Yesterday, I was reading The Economist.
We get The Economist once a week and I put it on our coffee table to make it look like we know what we’re talking about (“Did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads? It is!”)
Tag Archives: international
I don’t read my Economists
How to Write a Travel Piece
February 16, 2012
Start by looking through all your photos of the trip for inspiration. You need to have the perfect picture to illustrate your travel story. This process takes you over half an hour and you somehow find yourself looking at your wedding photos. Hm. Your nails were awesome. Maybe you should get a French manicure again soon?
Stop that. You have something important to write. Close the iPhotos.
Open Facebook. Close Facebook.
Ok, ok. Now you’ve found a picture, you put it in the blog post. There it is in your browser. Better than all the other pictures. Inspiring. Travel-worthy. Theroux-like. But there’s nothing underneath the picture. You know what, though? Serious writers don’t write with lots of pictures and blog links. You’re going to try something different. Like The New Yorker/Atlantic, classy-like. You close WordPress and switch to Word. You debate going analog because sometimes you write best on paper. But that’s just, like, too crazy right now, man. Who was that dude that always wrote with Moleskine? Hemingway? Gotta Google that.
Ok, five minutes later.
Ok, Word is open. The cursor is blinking on the page.
But first, you need writing music, you know, to get you pumped up and in the spirit. You open Grooveshark. You type Scotland into the search engine. Too much happy ceildigh music. You need something serious and writer-ly. You end up having to create your own playlist. Enya. Runrig. The Corries. You know, the basics of Gaelic seriousness. Your husband tells you to stop listening to that shit out loud because he is going to massacre you like the Campbells and the McDonalds. (You’ve been listening to/singing Scottish music for the past two months. Sometimes you also mix it up and sing Scottish songs in Russian or Hebrew.) You point out to him that technically killing one person is not a massacre. He gives you a dirty look and you put on headphones.
Open Facebook. Anyone doing anything cool? No. Close Facebook.
You write the first line.
“Scotland was amazing.” Stupid. First grade. Delete delete.
“Scotland technically should be free.” Terrible. What if you have Royalist readers? You can’t alienate your reader base.
“As you stand looking over the ramparts of Stirling Castle, you’re cold and wet and miserable, but mostly, you’re thinking about Alex Salmond and Scottish independence.” Stupid. Who the hell stands on the ramparts of a castle in the dead of winter? You did, but that’s not the point. It’s not a believable narrative. Also, what kind of weirdo thinks about Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister? Terrible. Delete Delete. Delete. Also, you weren’t technically thinking about Alex Salmond, but it’s a good narrative device. But then you feel like you’re lying to your readers. Spend five minutes wondering about the merits of lying to your readers. Google James Frey, leading you down a rabbithole of literature fraud. You would never do that. Unless you could also make millions.
Wait. Get back on track. You need to read up on Alex Salmond to better understand Scotland.
TheScotsman.com. Economist.com. Guardian.co.uk. Wikipedia. Google News.
Open Facebook. Anyone doing anything fun that you can comment on yet? No? Close that shit. Read New York Times. There’s a travel essay on Ireland in there. Feel the flames of jealousy. Ignore that shit. If you read it, it’s going to influence how you write your stuff. That’s why you’re strictly off travel writing for the minute.
Back to Guardian.co.uk. Write up some some stuff on Alex Salmond. But that will go later in the piece. You still don’t have an introduction. Keep listening to Grooveshark. Screw the introduction. You’ll write one later. Force yourself to grind out one paragraph.
Open Facebook. Jesus Christ. All people are doing are posting picture memes. Doesn’t anyone use Facebook for anything interesting anymore? Discussions? Close it.
Type up three more sentences. You are done with your paragraph. There it is.
The sun, always a fickle visitor in the Northern winter, was nowhere to be seen. The muted greenery of Stirling village and farms spread out below, and the clouds moved lugubriously across the stern crags in the distance. It was two days before Christmas and the castle was empty save for five Asian tourists huddled in the Great Hall. But I was outside, drinking in the landscape, fighting hypothermia, and thinking about Alex Salmond.
But, by God, it is TERRIBLE. It sounds like every amateur travel piece ever written. Also, maybe people will think you’re racist if you mention Asian tourists? But they really are Asian. Also, you should research Stirling Castle more.
Screw it. It’s done. For now. Jesus Christ, you are finally done with the first paragraph.
Promise your blog readers (and yourself) a finished version sometime next week, like you’ve been promising them for the past three weeks.
Open Facebook.
Stop SOPA, stop censorship.
January 18, 2012
Here is everything you need to know about SOPA, why it is extremely dangerous for the Internet, and why I am vehemently against it, and you should be, too. If you click the banner on the top right of the page, or go here, you can learn about what to do.
The Internet represents some of what is the best and most beautiful about humanity and human idea exchange. Let’s not let that change. Because here’s what happens when it does. My God, can you imagine that there would be no more comics?
