. It was obviously an old picture, black and white. From the way the couple was dressed it appeared to be the early 1900s. They were smiling in a way that seemed very happy.

Then the camera started zooming out so you saw more people in the picture. The other people weren’t looking at the picture, but all in the same direction–looking towards the right. None of them were smiling.

Then the camera kept zooming out so you could see the entire picture, and what everyone else in the photo was looking at: a lynching, two black people strung up in a tree.

Then it zoomed back to the two people smiling, and explained how framing an issue was equivalent to showing only one part of a picture so the person looking at it isn’t able to see the whole context.

I don’t mean to use this example in a way that seems “menacing,” but more as something to remember when you’re reading, writing, taking pictures, looking at pictures, and using the internet: what is the narrator, photographer, or website leaving out? What are you leaving out of what you write or take pictures? What am I leaving out here? [(a) The documentary was about Mumia Abu Jamal.]

Facebook’s privacy policy

On the opposite side of this is the idea of how much personal information you’re willing to have revealed and who has access to it. This brings me to Facebook.

I tried to delete my Facebook account over a year ago, and was pretty surprised that I couldn’t actually delete it, but only “suspend” it, which keeps other people from viewing it. All of my information is still there on their servers, however.

I didn’t suspend my account because I was worried they might jack my personal info, I just didn’t have time to use it anymore. After reading this timeline published last week though, I’m glad I got out when I did (if that even matters?).

Check this excerpt from Facebook’s Privacy Policy in 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information.

And now compare it with this excerpt from the privacy policy as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.”

The article concludes: “Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.”

Mini Travel Writing Contest based on different narrators

Last up, this week I’m running a min travel writing contest based on different styles of narration in nonfiction. The inspiration is Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel told from the point of view of 15 different narrators.

Please check the website for details. Deadline is on Thursday at 2 PM EST.

Community Connection

what is your opinion of Facebook’s privacy policy? Do you use Facebook? Let us know in the comments below.

Image: sasha w

HAPPY MONDAY. This week I wanted to mash up a few different thoughts on narrative nonfiction and travel writing. This has been an ongoing discussion among our team, and something we’re continually examining at MatadorU.

I feel like for some reason–perhaps the way writing has been taught in school over the last several decades, or the fact that it’s part of our everyday communication (as opposed to say, drawing or playing music)–most nonfiction, even “creative” nonfiction writing seems much less stylistically diverse than other forms of artistic expression. I’m not talking about content but more the style through which it’s delivered–sentence structure, expressions, usage.

This may just be the inherent limitations of the form, of  textual vs. visual or auditory media, but I believe it also has to do with people’s perceptions of how writing is supposed to “sound.”

Here’s an example. Some writers continue to use anthropomorphism in their writing, saying things like “The hawks ‘braved’ the ‘menacing’ wind,” even though there is no cultural, philosophical, religious, or any other frame of reference expressed in their writing that shows they actually see the world (nature as having human characteristics) this way.

Other examples include using cliches or expressions that suggest things the writer may not necessarily believe, but uses anyway as they “sound right.” For a brilliant study of this, read David Foster Wallace’s essay on usage, “Present Tense.”

Writing from the way you perceive events

A response to this, one that we commonly tell writers at Matador, is to “write from the way you perceive.” Doing this is a kind of discipline, I think. You have to go back and look at everything you write, questioning–”do I really think this, or does it just ’sound good’. . .or is it just a way of  explaining something as I’ve had it explained to me or read elsewhere, as opposed to the way I understand it?”

In a way it’s the opposite of (or perhaps a good follow-up to) writing in the “ecstatic” tradition, the Kerouac-style of just letting the words flow and trusting the “act of creation” itself.

I think it helps sometimes to create new structures as guidelines for shaping the way you narrate. I tried this at my blog last week. I don’t know if it’s helped my writing yet, but it was edifying in the sense that it made me look differently at various elements of nonfiction writing, particularly at providing information about cultural references (ex: “He was wearing a boina, ‘a kind of South American newsboy cap.’”) within the body of an article.

(Note on this: It seems we’re at a point in time whereby, via Google (and soon, augmented reality), references are no longer needed within the text, but may simply be linked or assumed as knowledge shared by the reader.)

Echo-chamber

Ironically, creating a new framework for expressing your perceptions is just another way of writing according to how things “sound.” There is definitely a kind of “danger” in this, as you can reach a point (something each writer must find for him/herself) where you’re no longer writing with the reader in mind but only for yourself.  Some people argue that when this happens (an “audience of one”), there is no longer a point of entry for the reader.

But I believe that if your thought and writing process is guided by, driven by honesty–a sense of truth-seeking–then it doesn’t matter: your writing will, by default, have meaning for others, and a readership beyond yourself.

Community Connection

How do you reconcile gaps between how you perceive place / culture / people, and how you express it in writing? Please share with us in the comments.

The “Autumn Special,” a 6′8″ squash-tail, later given away.

ON THIS LAST MOVE to Patagonia we reduced our “worldly possessions” to 3 large suitcases, a duffel bag, a backpack, a snowboard bag, and carseat (for our daughter). This was after being married for 6 years.

I don’t feel proud of this necessarily; it’s just the reality of (a) not having enough money / motivation to ship other things we had–art / books / toys / furniture–down here via container, (b) having a natural aversion to accumulating things, and (c) effecting a transcontinental move via airplane.

But damn, now that we’re down here I’m missing a lot of our shit.

Or not really. Some of it I miss, I guess. Some of it I need. Either way, I’ve been thinking about it lately, all of this different stuff that I’ve spent time with as a traveler, stuff that in some cases got named.

Here are some of them:

1. The Autumn Special

A 6′8″ squash-tail bought for $75 in Pismo Beach, California. Later stored in friend’s garage in San Francisco, then taken down to Mexico, where it was surfed for 4 months, then given to Argentine surfer in Pascuales.

2. “The Land Speeder” aka the “Santa Cruz”

2. 156 cm Santa Cruz snowboard bought for $125 at a surf shop in San Francisco. Used for a season in Tahoe (Heavenly Valley), then mailed to Andy Vernor for usage at local ski-hill in Wisconsin, then later mailed back to me with Land Speeder sticker applied. Was later stolen out of back of jeep in Nederland, Colorado.

Me paddling Big Gun, Encampment, Wyoming.

3. The Big Gun

A creek boat produced by Riot around 2003.

Purchased from a paddler in Glenwood Springs Colorado for $250.

Never fit right, but was used during 2005-2007 paddle seasons in Colorado / Wyoming. “Sold” to dude in Nederland, Colorado who was supposed to send me a check but never did.

4.The “Music Collection”

CD + cassette library maintained from middle school through college (Athens, Georgia) containing, among other artists, Air, Agent Orange, Augustus Pablo, B52s, Billie Holliday, Bob Dylan, Coltrane, Dead Kennedys, Digable Planets, Digweed, DJ Spooky, Django Rheinhardt, Ernest Rangling, Gregorian Monks, James Brown, the JB’s, King Oliver’s Dixieland Jazz Band, Led Zeppelin, Lee Perry, Miles Davis, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nirvana, Outkast, Plastikman, the Porchhonkys, Quincy Jones, r.e.m., Suicidal Tendencies, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground + a whole bunch of 4-track recordings of early guitar / bass / drum played with friends. .

Sold at various music stores and / or given away / lost. [Notes: none of this feels like a "loss" now that we're in post-cd "world," except for a particular collection of tapes that I kept in a Vietnam-era ammo case given to me by my Dad that seemed to have disappeared in between graduating from College and heading off to the Appalachian Trail. ]

The Stealth Fighter

The Stealth Fighter

A squirt boat given to me in Seattle by a crew of squirtboaters from Pennsylvania.

Used in exploratory runs on Skykomish and Snoqualmie rivers. Later washed down the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River after I got worked in seam / subduction zone at Purple Cliffs and had to swim.

Special notes: This craft was unique in all possession-experiences in that (a) it was something handmade, and (b) never sold but given from one person to the next, as well as (c) “given” back to the river, which (d) came close to turning into a near death experience as I kept fighting to save it as we started washing into the next rapid, but then gave up and (e) as I sat up on the bank afterward it felt like the whole thing was actually kind of hilarious and I was only sorry there was nobody there to see it happen, which (f) gave me this strange energy that I used to (instead of camping there as originally intended) drive 13 more hours straight across to Colorado to meet up with my friends.

6. The “Library”

Book / magazine collection maintained from middle school and in several houses and states after college, with titles by Alexie, Borges, Bukowski, Carver, Camus, Cather, DeFoe, Dostoyevsky, Emerson, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Frank, Ginsberg, Golding, Hamsun, Harrison, Hemingway, Herbert, Hesse, Huxley, James, Jewett, Kafka, Kerouac, Kingslover, Lawrence, Lee, Lewis, London, Lorca, MacLean, Mann, Marquez, Melville, Miller (Arthur + Henry), O’Connor, Ovid, Proulx, Roth, Salinger, Sartre, Shakespeare, Snyder, Steinbeck, Storm, Thoreau, Tolkien,Twain, Walker, Williams (William Carlos + Tennessee), Wiesel.

Sold at (a) garage sale in Marietta, GA, (b) various bookstores in Athens, Georgia, Boulder, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington, and left in various places (1) Appalachian Trail Shelters, (2) the Dharma Shack, (3) parents’ house in Florida.

Note: like the music, there is no real “sense of loss” as far as not being able to maintain these possessions.

7. The “Wonder Bucket” and “Belt”

Tool-belt + paint bucket “organizer” used in construction work from mid 90s to 2009 including assorted tools: a worm-drive skillsaw, framing hammer, speed-square, chisels, cordless drill / impact, sawzall, chalkline, plumb bob, level. Given away to people (a) semi-unintentionally in Seattle, and (b) deliberately (as they had work going on and could use them) in Colorado.

8. The Egg

A 1992 Toyota Previa Van with standard transmission and all wheel drive. “Sold” to friends in Colorado, but then later gifted as it was discovered that years of using the Egg as offroad vehicle / Boulder Canyon commuting-machine had led to a “terminal diagnosis” vis a vis Colorado emissions standards vs engine repair costs.

Community Connection

What gear / things have you named in your travels / life experience and what is your relationship to it? Do you hold on to things or just give them away? Please let us know in the comments below.

The look on that bro’s face, and always the local kid checking out your board. Photo: adobemac

[Author's note: all distances are approximate.]

From Mt. Katahdin, Maine to Front Royal, Virginia via the Appalachian Trail: 1,300 miles

I saw what happens to a hundred year-old bar when a television is plugged in for the first time. I learned how to think like a mouse. I got lost and ended up at a farm where they were harvesting cilantro. I went for 5 days without talking to anyone. I woke up one morning with my tarp crushed down to an inch above my face and a foot of snow on the other side of the plastic. I got a ride to town with a middle-aged rabbi who lived out of his car. I hiked with a bro whose mom had cancer.

I saw his face one night after he talked to her on the phone.

From Overflow Creek and the Chattooga and Tallulah Rivers to Athens, Georgia: 70 miles

I listened to a skinny raft guide describe his technique for guiding fat people down 7ft Falls as “hog-leg left.” I paddled by a 5,000 year-old fish-trap and saw a deer drinking from the river. I camped out with a girl by a shoals where we swam at night and then lay down by the fire. I eddied out above Singley’s Falls and told the first-timers “you just follow the water.” I cleaned an 80 foot drop and then pulled up to the bank and got out the safety-kit. I paddled Jawbone 100 times but was somewhere else on a day when someone finally went down.

I met up with all the kayakers before the funeral and heard someone call “safety?” and we all looked around for a second before one of us said “I think Tim would’ve wanted this to be safe, don’t you?”

Oceana, Tallulah gorge. Photo: Alex.

From Cotopoxi to Montañita to Esmereldas, Ecuador: 1,500 km

I camped at 15,000 feet in a summer-weight bag and puked from altitude sickness. I sat on the shoulder at la punta and waited for scraps. I spent one night with nowhere to sleep because of an Argentine girl whose nickname was smurf. I took a bus across the country with no money left in my wallet. I saw what happens when a large city has a total economic collapse.

I got a ride in a 4 x 4 that made it around burning barricades.

From San Jose, Costa Rica to Punta ______, El Salvador: 700 km

I paddled out in a 20-foot swell and learned how long I could hold my breath. I met a Canadian girl who seemed totally “free with her body” and wasn’t afraid of anything. I asked a fisherman if it was OK to camp out on the beach nearby and he took me to a storage room full of drying corn and told me to stay there if I wanted.

I got a ride in a US Army Humvee driven by a soldier who wasn’t allowed to swim in the ocean.

From Marietta, Georgia to Huntington Beach, California, (via San Francisco and Gardnerville, Nevada): 2,800 miles

I wore goggles at 6:00 a.m. while setting up cones at a ski resort parking lot. I saw a meth-head drive his 4 x 4 over a Ford Fiesta in his back yard. I kissed a Costa Rican girl on the dance floor of a $5-all-you-can-drink “beach party” at Harrah’s Casino. I saw Kevin Nealon in the back of a ski shuttle wearing the kind of snowsuit that ppl. used to call a “fag bag.” I spent a few days homeless in San Francisco and shaved in a Safeway bathroom. I carried sheets of plywood with a crew of Mexicans in Los Angeles who called the jobsite “Chinga City.”

Photo of camp in Cerritos.

I went to the beach after a three day rain killed all the smog, and saw Santa Catalina Island for the first time.

From Baja California Sur to Michoacan, Mexico to Boulder, Colorado (via Marietta, Georgia): 4,200 miles

I hiked up into the Cerritos and smoked Pitaya flowers. I cooked beans and rice over a fire for an Argentine girl (who later became my wife). I helped an old woman carry firewood and when we got back to her house she gave me a papaya. I sang songs at a summer camp I’d been to since I was 4 years old, and knew that it was the last time. I crawled out of a concrete bowl in a skatepark after breaking my femur.

I sat in bed watching icicles form outside the window and started writing about it.

Community Connection

Please send notes from the road to david at matadornetwork.com.

How do you remember the distances you’ve traveled? Please tell us in the comments below.

Image: Marco Bellucci

AFTER NINE MONTHS of working with students at MatadorU, along with another 3+ years of working with contributors at Matador in general, I’ve started to recognize some of the same patterns, the same things writers are doing–or avoiding doing–over and over.

I wanted to collect some of these patterns into simple questions to ask while you’re editing and revising your writing. These questions are most relevant to travel narratives, but can also be applied to really any form of travel writing or nonfiction.

1. How is your story revealing character?

Oftentimes beginning writers use structures that only observe characters and places “from a distance.” But it’s through close up interactions–characters acting and reacting to one another, that we learn who characters are. How is your story structured, and does that structure allow characters’ hopes, dreams, motivations, and emotions to be revealed?

2. Do your descriptions of characters stay superficial, or do they reveal subtext, such as their relationships?

3. Is the way you’re describing scenes / characters / places based strictly on the way you saw them, or are you also thinking about the overall effect the descriptions have on the reader?

Does describing, for example, every detail of a character’s “traditional garment” help or hinder the way your reader accesses the story?

4. Are you seeing other characters in a way that obscures your perspective?

Is your narrator describing people in a way that is romanticizing their lives, appropriating their problems or struggle, or making assumptions based on their cultural heritage or racial identity? We explored 8 ways of seeing people that can undermine your writing.

5. Are you recognizing that places, like people, continue to evolve and change, or are you “fixing” them in time so that they seem static?

This is another common trait of marketing style language–pulling places out of their temporal context so they seem less like an “entity” and more like a “product.”

6. Are you reducing places, stories, cultures, and characters in such a way that they simply become symbols and / or props for your philosophy, story, or ideas?

7. Are there cliches?

Are you describing things with cliches instead of concrete language or correct terminology? Are you using cliched expressions to “cover” places where you simple need more information?

We created a list of cliches that we’d prefer not to ever see in travel writing again.

8. Are you being transparent about your motivations to write the story, and your material connections to those in the story or who have sponsored it?

9. Are there cliched “constructions?”

Do you use certain forms of rhetoric that suggest rather than declare or in some way exploit emotional triggers of the reader? These are so common in marketing and advertising that they often enter other forms of writing subconsciously. Here’s a list of three of these common constructions.

10. Are you using fallacious logic?

When making points, have you constructed your argument based on faulty logic?

Community Connection

For more writing tips, please see our comprehensive resources for writers.

Image: Chris Radcliff

Call for TBEX Keynote Pieces

Over the weekend we passed this link around the team alot: Call for 2010 TBEX Keynote. TBEX founder Kim Mance explains:

You do not need to attend TBEX ’10 to submit work for inclusion in the Community Keynote (though we’d love to see you). Simply review the list below and submit one of your favorite blog posts that fits into a specific category. All work must be original, written by you, and published on your blog (whether old or new). There is no compensation for entries chosen (beyond TBEX fame and a link), and author retains their own copyright. One submission per person, only!

.

