Capsule Review: Tourists with Typewriters

Patrick Holland and Graham Huggin, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998)

In preparation for writing a book about travel, I’m reading a lot of travel books. In preparation for that, I read Tourists with Typewriters, one of the few books of critical analysis of the travel genre. The focus is on contemporary travel writing, which for Huggan and Holland means the latter half of the twentieth century.

Intelligent but sometimes muddled, Tourists with Typewriters never quite lives up to the witty promise of its title. It’s very much a book of its time. Published in the same year that I finished my first travels in India and Nepal, it freights itself with the word “millennium,” goes for a swim in the murky waters of a poorly articulated postmodernism, and takes breathless notice of an internet just beginning to transform everything about travel.

Still, it has much to offer if you’re about to take a deep dive into travel writing’s greatest hits, with trenchant looks at everyone from Theroux and Chatwin to Naipaul and Iyer. In a chapter on post-colonial writing, Huggan and Holland throw some good punches at the anachronistic British white males bumbling about in embarrassed nostalgia for empire, and also at some of the writers from the colonies who seem interested more in indicting Western culture than in talking about real people and places. Following that, a chapter on “zones” takes a look at the recurring tropes in writing about the tropics, the Orient (mainly Japan), the South Seas, and the arctic. While South Asia doesn’t make the list, the analyses of these other zones is fair warning that any travel book is in danger of reaching for easy cliches. It was this chapter, more than anything else, than made it clear to me how necessary it would be to read the heavy hitters on India — Naipaul, Dalrymple, Tulley, Sukhetu Mehta — if only to avoid unknowingly repeating them. After all, my image of India was shaped not just by personal experience, but by The Lonely Planet, which in turn was shaped by received ideas about India. It’s not that one must never repeat anything another author has said — the Taj Mahal was beautiful when I went there, even if others had already said so — but that one should understand the tropes and framings that animate the works of others and make a conscious decision about whether to echo or counter them.

Things get more difficult in a chapter called “Gender and Other Troubles,” which runs into what I think of as the gay traveler’s paradox: that for a Western male traveler, fucking the locals is exploitive if they’re women but liberatory if they’re men. To be fair, Tourists with Typewriters was written before intersectionality became a watchword, but it’s still a startling oversight. You could make the case, I suppose, that there’s a difference in what it means to be a woman engaged with a foreigner and a man engaged with a foreigner, and that this difference is decisive — men, for example, may have more local power, and aren’t at risk of pregnancy — but no such case is ever made. There does seem to be an argument that gay men, more than straight men, are traveling in search of opportunities for legitimate sexual expression that have to be suppressed at home, but this too is suspect when you’re talking about men leaving behind, say, Britain of the fifties for the South Pacific. Why should the gay escape from prudery be privileged? And why shouldn’t gay travelers be held to account the way straight ones are for their unequal relationships?

The chapter on “postmodern itineraries” is as muddled and impenetrable as you would hope, and a final chapter, on travel writing at the millennium, is one of those adorably dated looks at an early internet in motion. Best not to say too much about them. Overall, Tourists with Typewriters is useful both as a window into what is considered travel writing serious enough to review, and into some of the more common pitfalls of such writing.

Capsule Review: Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922)

There is much that is wrong with Siddhartha.

For one thing, it’s an orientalist fantasy of India written by someone who’d never been there. Siddhartha is a quintessential product of the German Oriental renaissance, which, free from the practical realities of colonialism, could maintain an Orient of the mind, an Orient of ancient texts. Siddhartha takes place not in any real India, but in the India of Shakuntala. And I know the dark turn this German Orientalism had already taken, casting the Aryans as the true founders of Western civilization, demoting the Greco-Roman and Semitic to mere sterile interlopers — and, with them, the Napoleonic French who had so recently humiliated them, and their language, which had taken over European intellectual discourse as the replacement for Latin. We all know where German Aryanism ended up, and though this can’t be blamed on Hermann Hesse in 1922, the Germanic presentation of haughtily pure and perfect brahmins can be a little discomfiting.

