Every travel writer who writes about the United States (I’ve already excluded a number of travel writers, including, regrettably, some American ones) does so in the shadow of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. Quoting Tocqueville in articles about the States became such a cliché that Calvin Trillin, when he was filing regular reports from around the country for The New Yorker, started a small club of reporters who vowed never to mention Tocqueville in a story.
But I would argue that writers who go out to look for America (and that includes songwriters) owe a greater debt to the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s than they do to the French political thinker. The Project’s American Guide Series – which covered all 48 states, plus the territories of Alaska and Puerto Rico – showed that every area of the country was worthy of attention, that Arkansas was as deserving of a book as California.
It was not obeisance to geographical relativism but rather a recognition of the infinite richness of the United States. The Guide’s belief in the value of the marginal, the beauty of the unsung – under threat today from the supremacy of the popular (the curse of the Internet) – infused James Morris’s Coast to Coast, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak. Its greatest champion was Jack Kerouac who, heading back to New York after travels in the West, found grandeur in the Susquehanna River.
A friend recently went with a group on a cruise around Southeast Asia. On his return, he told me that he found most of the other passengers much better company than the people in his group, who, on the whole, had done almost no reading about the countries that the ship visited. In fact, he said, they showed very little interest in the destinations. This would not be noteworthy except for the fact that my friend was on a press trip with fellow travel writers.
Aldous Huxley once compared teaching to throwing endless buckets of water over rows of long-necked bottles.
And yet...
I recently wrote to a woman who took a travel writing course from me in the spring of last year. I mentioned that I had a story in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, and added that, while teaching about leads one evening, I had read the story's opening paragraph in class.
She wrote back asking if the story began with a young woman reading a book under a tree.
If you're a freelance writer, it's hard to wrap your head around the idea of New Yorkers without power.
I've been a very delinquent blogger these last two weeks, what with houseguests and my biannual visit to Bascom Palmer yesterday (out by sunrise and back home with enlarged pupils that made reading impossible so I watched baseball). And next week I'm flying to Pennsylvania to visit my mother.
But if not here, I can be found in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, which came out last week. The story, "My Days with the Anti-Mafia" from the winter issue of The Missouri Review, paints a portrait of Palermo and the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo. It is always nice being in the anthology, but especially so when it's a story that I did on my own because none of the editors I queried showed any interest.
Plagiarism seems to be on the rise among writers, but I doubt that it's more prevalent now. It's just that the Internet has made it more detectable.
I have never understood the thinking behind it. As a writer you're supposed to be original ("make it new" Ezra Pound instructed). The whole point of writing is to give your individual experience your personal stamp, i.e., to refrain from repeating what's already been written. I hate cliches not just because overuse has made them tired and dull but because they're borrowed cleverness. The best writers come up with future cliches.
And, ethics aside, taking someone else's words as one's own is an admission of failure and inferiority: I can't do any better than that. Writerly pride alone should make plagiarism unthinkable.