The “Internet” as Nobel Prize candidate

In case you haven’t heard already, in a bit of anthropomorphism that could only occur in postmodern society, the “internet” is “in the running” for a Nobel Prize.

Tom Gates’ actual email: notes from SXSW

[Tom Gates emailed this to the team this morning. Links added for reference]

Just back from SXSW and some pool party where I apparently drooled over somebody who was on The Hills (embarrassing):

1) Hal and wife = SO ANNOYING to meet somebody that compatible, nice, refreshing and wonderful. Only reminds me of what I’ve yet to have done in the world. If Kate would be a man, I might be able to start on a relationship…
2) Lindi = “How, like, do we crash this Rachel Ray party”? Then, 30 seconds later, we crashed it.
3) The Music Industry is so hilariously fucked that it is amazing to be a part of this team. Publishing may be crazed, the Travel World may be zonked but…when you spend a week with musicians sucking teets for attention, you realize just how square we all have it. I spoke with so many people who are supposed to be experts in so many fields of the music world…we have them surrounded. Everyone at Matador: PLEASE, please remember that we have it in the bag. We’re not right about everything but…eh. You guys. I’m not much for how to express the “stoke” thing but…you don’t know how lucky we are. To work for a group where everyone can voice their opinion, where genuinely important decisions can be made in three email blasts…at some point I hope to form a coherent email about all of this but this week I was again reminded by how much we are unique, not only in the travel world but in THE WORLD.
4) Matador needs to address the concept of Mancook. Paul?

Have a great week everybody.

THIS IS basically an open question for Matador community members, as well as prospective members, including bloggers, writers, filmmakers, and photographers.

Our current terms of service provide copyright protection to anyone who posts content to Matador. This basically means that once you post something at Matador it’s illegal for someone else to re-post, reprint, or in any other way re-publish your work outside of Matador (although you as the author are free to republish it anywhere you want).

This policy, however, goes against a philosophy we believe in, mainly that online publishing and the communities that support online publishing should be based on transparency and set up in such a way as to, in CC’s words, “increase sharing and improve collaboration.”

The upside to having your content available via CC is that other blogs and websites would be able to republish your work, providing you with more links and an increased footprint on the web.

Our fear however, is that writers, photographers, and others who do not want their content to be shared, would not continue to participate actively in our community.

With all of this in mind, please take a second to help us know what you think:

Thanks for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We invite you to further explain (if necessary) your ideas in the comments below.

Cover of the same travel journal I’ve had since 5/9/08. Address on front: Rauli 596 entre argomedo y santa isabela, my friend Gustavo’s old apartment in Santiago, and the first place we stayed after coming to South America almost 2 years later.

I DON’T KNOW how much of an audience there is for this, but if I could I’d just publish excerpts and pages from people’s travel notebooks here every day. On certain levels that would be my ultimate vision for the Traveler’s Notebook. I have several reasons for this, but really they’re all just extensions of a need for transparency in writing about travel and place. I feel like people’s raw journals reveal perceptions and truths that oftentimes get obscured or diluted when they go to “flesh them out” into an article. I think this has to do both with people’s expectations as far as what seems “publishable,” as well as fear about letting people know what they really think.

The Longest Running Travel Notebook I’ve Ever Had

Below are various excerpts from a journal that has particular meaning for me. I started it in May of 2008 when we lived in Seattle. The very first entry was written at Elwha River campground after the first night of camping with my daughter Layla. I later remixed it into a blog at Matador.

Since then I’ve filled other journals, but for some reason keep coming back to this one, using it for everything: cut lists for carpentry projects, telephone numbers, directions to surf spots, maps of rivers, little notes of what people say, sketches of ideas for cabins, Layla’s crayon scribbles. I let it all mix together and don’t really worry about it. This is how I work:

Colorado (War, 9,200 ft.) by the numbers

# of days spent – 30
# of days snowboarded (in July) – 3
# of hitchhikers picked up along peak to peak Hwy – 4
# of times picked up while hitchiking – 2
# of feet of elevation – 9,200
# of miles you have to hike from there to go snowboarding – 4
# of times bear got into people’s cooler’s, trucks, food – 6
# of times bear ripped lock of trailer door – 1
# of times bear ripped entire door and frame off trailer – 1
# of lag screws used to fix / reinforce -4

Notes taken in Marietta, Georgia on 8/5/09 [with Layla's crayon scribble at bottom]:

“When he was a kid his daddy and preacher just sat him down and explained things to him, and he swallowed the worm and just pulled the whole bobber underwater.”

–Will on a kid’s Christianity

“Flow Chart of Distracted [originally "Divergent" but struck through] Thinking. A chart with three columns designed to represent textually how my mom and I communicate sometimes:

[(a) dialogue, (b) internal thought, (c) internal reaction to internal thought] and the text: “We’re going to a 50th wedding anniversary tonight. This couple’s kids live all over ¹ but they’re all in town this weekend…1. they probably couldn’t stand their parents → 2. no, don’t think like that.

Map of “La Confluencia,” drawn by Omar the day before I paddled the Rio Azul for the first time.

Notes written on 10/26/09 in Florida in a moment of total depression.

A deadness now. In the words mainly. Waiting for them to come back. Flipping back through this journal and realizing how much travel makes the words flow. Something about movement, leaving and arriving. None of this sounds right though. None of it expresses exactly where ‘we’re at’ right now. Someone just commented on my last blog if i’d read the “summer of black widows.” What summer has this been? Summer of bears. Summer of Japhy’s 13th birthday. Summer of the old crews getting back together in Colorado. Now it’s fall. It’s all flowed together like always. It’s been the worst fall of my life so far. The worst fall of Lau’s life. Fall of ultrasounds with no heartbeat. Fall of miscarriages. Fall of swollen knuckles. Fall of Vodka and Cranberry. Fall of getting Mom’s Infiniti up to 50 miles an hour around a curve in the neighborhood while wife and child are screaming in the car. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. The other night it was bad but then we had nothing left and so just walked around Siesta Key all empty. The sun had gone down and for a while we lay on the beach looking at clouds in the moonlight. When you see what speed they’re moving across the sky and feel like maybe you’re moving that speed too, it brings back that travel feeling like everything is alright again for a little while.

Sketch of cabin idea when it occurred to me to have two different lofts interconnected by a bridge. Drawn in Jan 2010.

Final note: my latest entry in this journal is a cut-list of fence boards for our land in El Bolson, Patagonia.

community connection

Please check out more of Matador’s journal pages.

If you’re interested in submitting, please email scans of photos resized to 930 pixels wide to david at matadornetwork dot com.

New logo of Periodismo Humano

Cinnaminta

Julie Schwietert showed me this site last week.

Cinnaminta is, in their words:

a free online service which enables you to request your poems, original writing, celebrations, acts of remembrance, prayers, messages or anything else to be read out aloud in places around the world which are special for you but which you cannot easily visit.

What I find most relevant about this site is the seemingly random way people use the requests, not just for readings, or to yodel across a canyon, but to ask for pictures, video, and sounds from particular places. I feel like the whole concept is a new way of exploring people’s relationship to place.

Periodismo Humano

Periodsimo Humano, or “human journalism” is a soon to be launched journalism project from Javier Bauluz, the only Spanish winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The project will be a non-profit org espousing the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its only “guideline.”

Last week they tweeted “why do you want a human journalism?” and then remixed the responses into the post Why a Human Journalism? A Post Written by 200 people. Here is an excerpt:

Queremos un periodismo humano porque necesitamos volver a saber por qué quisimos ser periodistas. Porque no nos resignamos. Porque andamos jibarizados a base de siglas y datos. Porque se puede ser responsable, ético, honesto, concienciado y, además, ser feliz. Porque es bueno que se conozca el código fuente de aquellos que nos informan: sus dudas y sus miedos. Porque el periodismo, como la vida, empieza por las cosas pequeñas

Translation: “We want a human journalism because we need to go back to knowing why we wanted to be journalists. Because we didn’t stop believing. Because we don’t go shrinking everything down to dates and abbreviations. Because you can be responsible, ethical, honest, conscientious, and still be happy. Because it’s good to recognize the doubts and fears behind that which informs us.* Because journalism, like life, begins with the little things.”

*not 100% sure of that particular sentence.

This project looks like a major opportunity for Spanish speaking and bilingual journalists wishing to work with a transparent and brilliant community.

Follow them @PmasDH

8 Key Terms for Determining Legitimacy in Journalism

Sarah Menkedick sent me this article last week on determining legitimacy. I really like this post, particularly in the way it rejects the notion that “professionalism” is equivalent to “legitimacy.”

Jay Rosen writes:

These thoughts grew from a comment thread at Nieman Lab. The post in question was titled: The news Good Housekeeping seal: What makes a nonprofit outlet legit? Such things as: adherence to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, submitting entries for professional prizes and holding a press credential from a federal or state body were said to be good proxies for legitimacy in journalism. I objected to this:

I don’t think “professionalism” is a feature of legitimacy at all. We could say it’s one way of attempting to secure legitimacy, but the equation: professional news person = legitimate provider of news does not work.

Rosen then gave his 8 key terms, beginning with veracity:

I’d start with the will to veracity, also known as truthtelling. Truthtelling even when it hurts or causes problems for your friends. Real journalists tell us what happened because it actually happened that way, and not some other way. All forms of legitimacy derive from this one.

Follow Jay Rosen: @jayrosen_nyu

National Day of Unplugging

Finally, I saw the national day of unplugging is “scheduled” for later this week. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate.

Community Connection

Please send media / links to david at matadornetwork.com

IT’S BEEN a while since I posted anything “from the editor,” and just wanted to check in for a minute with our readers.

First up, a recent stoke: The Notebook was recently recognized (along with BNT) at Blogs.com as one of 10 Great Travel Writing Blogs.

Next, a quick survey. We have a bunch of things planned here over the next few months, some of which tie into the upcoming launch of MatadorU’s Travel Photography Curriculum, and others that have to do with travel narratives.

In the meantime, I wanted to ask:

Image: RabiD Son

THE ORIGIN of this post began as a comment left at an earlier article, 3 Writing Styles that Kill Your Authenticity .

Basically I was ranting against marketing style language “constructions” as things that (a) obscured the truth, and (b) just “sucked” stylistically, but were nevertheless (c) pervasive, probably as a result of people’s continuous absorption of marketing and advertising via television, radio, computer, movies.

One important point I didn’t make in that article is that the “writing styles” I mentioned are also examples of fallacious arguments, something that writers often miss because many of us (myself included) have never studied rhetoric or logic in school.

Wikipedia’s definition of logical fallacy: writing that

“exploits emotional triggers or takes advantage of social relationships between people.”

So back to the article: one of the constructions that “killed” “authenticity” (using the word “killed,” at least without scare-quotes, is itself a bit fallacious) was the rhetorical question.

I wrote:

.. the narrator asks him or herself a question:

How many people wouldn’t want to live next to a beach like this?

[This] fails because it tries to force the reader into feeling a certain way about the story or question rather than just asking the question or telling the story and letting the reader think / feel for herself.

Then one commenter wrote the following:

#3 sounds a lot like a rhetorical question

Is that really such a writing disaster? I’d like to read more thoughts on this.

I mean, who doesn’t like a rhetorical question?

I wrote back:

Thanks for your question.

Yes, it is essentially a rhetorical question. And the last sentence of your comment illustrates the point exactly.

“I mean, who doesn’t like a rhetorical question?”

Rhetorical questions are constructed in such a way as to point the reader towards a particular answer or response.

For example, the way your sentence above is written implies (a) that you as its author ’speak’ for other people, (b) that this group of people ‘believes’ rhetorical questions are ‘likable’ and (c) this group is the majority–that it’s somehow out of the ordinary to ‘not like’ a rhetorical question.

But you could’ve just as easily written the sentence to work the other way, for example:

“Who hasn’t read enough meaningless rhetorical questions?”

In this case, the sentence is using the same construction, only trying to lead the reader in the opposite direction–to imply that rhetorical questions are somehow ‘not likable.’

Rhetorical questions are one of the classic examples of fallacious arguments or “logical fallacies.”

Today I was reading a recent article at WordHum which seems so full of logical fallacies I remembered this comment and decided to bring up the topic again.

First off, here’s a free resource outlining 89 fallacious arguments.

Now I want to go through several of the statements in the recent WordHum piece, showing how they are examples of logical fallacies.

1. “I doubt if the business, housed in an elegant 16th-century building, could last a month without us. “

This is a form of confusing correlation and causation. Confusing correlations and causation works look this. A person says “1. A occurs in correlation with B., 2. Therefore, A causes B.” This isn’t necessarily true however.

In “all fairness, ” the author’s construction “I doubt if” does mitigate the fallacy somewhat; he’s not “passing it off” as a pure statement of “fact” however, it still seems to be “exploit[ing] emotional triggers or tak[ing] advantage of social relationships between people.”

How could you write that statement non-fallaciously?

“I don’t think they could last a month without us. ”

2. “You know who I mean. Yes, you who wouldn’t be caught dead at Disney World. Or on a Caribbean cruise. Yes, you with the Moleskine notebook and sourpuss expression. You know who you are.”

This is a form of ad hominem known as as hominem abusive. The author is attempting to characterize certain people, however these characterizations are completely irrelevant to the “logic” of his argument. Just because someone has a certain expression or writes in a certain notebook has nothing to do with their “position” on tourism.

How to write that statement non-fallaciously:

I’m not sure if it’s possible.

3. “We tourists provide jobs and, more than that, keep centuries-old traditions alive.”

This is an example of casual reductionism, in which something that is very complex (in this case, the effects of travel on a country’s economy and culture) is reduced to one simple cause / effect relationship.

How to write this non-fallaciously:

“One potential benefit of tourism is helping to ‘fuel’ local tourist economies.”

4. “The moment we step foot in a foreign land we change it irrevocably. We tread heavily, whether we’re wearing sneakers or Birkenstocks. Why not do some good while we’re treading?”

This is an example of two different logical fallacies. The first is Reductive Oversimplification. Is “The moment we step foot in a foreign land we change it irrevocably,” true in all cases? Not necessarily, but it is “passed off” here as truth. Thus it’s fallacious.

The second fallacy is the one I mentioned in the introduction, the fallacy of a rhetorical question. The construction of the question leads you to believe that the argument of “being a tourist” is somehow “doing good.”

There’s probably some other fallacy in there too–something about the relationship set up between the first fallacy (oversimplification) and the second. But I’m not 100% sure.

How to write this non-fallaciously:

“I believe the moment I step into another country I change it irrevocably. ”

“5. The idea is simple: A culture is worth more alive than dead. “

This is the “premise” of the entire story, and the reason why it’s “fundamentally flawed.” This statement is an example of a bad analogy. The author is declaring “culture” analogous with “commodity.”

How to write this non-fallaciously:

attempt 1:

In my albeit conflating view of culture and economics, I believe that preserving certain tourist elements provides financial incentives to local economies greater than the potentially damaging effects vis-a-vis locals’ sense of “decaying morale” as parts of their cultural heritage are subsidized and possibly transformed into a spectacle via the elements’ continued existence as living artifacts, many of which appear to have become jokes among the local people, both in and of themselves, and also extrinsically, in the way they provide entertainment, especially during the high season when large numbers of tourists “flood” the artifacts leading to “blowout proportions” of people behaving in ways that appear to be delusions of massive beneficence and / or “enlightenment.”

I’m also aware that this piece is not FFF (free from fallacy), as, rereading it now, I’m detecting possible prestigious jargon and also the “sensation” that the whole thing may be an argument by gibberish.

Still, it seems truer to me than “a culture is worth more alive than dead.”

Community Connection

Please read Sarah Menkedick’s rebuttal of the piece at WorldHum.

Also, BNT has published two pieces on logical fallacies, The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide to Arguing with Logic, and The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide to Informal Fallacies.

Getsome.

Image: Pedro Simoes7

Crowdsourcing

Last Friday I had an interesting conversation via Twitter with Jeff Howe.

Jeff is a writer at Wired Magazine and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He coined the term “crowdsourcing,” and wrote a book on the subject last year.

As our team is (a) constantly using this term in our back-end emails, and (b) continuously evolving the way we produce certain kinds of content via crowdsourced information, I’ve really enjoyed getting into Jeff’s blog / perceptions of media / technology. I found this article on The Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism really relevant to Matador, and particular, MatadorU.

I think the crowd make excellent sources and additional sets of eyes and ears, but I believe the future lies in carefully cultivated partnerships between professionals and their audiences. Examples: I’m a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and their TPMMuckraker project, am bullish on my colleague David Cohn’s crowdfunded journalism site, Spot.Us. Both let professionals work the phones and write the copy, but encourage the crowd to do what it does best (unearthing data and marshaling support for underreported stories, respectively)

For some reason I’m unable to fully decide on a position re: “professionals vs. citizens” when it comes to travel writing. Perhaps this is because to me travel writing is more a form of literary expression than a journalistic “endeavor.”

Spot-Us expanding

Last month I reported on the “community funded reporting” project called Spot.us. I was stoked to find this interview with founder David Cohn where he lays out plans to expand Spot.Us to several more cities in the US.