Siddhartha is also, like all of Hesse’s important works, an adolescent book, in that it elevates the very adolescent quest for independence and self-knowledge into the highest good over a lifetime. Such a quest is a common enough pursuit for young adults, in the West at least, but most of us make our peace with the inevitable ambiguities of life and shift our focus to other concerns: love, family, career, creativity. We may feel twinges of regret for lost idealism, but in Siddhartha, this comes to be seen as a full-blown betrayal, which is an appealing view if you’re still in the midst of your youthful discovery phase and sure — as young people tend to be — that you will never settle into the ordinariness of your fucking parents.

And there is the further irony in putting all this adolescent rebellion into an Indian setting. India, still in the twenty-first century a land of arranged marriages and caste-bound social lives, is less amenable to quests for personal independence than almost anywhere else. Reading V.S. Naipaul and others, one gets a sense of how embedded Indians are within complex networks of identity. Who you are is who you are among, and there is little notion of simply rejecting all of it and starting fresh as an individual. This is a German idea, not an Indian one.

When I first read Siddhartha in my senior year of high school, I knew very little about India and nothing about German orientalism. I did know that I was struggling to break free of my parents’ religiosity, just as Siddhartha struggled to break free from the empty ritual life of his father. Four years later, when the idea of traveling to India came to me in a half-sleep, surely Siddhartha was there in the background. I didn’t travel to India on a conscious spiritual quest. Like Siddhartha, I felt I’d already had enough of teachers, that I needed to discover the world on my own, which is why I spent no time in ashrams or monasteries during that trip.

But perhaps Hermann Hesse had something to do with my half-formed notion that wandering aimlessly around India was a way to break free from a prescribed and rote course of life. I went to India because it was easier than starting a career, and because I was terrified of starting a career, which I imagined would chain me to a desk for forty years with no summer vacations and no adventures. Just why I thought India was the right place to go is a question I’ve been pursuing, and Siddhartha is one of the points of direct contact I can identify between the cultural body of received ideas and my own young self.

I remember, back in high school, liking Siddhartha and then not liking it. I liked — loved — the part where Siddhartha rebels against his father and goes off to find himself. I waited for him to become the Buddha, so I was startled when the Buddha turns out to be someone else. And then I remember being disappointed when Siddhartha went to the city, fell in with a courtesan, and became a wealthy merchant. I was still too young to get it. When Siddhartha finally leaves that life for the simplicity of being a ferryman, and at last finds true enlightenment in his old age, I saw it as too little too late. Who wants to wait so long for enlightenment, or to suffer so much along the way?

What Siddhartha misses — what Siddhartha misses — is that the way to find meaning in ordinary life is through human connection. Siddhartha stays aloof. He enjoys his courtesan but doesn’t marry her. He never has a child (that he knows about). He’s generous in business, but he never sees his business dealings as important to the community. What most of us learn is that to know thyself, you have to know others. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life that is examined but not experienced is no life at all.

Young people just starting out in life don’t know all this. What I learned in India was, first, what it was like to be utterly alone, and second, how to connect with others. I didn’t quite learn how to take real life seriously — that would come later — but it was the beginning of my discovery that what’s outside is more interesting than what’s inside.

For all its flaws, Siddhartha had me on the edge of tears for much of the way through. It’s a beautiful fable, and one can recognize the absurdity of one’s adolescent self while still mourning the passing of that self and its passions. Maybe that’s what this whole project is, writing about that formative four months in South Asia. Maybe that’s what the bildungsroman is, and why they’re written by adults rather than children.

Capsule Review: Orientalism

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Difficult, tendentious, infuriating, indispensible. What is there to say now about Orientalism, a work that altered its field so profoundly? Orientalism, for all its flaws — and they are many — is a book like On the Origin of Species or The Interpretation of Dreams, a book that created around itself a before and an after. For any Westerner writing about the East, Orientalism is something you have to grapple with (and if you haven’t it shows, Elizabeth Gilbert!).

