Tagged: the traveler’s notebook
Fall Notes
Published new notes from the editor. One of those kinds of stories that you just sit down and type straight out. Always the best kind for me, but have to go back and see how it reads tomorrow.
meta-tags for recent post on writing
Update 9/8/09- Cuaderno Inedito, Notes on the Wailing Wall
Julie Schwietert has just created a new blog called Cuaderno Inedito. The first line of her first post reads “I spend too much time on the haters.”
Just published an ill note by Robert Hirschfield at the Traveler’s Notebook: Notes on Not Being Able to Pray at the Wailing Wall. Here’s an excerpt:
It is early in the morning, and the other spiritually superficial tourists are still asleep. I want to say a prayer for my mother who prayed here once, and who died, prayerless, of Alzheimer’s.
I am shy around strangers; it keeps me from talking to God. But here is my chance. The plaza is a landing strip for prayers, the Wall the Ganges of the Jews. It makes me uneasy.
It feels like there’s a ‘paradigm shift’ at Matador. In a good way.
Subtitles
the better a story, the harder it is to preface it with a subtitle so the reader ‘doesn’t get lost.’
Literary Travel Writing: Robert Hirschfield
The best writing traverses all landscapes. Here’s an example: Notes on Two Rivers: Benares Through My Lens, a story by Robert Hirschfield.
The words help. The words don’t help. Judith hides behind the words. Right before I left for India, a cancerous nodule was discovered in her left lung. She never comes with me to India. She has a fear of being disabled by bacteria. An abstract expressionist painter, when she travels, it is Vancouver to photograph the stones and bones on her friend’s island.
“Sarcomas,” said Dr. Ari Klapholtz, the distinguished pulmonologist who examined her, “are funky.”