Media as a public subsidy

Another response to the changing economic model for journalism: declaring it a “public good” and subsidizing it by the government. This idea is the basis of a new book by University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney and The Nation correspondent John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

For more information, please read the recent interview with Nichols and McCheney at Democracy Now, part of which is excerpted below:

Robert McChesney:

we think we’re in a moment of crisis right now for journalism, not just the sort of the long-term crisis we often talk about and you chronicle on this program, but really a freefall collapse in which, in the next few years, the decisions we make will determine whether we even have journalism as it’s been known traditionally.

The business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this country is disintegrating. There will be some advertising, but much less. There will be some circulation revenues, but much less. And if we’re going to have journalism in this country, it’s going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector.

And we argue in the book, as you said, that we actually have a very rich tradition of this. The first hundred years of American history, the founders did not assume the market would give us journalism. There was no such assumption at all. They understood it was the first duty of a democratic state to see that a vibrant, independent, uncensored Fourth Estate exist.

Public Domain Manifesto

From the Public Domain Manifesto:

After decades of measures that have drastically reduced the public domain, typically by extending the terms of protection, it is time to strongly reaffirm how much our societies and economies rely on a vibrant and ever expanding public domain. The role of the public domain, in fact, already crucial in the past, it is even more important today, as the Internet and digital technologies enable us to access, use and re-distribute culture with an ease and a power unforeseeable even just a generation ago. The Public Domain Manifesto aims at reminding citizens and policy-makers of a common wealth that, since it belongs to all, it is often defended by no-one. In a time where we for the first time in history have the tools to enable direct access to most of our shared culture and knowledge it is important that policy makers and citizens strengthen the legal concept that enables free and unrestricted access and reuse.

In a previous mashup I linked to Edge which has interesting essays on the subject of public domain and the “threats of cloud capitalism.”

Community Connection

Please share your thoughts about the future of journalism in the comments below.

Who do you talk to on press trips? Photo: Sergio

MOST press trips are inherently tweaked.

For example, check out the following sentences in a press trip alert I received this morning:

“. . . there is some scope for sponsored participation in our expeditions in conjunction with corporate sponsors, usually if a commission in a well-known medium has been obtained and the sponsor can be given exposure. In that case the airfare, all meals, activities, lodging, and in country transportation are likely to be included. “

I interpret that as meaning “if your shit is big-time enough to adequately pimp us / our sponsors, we’ll pay for you to come.”

Which is the essence of most press trips.

And that’s fine. Any worrying about, romanticizing, or deluding yourself in any way about press trips is a total waste of time. The reality is that they can be positive or negative experiences, depending mostly on your ability to maintain your focus and find a good story.

With that in mind, I wanted to publish an email exchange from last week. This was from an editor in the middle of a press trip, and was answered by Matador CEO Ross Borden. More than anything, it shows the focus necessary when dealing with hosts and “handlers,” especially when you know you have a potentially good story:

turkey project was WEIRD today. an entire day of corporate sales shit and nada on the eco-angle – just men in suits sporting sinister black moustaches and loose-toothed smiles. if you don’t mind i’d like to sack all that crap and interview ken yeong, the malaysian eco-architect don whose vision this is, and whose words would surely be more suited to CHANGE than those of the investment people.

And the response:

dude, TAKE CONTROL from your host. In my experience, a good press trip usually involves strong arming your handler into allowing you to do what you actually want to do / write about / photograph. even if the person is afraid of losing their job over it, calmly explain that you’re going to scrap the rest of ‘today’s itinerary’, and wander around the city / markets snapping sick photos for a photo essay for MatadorTrips.com, and while you’re doing that, they should set up an interview with homeboy.

seriously, drop the hammer and don’t take no for an answer.

Community Connection

Most of us at Matador have been on multiple press trips. We teach how to apply for them at the U. And over the past couple years we’ve published various articles about them, everything from tips on how to “survive” your first press trip, to the way that certain publications’ policies regarding press trips tends to undermine honesty and transparency in journalism.

What experience have you had with press trips? How have you dealt with overbearing hosts?

Please share your comments with us below.

Image: | spoon |

THIS WEEKEND in a hostel in Futalefu, Chile I found one of my all-time favorite books, Cathedral, by Raymond Carver.

I’ve read the stories in this book probably half a dozen times each and still keep finding new layers.

Yesterday I noticed this passage in the story “Careful.”

As a quick set-up: the protagonist Lloyd is separated from his wife Inez, and has moved into a cheap attic apartment where he lives by himself and tries to deal with his drinking problem. After not having seen each other for a long time, Inez comes to visit.

“Hi, Lloyd,” Inez said. She didn’t smile. She stood in the doorway in a bright spring outfit. He hadn’t seen the outfit before. She was holding a canvas handbag that had sunflowers stitched onto its sides. He hadn’t seen the handbag either.”

As I read and then reread this passage I realized something about the way I usually write descriptions and the way most other writers write descriptions, and how this description of Inez was different: it reveals not only what the narrator saw but how he saw it.

Remember that he hasn’t seen his wife in a long time. Then notice the order of what he sees: (a) her face [and the fact she wasn't smiling], (b) her outfit, [noting that it's an outfit he hadn't seen before], and then (c) a new handbag.

Most writers seem to describe scenes and people in a way that seems just that–descriptions. For example, they might describe the scene listed above as: “She stood in the doorway wearing a spring dress and holding a handbag. She wasn’t smiling.”

There’s nothing “wrong” with that description, but it doesn’t convey much about the way the narrator sees this character. It says, essentially, that he sees her as just a woman standing in the doorway without smiling.

Compare this with all the unstated emotions conveyed through the way Carver ordered his descriptions of Inez. The first thing he notices: “She wasn’t smiling.” This implies that he may have hoped she would be smiling, or perhaps he’s simply resigned that she isn’t happy to see him. However you interpret it, what matters is that the first thing he noticed was her face.

After that, “she stood in the doorway.” She doesn’t just walk in. This implies various things about where they are in their relationship. He scans her body, notices that she’s wearing something new. Then his eye goes to her bag and he notices that’s new too. All of this continues to add a sense of distance between them. They’re no longer sharing the same experiences.

As I wrote last month about how Raymond Carver’s work wasn’t so much an “expression” but something remixed over and over with editor Gordon Lish until every detail was just right: there’s nothing accidental about any of these lines or how they’re ordered. Each one is constructed in a way that gives the maximum amount of information about who the characters are, what the relationship is between them, and how they see the world.

No matter what kind of writing you’re doing, whether it’s travel narratives or straight up journalism, learning how to describe beyond what just you can “see” (such as the relationships between characters), is another way to progress as a writer.

Community Connection

Sometimes even before writing it helps just to work on your observation skills.

THE IDEA for this post came from a question at Matador’s forums earlier this week. A discussion was raised about how to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing content.

Below are a couple resources that show you how to do this, and then after that is a bit more on why I think this is worth doing. Earlier this year I wrote a very general overview on Which Blogging Platform is Best for Writers , and I still think it’s valid, however, after looking at a few more things about SEO and “ranking” (which I’ll explain below), I’ve changed my mind somewhat about Blogger.

How to switch

WordPress has an easy to follow page that explains how to import content from Blogger (or other platforms) to WP.

Or you can watch this video:

@Sosauce

@cerusso

@familyonbikes

@Shurleyhall

@joanna_haugen

@karenbryan

@20stravel

@evenyc

@dahveed_miller

@waywardlife

Matador Tweeps

Follow the Matador Staff on Twitter! @rossborden, @LolaAkinmade, @dahveed_miller ,@tcpatterson, @ianmack, @livingholistic, @waywardlife, @collazoprojects, @joanna_haugen, @vagab0nderz, @sarahmenkedick, @halamen, @joshywashington, @thefutureisred, @candicewalsh, @andrewghayes

Community Connection

Feel like you want to have your face and twittering featured here sometime in the future?

RT a message to @matadornetwork

Photo: ekai

IT’S BEEN hard getting books in Patagonia. English selections in local bookstores are weak (although I did find 5 Major Plays by Chekhov).

Over the past month though I’ve made this progression. I’ve ‘crossed a line.’

Before I never used to take the computer into bed. Something about working on that mofo all day and then bringing it into bed and falling asleep with it on your chest just seems anti-life or something.

But whatever. I need to read to fall asleep. I’ve gotten used to it now. It works pretty much the same as paper.

Once you ‘get here’ it opens up everything as far as reading. (I realize of course everyone with a kindle or ipad or whatever is ‘already here’ but I just can’t afford and don’t want to buy more shit.)

ReadPrint

The first real site I’ve gotten to love is ReadPrint.com. It’s free and has a good layout and plenty of Dostoevsky and Joyce and Chekhov and Cather and most of the classics.

The one catch is that they don’t have any books you’d consider modern classics (Camus, Sartre, Carver, or even Baudelaire). It’s all from 100 years ago or more.

Still, there are quotes from nearly every major author you can think of, past and present. In that way it’s a major resource.

52 Stories

I’ve been getting into fiftytwostories. It’s a site from Harper Perennial that publishes one free story each week. I was led to this site because they published the story “Tennessee” from Justin Taylor’s new book Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever.

Fiction and Nonfiction

I realize most of the reading I’ve listed so far is fiction. There’s a reason for this: I like most fiction better than I do most nonfiction.

What I seem to be attracted to most of all though is work that’s at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction. Most of Hunter S. Thompson’s books, for example. Kerouac. Bukowski.

A recent article at Utne talks about how this intersection of fiction and nonfiction is progressing, citing Dave Eggers and others. A good read.

Musician’s Notebooks

Like poetry, personal journals seem to be outside of fiction and nonfiction somehow. Sometimes I feel like writing never intended for publication is more transparent than anything else.

Anyway, I found these ‘notebook pages’ from musicians at Largehearted Boy. Some interesting stuff so far; I liked the one from Julian Koster of the Music Tapes.

Only thing is, they seem to read as if they were intended for publication–more like essays than actual journal pages.

2 Tools for Writers / Bloggers

I installed and started using apture on my blog. It’s sweet. Basically any word(s) you want to link to–you plug that into a quick search–and then apture automatically searches dozens of different sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and others for relevant links which you can either choose to link to or embed in your post. What’s really cool though is that even if you just link them, the link comes up in a mini-preview screen so that the reader doesn’t actually leave your blog. For an example, check my blog here and then click on any of the links. Really simple.

Another tool that I’m just starting to use is compfight. It’s basically a faster way to swoop Creative Commons images than going through Flickr or GoogleCommons. I used it to get the feature image for this post.

Using Where You Live to Advance Your Writing Career

Julie Schwietert wrote a really transparent piece about how where you live as the starting point for your writing. Great advice in there.

Have a great week everyone, and please hit me up with any Monday Mashup links or sites you’re feeling and which might be worth recommending to other travelers, writers, and bloggers. Bigup.

Image: carrotcreative

@Fictonaut

Online literary community for “adventurous readers & writers.” Fictionaut editors tweet dozens of times a day on various stories, interviews, plus publishing and job opportunities.

@SpotUS

Spot.Us is a nonprofit organization supporting independent journalists in the Bay Area and Los Angeles through community funded reporting.

@mediabistro

Key resource for writer, journalists, and new media professionals.

@htmlgiant

HTML GIANT tweets mostly bigs up their own stories but definitely check them out.

@sixsentences

6S is a friendly and supportive community for writers based around a 6-sentence form. Occasional tweets on writing opportunities and links to good interviews / articles.

@matadornetwork

For those unfamiliar with us, Matador is the most-read independent travel publication on the web. We have a worldwide community of travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers.

Community Connection

What writing communities do you participate in or follow via Twitter?

Matadorian Beija-Flor with street kids in Brazil. There are all different kinds of travel.

FOR ME the relevant question is never why but when, followed closely by where.

You think about why you do something, maybe write that reason down, but then when you look at it a year later–or maybe 5 years later-at some point you’re going to change the way you feel about it. There was the “why” you did it then and the “why” you’d do it (or not do it) now.

Your answer to the question why is like a little bookmark of the way you thought and felt about something at a specific moment in your life. And in some ways this seems more important than the actual answer itself.

This is my thinking anyway after spending a while collecting various Matadorians’ answers to the question “Why do you travel?” Some of the answers seem ‘wise’ or ‘earnest’ but mainly they just make me stoked on the people who said them.

Beija-Flor

As the world is my home, I need to feel at home.

Mike Lynch

To keep away from home.

SweeneySays

Because I feel most at home when I am in motion.

Matt Scott

There just too much great stuff to see

Beer and Beans

To see the way light falls in other parts of the world.

Jess Vulcan

Because I don’t like owning silverware.

Nancy Harder

Because I truly believe that travel is art. We have the ability to create masterpieces with our experiences.

Sarah Menkedick

To avoid falling into patterns and only seeing the obvious things from an ingrained personal perspective.

A Literal Girl

To try to understand how we experience place.

Julie Schwietert

To know myself better and to know the world better.

Candice Walsh

To learn, to explore, to meet new people, to find what the hell I’m looking for.

Neha

To look for all those stories waiting to be found.

LeighShulman

It keeps me from taking things for granted.

Gregory Hubbs

To learn from other human beings and experience the world in new ways.

Lola Akinmade

To be a cultural ambassador as well as soak up the wisdom of other cultures.

Hal Amen

I’m not sure…but I can’t stop!

Community Connection

Why do you travel? Please share your answer with us in the comments below.

Mashup: Cambodia 4 kids

Alexa Toolbar

For the past couple months I’ve had the Alexa toolbar installed on my computer. On one level it’s a powerful tool for anyone looking to get ad revenue for their blogs or who is networking via social media to expand their audience.

That said, the Alexa toolbar can fundamentally change the way you work on the internet and perhaps even the way you ‘deal’ with people. Basically, the toolbar shows a numerical ranking of every page you visit. It’s all based on traffic. Google is #1. Your brother’s law office website is #23,308,088.

Suddenly you start feeling sorry for people’s blogs. You visit a page like the American Poetry Review and wonder how your relatively crappy blog has a higher rank.

As an example of the effect of Alexa rankings, I’m going to add today’s Alexa rank to the rest of the items listed in this article.

Trueslant

Alexa Rank: #12,219

Trueslant is a privately held company funded by Forbes Media. They are, in their own words:

“an original content news network tailored to both the “Entrepreneurial Journalist” and marketers who want a more effective way to engage with digital audiences. Contributors, consumers and marketers each have a voice on True/Slant.

True/Slant is the digital home for the “Entrepreneurial Journalist.” Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm).

Consumers have direct access to contributors they respect and follow. By commenting with contributors and each other, they create an authentic and ongoing dialogue around the news.”

I feel slightly alienated at being categorized directly as a consumer although perhaps I should respect the transparent way the editors / publishers are describing their target audience and accept that the word “reader” is becoming more euphemistic than anything else.

This said, I like the structure of trueslant. It’s a lot like Matador in the sense of community building. I see trueslant as a potential option for many of our contributors looking to connect with networks of political writers.

ommwriter

Alexa Rank: #59,491

Last monday I talked about listening to music while writing. Afterward, I thought more about the idea of distractedness and its effect on how I work. I found this writing software OmmWriter. It’s basically a simple text editor with a very clean and minimalist interface designed to mimic the “close relationship of pen and paper.”

The Nervous Breakdown

Alexa Rank: #330,985

Following up on a story on 2 Transparent Responses to Current Economic ‘Climate’ for Writers, I found this “self-interview” by Stephen Elliot on his D.I.Y. booktour.

My favorite “question” was this:

So you didn’t hook up?

I made out with a woman in Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t generally hook up with people when I first meet them. And also, when you’re on the road, I don’t know, it’s kind of awkward. What I long for when I travel isn’t sex, it’s intimacy. I don’t know if you can have intimacy with someone you just met. Why are we talking about this?

I like the Nervous Breakdown. They seem transparent. They have a section on “Flash Nonfiction” with writing that focuses sometimes on travel and place.

Pamela

Alexa Rank: #65, 956

My original system for recording phone interviews was putting calls on speakerphone and then recording them on a digital voice recorder. It sucked. Lately, I’ve been using Skype more and more, and just saw Pamela, an add-on for Skype that enables you to record calls as audio or video files. I can’t imagine a more useful tool for journalists, travel writers, and filmmakers. Download is free is you get up to 15 minutes of recording.

Edge

Alexa Rank: #50,230

Edge is good for reading when you start to have thoughts like “Damn, we’re all just Google’s ‘bitches’.” With all the positive effects that new media and the internet have created (such as being able to make a living typing this on a windy morning in Patagonia), we’re often so ‘heads-down’ in it that it’s hard (read: scary) to stop and question its trajectory vis a vis “cloud capitalism.”

From the Edge:

..A third threat comes from the new media moguls, the cloud capitalists: Facebook, Apple, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, who will seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.