The first time I read Orientalism, I remember arguing with Said quite a bit as I went along. This time, having read a great deal more of the scholarship he’s talking about, I didn’t argue as much. It was clearer what he was attacking and what he wasn’t, and it read less like an assault on all of Western thought than like a lament for the shift from the earliest Orientalists, the translators and enthusiasts, to the institutionalized purveyors of recycled truisms in service of empire.

A danger, with Orientalism — one for which Said takes some of his critics to task in an afterword — is slipping into that universalist mindset, which is exactly what Said is attacking. A lengthy book insisting that the recurring error of Orientalism is to essentialize should not be read as essentializing all of Western thought or scholarship. Another danger is letting Orientalism live too much inside your head, to where you can no longer speak your own thoughts and experiences because you hear Edward Said whispering in your ear, questioning whether your thoughts are your own or just the received idea, and if the latter, whether you’d be doing harm by recapitulating them. If everyone who travels to India, for example, reports seeing many of the same things, there is the possibility that it’s because those things are actually there, and that they are interestingly different from what you find elsewhere, and that it’s not merely a set of received ideas derived from books.

That said, it’s undeniable that we all came to India expecting or hoping for certain things — carrying certain ideas — and Said is illuminating in describing how these ideas came to be, and how they came to be repeated.

Capsule Review: Cannery Row

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)

I used to love John Steinbeck, around the same time that I loved Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Not everything holds up. As I got older, Steinbeck’s dime-store preachiness began to seem cloying, and I thought of Cannery Row as his novel with the least of that stuff. Rereading it again, I’m sorry to say that it too suffers from the usual Steinbeckian defects.

I read this book somewhere in India, or at least I think I did. My travel notes mention that I read Steinbeck, and I can’t imagine what other book of his I might have read, but I honestly don’t remember when or where I read Cannery Row on that trip.

Reading it now, it’s an interesting contrast to On the Road, written around the same time. Kerouac and Steinbeck both write about bummy folks in California, but where Steinbeck valorizes and patronizes his poor characters, turning them into clowns or saints or clown-saints, Kerouac actually lives among them, is one of them. Cannery Row is an elegy; On the Road is an ejaculation.

And what hath all this to do with India? Not much, I’m afraid, except that I probably felt back then like Steinbeck was doing something noble in trying to give humanity to the poor, something India can make extremely difficult.

Capsule Review: Far Out

Mark Liechty, Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (2017)

In 2002, on my second trip to the Indian Subcontinent, I began with a ten-day meditation course at Kopan Monastery in the Kathmandu Valley. We began our days in silence, sipping our chai to the sound of Tibetan Buddhist prayer emerging from the main gompa: deep, rumbling chanting, punctuated with cymbal clashes and horn blasts. For ten days, we lived among the Tibetans. The monastery served as a school for children, and we watched as the young monks engaged in raucous outdoor debating sessions, or simply ran and played as kids do, little streaks of excitable maroon zipping in and out of the buildings.

Our course was led by Karin Valham, a Swedish nun who had come to Nepal in the 1970s and stayed on. In the afternoons we got into debates with her, sometimes contentious, and I began to wonder how well she understood either Tibetan Buddhism or Western philosophy. A couple of times we had answer sessions with Lama Lhundrup, through a young translator, and tried to get answers to our more difficult questions. At one point, the lama was giving a fairly mechanical idea of how karma works — if you’re handsome, it’s because you were humble in a past life, if you’re rich it’s because you were generous, and so on — when a woman asked if this meant people in Hollywood had the best karma. There was a long exchange between the translator and the lama, and then the translator asked, “Excuse me, Hollywood is in America?”

It was a charming moment, and we took it as a delightful proof of authenticity: here was a small remaining corner of the world where Hollywood was less important than holy words. But perhaps we should have known better.

In Far Out, Mark Liechty tells the story of Kopan Monastery and much else besides. This unusual book is a fascinating look not just at how tourists came to Nepal and responded to it, but how Nepal and Nepalis responded to tourists and shaped their experiences. Beginning in the 1950s, Nepal became a playground for the wealthy who wanted to go to the ends of the earth, a kind of last haven of Raj nostalgia where you could meet exotic royalty and hunt tigers. That phase gave way to mountaineering and adventure tourism, driven by the 1953 summitting of Everest.

