On the Art of the Travel Log

Having finally caught up on my New York / New Jersey trip entries (look back in the April and May 2006 archives to read them), I thought this deserved posting:

Admittedly, I'm not very good at writing travel logs. After all, my main audience for these diary entries is myself and what I publish here are really just slightly coherent first drafts of my notes and thoughts.

All the same, I found the discussion with Author Frances Mayes on KQED's Forum on March 31 2006 quite interesting. (Listen if you want.) Mayes was talking about her new book and all the places she lived and described in the book. The theme -move somewhere and live there for a while- is exactly like what I did with Manhattan years ago.

Eighteen minutes into the conversation Mayes talked about being offered bites off of other people's plates and remarked how this doesn't happen in America. In contrast, this happened to me (and similar events) in Manhattan; at the time I said this would never occur in my home of California. Interpret these observations as you will.

Thirty minutes into the conversation I heard an exchange which really describes why I take notes of things I see and think:

Caller: "... [My wife] would look at the notes she took during the day and she would try to write out her narrative. Very important to do that because you can write your own Under the Tuscan Sun when you get home."
Mayes: "I'm so glad he brought that up because I think what he said is so crucial to enjoyment. I see people in cafes writing in their notebooks and I always think that is the most delicious moment in travel, when you're alone in a cafe with your notebook and you're writing down all you've seen. In a way it kind of doubles your pleasure and your perception; when you start writing down what you've done and seen, you see more and it makes bigger associations for you."

Finally, although this quote twenty-five minutes into the discussion isn't really relevant to discussing travel logs, I hadn't heard it before but thought it was very incisive:

"I loved Garcia Lorca's comment about racism in Harlem when he was there studying jazz. He said he could not understand racism because it was in fact a sign of God's creativity."

(Sadly, I could not verify this quote and attribution on the web.)