These cloud capitalists are the new powers behind global cultural relations. Their rise has sparked an increasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard led by Rupert Murdoch. This battle between old and new media powers however has distracted attention from the question of how these companies will organise cloud culture on our behalf. Elements of their business models resemble traditional public services: Google’s work with a consortium of libraries around the world to digitise books that are out of copyright; ITunes U provides thousands of models of course material for free. However these companies are also businesses: they will want to organise the cloud to make money. By the end of the decade Google will have unprecedented control over literary culture, past, present and future.

Community Connection

Are you reading something, or have recently discovered something that might be useful to other writers, travelers, or new media professionals? Please send it to david [at] matadornetwork[dot]com with “Monday Mashup” in the subject line.

Photo: Very Quiet

WHILE I’M TRAVELING I can listen to any kind of music and still write.

When I lived in Buenos Aires for example, I used to write in buses playing all different music. 80s Depeche Mode type of stuff to Rock Nacional to cumbia. It didn’t matter. I could keep my head down and write.

But for some reason when I’m at home writing it always matters. It completely matters. When I’m writing at home certain music just seems to shut down my concentration. Unfortunately I can’t reduce it to simple categories like “music without lyrics” or even specific genres like “breaks” because there’s always exceptions of what’s “allowable,” even within sub-genres.

For example, I can write while listening to certain reggae music, say raggamuffin-sounding stuff by Damien Marley, but it can’t be any of the pre Jam Rock-era Damien Marley. If not I’ll end up thinking something like “damn those cheesy synth tones; what were the producers thinking?” and the flow is broken.

In general though what seems to work is music that either keeps “pushing forward” (like straight-up house or drum and bass ) or sort of “billows out” like a lot of Charles Mingus tunes or most dub (Lee Perry, King Tubby) as well as most ambient. If something can be characterized as “ultra-smooth” it probably works. Jobim, for example. Most Bosa Nova.

But then I can’t listen to most funk (which is the root of “pushing forward”) unless it’s like an instrumental track from the JB’s. In a similar way I can’t listen to anything “classic” from high-school / college days such as Blood Sugar Sex Magic-era Chili Peppers or Neutral Milk Hotel or Pixies, Radiohead, Sublime, or R.E.M.

Most hip hop doesn’t work either. I end up trying to “get on the mic” or something, deconstructing the lyrics and typing in the same bpm as the track.

And there are certain kinds of music that never work. Any “high lonesome sound” bluegrass like the Stanley Brothers. Anything I first heard as a little kid from dad’s record collection like Hank Williams. Anything by Billie Holliday or Edith Piaf or Patsy Cline.

Finally, there’s the “x-factor,” which overrides everything.This is when I’m in that mode where I don’t really care about what I’m writing but the words just come out. Which ties back in to my original observation–that when I’m traveling it doesn’t matter what music is playing, I just write.

Something about this seems important. It seems like a transparent action versus a form of OD’ing on self-consciousness. For example, yesterday we had a great email thread about a producer in Buenos Aires who needed connections. This led to me passing along links about digital cumba collective Zizek and then, as I kept working, listening to one of their recent mixtapes. It was all a flow that felt really spontaneous and real.

But then I started writing some paragraphs for a book proposal, and the cumbia was just shutting me down. I started feeling like what I was writing was less like a natural flow / creation and something I was totally forcing. I took off my headphones and finished it with no music.

These are the kind of things I think about. I think about how I write and how different people write. Not just the writing itself but the way we do it. I want to know, for example, what Jon Favreau (27 yr. old speechwriter for Obama) listens to (if anything) when he writes President Obama’s speeches. Could he have, for example, composed certain emotive parts of the President’s Inaugural address while listening to GirlTalk or perhaps Li’l Wayne?

I’m not sure I have any real conclusions here. It always seems to come down to just you and the words and however you can get them down. I feel like I need to follow up on this next week with more data and thought. So let’s end it with you:

Community Connection

Thanks for voting in the poll and leaving your favorite music to write to (or what makes it harder) in the comments below. ]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-on-writing/what-music-do-you-listen-to-when-you-write-poll/feed/ 36 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/writing-support/how-to-craft-a-writing-resume/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/writing-support/how-to-craft-a-writing-resume/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:20:20 +0000 David Miller http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=7427 For writers, especially beginning writers without a long publication record, putting together a CV or resume for a writing job can seem tricky and perhaps depressing. Here’s how to make yourself look good.

Image: juhansonin

EARLIER THIS WEEK I needed to put together either a resume or CV (Curriculum Vitae) for review by a university.

I hadn’t updated my resume in at least 6 years and basically created a new one. Perhaps because I wasn’t under pressure of having to use this for getting a job, I found the process of creating it strangely gratifying. It almost seemed like editing a story.

Here were some things I learned:

1.Utilize a CV format instead of a resume.

The standard resume format forces you to begin with your employment or professional history, starting with the last thing you did. I could never keep track of the exact start / finish dates of all the different gigs I had. And I always hated how it felt like I needed to ‘cover’ various gaps of time where I was basically traveling or surfing or whatever.

Think about it from the point of view of the person reading the resume. This is the first thing they come to after your name and personal info: the last thing you did was work for 6 months as a parking lot attendant at a large corporate ski resort where your “ending salary” was $8.75.

Perhaps even worse is beginning with an “objective statement” explicating how you’re the “perfect candidate” because of cliches x, y, and z.

The CV format saves you from all of this because you start with your academic history. At least the first thing the person reads is that you graduated from high school (hopefully), college (better), and that you majored in something that is either relevant to what you’re applying for, or is something you can make seem relevant via the way you present your work experience.

2. Utilize a “Summary of Professional Experience” written in a smooth, almost narrative style.

After listing your academic history, go on to professional experience, but instead of bullet points and dates, write it all out like a story. Show the person reading it that you have skills to put sentences and paragraphs together. A summary also gives you a transparent way of ‘covering’ gaps in employment in a way that seems positive. Take this paragraph from my CV:

After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1995 I spent 5 months hiking the Appalachian trail, then returned to Athens, Georgia where I was hired by the Athens Montessori School as a middle school teacher. I helped innovate an experiential education curriculum for adolescents based on teambuilding and utilizing travel and “place” as springboards for learning. I resigned my full-time teaching position in the summer of 1999 (due to travel), but continued to work as a trip leader and teambuilding facilitator for both the Athens Montessori School and High Meadows School and Camp until relocating to Colorado in 2002.

Notice how there are essentially three years’ worth of employment that are ’skipped over’? It’s not that I wasn’t working; it’s just that I kept traveling and doing various gigs (read: parking lot attendant) that I didn’t want to mention.This isn’t necessarily hiding anything, it’s just that these things aren’t directly relevant to my experience as a writer or educator.

3. Continuously edit each sentence until it contains only what you did and nothing more.

Take another paragraph from my professional experience summary:

In the winter of 2006 I began contributing articles to the newly-founded Matador Travel Network, and later that Spring was hired as editor. Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.

In the first draft of this paragraph I’d written “Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate what has become known as a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.”

Anything that inserts something essentially subjective or just straight up unnecessary like “what has become known as” is anti-flow. Trying to make something ’sound’ a certain way always comes out sounding false. Just state what you did or are doing, whatever it is.

4. Leave out jobs and experiences that are irrelevant to your writing goals or future career.

Take this paragraph from my summary:

In the fall of 2002 I was hired by Wild Bear Center in Nederland, Colorado as an environmental educator and teambuilding facilitator. At this time I also began working as a freelance writer, contributing to alternative weeklies such as the Flagpole as well as the regional western publication Mountain Gazette. I was hired as a reporter and columnist by the local Nederland paper, The Mountain-Ear in Fall of 2003, and in the Spring of 2004 I also became a staff writer for the Boulder Weekly.

The main things I’m trying to express in this CV are that (a) I have numerous skills and experiences as a writer and (b) I have numerous skills as an educator that tie into the way I write and work with writing students.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter that also in the during the time outlined above I also worked in construction. Or, if I was going for a different kind of job, lets say a technical writer, I would consider putting this information in.

5. Include only your most relevant publications and awards.

After the summary of your professional history, list any relevant publications. You don’t want to fill pages’ worth of urls and titles, only put the best ones up there. Afterwards (or before) add a quick note stating that you have a blog and that your archives can be accessed there.

Here’s how I started my Publications section:

Publication Credits

Matador:

Note: Because I write and publish on a daily basis at Matador, I’ve listed only a selection of work. For a more complete listing, please visit my author profile at the Traveler’s Notebook as well as my author page at Matador.

Notes on Celebrating New Year’s with Los Colque narrative nonfiction on life and culture in Patagonia

Notes on 2 Transparent Responses to Current Economic Climate for Writers  analysis of writers’ innovations in new media and community building

Writing by Remixing: Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver literary criticism and analysis of Gordon Lish’s edits of Raymond Carver’s story “Beginners”

[etc.]

Recent print and online publications outside of Matador:

Fodor’s Patagonia (Random House, 2009) Contributed chapter on Atlantic Patagonia.

Poem in Drash literary magazine, Summer 2009

[etc.]

Special Archived Selections outside of Matador:

“How to Rebuild a Paddle” Short Story for Mountain Gazette Fall 2006

Note that it isn’t necessary to link to every single piece. All that matters is that the CV transmits a sense of what you’ve done as a writer.

5. Try to end on something strong.

Depending on if you’ve won awards or not, you can choose to end your CV either with an awards section or a section on “Ongoing Projects.” Any awards you’ve won can leave whoever’s reading your CV with a positive impression of you. Don’t forget that college grants and scholarships can all be considered awards. Here was some of mine:

Study Grant awarded by Mountain Forum for Peace in Winter of 2005 to fund travels / research in Argentina for profiling the Madres of Plaza del Mayo.

“Three Fires” winner of the 1000 words contest in Mountain Gazette, November 2003

If you don’t have anything to put up as an award (or you have something, but you don’t want to end on that ‘note’), then close your CV with your current projects, whether they be blogs or any other major writing projects.

Quick Recap:

1. Start with your Name, Address, Phone / Fax / Skype, and email, each piece of info given its own line, centered and doublespaced. After this section, everything else is left-justified.

2. Educational History

3. Summary of Professional Experience

4. Publication Credits

5. Awards

6. Ongoing Projects

Community Connection

We’ve compiled lots of our notes on writing in a single page that covers everything from crafting narrative scenes to writing bilingual dialogue.

Also, be sure to visit NomadicMatt’s classic piece How to Make Travel Look Good on a Resume.

Image: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

1. Jason Paul living off Craigslist

Jason Paul has started living off Craigslist. In his own words:

… Jason Paul, a recent graduate from American University attempted, like many from the 2009 class, to secure a job. After applying for over 180 journalism jobs in over 35 states, Jason decided to pursue a blog/book idea of his own.

Right now, unless he is sleeping, Jason is doing something related to Craigslist.org. For those of you who do not know what Craigslist is, it is basically a classifieds page from the newspaper. The site is in 570 cities in 50 countries and allows users to post ads, with the exception of a few categories, for free.

Essentially, Jason is living off Craigslist.

This means food, housing, jobs, entertainment, friends and anything else you can possibly imagine.

So far he has traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, found housing, found a job and is beginning to make friends.

Jason blogs about everything he does in a transparent way. He includes the texts of emails within his blog posts. He blogs about training to work at Denny’s. He blogs about living in a basement.

The concept of livingcraigslist reminds me of thru-you in that Jason Paul is able to construct his artistic ‘product’ based strictly on different elements of social media and online communities.

2. Stephen Elliot Do It Yourself Book Tour

Stephen Elliot is the author of The Adderall Diaries, and half a dozen other books. In recent NYT essay, he explains how, instead of an underfunded, depressing, cheap hotel room-style book tour to “large coastal cities,” he put together a DIY book tour that took place at people’s houses.

He explains:

Before my book came out, I had set up a lending library allowing anyone to receive a free review copy on the condition they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense. (Now that a majority of reviews are appearing on blogs and in Facebook notes, everyone is a reviewer.) I asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise 20 attendees. I would sleep on their couch. My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself.

What is most interesting to me about this is the effect the readings had. As venues were not bookstores but people’s homes, and audiences were not typical literary crowds but just friends of whichever reader hosted the event, the readings became long and intimate discussions. Stephen found that “In a weird way the readings began to feel like an extension of the book.”

Notes

1. Both writers / bloggers are using the internet to coordinate their ‘offline’ life, whether it’s promoting / organizing a book tour (S.Elliot) or ‘everything’ (J. Paul).

2. Jason Paul is essentially transforming his offline life into his online ‘art’.

3. The way they are leveraging their work on and offline represents an ethic of transparency.

4. Both writers’ responses facilitate the building of community both on and offline in ways that wouldn’t have happend had they followed traditional paths.

Community Connection

What other transparent responses to market pressures on writers and journalists have you heard about or experienced? Please share in the comments below.

Image: HikingArtist.com

AT MATADOR we usually avoid bigging ourselves up too much, but there have been some hardworking ninjas behind the scenes creating some great resources for writers and bloggers. I wanted to share some of the following:

How to Write

This page includes everything from how to write narrative essays using scenes to techniques for writing bilingual dialogue.

There are also lots of resources as far as magazines and websites you should know about.

Blogging Tips

Blogging tips is probably our fastest growing section of articles. There are resources here that can take you step by step through how to start a WordPress blog and finding a good WordPress theme.

If you’re already have a blog, this page also has good info on how to deal with content scraping and what to do with out of control comments.

Social Media

This page still has a lot more to add, but there are some really good resources here already on things like how to promote your photography online and utilizing retweets to become a twitter ninja..

Additional Resources

I also wanted to mention just a few of the other resources and communities outside of Matador that I visit at least on a semi-regular basis:

*New Pages – comprehensive listing of calls for submissions and literary magazines
*Practicing Writer – blog and site with focus on academic opportunities / discussions, and good market resources as well as interviews. Good newsletter.
*Brevity – blog on ‘creative nonfiction’, has good commentary, essays and news in the nonfiction ‘world’.

Community Connection

These are some of the resources out there for writers. What other ones do you use? Please let us know in the comments below, and thanks for visiting and sharing our focus pages.

Photo: Pink Moose

THERE’S AN old phrase Brian Eno supposedly said about the Velvet Underground. It goes something like “when the first Velvet Underground album came out, only about 1,000 people bought it, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band.”

I’m not sure what the sales of Raymond Carver’s first books were, but on a level of artistic influence you could apply a similar statement. People read him and want to become writers. Or they read him and it totally influences their style.

The way we internalize an artist’s work is what ultimately matters. It’s more important than the “truth” about a writer’s life. How can learning about Lou Reed’s adolescence possibly compare with hearing “Candy Says” for the first time during your own?

This is why when I found out that editor Gordon Lish is responsible for much of what I love about Carver’s short stories, it didn’t affect how I felt about him as a writer. If anything it makes him seem more real.

In December 2007, the New Yorker published the original version of Carver’s story “Beginners” overlaid with Gordon Lish’s edits so you can compare the draft with the final version of the story published as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The story is about a group of friends in their late 30s sitting around drinking and recounting different relationships, accidents, and people who committed suicide. Like most of Carver’s work, there is minimal plot / action, but instead a kind of tension (and weirdly powerful sense of compassion) that seems to drive everything forward.

Here are several notes about the way the story was edited (and in some cases, rewritten, by Gordon Lish). In the quoted examples, I’ve preserved the formatting as it was printed in the New Yorker, with Gordon Lish’s strikeouts + edits / writing in bold.  

1. Temporal references or references to backstory are cut or significantly reduced.

Ex: The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink.

Ex: He said When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back on to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

Throughout the story, Lish cut references to specific moments in time and specific backstory. This has the effect of making the story seem “truer,” as when we look back in time we rarely remember the exact day (or if we do it doesn’t really matter), but instead tend to organize our memories by “periods.”

If you imagine the story as a film, removing the backstory (where you’d have to cut to a different scene or flashback) and references to time also make the whole narrative move faster,  with more tension. It gives you the feeling that you’re speeding towards something (probably bad) happening.

2. Each sentence containing two simple clauses connected with the conjunction “but” is broken into two separate sentences.

Ex: We lived in Albuquerque, then. But but we were all from somewhere else.

This, one of the most characteristic elements of Carver’s style, wasn’t actually the way he wrote the drafts; it was the way Lish remixed it. Although this is a very subtle linguistic element, it’s notable (especially considering the time in which it was published) because (a) it “violated” the rule that you don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, (b) it went against the decades-old prose style pioneered by Hemingway of created long compound sentences with clauses often having little to do with one another but joined anyway by a conjunction, and most importantly, (c) it gave the text this fragmented and on-edge feel as if the narrator was incapable of just letting go (or something) but had to keep backing up everything he said with some other thought or emotion.

3.  Any dialogue that doesn’t sound like how people actually talk is changed to vernacular.

Ex: That old couple who had this car wreck got into an accident out on the interstate? A kid hit them and they were all torn to shit battered up.

Ex: I’d like to just knock on the door and let loose release a hive of bees in the house.

There are other effects that Lish added or emphasized such as parallel construction, repetition of certain phrases (“what we’re talking about”), and also changing the ending, however, the notes above are the easiest ones to pull from the story and explain.