And then, starting in the 1960s, the hippies started to come, both on the overland route and increasingly by air. Liechty clearly has a soft spot for this generation of travelers — it’s there in the title — and like a lot of people, he seems to imagine it as something of a golden age. And for a lot of Nepalis it was. Liechty, who speaks Nepali, conducted extensive interviewers with Nepalis who were part of the tourist trade, or who partook of the hippie culture. One gets an extraordinary, all-too-rare sense of the Nepalis as participants in the global youthquake that shook that era.

The hippie phenomenon lasted a little longer in Kathmandu than elsewhere in the world, but it had to fade there too, and it did, especially after Nepal banned marijuana sales (but not possession) under US pressure. Liechty seems a little chagrinned at the newer wave of Westerners who were less willing to slum it and get dysentery, who wanted basic creature comforts on their relatively short vacations, though this era also brough a lot more money to Nepal (but you can get the impression tourism is the main part of the Nepali economy, when in fact it’s just 7.9%, well under the global average of 10.3%). As Pico Iyer discovered in Video Night, tripping gave way to trekking in this era.

Liechty also documents another shift in Kathmandu that has broader global parallels. I had already noted that Tibetan Buddhism was for Gen X what Hinduism had been for the boomers. Ravi Shankar played at Montery Pop, the Beatles and Donovan went to Rishikesh, and Swami Satchidananda spoke at Woodstock. Well, I went to the Tibetan Freedom Concert, hosted by the Beastie Boys, and everyone was there. Hinduism lacked a way for outsiders, mleccha, to become a real part of it, but Buddhism welcomed everyone.

And that’s where Koman Monastery comes in. We saw it as a Tibetan institution, but it turns out to have been something more complex and hybrid. Liechty tells the story of Zina Rachevski, a Hollywood socialite, an heiress of Russian, possibly Russian Jewish, descent and pretended royalty who was known as “the princess,” had an affair with Marlon Brando in Paris, declared herself the reincarnation of Madam Blavatsky in Greece, and eventually wandered to India, where she met two Tibetan lamas living in a refugee camp. She got them out of there and into better lodgings, then brought them to Kathmandu, where she encouraged them to teach the Westerners who hung around Bodnath (there appears to have been some sort of rivalry between the Buddhist trekker types there and the Hindu stoner types out by Swayambunath). Rachevsky wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, and after a while she seems to have been pushed out. In the end she departed for a three-year silent retreat at a remote monastery near Everest — her Buddhism seems to have been sincere — and there died of a stomach ailment. She was in her forties.

No one ever mentioned Rachevsky while I was at Kopan. She’s a poor fit for an institution that sells itself as an authentic outpost of Tibetan culture — more authentic than what you can find these days in Tibet itself, since Kopan is free from Chinese government inteference. Yet Kopan is an authentic manifestation of something Nepal excels at, which is bringing together elements of its own culture, those of its neighbors north and south, and those of the West to create something unique and inviting. The earliest Westerners to visit Nepal were struck by its syncretic mix of Hinduism and Buddhism, and that syncretic instinct lives on: in Tibetan monasteries with Swedish nuns giving courses designed for Westerners, in restaurants where the pizza is topped with buffalo cheese, in trekking lodges of Thakali-style stone with names like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, where they bring the apple fritters and spring roles to the hot table with the brazier of coals underneath to keep your legs warm. India has a reputation for absorbing and making Indian every influence that comes to it; Nepal, always a little different, has its own way of taking those outside influences and reflecting them back in enticing ways. Liechty tells this story well and with admirable depth, giving Nepalis a voice in their own story of engaging the wider world through the twentieth century.

Capsule Review: Empire of Signs

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1970)

Roland Barthes went to Japan. Or did he?

