The beauty of writing an essay as opposed to a travel story is the absence of a notebook. It's like working without a net.
I forgot to mention that I would be off for a few days at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Minneapolis. Over 10,000 writers and teachers of writing descended on the city, where they attended panels, gave readings, and hung out in bars (the last two sometimes simultaneously). They also browsed the large exhibition hall, which was set up with tables and booths representing writing programs, university presses, and what seemed like every literary magazine in America. Walking around the convention center you got the unusual impression that the world was in love with writers.
So it was good that a woman came by and dumped a pile of fortune cookies on the table where I was talking with a friend one day. After opening his up, Jim handed me the fortune: "Your writing will go underappreciated in your lifetime."
Back to the movie: At the Tower Theater Sunday afternoon a packed house watched a film about the Warsaw Uprising. It was a horrifyingly graphic, uncompromising depiction of the doomed revolt of Varsovians - women as well as men, many in their teens - against the occupying German forces in the waning days of World War II. At the end of the two-month battle, 200,000 Poles were dead (in a city with a pre-war population of 900,000). At one point a young woman standing amidst ruins hears an explosion and runs to avoid a shower of blood and limbs. Watching that scene I thought of my editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine who, after commissioning a story about Warsaw from me, requested I "bring out more of the romance of the city."
In his story about traveling through North America, Karl Ove Knausgaard spends a great deal of time talking about his arrival without a valid driver's license, his panicked attempt to obtain one, and his embarrassed confession of this oversight to his editors at the New York Times Magazine. It struck me as the sort of thing you can get away with if you're a famous novelist but would get any freelance travel writer fired.
At one point in the piece Knausgaard discusses two books he admires about cross-country journeys: Lolita and On the Road. He does not mention that Vladimir Nabokov never learned how to drive and that Jack Kerouac drove so poorly that he was rarely given the opportunity. I'm not sure if this omission was due to Norwegian modesty - it would have made the three writers equals of a sort, at least in terms of a handicap - or simply a lack of knowledge.
I read the entire piece eagerly, even - especially - the personal revelations. A travel writer, I am always fascinated to hear what experiences other writers have in their pursuit of travel stories. (And this one had a kind of can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck quality.) What differentiated Knausgaard's writing from Nabokov's and Kerouac's - and Henry Miller's and Jan Morris' and Jonathan Raban's - was the fact that, except in places, it was not masterful or revelatory enough to make me want to read it again.
It used to be that one of the major challenges for writers was to sit down at their desks. Once they did that, they had successfully shut out the world's distractions. That's not the case today, with Facebook and Twitter. We are the first writers in history to be distracted by the thing we write on.