Travel is my religion (so is really terrible amateur photography)
December 26, 2011
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
Wow. Where do I start about our vacation to the England and Scotland last week?
I love to travel, and I live to travel. Planning travel is a pain in the ass and makes me really stressed out, but the moment when I see the US disappearing below me is when I am at my happiest. Being on an airplane, on a train, and in a car in a foreign country is the closest I’ve ever felt to being an optimist.
London.
So far, Mr. B and I have been to Prague, Israel, and a bunch of places in the US together. Since we’ve been crazy with changing jobs and houses and everything, we haven’t been able to have a decent vacation aside from the few days we spent in Las Vegas and Boston this year. But a real vacation for me means leaving North America, and that’s exactly what we did when we went to England and Scotland last week.
Initially, I wanted to go to Argentina, because it’s warm in the winter. But Argentina was $$$$$$. So then I thought maybe Iceland, because it’s close by and really cheap in the winter. No dice, because Iceland has only 4 hours of daylight when we wanted to go. Add a Russian to that equation, and you go suicidal. The next logical location was the UK, because it’s relatively close from North America (6 hour flight from Philadelphia), and this time around, since we’d only leave for 6 days, I didn’t feel like dealing with logistics of travel in non-English (or Russian or Hebrew or Italian)-speaking countries. For our next trip, I’m hoping we have 2 weeks for Japan (or maybe, India).
We spent 2 days in London, then took the train to Edinburgh, did a Scottish Lowlands tour, then took the train to Glasgow, did a Scottish Highlands tour, and then took an overnight sleeper train back to London. After all of this, I have to say that, as much as I hate some things about Europe, including organizing travel in Europe, I am completely besotted with both England and Scotland. The Scottish Highlands and the history of Scotland as a nation especially left a very deep impression on me, and I’m hoping to write about it in a more coherent fashion after I organize my thoughts and figure out the best way to split them up into blog posts.
In the meantime, here are some of my favorite snaps. Also, don’t make fun of my hat. It was REALLY cold the whole time. As always, clicky to enlarge.
St. Paul’s Cathedral, London
Queen Me Street, London
Sunset over the Thames, London Eye, and Parliament
We were lucky enough to get to Big Ben at sunset, when the best pictures happen.
Christmastime Edinburgh at night. But more like Edinburrrrrrrrgh, amirite?
Losing my head over my favorite crush, Adam Smith, in his native Scotland (Edinburgh). Please dear God don’t say anything about my boots.
The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond and Ben Lomond in the background.
Glasgow, the day before Christmas
Highland dude in Edinburgh with the Edinburgh Castle in the background.
Tower of London. What I love about medieval places is that I’m never too short, but always the right height never to watch my head in doorways.
Lots more later.
This post is kind of hipster because I talk about old-school radios and miss them, but I also love my iPad
December 5, 2011
When I was 12, I bought a shortwave radio that I could also tune to international channels.
It offered a terrible user experience, as the cool kids would say these days. It caught a signal maybe 20% of the time. You also didn’t know which country you were tuning to, only the frequency. But the 20% of the time it did work, it was amazing.
After I’d finished all my homework and climbed into bed, I’d lie under the covers so my parents wouldn’t hear and try to catch stations from across the universe in the dark. It always reminded me of my mom’s stories of my grandfather tuning to Kol Israel in the 1970s, trying to get through the dampers that the Soviet Union had installed to block external radio signals. (By the way, if you’re looking to go down the nostalgia rabbit hole, start here. It’s a broadcast of Moscow Radio IN JAPANESE from the 1970s.)
There would be static, static, static, then fine-tuning, then, finally, a voice broadcasting from halfway across the world. Once I was able to catch Russian radio and I listened for half an hour, fascinated. Sometimes it would be somewhere in Africa. Sometimes, Japan or China. But never for very long, and never something with context that I could hang onto. I’d get delicious shivers down my spine at imagining all of the far away places that the static on the radio was trying to reach, wanting to be there, but also very glad to be safe at home.
Recently, I discovered the same thing for my iPad, TuneIn Radio:
and it’s pretty much like the same thing. I mean, sure, you could technically do the same thing on your computer with individual radio stations, but it’s not the same because the app aggregates by location and type. I have to say the fact that I can tune to any station with the press of a finger does take some of the mystery and romance out of it, but I still get the same sort of chills from the fact that I’m able to listen to radio from Kenya.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to a crazy amount of music from all over the world. When I’m cooking on weekend mornings, I put on Russian radio. For cleaning, it’s usually a pop station from the Maghreb or Kahliji. Sometimes it’s the BBC’s Hindi service. Sometimes I’ll listen to stations from Johannesburg, and wonder how different we all are, but how much we all have in common.
Usually, though, just as I’m about to reach a profound thought about humanity, Mr. B comes and tunes the app to a top-40 station in the US. But that’s ok, because I like pop music, too. Especially when I find out that it’s sexually suggestive songs in English by a Congolese-Swedish guy playing on a conservative Saudi station.