In what has to be one of the strangest dodges in the long history of travel writing, Barthes opens his book about Japan by declaring that he will not be “claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse),” but rather gather together some features from somewhere, call them a system, and name that system Japan. Are we clear? So later, after rhapsodizing about chopsticks and before rhapsodizing about the shape of Asian eyes, when Barthes lets it slip that he’s been checking out boys in rope bondage, you should keep in mind that there are in fact no boys, no ropes, only a system, and so you needn’t worry whether Monsieur has engaged in any major gesture of Western discourse.

Such slight of hand, of course, is not convincing, and one wonders if it’s all tongue in cheek. The caveat is as much a tradition of travel writing as descriptions of native dress, and here Barthes has simply taken it to a degree of absurdity worthy of a post-structuralist. What comes across, once you get past all the mumbo jumbo, are the sketchy observations of a clever visitor who liked Japan very much during his short time there. This is fine, I suppose, but Empire of Signs is already a short book, and if you were to take out the impenetrable semiotics nonsense, it would be little more than some jottings. Which is maybe all that it is.

So why did I end up reading it? Because people who write about travel writing inevitably cite it, that’s why. And here, perhaps, is Barthes’ most skillful magic trick: he has written a travel book that he claims is not a travel book, and in doing so he has turned it into a suitcase, always there for the next theorist to unpack.

Capsule Review: The Road to Oxiana

Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937)

An influential work can look less impressive once its influence is everywhere. Lever House was once a lone rectangle of glass in a sea of ornate stonework. It’s harder to see what the fuss was about now that it’s surrounded by other glass rectangles. It’s harder to grasp what was so startling about thematic touches and studio trickery of Sgt. Pepper when you’ve grown up on Dark Side of the Moon and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy then when the top 10 albums included The Monkees, More of the Monkees, and The Sound of Music.

The same could be said of The Road to Oxiana, a travel account of crossing Persia into Afghanistan in 1933. Here, before Bruce Chatwin, before Eric Newby, before William Dalrymple, is a wry Englishman — Eton, Oxford, gay and closeted — writing with a now-familiar mixture of rapturous description of places and slapstick interaction with local people and the many irritations of life on the road. There are comedies rendered as playscripts, and there are long, moralizing analyses of squinches. I can sort of see why this book became an object of worship for the likes of Chatwin and Paul Fussell, but sometimes it feels like trying to get a Deadhead to explain to you what the deal is.

There are inspired bits of silliness, like his decision to refer to the Shah of Iran as Marjoribanks to avoid any trouble with the authorities should they read his notebooks, and also disheartening burts of anti-Jewish sentiment and other ugly judgments of local people. Maybe the best and most revolutionary conceit is that The Road to Oxiana never explains itself. It begins in medias res with Byron swimming in a canal in Venice and just goes from there, and either you come along or you don’t. You gather that Byron is interested in seeing the ancient architecture, about which he is deeply knowledgeable, but there’s never any real rationale given for the trip or why you ought to care about it. The story is just the story. Though they’re very different books, and very different characters, it’s the same technique you find in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and you find it also in An Area of Darkness, the first of V.S. Naipaul’s India books.

I don’t know that I can take quite so astringent an approach to writing my own travel story. Much of what interests me is exactly the why that hovers around the journey, the hidden lines of influence that steered me to India and away from other places. But there’s something to be said for telling the story without apologies or excuses. I was there, I saw what I saw, I felt what I felt, I behaved the way I behaved. A reader can come along with me or not, but I should probably avoid pleading overmuch for any significance. If it’s interesting to you, then it’s a story worth hearing. If not, read something else. All of my favorite books are boring to somebody.

And another thing: In my own writing, no squinches. In book after book, I’ve found myself exhausted by passages of architectural and horticultural description. In the era of Google especially, none of this is necessary. I can give you a general sense of what the Jantar Mantar or what you looks like, and then you can Google it if you care to. And I neither know nor remember enough to bore you with which sort of bird alighted on which sort of blossom just before the rains on a particular Thursday. So there you go. No architraves and no excuses.

