Last Updated on April 25, 2019
When irony died a premature death, thanks to the events of 9/11, I wasn’t terribly upset. I actually hoped its passing would spell the end of cooler-than-thou t-shirt slogans that every hipster from Silverlake to Williamsburg wore as a de rigeur part of their wardrobe. Eh-eh. Instead, irony seems to have gone into a coma, not quite dead but not entirely certain the world is ready for the announcement that it’s still alive and kicking. I got over it.
But when I read that some bloke named Chuck Thompson (never trust a guy who willingly goes by “Chuck”) thinks that today’s travel writers amount to little more than a class of uninspired hacks, I was peeved — and a might bit baffled. Does this guy not read National Geographic Adventure or Outside? Has he not heard of Tim Cahill, Pico Iyer? Sure, there are more than enough travel-industry stoolies who’ll write a glowing review of any dump that throws them a comp, but isn’t toadyism part of any industry?
I haven’t yet read Chuck’s opus, Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, but based on the pieces I have scanned, I have no need to. The first one I plucked out on Amazon began (I kid you not):
Watching the Penis Olympics didn’t make me feel much like the “foreign ambassador” the JET orientation had prepared me to be. Worse, the pressure on me to participate was fierce. A lupine excitement gripped the room at the possibility of seeing a Caucasian penis in the engorged flesh, but the assumption that I was packing a gigantic wad, flattering to be sure, was also intimidating.
And two Surprise Me! clicks later:
Temples, not tits, filled my Thai checklist.
Pure poetry, Chuck.
If travel writing has passed its peak, Chuck sure ain’t helping prep for its comeback tour with frat-boy prose like that. So who is he to pass judgment on the rest of the travel-writing community, especially when the fluff pieces he so despises are usually taken by well-meaning writers just to pay the bills in between more important writing gigs?
Senor Chuck does, however, make some valid points, including several that brought back stinging memories of a not-so-long-ago gig. Says Rolf Potts, in his review of Chuck’s book [emboldened words hold special meaning for yours truly]:
Thompson proceeds with an accurate roundup of the elements that conspire to create bad travel writing: throw-away words like “hip,” “happening,” “sun-drenched,” “undiscovered,” and “magical”; imperative language that urges the reader to “do” this, “eat” that, “go” here; stories that depict tourism workers (taxi drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders) as “local color”; the fake narrative “raisons d’etre writers invent to justify their travels”; the untraveled writers and editors who assemble authoritative-sounding travel “roundups” from Internet research; the conflicts of interest that arise when writers fund their travels with industry-subsidized “comps”; publications running what is essentially the same story over and over again, never questioning stereotype assumptions about certain parts of the world.
All genres have their low-brow and their high. Travel writing is no different. To lump the commercial in with the literary is like comparing Knocked Up to
North by Northwest
. Kudos to Potts for taking Chuck down a notch.