Old World Wandering is the story of two overland journeys through Europe, Asia and Africa, for readers who travel.
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August 22, 2012
August 22, 2012
William Dalrymple: "What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller?"
When In Xanadu was published at the end of the 80s, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were often reduced to objects in the background. I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories centre stage.
Above all, I had to consider whether travel writing was still a form that could adapt to this very changed world. With the book finished, and having read a lot of the more recent travel books produced by younger writers, I have not the slightest doubt that the genre has a great deal of life in it yet. For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It’s possible to cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms - biography, or anthropological writing - or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin’s footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.
August 22, 2012
August 21, 2012
Inmates outside a 1930s Shanghai opium detoxification clinic, from Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, a Foreign Policy slideshow
August 20, 2012
August 20, 2012
"Traveling with Clinton is like chasing after a woman shot out of a cannon with rocket boosters strapped to her pantsuit: The world rushes past in a blur and you’re catapulted into an alternate reality, one in which days are relentlessly scheduled and life seems an endless progression from one meeting, interview, press conference, or statement to another, with flights covering thousands of miles in between."
— Nine Days with the Most Traveled Secretary of State in History
August 20, 2012
Dawn over a Tibetan village outside Shangri-La in Yunnan, China
August 16, 2012
Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?
There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.
August 15, 2012
August 15, 2012
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A single groove in a vinyl record, magnified 1000 times.
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Ice Flowers
These peculiar natural phenomena are formed on new layers of sea ice from saturated water vapors that come...
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Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky,... -
The city that dreams us all
this just made me fall in love with beijing all over again.
by OCTAVIO PAZ
news today and...
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Wilkes Street. E1. (Taken with instagram)
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The Ten Commandments of Beijing
1. Thou shalt not praise Shanghai, nor move down to it, for Beijing is a filthy jealous mistress.
2. Thou...
