How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel by Pierre Bayard

When I first read the title, I thought that it was a humor book. But it isn’t. Bayard’s book praises writers and “adventurers” who’ve not been to the places they talk about.

He claims that the role of fiction in the travelogue discourages people from traveling. They learn what they wanted to know about a place. Why put out the effort? Really?

How far did Marco Polo get? Maybe no further than Venice, according to Bayard. And how about Margaret Mead? She did go to Samoa and wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, which made her world famous. But according to Bayard, she didn’t stay with the local population for long. Therefore she came up with conclusions that Samoan teenagers were much freer with sex than their American counterparts. This was refuted in the 1980s.

Bayard spends too much time with Jayson Blair, the NY Times journalist who faked his stories. He was caught, shamed and fired but Bayard seems to redeem him. Same with Rosie Ruiz, the woman who took the NYC subway during the New York City marathon. If you read the chapter on Ruiz’ ruse in a certain way, you can say that Bayard understands and even condones her behavior.

The main reason I read the book cover to cover is that Bayard seems to explain and even praise the exact opposite of what I do. I won’t write about some place I haven’t been to.

Even if I get most of my information from the web and think I understand it, I need to go there. He talks about the spirit of the place.

What you can see when you travel may be “disconnected fragments of reality” or “common places devoid of interest”, he says. But I disagree. Common places are interesting, if you spend time in them. I’ve been to many, many national park service battlefields, by now. And they’re all different and interesting.

You got to get out more, Prof. Bayard. I’ll save armchair travel for when I’m really old.

I just finished a sweet memoir, Dear Bob and Sue, about a couple’s journey through the national parks. It’s written by Matt & Karen Smith, a 50ish couple who visited all the 59 national parks in the United States, including the one in American Samoa.

They write about their impressions of each park, letting their personalities come through. They didn’t do much research or background reading.  They only seemed to write about what they learned when they were at a park. Still a fun read.

This is a funny book, no doubt about it. Matt and Karen, the authors, quit their jobs for a year when they (or at least, when he) were fifty.

They planned to visit all the 59 national park protected by the National Park Service. And they did! Some of the visits were really fly-in, fly out – literally in Alaska. They spend a lot of time drinking and looking for meals, but that’s their way of travelling.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is my “home” park, so I immediately went to that write-up. Since they visited all these parks superficially, they had the usual stereotypes of the Southern Appalachians. Matt even expected to hear Dueling Banjos. He also said that he didn’t want to talk to people in the wilderness. You want to talk to everyone in the wilderness.

Epilogue

Hey, writers. I’m now in the prestigious club of those whose reviews has been rejected by Amazon. In this case they gave me a whole bunch of reasons for rejection. The only one I could think of is that I put “personally identifiable content in the review. So read it on my blog and see if you can pick out why they rejected me.

Answer – probably because I said that the Smokies was my home park. Yeah… Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the country. I’m not the only one that goes there often. In fact, I’m going there tomorrow. This rejection is done by a computer program – for sure.

What if this was a publicity stunt by Amazon? It surely got people talking.