Overall, I feel that Lish didn’t so much apply his own vision of what he thought the story should be, but more identified certain aspects of Carver’s style that could be condensed and magnified so that it was even more “Carver” than the original. I think this represents the ultimate work of an editor.

For writers (even travel or nonfiction writers), the obvious lesson here is that whether you work with others or just continually self-edit, there are infinite ways to remix the phrasing, sentence construction, amount of background info / temporal references, and dozens of other elements to achieve specific effects with your story.

Community Connection

Another closely related topic to editing is translating. Please see Leigh Shulman’s Notes on Iranian Translation, with an excerpt of her translation published at Guernica Magazine.

COMMUNITY FUNDED reporting. I like this idea a lot. Their domain name is sweet too, Spot.Us

Spot.us is, as stated in their elevator pitch-

a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Read More

The basic concept is that you can donate $20 (or other amounts) to help fund currently accepted pitches, and you can also register, which enables you to submit your own pitches for consideration and funding.

Just to get an idea of what kinds of pitches are currently being funded, check out some of these titles:

*Who Benefits from the Legalization of Medical Marijuana

*American Apparel’s Firings: A Canary in the Immigration Policy Coal Mine

*New Depression in LA

Admittedly, I’ve only just briefly checked out this community, but I love what I see so far. There appears to be a very clean and straightforward system of submitting pitches, having work peer reviewed as well as work on stories in collaboration, something I believe will become more and more common to journalists working in 2010.

What really stokes me though about the concept of Spot.Us is that it’s locally-based (currently in the Bay Area and Los Angeles) yet scalable worldwide.

With current freelance writing rates bottoming out last year, Spot.Us gives writers a chance to make a decent rate for their work, and most importantly, pursue stories they might otherwise be unable to afford researching or going after. I would love to see this blow up around the country.

For more info, check out this slideshow:

Community Connection

What do you think about community funded reporting? Please let us know in the comments. We’d especially like to hear from any community members of spot.us.

Some of the Colque grandkids + Lau and Layla.

12/31/09 4 PM

Maxi is carrying crates of beer down into a well-pit. I whistle to him across the fence and he grins back at me.

Maxi is one of Adela’s 80 grandchildren. He’s about 17. When the men are working on a car he’ll look under the hood with them for a few minutes but that’s all. Afterwards he goes back to playing soccer with the younger kids. He’s just the right age, size, and strength to carry the beer down to cold water in the bottom of the well.

7:15-8:15 PM

Maradona gets the fire going around 7. I still haven’t learned everyone’s name yet, but he’s the one son who still lives in the house with Adela, and is middle aged, maybe 46. He doesn’t seem to have a wife, but perhaps is Maxi’s dad. He has hair like Diego Maradona.

Around 8 he sets up the asado: two Patagonian lambs flayed on racks and tilted towards the fire, and dozens of whole chickens and sausages laid out on different grills with shovelfuls of coals slid underneath.

We see Fatima wearing a ballerina outfit. Layla goes in to tell Mamá. “Nena vestido!” she says. “We’re going over in just a little bit,” I tell her. She goes back to her room and gets her striped dress and lays it out on the floor “Ese vestido,” she says.

9:20 PM

Lau gets out of the shower and puts on a blouse. It feels like we’re ‘going out’ even though we’re just walking next door. We take the camera. We take two bottles of cider and two pan dulces. The kids meet us out in the street and Brisa takes the bag of food and drinks from us. Two of the girls, Abril and Agustina reach up to carry Layla in but when she squirms and climbs further up into Lau’s arms. Adela stands by the door of the house smiling at us.

Three weeks ago she asked me if we have any family acá. I told her we don’t, that they’re all in Buenos Aires or “allá” which means back in the place my accent comes from. But then, perhaps because of the way she looked at me when I said this I felt the need to add something so I said “But we stay in touch with them on the computer.” She nodded and then said “Well if you don’t have plans for el 31, come over and spend it with us.”

Cordero. Photo by author.

9:40 PM

The men are standing by the fire passing around liters of beer. I tell Lau I’m going over there. Noel and the others boys try to get me to play soccer with them instead. I tell them in a minute.

There are about 8 men by the fire, all Adela’s sons or sons in law. I’ve only spoken to Maradona before and I feel embarrassed walking up. I don’t really know how to introduce myself but then we’re all more or less the same age (fathers with young children) and I just nod to everyone and step into an open place by the fire. The beer bottle comes around and I take a pull and pass it on.

I look at the fire and then ask Maradona how long it takes to cook cordero (2 hours on the ribs side, then 20 minutes).

I tell them about how people back where I’m from have pig-roasts. For a second it makes me think about a certain time (late 90s) and place (The Chattooga River) and people (raft guides and safety kayakers, most beer-drunk and tripping on acid or mushrooms on top of raft busses), and how at that time I had a much more limited perspective of acá and allá. But I can’t really explain that here so I just say “yeah, we roast the pigs by burying them for hours in hot coals.”

The beer comes back around to me again and I take a swig and then pass it to Noel and Brisa’s dad then walk back to the house to see how the girls are.

9:50 PM

The Colque’s house is unfinished concrete and block construction with windows missing but little details like wooden swans in the dooryard. For a second I just stand in the entrance and look inside. The stereo is playing cumbia and reggeton at med-high volume. There are probably 20 different Colque women, both Adela’s daughters and grandaughters inside the small kitchen / eating area. They’re all talking and laughing and rapidly preparing salads and tending to the children.

I’ve only met a few of them and up until now have only seen them in long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts for working in the farm. Tonight they have on dresses and blouses and I pretend not to notice (and they pretend not to notice me noticing) several of the young women’s large and in some cases enormous breasts.

Then a kid, maybe 16, his hair cut in 80s (The Cure) style pushes through the doorway behind me then pats me on the shoulder and as if reading my mind says “don’t be embarrassed, go in!”

10:00 PM

Back at the fire I ask questions about the land here, the well-pit (you hit water here in 3 meters).

I ask if the nearby creek ever floods (no, but the river does.) Adela’s husband, a skinny man in his 60s, offers me a cigarette. He speaks in a crazy slang and accent that I can barely understand. I ask about what it was like here before there was pavement on the highway. I ask about the Indians who were here before. “The viejos pobladores live up by Nahuel Pan,” Maradona says.

The food is nearly cooked and the women call for some more tables inside. I’m standing opposite of where a table is so I grab an end and help carry it towards the house.

10:30 PM

. Photo by Laura Bernhein

Adela has saved us seats next to her at dinner. Lau is asking about how each person in the room is related to the other.

There are so many people that if you need something (like water) you just yell it out over the music and then people keep repeating it across the room until whoever is in the kitchen passes it out and it moves from hand to hand across the room.

I cut a piece of sausage and fold it into a roll with chimichuri sauce and a salad of bittersweet greens.

It occurs to me that everything on the table except for the drinks and the salt and pepper was either grown or raised here. The cordero is salty and wild-tasting, an animal that lived its life grazing Patagonian grasses and wild rose. Layla grabs a piece off my plate and starts chewing (she’s been, up until now, a vegetarian). Lau and Adela both notice it and smile. “Más,” Layla says.

11:30 PM -12:30 AM

After dinner the kids start lighting fireworks in what would pass in the US as basically unsupervised pandemonium. Five year old girls are holding Roman candles and 7 year old boys are launching bottle rockets directly out of their hands. I have Layla up in my arms the whole time but she keeps squirming to get down. The kids come over and give her a sparkler.

12:45 AM

We go back to the house to put Layla to bed. Lau and I talk about the party. I tell her that the whole fireworks thing is an example of how people like the Colques simply live with less fear and worry than other people. “It’s like, sooner or later, one of them loses and eye or a hand or whatever,” I say. “But then instead of worrying about it, it’s just like ‘si, si, pobre Pablito, one year he was holding a Roman candle and the puta cosa just blew up in his hand.’”

Of course this is just the kind of bullshit you say when you don’t want there to be silence or talk about things that will make you depressed. But then Lau mentions that while Adela was explaining all the different relationships at dinner she had said that one of her kids had died. “She didn’t really go into it though,” Lau said.

1:00 AM

Photo by author.

Besides being New Year’s, the 31st is also Adela’s birthday. Lau stays back while Layla sleeps and I go over back over just to say thanks and goodbye.

I see a few of the men still by the fire but most everyone is back inside the house. I hear them singing. When I walk back in Adela has a knife and is cutting a cake the size of a small table. I look at the way she holds the knife and remember how yesterday she explained how to slice the roots of the thistles in the yard to make them easier to pull.

It occurs to me that when Lau brought up what Adela had said about a child dying, she wasn’t saying this in and of itself but was also thinking about the baby she miscarried a few months ago. Right now Lau would be around 6 months pregnant and we’re both grieving this in our own ways. The candles on Adela’s cake say 61. Each year you get older you learn how it feels to lose a little more. Adela looks at me standing there. She gives a nod indicating she understands we put Layla to bed. Then she cuts a big corner off the cake. “Llevátela.” she says. Take it back with you.

The author in Colorado. Photo: Lau

Now’s the season for year-in-review features and ‘looking ahead’ pieces, the kinds of stories that would seem little more than exercises in banality were they not necessary somehow to our sense of time and place.

Music countdowns, say the “Top 209 songs of 2009,” are perfect examples. By what criteria can we reduce music (or writing, or even people themselves–Traveler of the YEAR!!) into some kind of zero sum game?

Still, it occurs to me that even if the subjects and formats are unoriginal, just stopping and taking time to remember is a very human and life affirming act.

The other day Klaus and Manuel, two raft guides at Lat42Patagonia, asked about what I did. When I told them I was a writer, they asked the default question down here, which (as it should be) is “do you write books?”

“It’s mostly stories and articles online,” I explained. “One day I’d like to collect them into a book though.”

Anyway, the conversation left me thinking about people’s perceptions of what a writer is in 2009, and now looking ahead to 2010. Here are a few notes:

1. Blogger vs. Writer ‘debate’

Don’t waste time posturing or defending or shit-talking anyone in this silly-ass argument. Being a writer (or whatever) in 2010 means getting paid to write what you want to write. Part of this (perhaps all of it) will mean blogging; part will be journalism, fiction, poetry, whatever shape your imagination and work takes.

2. You don’t have to write a book.

As proven by NomadicMatt , you don’t have be writing a book to still be a financially successful writer and get featured in the New York Times

3. If you write a book, you can publish it yourself.

This year, Cory Doctorow showed that you can self-publish your work, give it away for free, and still make money by offering a print on demand option.

4. However, If all you want is to see your name in print, there are plenty of vanity-press operations ready to take your money.

Consider the move by Harlequin earlier this year wherein they began charging writers thousands to self-publish via their imprint.

5. You can make an enormous impact with simple ebook.

Earlier this month, Seth Godin’s ebook What Matters Now became a Trending Topic on Twitter, getting retweeted over 4,000 times.

6. Independent Publishing Houses

Writers seeking traditional book publication in 2010 will increasingly look to independent publishing houses.

7. Writing conferences will focus on social media.

Those attending conferences in 2010 will be bludgeoned by social media ‘gurus’ with pie graphs showing the correlation between your followers on twitter and your potential readership.

8. New forms

Hint Fiction, Micro-Notes, Segmented Essays, and other new forms of writing will become increasingly common, as writing continues to be optimized for reading on screens.

9. Multimedia

Writing / publishing / reading via mobile devices will lead to more experimentation with multimedia.

10. Real-time composition

New technology such as Google Wave combined with back-channel conversations being an increasingly important element of media events will mean that writers and journalists in 2010 will publish more work created in “real-time” as opposed to the the traditional process of drafts which are polished and edited before publication.

11. Revitalization of tribes

The democratization of media / disbanding of large publications will lead to writers building new communities in 2010. These include both official communities which exist online such as Fictionaut, SixSentences, or Matador, or just crews of writers who are associated with one another (via collective projects or similar styles), and thus can help mutually promote their work, such as the crew who runs HTML Giant.

12. Continuing Education

Looking beyond grad school and MFA programs, writers in 2010 will find increasingly relevant training and skills via online writing programs and learning centers.

13. Transparency

Whereas writers have traditionally had to make ethical choices when writing about places or stories to which they had material connections, writers in 2010 are essentially free to write about whatever they want, take whatever story they want, as long as their writing has an underpinning of material transparency.

14. Self Promotion

Although many writers may claim they didn’t go to journalism school to “sell themselves,” writers in 2010 need to find how they can best promote their personal brands.

Community Connection

Happy New Year everyone! How do you see being a writer in 2010?

The author in Colorado Flatirons. Photo: Lau

NOCHEBUENA is the “good night” before Christmas.

Here in Argentina it’s also when Santa comes–the kids staying up until 12 when it switches to actual Navidad and a family member dressed as Santa appears pillow-stuffed and possibly wine-drunk at the door. Presents are distributed. Everyone stays up all night. This is the answer for those who ask how Argentine kids seem to have no bedtimes but can still get up and function each morning. Like most things it comes down to imagination.

Birthdays are the same. No sense in wasting good nocturnal hours. I found myself promoting this earlier in the summer on a cross-country drive from Colorado back to Georgia. My bro Will Kimzey and I had committed to “Oklahoma in the dark” a new and spontaneous manifestation of our blow-it-out-in-a-single-push road trip style. PFunk was in heavy rotation. Once the clock got to 11:55 a.m. I started watching it carefully for my surprise happy bday bust-out. You can’t miss a second.

Right now our neighbors the Colques are hacking their back yard with a gas powered weed-eater, the preferred lawn tool in Patagonia perhaps after the machete. Not having any portable stereos, they’ve been parking cars back there the last several nights, pumping cumbia beats, playing soccer, and having the inevitable water fights.

The music takes me back to a Nochebuena in Colorado, 2005. After a day of fresh pow at our local mountain, Eldo, I got back to my truck and KGNU’s Latin Christmas tunes.

Even though most of the songs were simple sons and rhumbas about things like christmas trees and eating roasted pig, something about the juxtaposition–the Rocky Mountain snow still floating down and filling in the lines I’d left in on the mountain (another pow day tomorrow), my hands and face still stinging cold, but this music on the radio that could’ve only come from someplace warm and near the ocean–all of it combined in a moment of transcendence where it felt like I could almost make out ‘where we were headed’ (towards this music). It was a moment of both ultra stoke and nonspecific loneliness, and I think there may have been a bit of sacred weeping.

It’s difficult for me to register events or contextualize emotions without there being some kind of soundtrack. Certainly iPods have stifled some of the spontaneity and chance that post snowboarding parking-lot moments like these might turn transcendent, the DJ down in the valley seeming to pick each tune in a way that helps your life push downstream a little smoother and maybe with a bit more reach and gamble and appreciation than if you’d chosen your own playlist.

But then it’s all a matter of how the day unfolds. Yesterday morning I was reading Kierkegaard’s journals and listening to Outkast at the same time, an overtly discordant pairing until the track “Unhappy” came on and Big Boi sang, “might as well have fun cuz your happiness is done when your goose is cooked.”

Layla just woke up and ran in here naked, holding two of her “babies” and asking for her morning jugo. I’m reminded again of how it works. It’s time to slice oranges. Merry Christmas.

Rio Azul, just below confluence. All photos by David Miller.

SOMETIMES ALL IT TAKES is showing up. This occurred to me during the hike into the confluence of Rios Azul and Blanco near El Bolsón, Patagonia, pausing for a moment to rest the knees and study the terrain–the two rivers dropping out of steep notches in the cordillera, then joining in the valley where I could hear whitewater hundreds of meters below.

Today was a paddle day. I was coming to visit Shea Jordan and the crew at Lat42South for a Sunday run down the Confluence section of the Rio Azul. They were looking for another safety kayaker and I was looking for (after being down here pretty much solo for three weeks), my gente.

We let the world become more complicated than it needs to be. Know who your tribe is and you’re most of the way there. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Seattle or San Juan del Sur: my gente are the people who go up and down mountains and rivers and waves.

Just before reaching the bottom of the road I met up with a local kid, maybe 25, named Federico. He was going on the trip as a passajero (test dummy). We got down to the river, hiked upstream and then crossed a dilapidated footbridge. The river flowing below was totally clear.

Chacra on the road to the confluence.

This was my first time seeing any of this part of the Andes, essentially the base of the glaciated peaks I find myself constantly looking at from town.

Unlike the US and other parts of the world, there are no trophy houses built up on the mountainsides. Most of the population lives in the valley, in town.

There were still people back here but they were essentially gauchos, people who lived an agrarian life on small farms.

We ascended several more switchbacks, then the trail rounded off at a broad saddle of land above the confluence. Knolls of pastureland, gently sloping, rolled down to orchards and gardens with small outbuildings set into the hillside, the grass covering over the roofs.

Inside, Shea and and several other kids were sitting on the sofas. I was introduced to Claus and Manuel, two young raft guides who lived nearby. Omar, Shea’s business partner from Buenos Aires, was also there. We talked about the run today, the river level.

Cellar / outbuilding at La Confluencia.