Korean City Slogans

Long ago, someone compiled a list of these. They’re outstanding. Here are updated versions from 2022, wherever I could find them. In many cases, these are billed as the city “brand,” but whatever. I tried to go with official-looking slogans as much as possible, not just headings from city websites, but it’s sometimes a bit tough to tell, and I included only actual English slogans, not translations. Explanations from city websites, where they were insane enough to merit inclusion, are shown in italics.

Andong: Andong, the Capital of Korean Spirit
Plausible, this one, as the Andong region is known for historical sites and Confucian tradition.

Anseong: City of Masters
Masters of what? Unknown.

Asan: SMART Asan
SMART stands for Spring Mankind Art Renovation Technic. Take it for what it’s worth.

Boryeong: VIVA Boryeong
‘VIVA Boryeong’ implicitly means ‘Peace and Comfort Forever (a great city to live in for a long period of time).’ 
Sure it does, Boryeong. Sure it does.

Bucheon: Fantasia
“Fantasia Bucheon” is a city that dynamically develops as we make great strides toward the future.As a city brand that accentuates the charm of Bucheon, “rhythmic character arrangement and color, symbolizing “diverse fun, pleasure, and happy melody” represent Bucheon’s future as a new conceptual city where fun and vibrant culture and advanced cutting-edge industry interact for mutual growth and development.The word mark features interconnected alphabet characters to convey our idea of a systemic urban network and organic infrastructure in Bucheon where various industries, natural environment, and people coexist in harmony.
I totally got all that from the title of a 1940 Disney classic.

Busan: Dynamic Busan
Korea, before it asked you to Imagine Your Korea, before it was Korea Sparkling, was Dynamic Korea, the Hub of Asia. Good on Busan for recycling!

Changwon: Plus Changwon
Flexibility to be added anywhere, Possibility to add anything, Changwon’s future value growing bigger with the more you add.

Cheonan: CHEONAN, THE WORLD’S BEST CITY!
Bold claim for a city mostly known for being a place you pass through on your way to somewhere else.

Daegu: Happy Citizens / Proud Daegu
Too proud for just one slogan.

Daejeon: New DaeJeon, Shaped by Citizens

Dangjin: Energetic Dangjin

Dongducheon: Do Dream
Grammatically questionable but sweet.

Donghae: Sunrise city, DONGHAE
Sensible enough for a city whose name means “East Sea.”

Gangneung: PINE CITY Gangneung
Brand of Gangneung uses the image of a pine tree to conjure up a sense of peace and relaxation in the mind. It expresses the values of the city as a tourist destination, which also happens to be home to many pine trees.

In <Bonchogangmok>, the pine tree is referred to “the adult of all trees”, and green pine means creation and abundance of life. The design symbolizes the high spirit of Gangneung people and the meaning of JeilGangneung.

Geoje: Blue City GEOJE
I think they mean this to be both the blue of the sea and blue collar, but I’m not really sure.

Gimhae: Royal Capital of Gaya, Gimhae

Gimje: THE ONLY PLACE WHERE HEAVEN AND EARTH MEET
From Wikipedia: Gimje is known as the region where the sky meets the ground … Gimje is the only region where Koreans can see the horizon from a landlocked area. 

Gimpo: FULL LIFE GIMPO
Gimpo very much wants to convince you it’s an actual city, not just Seoul’s older airport, now used for domestic travel.

Gongju: Gongju, the Gateway to a Happy Future

Gumi: YES GUMI
The Gumi city brand, YES GUMI means Smart and exciting Gumi being with you! and it reveals city’s future vision for the next 100 years with its citizens.
YES stands for
Your City : Beginning of positive innovation created by you
Exciting City : Exciting YES Gumi as everyone can sympathize with
Smart City : A Rich city full of jobs through people-centered smart innovation.

Gunpo: GUNPO Good for you

Gwanyang: Sunshine Gwanyang
Interesting choice of slogan for the city with the world’s largest steel mill.

Gyeongju: Golden City, Beautiful Gyeongju

Gyeryong: Fresh GyeRyong
This brand expresses the image of a rustic city with clear skies, rich soil and clean waters to actively promote the image of a dynamic Gyeryong City fast becoming the true center of Korea with its elevation to city status.

