I'm heading off tomorrow, driving to Georgia for the wedding of a friend, so I won't be writing for about a week. The wedding takes place Saturday, which is the birthday of James Fenton, who was born in Lincoln, England in 1949.
A great poet, Fenton also wrote an excellent travel book, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. Full of colorful characters and unique experiences (Fenton was present at the looting of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon), All the Wrong Places - published in 1988 - was an early indication of one of the paths the travel book (in the hands of people like Robert Kaplan and Jeffrey Tayler) was going to take. Toward politics, that is, not - unfortunately - toward poetry.