I realized I was witnessing (and in some way, participating in) something amazing. After spending what seems like my entire youth hanging around different rivers and raft companies that had been in business for decades, here were these kids setting up a brand new one, on an essentially virgin stretch of river, a place that had been run so few times only a couple spots even had names.

Shea took me on a quick tour of the lodge. The building was shaped like a shallow V with dormitories on one wing and a private suite plus office / library on the other.

The two were joined via a common area with a deck overlooking the gorge. The lower level was all open with a kitchen plus huge walk-in pantry (stacked floor to ceiling with fruit preserves they’d canned themselves and herbs from the garden) on one side, then a lounge area with ping-pong table and TV on the other.

At the center was a massive wood-burning stove and sofas. Everything was made out of rough-cut native cypress, and the main level walls were straw bale with adobe. It was an ideal juxtaposition: you could hear the river down below, see the mountains all around, and there was WiFi.

Take out of Confluence section through local sheep farm.

We went outside then, past the parilla (grill), then up the hill to the spa, yoga room, plunge pool, and, at the very top, the hot tub. Shea showed me some of the mechanical rooms, and he explained how a small scale hydroelectric turbine powered the whole place, along with a methane processor that transformed waste materials into gas for cooking.

We didn’t go out to the fields, but Shea explained how guests were served food that was all produced here locally.

They also hosted WWOOF volunteers at different times during the year. There were two volunteers here now, both improbably beautiful girls from the Czech Republic.

The entire ‘operation’ was obviously something that Shea’s family had put decades of learning, experience, vision into. It was a working example of land-use, food production, and integration of local (and worldwide) communities and economies, all based on an ethic of environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Next we stopped at boat shed. Shea was taking down a Necky Chronic; I grabbed a Wavesport ZG + gear. (The rest of the crew would be taking down a high-performance raft called a Mini-Me).Then we waited for the Manuel and Omar to get back from running shuttle (they were leaving one of the trucks down at the takeout and coming back on a motorcycle).

Terminator. Classic class III/IV rock jumble with epic boof line.

While we hung out on the porch, Claus asked me the series of questions that inevitably ends with “why did you move down here?”

I told him:

“Es una cosa cultural. It’s not that we don’t like the US. It’s just that there’s something down here about the culture.

Take this for example. Two days ago I called up Cristian Ferrer [owner of a rafting operation on lower section of river]. I called him de la nada (‘out of the blue’) and told him I was a paddler who’d just moved to town and was hoping to meet some other boaters.

He was like ‘che, I’m heading into town right now, let’s meet up.’ And so we did. He invited me back to his house, and to go paddling that day. That’s how I met Shea and Omar. Then you guys invited me here. It was all one flow.

It’s not that this couldn’t happen in the US, but it’s just different. People back there have a million things to do. They need to check their calendars. They need to ‘check your references’.

The idea of operating on flow and buena onda still exists, but it isn’t part of the culture like it is here. People schedule dates for their kids to play with each other. We just wanted our daughter to grow up with a different onda.”

Claus nodded and looked at me in a way like he was really listening, really hearing this. I thought for a minute how strange it would be if the roles were switched, if I were back in the US listening to some Argentino explaining why he moved there.

A few minutes later Manuel and Omar came back and then we all suited up and carried down to the water. I couldn’t quite believe how, if you stayed or lived here, you could literally just wake up in the morning, whip up some breakfast, check the internet for a while, then walk down the stairs and go boating in water that was pure enough to drink.

Put in at Rio Azul. Water is totally potable.

On the beach, riverside, the raft crew had a safety talk while Shea and I got in our kayaks and ferried back and forth between two eddies. The river was clear and cold and different shades of blue and green that flowed through the Baldivian (mostly species of beech trees + cypress) forest.

I cupped my hand and drank right from the river, a first. Totally savoring this, a new home river. A new local crew. Stoke is an immediate feeling. Gratitude is stoke sustained. Somehow I was feeling both as we peeled out from the eddy and floated down to the first rapids. This was only the beginning.

Community Connection

For more information, please check Lat42South as well as the lodge’s site, La Confluencia.

Additionally, Shea’s dad, Mark Jordan is a co-creator of the exceptional CIESA, an ongoing educational and research project focusing on sustainable agriculture in Patagonia.

Matador Editor David Miller at ‘the office’.

YESTERDAY A RECENT graduate, AdventureRob, had this to say in his candid review of MatadorU’s travel writing curriculum: “The course doesn’t just concentrate on travel writing, but life as a travel writer in the modern world.”

It’s funny how hearing other people describe something can make you look at it with a new perspective. I never would’ve thought to express it this way (I never think of myself as living the “life of a travel writer” even though that’s the life I have essentially), and yet somehow this statement points at something fundamental about the course as well as something we like to call the Matador “vision” itself.

The other day I met Christie Pashby, a professional guidebook writer and director of the Patagonia Travel Company. We took a float trip down the lower whitewater section of the Rio Azul. She was asking about Matador, and then we realized she’d actually contributed to one of the very first articles here on the Traveler’s Notebook.

More than anything, Christie seemed to be lamenting the disintegration of old-school media, saying (with regards to blogging / creating a personal brand), that she “didn’t go to journalism school to ’sell herself’.”

I told her I understood completely. The motivations behind one’s need to write and tell stories are often antithetical to earning a living. So when there’s a structure in place that allows you to do both (such as traditional journalism over the last several decades) you want to see it continue to progress.

But what I love about the media revolution, the “modern world” that Rob alludes to, is that it essentially is a progression of the old school. The elements of good reporting, good writing, good storytelling are universal whether you’re blogging or working on a profile for your local paper.

What’s happened though, is that as media has become democratized, liberated from location, traditional ‘training’, and workplace hierarchies (among hundreds of other changes) the new paradigms are unfamiliar.

As I talked about yesterday, we have no map.

This is where MatadorU comes in. In essence it all comes down to a question Christie asked me: “Are your students actually making it?”

“It’s early,” I told her, “But yeah. We’re already seeing students making the leap to becoming fully independent freelance writers . Others we’ve pulled aboard our team. It’s not overnight, but yeah, I can honestly say that it’s working.”

The thing is (and I think I can safely speak for everyone who participated in the creation of MatadorU), there’s no real credit to be taken on our part as far as students’ successes. This is perhaps the greatest lesson of MatadorU, and the way in which it most closely aligns itself with new school paradigms of becoming a professional writer, blogger, or whatever: it comes down to how bad you want it, how much energy you’re willing to put into it.

And a close second to this is the way we tend to organize ourselves into tribes. What’s now a social media buzzword, and one of Seth Godin’s bestsellers, has been known to teachers forever. As I said a few months ago during one of the more spontaneous and lucid moments in an interview (I get nervous during interviews and tend to drink beer) at Travel Writer’s Exchange:

“It’s not coincidental that many of the original staff and members of Matador have backgrounds in education. Teachers are different. We’re always seeking to build community.”

The bottom line is that at Matador we embrace new media and respect the vision of those who choose to support themselves traveling, writing, filming, recording, and taking pictures around the world. This is our tribe. MatadorU is just a way for us–both students and teachers–to help each other add our names and lines to the map.

Community Connection

How do you apply your training and skills as a journalist to the new media revolution? Please share with us in the comments below.

Internet map by The OPTE project

AFTER READING the following post by Marie, I started wondering how to visually represent what she was talking about.

Then I found (duh) there actually are people mapping the internet via IP address as well as other metrics which, to be honest, I don’t really want to even try to understand.

Marie wrote:

When I start reading a blog or a Tweet by someone I don’t know and then click on one of their contacts’ blogs or something else on their page, it seems I inevitably end up on the page of someone I know from Flickr, Twitter, my own blog readers, Matador, etc. How is that? Are we all getting our contacts from each others pages or is it just that the people you are friends with just have the same taste as you? I’d really like to see a drawing of the map I take when on the net and how it matches up with the map of others. Do they have that yet? I’m sure I’d be going round in circles and eventually passing through the circles of others.

–from Social Networking: How would it work in real life?

Marie goes on to describe a scenario wherein the virtual friending or unfriending of social media contacts plays out in the real world. You simply meet someone and instantly, effortlessly accept or reject them.

But what I loved more than anything about this post was the notion of just going around in circles, bumping into others, and the inherent tendency to form tribes (something Seth Godin would surely approve).

What speaks to me, what interests me about social media, microblogging, ambient awareness, location ‘independence’, accelerated culture (Does that term still apply? Does twitter make us ‘post-accelerated’ culture?) basically the entire amorphous realm of computer mediated communication, is that there really is no map, no precedent. Like Marie, I could use a drawing.

Community Connection

From the very beginning of Matador we’ve been stoked on the voices and exchange of ideas coming out of our community site. To make sure more of these ideas, photos, and blogs reach more people, we’ve begun pulling the best of the community blogs up into the Network sites. To participate, please join the Matador Community!

Image: Paul Stevenson

IT’S NO original insight that being a writer is a problematic gig vis-à-vis your mental health.

This seemed evident again on the way to the bank last week when I saw a Mapuche man with the perfect look of a TV or movie ‘Indian chief’ only he was dressed more or less like me (jeans, collared shirt) and stood on the sidewalk unwrapping a stick of gum.

Suddenly I thought of a short story or perhaps feature film idea where the protagonist’s brain is wired so that whenever he sees someone, their clothing, hairstyle, jewelry, all magically revert back several generations to their original ‘ethnicity’.

In this case the Indian man would have on skins, possibly war paint. The girl of what appeared to be Spanish descent walking by us with the ass-enhancing pantware would instead have on some kind off Medieval gown. My wife (of Swiss, German descent), would be sporting an Oktoberfest maiden’s beer serving apparel and Teutonic braids. That sort of thing.

Of course even as I was visualizing all of this I realized that (a) trying to apply any kind of reductionism to one’s ethnic lineage seemed dubious and deluded and borderline dangerous, (b) presenting people this way was far less interesting and life-affirming than seeing their ‘real’ reality right at present time, ground level, (c) part of this idea occurred surely because I have a tendency to reduce people this way myself, say 14% of the time–not appearance-wise, but more a form of cultural / behavioral stereotyping, and (d) the beleaguered protagonist could be played by Ashton Kutcher in a ‘breakout’ production which somehow involved Twitter, Larry King, and the first ever “real-time major motion picture experience with live social media back chat.”

Actually I just invented that last one. By the third or fourth step past the Mapuche man I’d already given up on the idea.

Instead of contriving a story arc wherein Kutcher’s character learns to ‘see people for themselves’ (the payoff of which would surely hinge on a make-out scene with someone ambiguously ‘ethnic’ (but definitely hot)), I began to think about ways of seeing people that can sabotage your writing. Here’s what I have so far:

1. Romanticizing someone else’s life (Ex.: A mountain guide in Ecuador.)

2. Appropriating someone else’s problems / struggle as your own. (Local people being displaced by newer, wealthier immigrants or tourism.)

3. Believing that someone is a “father / mother / brother / sister figure”

4. Making assumptions based on cultural heritage.

5. Isolating people from time / place / family relationships so that they become, essentially, symbols or simply props for the narrator or author’s ego.

6. Attributing the emotions someone made you feel (especially if you’re observing them from a distance instead of interacting) back to them. (Ex. “The carefree Cuban woman.”)

7. Dismissing material / economic connections between yourself and others (The “incredibly affable taxi drivers,” in Costa Rica.)

8. Seeing people exclusively through the filter of strictly-held philosophical, religious, or artistic beliefs / aesthetics.

For travel writers moving quickly through a place, it’s easy to fall into the trap of writing quick notes or impressions, which by default tend to reduce people to symbols or caricatures.

More difficult, more time consuming, is digging for the people’s voices and stories over time and finding common ground in spite of cultural differences, language, and geography.

Finally, how to ‘overcome’ problematic ways of seeing people? The first step is obviously recognizing when you’re doing it. Just being self aware–knowing that you have certain ways you look at things and being as transparent about it all as you can–goes a long way.

It goes without saying as well that none of the above are really 100% fixed “rules” or anything. For example, you could portray a scene where you broke # 5 and still write a compelling piece. It just becomes a question of how much you want to focus on place and people vs. your own experience.

Community Connection

As writers, what choices do you make when it comes to including people in your stories?

How do you present them so they aren’t just props?

I HAVE NO interest in media deathwatches. I published a few pieces on newspaper circulations taking massive hits a couple months ago, and am over it. We all know (I think) where this is going.

For me it’s always about people, places, and communities, not institutions. So that said, yesterday’s news that National Geographic Adventure was folding made me sad for the writers and editors who lost their jobs, and how this will likely play out at ground level (the fragmentation of what I imagine to be a very soulful and tight community), but I’m not 100% sure that, as Steve Casimiro said, “outdoor culture is far emptier for this news.”

Outdoor culture is made emptier when a beloved person (Shane McConkey comes to mind) or place (say, a river being dammed) is lost. But the institutions themselves, whether media companies, magazine, or gear companies, are still only peripheral. They’re always in the wavelike process of forming, swelling, breaking, and reforming. At least that’s how I see it.

After getting laid off from USA Today, Travel Editor Chris Faust’s goodbye to USA Today blog expressed similar remorse. This firing wasn’t just his team getting axed but an affront to the institution of journalism.

She writes, “What bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements…I hustled and I cajoled and I ended up out on my ass anyway…I’m a true believer in the power of journalism. I walked into my first newspaper office when I was 16, fell in love with deadlines and chaos, and never looked back.. . I felt it was a calling, more so than a job.”

I like how Faust looks downstream at freelancers “creating niche businesses, busting up the paradigm.” She writes, “These freelancers-slash-entrepreneurs are smart. They are nimble. And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks.”

And if anything, I respect Faust for looking ahead, and I respect the NatGeo Adventure editors / officers for simply calling it and moving on as opposed to flailing (like the Dallas Morning News section editors now reporting directly to sales managers) or in some way undercutting their original vision.

All of this leads me back to Matador. From our start in 2006, the vision has always been to enable writers to take the path of least resistance between place, story, and reader. It’s something that never could’ve existed pre-internet, but at the same time is an ethic born out of relating to place and community in the most on the ground, person-to-person way possible.

As a writer and old-school journalist myself, my initial instinct was to press CEO Ross Borden towards coming up with some kind of print manifestation of Matador. An anthology perhaps, a monthly print edition. I felt it would be a validation of sorts.

Ross was always looking farther downstream however, and could already see a new direction–readership, community, and media based on blog networks–as the future. This blog in particular, The Traveler’s Notebook, was the first we decided to launch. It would help give people tools and resources for becoming new school travel writers and journalists.

From here we’ve put everything we’ve learned into a new media learning center, MatadorU. As I said earlier, I’m not interested in seeing old school journalists getting beat down. I want to see people with stories worth telling, regardless of institutions, get the audience that they (both the writers and the stories) deserve.

Community Connection

How are you, as a writer and / or journalist, dealing with the revolution taking place in publishing and journalism? Please let us know in the comments.

BACK WHEN I was doing a lot of remixing and audio production I always dreamed about having some kind of ‘brain machine’ that would simply extract whatever rhythms or melodies you were hearing in your head and export them directly to .wav files.

Obviously this is still a ways downstream, but I have no doubt there will be something like it eventually, with odds on Google as the people who figure it out.

Anyway, a few days ago our new associate editor Candice Walsh sent me an invite to try Google Wave, and it reminded me of the brain machine, or at least the spirit of the brain machine concept. If you haven’t heard about it yet, here’s an overview.

The best way I can describe it (admittedly after just messing around), is to compare it to Twitter. You invite people to join in a new “wave” (kind of like a timeline) and everyone can add updates / ideas / photos. The whole thing is then collected in a kind of live document known as a Google “Wave.”

The reason why I compare it to Twitter is that the creation of the wave happens in real-time, and you can actually go back and use a control panel similar to a MP3 player to ‘replay’ it.

This ‘live’ element makes Google Wave particularly interesting for applications like group brainstorms, the kind of thing we do a lot of here at Matador. You can actually ’see’ people typing, which gives a uniquely transparent look at how they work / think. Until they come up with the Brain Machine, I think this is potentially the most exciting aspect of new technology, (and one that should interest writers in particular), the ability to work with other people to create multimedia content in real time.

Also of interest to writers and journalists will be using Wave to create more in-depth back-channel conversations, a form of ‘augmented reality’, during media coverage of events. Earlier this month, freshnetworks blogged about using Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences, pondering the future of both, and asking if “augmented reality” (a term which honestly seems to fit a stoner’s lexicon better than social media) – will be the next “major influence?”

The one drawback that I see so far is that Google Wave does not seem intuitive at all. Basically most of us are used to thinking linearly when it comes to writing emails, chatting, and using the computer in general. You go from one line to the next. Google Waves are organic, non-linear, more like a map (the Wave engineers were the same who created Google Maps). The conversations can sprout multiple branches, each leading in different directions.

If you’ve received an invite and are having trouble getting started, an excellent resource is Get Started with Google Wave.