Hwaseong: The Way to Better Living

Icheon: City of Crafts and Folk Art

Iksan: Amazing Iksan

Incheon: all ways Incheon
“All Ways Incheon” means that Incheon is building the way for Korea, leading the way to the world, and creating a way for everyone. It represents where Incheon currently stands and the direction in which the city wishes to progress towards moving forward.

Jecheon: HEALING CITY JECHEON

Jeonju: Feel Korea in Jeonju

Jinju: Charm Jinju

Namwon: ♥1*
They also go by “The City Of Love,” but this Prince-esque use of symbols is so nuts, I thought I’d include it.

Mokpo: Romantic Port Mokpo

Mungyeong: Moving forward – The New Mungyeong

Osan: AI Artificial Intelligence
Not sure what they’re after here, as their English website has nothing about AI, but it’s a town mostly known for its US air base. The mayor says “people are sparkling” and that Osan is “Korea’s belly button.” Make of that what you will.

Pocheon: Fortune City Pocheon

Pyeongtaek: Citizen-Centric New PyeongTaek
Their “Integrated Brand for Agricultural and Special Products” is “Super O’ning,” which is amazing.

Sacheon: Mecca of high-tech aviation industry
Mecca is not, however, a sister city.

Sangju: Just Sangju
So, not Mecca then?

Seongnam
OK, so this is my current hometown, and while there’s no slogan as such, there is a city song, and it’s amazing. How we got a mariachi, I have no idea, but it’s our’s and I love it.

Seoul: I.SEOUL.U
So this one is notorious. The website has all the tortured logic behind this peculiar, unreadable catchphrase. If it helps any, this is the city brand, while the city slogan is “Seoul, Up and Running Again for Fairness,” a messy disaster with MAGA-like implications that Seoul at some point was down and not running.

Sokcho: Fresh Sokcho

Taebaek: Always Taebaek
Never Mecca, for example.

Tonyeong: The Land of Sea, Tongyeong

Uiwang: Yes! Uiwang
Emphatic if not original.

Ulsan: The Rising City

Wonju: Healthy Wonju

Yangju: JOY

Yangsan: Active Yangsan

Yeongcheon: StaR YeongCheon
Alas, no explanation for this strange slogan or its strange capitalization.

Capsule Review: In Cold Blood

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

In writing about my travels in India and Nepal, one of the core questions, briefly phrased, is What the hell was I thinking? I have been focused on this question from the angle of what put the notion of India into my head in the first place, but it seems that much of the story is the clash between prior notions and what I actually faced once I’d arrived, and how I responded to that dissonance.

One way I responded, of course, was to read books. In the time before ubiquitous internet, when even English-language cable content was hit or miss, books were the companions you had when you retreated to your hotel room, or while waiting for a banana pancake and a lemon soda that for some reason are taking over an hour to prepare. I read a great deal on the road, and the books influenced my mindset as I confronted the unknown, whether it was reading Migraine and thinking I was having them, or reading House of the Dead and beginning to see cheap South Indian hotels as gulags.

What I chose to read is also a reflection on my thinking at the time. I don’t think I read a single book about India or by an Indian while I was traveling. Reading was my escape from an overwhelming experience. But what I did choose — constrained, of course, by what was available in whatever used bookstore I was browsing at the time — was … Well, it was sometimes pretty weird. Why read about Dostoevsky in Siberia? Or why, still jet lagged and addled in Bombay, did I walk out of the Taj Mahal Hotel bookstore with In Cold Blood? I hadn’t ever read true crime before, and maybe I just thought it would be gripping enough to keep me enthralled through the difficult nights ahead, but I’m not sure psychopathic murderers on a travel spree was the best thing for me at that moment. I remember feeling like a walking moneybag amid Bombay in all its poverty and not knowing how you might recognize the sort of badmash who would stab you for your wallet, although eventually I consoled myself with the thought that unlike in New York City, here I was at least bigger than most of the people around me.

