What You Should Know About Travel Writing

What You Should Know About Travel Writing Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrators encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature. All travel writing- because it is writing- is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation (quoted by  Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, 2013). Notable contemporary travel writers in English include  Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson,  Pico Iyer,  Rory MacLean,  Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick,  Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz,  Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others. Examples of Travel Writing By the Railway Side by Alice MeynellLists and Anaphora in Bill Brysons Neither Here Nor ThereLists in William Least Heat-Moons Place DescriptionLondon From a Distance by Ford Madox FordNiagara Falls by Rupert BrookeNights in London by Thomas BurkeOf Trave, by Francis BaconOf Travel by Owen FellthamRochester by Nathaniel Hawthorne Examples and Observations The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention, they make ample use of their imaginations. . . .The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay, and the- often inadvertent- self-revelation of a memoir. It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities.(Thomas Swick, N ot a Tourist. The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2010) Narrators and NarrativesThere exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greenes Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipauls An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator, so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing, is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre. . . .Freed from strictly chronological, fact-driven narratives, nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style, offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms.(Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World. Routledge, 2002)V.S. Naipaul on Making InquiriesMy books ha ve to be called travel writing, but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme. I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives.(V.S. Naipaul, interview with Ahmed Rashid, Death of the Novel. The Observer, Feb. 25, 1996) Paul Theroux on the Travelers Mood- Most travel narratives- perhaps all of them, the classics anyway- describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler- the traveler’s mood, especially- is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing.(Paul Theroux, The Soul of the South. Smithsonian Magazine, July-August 2014)-  Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. M aine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. â€Å"I need the winter to rest my body,† my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . .(Paul Theroux, The Wicked Coast. The Atlantic, June 2011) Susan Orlean on the Journey- To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience- the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing- the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses- that isnt explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I dont actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what Ive seen.(Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Whos Been Everywhere. Random House, 2004)- When I went to Scotland for a friends wedding last summer, I didnt plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didnt expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I dont know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didnt want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . .(Susan Orlean, opening paragraph of Shooting Party. The New Yorker, September 29, 1999) Jonathan Raban on the Open House- As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing.(Jonathan Raban, For Love Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987. Picador, 1988)- Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. Its when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name youv e never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest.(Jonathan Raban, Why Travel? Driving Home: An American Journey. Pantheon, 2011) The Joy of Travel WritingSome travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages.(Frances Mayes, Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002. Houghton, 2002)

Improving Mobile Access to Government Websites

Improving Mobile Access to Government Websites The U.S. federal government is working to improve access to the wealth of information and services available on its more than 11,000 websites from mobile devices like tablets and cellphones, according to an interesting new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). While most people still use desktop and laptop computers, consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to access websites with government information and services. As the GAO noted, millions of Americans use mobile devices every day to get information from websites. In addition, mobile users can now do many things on websites that previously required a desktop or laptop computer, like shopping, banking, and accessing government services. For example, the number of individual visitors using cellphones and tablets to access the Department of the Interiors information and services increased significantly from 57,428 visitors in 2011 to 1,206,959 in 2013, according to agency records provided to the GAO. Given this trend, the GAO pointed that the government needs to make its wealth of information and services available â€Å"anytime, anywhere, and on any device.†    However, as the GAO points out, mobile Internet users face a range of challenges accessing government services online. â€Å"For example, viewing any website that has not been â€Å"optimized† for mobile access- in other words, redesigned for smaller screens- can be challenging,† notes the GAO report. Trying to Meet the Mobile Challenge On May 23, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order entitled â€Å"Building a 21st Century Digital Government,† directing the federal agencies to deliver better digital services to the American people. â€Å"As a Government, and as a trusted provider of services, we must never forget who our customers are – the American people,† the President told the agencies. In response to that order, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget created a Digital Government Strategy to be implemented by the Digital Services Advisory Group. The Advisory Group provides the agencies with help and resources needed to improve access to their websites via mobile devices. At the request of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s purchasing agent and property manager, the GAO investigated the progress and success of the agencies in meeting the goals of the Digital Government Strategy. What the GAO Found In all, 24 agencies are required to comply with provisions of the Digital Government Strategy, and according to the GAO, all 24 have made efforts to improve their digital services for those who use mobile devices. In its investigation the GAO specifically reviewed six randomly selected agencies: the Department of the Interior (DOI), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) within the Department of Homeland Security, the National Weather Service (NWS) within the Department of Commerce, the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The GAO reviewed 5 years (2009 through 2013) of online visitor data as recorded by Google Analytics from each agency. The data included the type of device (smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer) consumers used to access the agencies’ main website. In addition, the GAO interviewed officials from the six agencies to gather insights about the challenges consumers might face when accessing government services using their mobile devices. The GAO found that five of the six agencies have taken substantive steps to improve access to their websites via mobile devices. For example in 2012, the DOT fully redesigned its main website to provide a separate platform for mobile users. Three of the other agencies GAO interviewed have also redesigned their websites to better accommodate mobile devices and the other two agencies have plans to do so. Of the 6 agencies reviewed by the GAO, only the Federal Maritime Commission had yet to take steps to enhance access to their websites via mobile devices, but plans to enhance access to its website in 2015. Who Uses Mobile Devices? Perhaps the most interesting part of the GAO’s report is an accounting of who most often use mobile devices to access websites. The GAO cites a Pew Research Center report from 2013 showing that certain groups relied on cellphones to access websites than others. In general, PEW found that people who are young, have more income, have graduate degrees, or are African American have the highest rate of mobile access. In contrast, PEW found that people less likely to use mobile devices to access websites in 2013 included seniors, the less educated, or rural populations. Of course, there are still many rural areas that lack cellphone service, let alone wireless Internet access. Only 22% of people 65 and older used mobile devices to access the Internet, compared to 85% of younger people. â€Å"GAO also found that access to the Internet using cellphones has increased, primarily due to lower cost, convenience, and technical advances,† stated the GAO report. Specifically, the Pew survey found that: 74% of African Americans use cellphones to access the Internet.85% of people ages 18 to 29 used cellphones to access the Internet, compared to only 22% of seniors age 65 and older.79% of those using cellphones to access the Internet have incomes of at least $75,000.Only 50% of people living in rural areas use cellphones to access the Internet.74% have college degrees or higher, compared to 53% with a high school diploma and 51% without a high school education. The GAO made no recommendations in relationship to its findings, and issued its report for informational purposes only.