Community Connection

Travelers, writers: what experience have you had so far with Google Wave? How do you see being able to use it as a writer?

Let us know in the comments below.

AS WRITERS, any tasks that take away from writing time can quickly become tedious and frustrating.

None, at least to me anyway, seems more of a time-suck than dealing with social media.

It’s taken me forever, but I’ve finally started using something that Matador Video Editor Joshywashington clued me into several month ago, Ping.

Ping is a dead simple way to update literally dozens (most likely all) of the new media and social media apps and even blogs you’re writing by sending whatever text / photos / tags/ html via an easy to use dashboard. You can choose to update blogs (at Tumblr, Blogger or Wordpress.com, among others) or update status (at Twitter, Facebook and dozens of others) and also add to YouTube, Vimeo and other content sharing sites.

For people just getting started with social media, updating multiple blogs / apps might seem strange or unnecessary, but for spreading your message and building your brand, each one of these little updates and posts helps to further increase your internet footprint.

Ping is super easy to get started using. Try simply opening your account and then adding a test post to your blog or twitter account. From there you’ll get the feel.

Community Connection

For recent tips on social media and branding for travel writers, check out How to Develop a Personal Brand as a Writer as well as becoming a Twitter Ninja: Understanding Rewtweets.

Also, does anyone have any particular tips or expertise for using Ping? Please share with us in the comments below.

My new barrio (Arrayanes), Piltriquitron in backround.

Admittedly crappy photo (Malbec, cold hands).

AFTER 6 DAYS I feel like I know at least where the sun rises.

This time of year it comes up over the northern flank of Cerro Piltriquitron, just north of the most jagged comb ridge.

Arriving in a new place there’s that need to ubicar, to locate, and not just external things like where they sell homemade bread or empanadas or bed sheets, but to actually be ubicado, to feel yourself located in the place.

For me it always begins with place names and terrain features of the surrounding foothills and outlying ranges, any water–rivers, oceans–as well as prevailing wind or weather directions. In places where the urban or suburban landscape is so sprawled that none of these landmarks are available (Buenos Aires) getting located seems more an act of trust.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I woke up in a semi-funk, a new reality seeming to set in that (a) in all my time traveling (probably 3 years combined) I’ve never really thought of myself as an ‘ex-pat’ but I sort of felt like one now, and (b) I have no real emotional reference or precedent for any of this. My default reaction was to head up into the mountains.

Chacras below Piltriquitron. Image: Tetsumo

I took the road past our land then cut north on Camino de los Nogales. This is the most desirable land in all of Patagonia, and chacras, or farms (most of them organic) run along both sides of the road all the way to the foot of Cerro Piltriquitron.

Except for the Caranchos (Polyborus plancus), these kind of South American hawks that have wings shaped like condors’, there seemed to be no movement or people anywhere. I realized it was siesta.

Up the road were broad fields with rows of raspberry bushes and hops for the local breweries. All along the edges grew lupine and other wildflowers. It was hot enough, finally, that I took off my polypro shirt and moved under the shade of the Nogales (walnut trees).

After a while I found a horse trail which veered away from the road and along a forest preserve. At one point I saw movement, which turned out to be two horses. One had his head down feeding, then raised his neck up and transfixed me with ultra pale blue eyes. Then they both disappeared into the woods.

Another 10 minutes of walking and I found an easy place to duck through the fence wires. This wasn’t necessarily the high mountain access I was looking for, but then it seemed like this hidden patch of woods was actually better–out of the sun, out of view.

When I’m feeling depressed it helps to temporarily disappear (ideally inside a wave but that’s a different story), and I realized that in some ways this was as off the map as I’d been in a long time. In what guidebook or any book was this little patch of native Cypress forest?

Later I walked back to town and bought a couple folding chairs and my own little Thanksgiving dinner, a thin carving of bife de lomo with mashed potatoes, which I intended to prepare later with emotionally bolstering doses of raw garlic, fresh parsley, and Malbec.

That evening I was on my pre-dinner wine-stroll through the neighborhood, trying to get a good picture (seemed impossible), and on the way back, there was the moment, finally, where I officially met all the kids who live next door (13, somehow all under the ages of 15).

The way you interact with the local kids in a new place is probably the single most important (and revealing) situation you face as that privileged mofo now living in their neighborhood. No psychoanalyst or therapist can ever give you a more honest or dead-on assessment of who you are than the kids who seem to be playing all day in the dirt, but actually have their eyes on you all the time, and see through fronts.

What soccer in Patagonia looks like. Image: jaytkendall

Anyway, I had a cup of wine in my hand. The whole crew was in the area between our two houses, the two oldest boys with a soccer ball. One of them saw me coming and meant to get out of the way but then realized I was actually coming for the ball.

He tried to dribble past me then but I shot in and got the ball (saying something which came out, I think as, Huaa!) then dribbled around in the dust holding my wine-cup above our heads (both of us laughing) until he, of course, got the ball back. Little dude actually had on cleats.

“What’s in your cup?“ the kid asked.

“Wine,” I said. “Today is a holiday where I’m from [this seemed like a good justification] Thanksgiving.”

“Where are you from?”

“Georgia. Los Estados Unidos. Te ubicas? It’s the state right above Florida.”

The whole circle of the kids closed in then, three other boys, and four girls aged from 5 to maybe 10, each carrying on her hip a different dirt-faced and hugely-smiling baby.

I simultaneously thought (a) if only I could take a picture of these faces right now, of how stoked they are, (b) if my mom saw the picture she’d probably see first how dirty they are and then every other potential emotion / perception would likely be blocked out except for fear and anxiety over my choice to come down here, and (c) how stoked is Layla going to be to meet this crew?

The girls wanted to show off the babies to me. The boys wanted to know if I had a car (I pointed to my shoes.) I explained to everyone that my wife Lau and daughter Layla were coming next week along with our fat cat Lulu and our dog Julio.

I asked about their dogs, which one was the most bravo, and then as if on cue there was some kind of movement in the bushes down the street and all 3 of their dogs took off with their cat taking the opportunity to escape out the back of the yard. Immediately all of the boys started hollering and running after them.

After this I slid back home and skyped my parents for Thanksgiving. The stoke level which I had guarded rather shakily all day seemed to evaporate instantly as I listened to my mom’s plaintive voice describing the ‘concert’ performed by the cousins’ kids. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to listen to that, it’s just that the questions we should’ve been asking each other–how are you–were caught up somehow, unable to flow.

I know they’re suffering because to them I’m no longer ubicado. Seattle was far away from Florida but still essentially on the map. Patagonia is an abstract concept, someplace unimaginably distant (even if it’s not), even though we’re still talking right there on the phone.

The Sun is past morning angles now, high over the valley, although this house has yet to warm up. To locate and be located, not off in some dream or illusion but right at ground level, wherever you are when you finish reading or writing, wherever you are when you fall asleep or wake back, blinking there for a few minutes as you look out your tent or window: you just want to keep telling yourself, your family, everyone, “Don’t be afraid, be stoked! This is all of us together, just moving downstream, you see?”

Community Connection

How do you reconcile traveling in totally different directions than you your friends and family? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo: Laura Bernhein

Ben Polansky

1. Love of my family
2. Company of my friends
3. The touch of my girlfriend
4. The cool side of the pillow.
5. The smile from the woman at the bakery on my way to work.
6. Playing music with my friends.
7. The sunny side of the street on a cool day in San Francisco.
8. The tickle of a cue tip in my ear.
9. Listening to old Blues records on a rainy day.
10. Surfing at sunset.
11. My goddaughter’s curly hair.
12. Sticking my face in a warm pile of laundry.
13. Napping in a hammock in the sun.
14. A hard day’s work.
15. Watching young people learn.
16. Watching old people learn.
17. Ice cubes in my orange juice.
18. Listening to Barack Obama talk about hope and change
19. Teaching someone something new.
20. Reading people’s travel blogs about adventure and discovery on Matador.

Julie Schwietert

21. A stack of books brought home from the library, even when I know I’ll never finish them all.
22. The memories of listening to people’s stories as I traveled this year.
23. Watching weavers crush moss, berries, and nuts in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, as they make natural dyes.
24. Cooking with my husband.
25. The warmth of my dog as she jumps into bed in the morning.
26. Reading articles written by people living the Matador vision.
27. Reading a line that resonates so deeply it makes me see something in a new way.
28. Guessing the spices and ingredients in the food we eat.
29. Dreaming about going back to places I’ve been.
30. Making plans for the after-school program in Colombia.
31. Having found long-lost friends this year.
32. Thinking about learning a new language online.
33. Waking up from a good sleep.
34. Knowing the day will be incredible when the morning coffee is just right.
35. Pulling up the window shade and seeing a brilliant blue sky.
36. Receiving a real letter.
37. Checking the mail.
38. Leaving home.
39. Going home.
40. Having the opportunity to meet up in person with people I’ve met online via Matador– in Mexico, in the US.
41. Knowing that Matador members went to Cuba this year and saw things for themselves…and had an amazing experience.
42. Thinking back to election night and seeing images of people around the world gathered together, in communities, dancing in the streets.
43. Wandering markets in Mexico.
44. Thinking about January 20, 2009.
45. Feeling better after you’ve been feeling bad.
46. Reading blogs of Matador members outside the Matador community: www.bigsweettooth.com, www.miller-david.com, and others
47. Reading what makes other people grateful.

Al

48) Competition
49) Running really fast
50) Building, supporting, and maintaining a family
51) Fathering
52) Bob Marley tunes anywhere anytime
53) Kisses
54) Health
55) Cool breeze on a hot day
56) Warmth of a fire at night
57) Homecomings
58) Barefeet on grass
59) Barefeet in sand
60) Taking off your shoes and socks after a long day
61) Mixed couples
62) Biracial Children
63) Dancing
64) A Fresh Haircut
65) Summertime
66) Stretching in the morning
67) Last, but not least: New Socks and New Underwear. I know they cost money, but come on…There’s really no better feeling.

Hard not to give repeats.

Kdeez

68. My beautiful wife who is a strong, intuitive, loving mother and who understands and loves me for who I am.
69. My joyful son, Raja, who is smart, always smiling, outgoing and brave.
70. My mother who is gentle and kind, and who I am continually able to learn from.
71. My brothers and sisters who are creative and intelligent and a joy to be around.
72. My friends who are fun to spend time with and who are true to themselves.
73. My business where we are able to work with friends and family and contribute to open source communities.
74. My coworkers who are smart, dedicated and know what needs to be done and do it without having to be told to.
75. Our clients who are open to using open source software and choose to work with us.
76. Open source software communities and the developers that make them possible by contributing their code and free time towards sharing and openness.
77. Drupal. It’s a great tool and framework to use for building all different types of websites and web applications.
78. The universe that always provides and brings the right things to us at the right times.
79. The sun that provides light and warmth and allows us to have rain and support life.
80. The earth that provides nutrients and soil by which food can be grown as well as many other natural resources.
81. The air which we breath, allowing our brains and bodies to function.
82. The water, the most fulfilling and important substance on this earth.
83. Mother nature and all that she encompasses, plants, animals, the mountains, valleys, oceans, and more.
84. The people that grow our food.
85. The people that make our clothes.
86. Having a roof/shelter over my head.
87. Having food in my belly everyday.
88. The waves and rythm of the energy by which all things move.
89. Music, dancing sound waves that fill our soul with emotions and happiness.
90. Memory that allows me to remember my childhood and allows me to learn from the past.
91. Yoga, passed down from ancient times, that allows us to keep our mind, body and soul healthy and in harmony.
92. Exercise, keeping our body in good health and shape so that we’re able to live happily.
93. Meditation, helping to focus our minds and connect with who we really are internally.
94. The good health of my current body.
95. The hiking and biking trails all over the world which help us spend quality time with nature.
96. For the ocean, wind, and surfable waves which help me to get out in the ocean, recharge my batteries, surf, and experience being free.
97. That George Bush is out of office and that we have a new president that has some intelligence and actually cares about his job and this country.
98. That there has been a wake up call for the economy and irresponsible corporations who have been leeching the people and nature for all they have.
99. Almost being out of debt.
100. Thanksgiving Day, for reminding me to think of the things I’m thankful for and for getting friends and family together to share in thanks.

Ross Borden

101. My three amazing sisters
102. Mi mum
103. The Pacific Ocean
104. Powder snow
105. California redwood forests
106. Singing in the shower
107. Battle dancing
108. Being a dork with my little sisters
109. Lucy’s ninja-ness
110. Clara’s sense of humor
111. Reading stories to little billies
112. People watching in hilarious circumstances
113. Bouldering outside with the homies
114. TAPAS in Granada (free with the purchase of a beer)
115. The rights we enjoy as Americans
116. Thanksgiving – the only holiday where someone isn’t trying to sell you something
117. The culinary genius that is Tex Mex
118. A wagging greeting from a happy dog
119. Wrestling with the girl I love
120. Laughing with old friends about our antics in high school
121. A breath of fresh air, por las montañas
122. Being proud again to be an American!
123. My hippie friend, Ben Polansky
124. The superstokeinspiration that I get everyday from reading what you’re all up to out in the world!

Hal Amen

125. Dreams (nightmares included)

Nick Polansky

126. Laughing with friends.
127. Dancing with friends.
128. Dancing with family.
129. Watching family and friends dance.
130. Making furniture out of junk.
131. Selling furniture made out of junk.
132. A ripe persimmon from the garden.
133. Hard work.
134. A saliva smeared sketch on a napkin.
135. Hand-me-down overalls.
136. Toe stretches.
137. Head rubs.
138. Getting a hair cut from a roommate.
139. Walking the dog.
140. Water.
141. Rain.
142. Fire.
143. Hummingbirds in the tree outside my kitchen.
144. Samples at Trader Joe’s.
145. Labor.
146. Cycling.
147. Walking.
148. Riding the bus on Spare the Air Day.
149. Lying down in first rain.

Carlo Alcos

150. My ears
151. My eyes
152. My nose
153. My sense of touch
154. My wife
155-157. Our freedom, resourcefulness and health to travel where an when we want
158. All the animals of the earth. Can humans please stop thinking we are above them? And realize that we are all part of the big picture?

Debi

159. I am grateful for… my health above all; it is my army in life.
160. My blessings and good fortune.
161. My beautiful, healthy, intelligent son.
162. My husband’s health and love.
163. My strong, intelligent, hard working, healthy parents who made my great life possible.
164. The support, trust and loyalty of friends and family.
165. That everyone gets home safe everyday from school and work.
166. The best cafe au lait every morning, better than in any coffee shop, made at home.
167. I am grateful for the peace within.
168. Also for the peace that surrounds me; I live in a stable environment, untouched by war or ravaged by corruption and evil.
169. Daydreams, and the fact that I remember night dreams to analyze them, which helps me solve some of the problems that come up in my life.
170. Long hot showers on a cold day.
171. Cold showers on hot summer days.
172. That I live in a part of the world with 4 seasons.
173. I am grateful for the fact that I take nothing and no one for granted, and I am conscious of this from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep.
174. The evolution in my own life.
175. Chocolate
176. Croissants
177. Days on the beach
178. Staying toasty warm indoors on cold winter days
179. Another day
180. My hyperawareness of everything around me, I smell the flowers and the coffee, breath in the fresh air and I’ve always been at one with life like this – it’s a blessing to add to all the blessings.
181. I just love brushing my teeth and that clean feeling!
182. Listening to all kinds of commercial free music on satellite radio.
183. And so much more, I could be here writing a book….:-0

Alan Velasco

184. Toilet Paper
185. Laughter
186. The awesome feeling of walking into an air conditioned building in the summer.

VagabonderZ

187. Coming home after a few drinks with friends and finding Revenge of the Nerds on the telly. “No one is really free until nerd persecution ends”

Eva Holland

188. Staying up too late laughing with my mom.
189. Jumping the fence at the football stadium late at night (in high school) and climbing up to the highest row.
190. Rollerblading by the Ottawa River.
191. Full moons.
192. Walking the boardwalk at Halifax Harbour after dark, and hanging out by the tugboats.
193. Free samples at the bagel shop.
194. Snow angels.
195. Snow forts.
196. Snowball fights. (Got winter on my mind…)
197. Thunderstorms.
198. My friend’s fat cats falling asleep on my legs.
199. Long walks, wherever I am.
200. Good conversations with strangers – on trains, planes, in hostels, wherever.

MountainJedi

201.Receiving a hug and a kind note from a friend, unbidden.
202.Tabula rasa
203.Belonging and not belonging all wrapped up into one.

Becky

204. Slow dancing in the kitchen with my boyfriend
205. Hellos
206. Sand in between my toes
207. Holding hands
208. Diving into the same book twice because it’s that good
209. Naps in the park
210. People watching after New Year’s and Halloween
211. Dreaming
212. An ample amount of dehydrated marshmallows in my hot chocolate
213. Every Tuesday when the florist brings in a new flower arrangement
214. Surprises
215. Summer nights
216. Uncontrollable laughter
217. Kisses
218. The smell of burning candles
219. Memories
220. Love stories
221. Hugs
222. Running into an old friend
223. Loving and being loved
224. Productive days
225. Lazy days
226. Sharing
227. Complements
228. The smell of fries
229. Sex
230. My beautiful family
231. My forever friendships
232. Waking up next to Ben
233. Stretching in the morning
234. The job I have
235. The house I live in
236. Smothering myself in warm towels
237. Movies in the park
238. Sunsets
239. The smell of fall
240. My health
241. Sleepovers with my younger siblings
242. Music…im so thankful for the sound,lyrics, and meaning!