So you want a review of In Cold Blood? Jesus, did you not read it in high school or something? Or maybe see the movie, in which murderer Perry Smith is played by future murderer Robert Blake? Or see Capote, for which Seymour Philip Hoffman won an Oscar nine years before he overdosed? Well, it’s the story of two psychopaths who murder a very nice Kansas family and then drive around for a while and then get caught and executed.

The style, revolutionary at the time, was novelistic, and there have been questions about its veracity, which Capote insisted on, to his detriment. This was before The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe or the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, before Helter Skelter and Mindhunters. Neither true crime nor novelistic journalism were yet prominent. As with many influential works, you have to squint to see what was so startling in it because so much of it has become commonplace. Sgt. Pepper’s thematic structure, its songs fading into each other, its sound effects and studio trickery, blew everyone’s minds in 1967, but none of that seems so extraordinary if you grew up on Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall and hip-hop. But Sgt. Pepper has great songs, and In Cold Blood has Kansans and losers. Its questioning of capital punshment and of the criminal responsibility of emotionally and physically damaged people is too shallow to amount to much in today’s terms, though again these may have been bold questions at the time, the beginnings of a long conversation.

It’s also worth noting that as an inveterate New Yorker junkie flown to Bombay, I gravitated, entirely by accident, to a book originally serialized in that magazine. (The other book I bought that day was Migraine, by frequen New Yorker writer Oliver Sacks.) You can take the boy out of New York, but you can’t take The New Yorker out of the boy.

Capsule Review: Video Night in Kathmandu

Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (1988)

On a rooftop in Kathmandu in 1997, I watched Trainspotting with a bunch of other tourists, and I remember thinking, during the infamous scene about the worst toilet in Scotland, that it actually looked pretty posh, what with its porcelain basin and all. I’d just come back from a couple of weeks in the mountains, and I’d seen far worse.

I’d always thought Video Night was about these tourist showings, and that the book was another Karma Cola, another Indian’s perspective on the marauding Western tourists. But Iyer is Californian, not Indian (though his parents are from India), and Video Night is a kind of mirror image of Karma Cola: a look at how Asia and Asians are being changed by the globalized economy that was just beginning to emerge in the 1980s.

Iyer breaks his book into chapters by locale — Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Japan — and for each he delves into a particular theme, drawing from it a kind of insight about that particular nation. It’s a risky business, but Iyer’s insights are so sharp, and his turn of phrase so skillful, that he carries it off. For all the places I visited in the years or decades after Iyer, he seems to have captured an essence that resonated powerfully with my own experience. (The one significant exception is China, which by the time I visited in 2009 and 20014 had transformed itself from a land of cement buildings, gawping old folks, carless boulevards, and empty plazas into a teeming capitalist madhouse.)

More than any other book I’ve read so far, Video Night seems like what I’d like to write. Indeed, reading Video Night as prep for my own book sometimes felt like getting out your guitar and ProTools and then listening to the White Album for inspiration. What even is the point? But my story is its own thing, I suppose, and happened in a different time, and I’ll tell it.

What’s most useful to me from Iyer is the structure. A lot of itinerary-driven travel writing falls into the same meandering difficulty as the travelers themselves who start to wonder why they’re slogging on to the next ruin in the guidebook. Even when it’s done very well, as in Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, it can come to seem a little flacid and pointless. Iyer escapes this difficulty by writing thematically rather than chronologically. Some of the essays are more narrowly pitched than others — Thailand is about love for sale, India is about Bollywood, Japan is about baseball — but even the more diffuse pieces have a sort of a thesis behind them, which gives the narrative force and purpose. You feel like each essay has something specific to say. There’s a reason you’re being asked to come along.

While I don’t imagine restructuring my narrative quite so much — the chronological quality seems more important in what is, in part, a bildungsroman — I can see how I might organize the journey into chunks, each with a kind of theme or focus. I won’t give too much away for now, but I’m grateful to Iyer for reminding me of my own essayistic strengths. My best writing has been travel writing, and the best of that was written on specific themes. Maybe that’s the way to go.