Abram

243. Playing basketball.
244. Beautiful women.
245. Good friends.
246. HBO’s “The Wire”.
247. Sleeping in.
248. Home cooked meals.
249. My girlfriend’s smile.
250. The internet.
251. A good book.
252. Being alive.

rebeccacate

253. Hugging and holding my grandchildren.
254. Waking up in the morning.
255. Sunshine.
256. Not answering to a boss (retirement).

Sarah Menkedick

Not sure how the numbers are going here, but I figure the more free things to be grateful for, the better, so I’ll start at 236:

236. the smell of pine trees
237. reading a book on a park bench all afternoon
238. finishing a project and feeling a rush of exhausted satisfaction
239.. the way my dog “shakes” by slamming her paw down on my palm
240. the feel of a hot shower after a long run
241. the ache and burn of my muscles after a long run
242. the first sip of coffee in the morning in the breeze from the open window
243. my husband and the way he and the dog are my family
244. my family
245. the taste of rajas made by Oaxacan nuns
246. fetching with the dog at sunset on the Cerro Fortin
247. the smell of winter in Ohio
248. the smell of summer in Ohio
249. the woods
250. rain

jetsettin

281. Trees and flowers
282. My kitten
283. Nature and wildlife
284. Art and music
285. My books
286. My intellect
287. Discovering my coaching, teaching, and leadership abiliity
288. My writing ability and other artistic abilities
289. Being able to be a part of my niece and nephew’s lives
290. Trips taken to the UK.
291. Writing for Travel-Writers-Exchange.com and Baja-Fun.com; was given the chance to showcase my writing talent; someone took a “chance” on me and believes in me.
292. Developing confidence and self-esteem; believing in myself even if no one else does
293. Moving to AZ — hiking the mountains
295. Waking up from unconsciousness — was sleepwalking through my life
296. Meditation
297. The ability to workout

Adventure Kid

298. A deep breath of clean foreign air while looking out across the Alps.

marisateschl

299. the smell of the earth after it’s rained
300. using a bag you last used when on the beach and finding sand and a postcard you never finished writing in it

Anonymous

281 Water pressure
282 My job
283 My brother
284 My independence
285 A thumbnail moon

aki.claire

301. Smiles
302. Legs to walk
303. Internal photographs
304. Love!
305. Laughter.
306. All the lessons you’ve learned by helping other people.
307. The feeling you get when a friend cheers you up
308. Knowing that the sun will rise soon
309. Seeing shooting stars from your rooftop
310. Watching the transition from day to night.
311. Puffy clouds.
312. Seeing the pale green buds sprout in the spring.
313. The caressing of cherry blossom leaves caught in the spring breeze.
314. The help of a complete stranger.
315. The dreams that motivate me.

Tinydancer

316. Discovering just how many different kinds of sunsets there are
317. Reunions with best friends, no matter how short the time passed
318. Falling asleep to the sound of waves crashing
319. Having been in love
320. Hope of a new, different love
321. Random encounters with strangers on my bus
322. Knowing my opinion is valued at work

daniellas

323. Fresh coffee in the morning
324. Laughing to tears with my sister
325. Finding magical places in my neighbourhood
326. Freshly washed bedlinen
327. Sea breeze in my face
328. Watching Amelie again and again
329. Getting things done and being proud of myself for doing that
330. Falling in Love
331. Charlie playing the piano on a sunny morning under a beautiful tree
332. Cooking with my friends
333. Taking beautiful photographs
334. walking and laughing
335. Nature
336. The feeling of freedom

trader

337. Brushing your teeth on the beach, looking out over the sea and the mountains on the opposite side of the bay reflecting the sun which has not yet reached you.
338. Reading poetry to the waves while standing on the bow of a traveling boat.
339. The burn in my legs as I climb the slope of a mountain too steep to descend and the knowledge that another way must be found.
340. The subtle realization of true happiness as I sit at a plywood desk in a remote cabin, accompanied only by a notebook and a pen.

jclum3

341: the smile you get after traveling 5,000 miles to see the woman that you love.

vera alves

342. Tulips
343. Talking to friends and not noticing time passing
344. My family’s love and support
345. Hugs
346. Closing your eyes while lying on the beach
347. Knowing that, no matter how long it takes, I’ll hug my family again
348. Making plans
349. Reading a book and loving it so much you don’t want to get to the last page
350. Fresh sheets
351. Postcards or letters from friends

vapintar

352. That I always have a family to return to
353. Forgiveness
354. That laughter really is the best medicine
355. That things do change, for the good, the bad, the in between
356. That all these people have written posts
357. The simple things
358. People who believe in me
359. Hope
360. Love
361. Smiling is catching
362. Potatoes

Apocalisp

363. High Fives – Seriously try and be sad during a high five, it’s impossible

elizabeth.zito

364. The warmth of my dog when she curls up next to me every night.
365. The things I learn each day
366. Always having the option of WALKING.
367. When hands touch
368. The fact that my mom still gets upset that I don’t let her do my laundry when I visit home.
369. Imagination
370. How happy my roommates are
371. The fact that people cannot hear rhythm without subconciously tapping, dancing, moving in time.
372. Youtube. Just sayin’.
373. The way Pennsylvania smells in September
374. What this painting conveys: http://jerseystylephotography.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/masterbedroom.jpg

hungrytravel…

375. Riding downhill on a bike
376. Vintage performances on Youtube (James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Soul Train Lines)

Ryukyu Mike

377. Sea breeze

Joanna Haugen

378. Mornings where I can sleep in.
379. Mornings where I get up early to walk my dogs before anyone else is up.
380. Quiet.
381. Imagination.
382. Skies dark enough to see all the stars.
383. Sunshine.
384. Spending time with people I love.

Photo by sskennel

THERE’S NO DOUBT the world keeps getting weirder. As always, what matters is how you respond, which as Hunter S. Thompson indicated, means “going pro,” getting paid somehow to jump ass-first into the river.

This isn’t, as they say, without sacrifice, which for me has meant among other things, being away from friends and family and querencias (Southern Appalachian Mountains) during this time of year. For the past decade I was either traveling or living out West, and when November came I’d invariably look at the cloudforest or the aspens and see instead the white pines and tulip poplars (with predictable leaves-floating-down scenario) I was missing back home. In stronger moments of reflection (depression) I could actually smell smoke / hear rivers flowing.

For the first few years of exile my Jewish guilt was also cranked up in the mix. Lord I wouldn’t be there again for the Thanksgiving family roll-call! (Plus pop quiz on college / career trajectories with and bonus exam on any gadget, clothing, and vehicle purchases.)

Certainly I wasn’t thinking about the food which had taken a severe nosedive over the years (butterball), an inverse function of our family’s levels of affluence. This unfortunately is the general trend vís-à-vís time spent cooking versus the default mode of ‘ordering,’ however, it should be noted that my mom’s pumpkin bread and Momo’s gravy always delivered.

I can’t pretend that on some levels the guilt isn’t still there (‘hardwired’ as the phrase goes), or if not guilt then just a feeling of ‘damn, I wonder how everyone is.’ Is it enough then, for me to celebrate Thanksgiving like this, remembering them, writing about them, all the way down here in Patagonia?

I wonder what Uncle Rob, himself an inimitable pro (who ended up moving to Hawaii, where, now that I think of it, I could totally see a Thanksgiving feast of wild pig someday) might say. He’d probably just want to see Layla, and maybe later throw the football, as good a response as any.

In a call last night with TV producer Misty Tosh and Matador jefe Ross Borden we tried to describe that element in Matador that inspired us the most, and somehow locked onto the phrase “people breaking free,” perhaps another way to verbalize what Hunter S. Thompson was advocating.

Yesterday a family of Mapuche Indians stopped me in the street (addressing me, damnit, as Usted Señor) and asked me if I lived here. I realized that as of 3 days (long enough for me to stop pulling in on the front gate to go out) this was technically true.

I didn’t know the address they were looking for, but for a few seconds I was somehow both in the scene and watching it from somewhere else (that future place you go in your mind when you think ‘I’ll write about this?’) as the old man pointed through the rain and said he’d heard it was más p’allá.

Of course this scene shouldn’t ‘stand for’ anything more than itself, as this way of thinking has led people to do weird and evil shit (like decimate the very people who helped them survive their first seasons after arriving in the Americas, then set up a national holiday “giving thanks”) since the beginning of time. This was just one man asking another for directions as has happened and will continue to happened in stadiums and forests and bus terminals and above rapids and in muddy streets everywhere in the world forever.

Try to ‘draw out’ this direction-giving into a spiritual thing or a religion or anything else and you’ve gone from pro to amateur. Keep it at ground level and just give the man directions or smile and tell him you don’t know but you’re sure he’ll find it up there más p’allá.

Community Connection

Going back through the archives the other day I realized the Notebook has now been around just over 2 years. I think from the very beginning, helping people go pro was part of the vision. Giving people info and stories. Of course you still have to make the jump yourself.

And if you’re still at home, offer to help this year in the kitchen. Learn a recipe from your mom. Then go write about it. Happy Thanksgiving.

THE BOTTOM LINE is this: in today’s media revolution, each moment seems to bring yet another opportunity for citizen journalists, backpack filmmakers, travel writers, and virtually anyone with a creative vision and a willingness to find and document interesting stories.

One of the central tenets we teach travel writers at MatadorU is that to publish, it’s necessary to develop a “publication mindset.” In other words, to look at publishing not from the perspective of a writer but from that of the person receiving your work.

With this in mind, look at how YouTube’s new platform YouTube Direct is going to facilitate the search for and incorporation of user-generated content like yours for media websites around the world:

Knowing this, ask yourself how you can develop your portfolio, presence, and reach as a citizen journalist or filmmaker. Here are several resources to help get you started, or to build on knowledge you already have:

*4 Tips for Shooting Better Travel Videos
*How to Use Voice Over to Tell a Story
*Tips for Travel Video: The Elements of a Story
*Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards [A straight up guide to the elements journalistic storytelling for those with little or no training.]

Community Connection

How do you plan on utilizing the continually unfolding opportunities for citizen journalism? And for editors of media sites: what is your experience so far with YouTube Direct?

Please share your comments with us below.

Photo: Rutger de Moddertukker

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD YET, new FTC guidelines will be going into place beginning Dec. 1. These guidelines include, among other things, a mandate on disclosing any and all paid sponsorships or endorsements.

From the FTC Guide:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. . . . Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

While many bloggers such as Marty Dickinson are bemoaning the impending regulations, some of us in the travel writing are looking at them as a step in the right direction. With full disclosure now being federally mandated, there seems to be more of a chance that current industry policies forbidding travel writers from taking comps will be revised, giving travel writers more freedom in looking for / accepting stories, and perhaps more to the point, earning a living.

How you answer Dickinson’s question about the regulations–”why would it be important for people to know that you’re getting a commission payment for a referral?” will probably determine how you feel overall about the issue.

The point is less about money and more about about transparency. After looking at this issue (or at least trying to) from all sides, I came up with a manifesto of sorts called Material Transparency.

I argued that bloggers and writers not only embrace the impending FTC regulations on material connections, but expand the concept into an overall aesthetic of transparency in their other connections, their crew, their companies, all as a way of defining and helping exhibit / promote their personal brand.

In what ways, if any, will these upcoming regulations affect your work as a writer or blogger? Please let us know in the comments below.

Photo by a song under the sugar sugar

YOU DON’T MISTAKE travel writing for punk rock. Most of it just isn’t loud or raw enough. Publicly, at readings, travel writers tend to restrain themselves from smashing the podium or lighting shit on fire.

The process of creation itself (and the audience’s reception) is generally an ass-to-chair kind of deal, often with food and / or beverages nearby [writing these lines with a tomato and cheese sandwich + coffee in a cafe in Santiago].

Finally, as Chuck Klosterman observed, anytime punk rock tries to explain or justify itself, it’s finished. By contrast, most travel writing seems to be, at least on some level, a way for the writer to explain or justify whatever trip he or she is on. That’s the basic gig.

Still, I’d like to imagine a scenario where travel writing was 100% punk. Where you were all-out free to write anything about anyone or anyplace in any style you wanted, free to investigate and write the stories of what’s going on in say, the cruise ship industry, only from a deckhand, not a passenger’s point of view. Or with the Kalahari Bushmen. Or maybe the fucked up lady that lives right above you in your building.

The fact that we all actually have this freedom but so few of us choose to exercise it is partly a reflection, I’m guessing, on human nature (paraphrasing Saul Bellow: “We get as much truth as we have courage to ask,”) and part straight up bitch-slapping economics.

There appears to be no dearth of paying markets for stories that lend themselves to advertising, but far fewer options (and certainly far less sustainable options) for writers going after stories on people and their relationship with place, which, to me anyway, is what travel writing is. As Jim Harrison wrote “How could we disappear into ourselves and forget our subject matter, the earth?”

Obviously I recognize the need for other kinds of writing (and have actually enjoyed having a copy down here of the Fodor’s Patagonia that Tim Patterson and I contributed to last year).

But most of all I’m interested in reading the stories people write not out of a need to accomplish or get paid but just out of a raw need to tell the story. And unless or until someone is out there writing / editing / and publishing their work in real time as they’re getting shot at in Iraq or patrolling the mountains in Afghanistan, I guess that’s as close to punk rock that we as travel writers can get.

15 Vital Matador Narratives

So all of this blathered, I asked around our crew what we should include in a list of travel stories published at Matador which are the most punk rock, the ones that seem to keep reverberating:

- 8:46am, 9/11 Manhattan

- Huayhuash: A Convergence of Change and Resilience

- Notes on Los Pitayeros

- My Chinese Clown

- Another End of the Road: (Still) Searching for Surf in Centroamerica

- Carnaval. Darkness.

- What would you give for your traveler’s moment?

- The Ringer

- Golden Trout

- My Hometown in 500 Words: Lagos

- Wrestling, Pig Skin, and Beer

- Birth of Layla Miller

- Growing up in East Germany

- Notes on Not Being Able to Pray at the Wailing Wall

- Hiking the Chacaltaya Glacier

Community Connection

What and who are you reading? Who is producing vital travel narratives right now–either famous or unknown?

Feature photo and photo above by the_toe_stubber.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a total beginner when it comes to photography. I have virtually no skills. I’m totally humbled when I see someone’s work like Trey Ratcliff or Matador’s own Lola Akinmade.

That being said, I feel like I do have an appreciation for form, composition, color, and a good idea of how to select an image for a story I’m writing or editing. Basically, I think like a writer. What I’m looking for are pictures that tell a story. This shot above is a good example. [Original photo link.]

In trying to learn more, I thought I’d share what I like about this picture, what its narrative elements are, and then hopefully people with more skill / knowledge can add their expertise.

1. The setting and the subject are both specific and universal.

Where is this photo taken? I’m not sure, but it’s obviously an urban environment. From the reflection in the glass it seems like the woman is in front of a store, which, if you look in the background, might be a sex shop?

What’s important is that she’s not just ‘anywhere’, but in a specific and immediately recognizable place. This is also a key tenet of good travel writing: no matter what the storyline, the place itself is always underpinning everything. You should get (and ideally, ‘feel’) where the characters are as soon as you start reading.

Similarly, the emotions conveyed are specific to this woman, to her style, but are also familiar and perceivable to anyone. The way she is sucking on her cigarette, the look in her eyes: all of it seems to exude lasciviousness, fearlessness (or maybe feigned fearlessness?), defiance. Because it is so universally recognizable it all invites our imagining a story.

2. Every element in the image is balanced to create an aesthetic unity.

From the colors (the warm red of her sweater and pink bra of the woman [mannequin?] behind her, the cooler blues and greens of the wall) to the way her face in the foreground balances with the woman’s body in the background, everything seems to reinforce the overall aesthetic.

Similarly with writing, the best stories seem to do everything at once. The description flows into the plot which flows into dialogue which flows into the narrator’s reflections. Everything is balanced.

3. Subtle details keep leading your eye around the picture.

Pictures that tell stories make you want to keep looking at them and imagining more. The more I look at this image, the more I notice things like:

• She has one ear covered and one exposed.
• You see almost none of her body in the picture, whereas the model in the background is almost all body but with no face.
• Her hair looks like it hasn’t been combed very well, and she wears no makeup or jewelry.

The best stories have subtle and unexpected details throughout (and especially at the beginning and ending) that keep us moving along and leading us in new directions, ideally, adding more depth each time we go back and read.

Community Connection

What elements do you find in pictures that tell stories? And how can you apply this knowledge to your own photography? Please let us know in the comments below.