Travel writer snobs - making fun of the rest of us

I have never read much from Bill Bryson. He has always been on the periphery of my reading world, though it had seemed based on what I knew of his writing subjects that I might enjoy him. So a couple of years ago I picked up one of his books to read. I really couldn’t get through it. Maybe this book was an outlier, but it seemed to me that he never met anyone in his travels that he actually liked. It was a long list of rubes and people whose main attraction to him was being targets for ridicule and poking fun. He came across as the travel writer equivalent of a bully. I wondered, has Bill Bryson ever come home from a trip better off, enriched in some way? And I don’t mean enriched by having new royalties for a new book to sell.

I think it might make sense to approach this question not as a hate mail for Bill Bryson, but as a call out to his readers. Hopefully we might open the eyes of the traveling public that travel is not just an excuse to make fun of others not like you. And travel reading hopefully not an occasion to feel like the rest of the world is there for your condescending amusement. I am guessing that there are a lot for whom the easy jokes and gybes are entertaining enough but they really don’t see themselves as snobs and would like to be engaged in the world at a more interesting level than merely by making fun of others with different lives. For these people, keep reading.

I suppose the first thing to try and do is to actually identify snobbish travel writing when we come across it. That isn’t always obvious. It is often so darn clever and amusing that we just smile and move along.

For instance, I watched David Letterman for many many years before I realized that his humor was based on making fun of virtually everyone else and everything not of his own world. Maybe you got the feeling he was laughing with you, not just at you, but you were always the butt of the joke nevertheless. This doesn’t mean he isn’t a gifted comedian and talk show host. It just means that he perhaps isn’t actually a very nice person. And maybe if you took his approach to all your own social interactions you might find your circle of friends growing smaller with each passing year. Maybe not, I’ve never met him. But I think it is hard to break through a barrier with another person when you are incessantly on the lookout for ways of making fun of them.

So for me, I guess the first marker to identify the travel author snob is when I start to realize that I have been introduced to a number of people in their travelogue and so far not once has there been anything nice said about any of them. They are comical, they are strange, they are narrow, they are not as cool as the writer. They simply have been offered up as a tableau on a weird and disorienting amusement ride. Welcome to the bat house.

Now there are going to be times in travel when you do actually meet up with characters, and observe things that are genuinely amusing. And part of an author’s job in describing that world is to draw for us mental pictures of those encounters. I enjoy an ironic comparison or the juxtaposition of different worlds as much as anyone. The amusement value can be both entertaining and at best even enlightening. But at some point you may notice that for the sake of constant entertainment, pretty much every encounter, maybe even every paragraph, and even sometimes almost every sentence is filled with adjectives and imagery that makes us laugh at (not with) the subjects. It is one thing to be funny, it is another to simply make fun of someone else.

So is this limited to the high and mighty, the Bill Brysons and David Lettermans (would that be Lettermen?)? Unfortunately not. It seems that this form of travel writing is pretty popular. There are a lot of writers that think their job is simply to amuse us and pander to our mostly urban sense of superiority rather than maybe actually enlighten us about the gifts which travel brings us. Here, I hope to make this sort of writing, entertaining as it may be, easier to spot.

To do so I am going to call out the article that gave rise to my rant here. It is a good example of what to me is someone that should have been taken aside years ago and told that their place in the world is not to think they are better than the rest of us. Not too surprisingly, it came from the New York Times Magazine section, a publication centered on a city that thinks the known world effectively ends somewhere mid-river in the Hudson. (See, I can do this too.)

Though I hate to give this author and her article any more internet hits than she deserves. here is the webpage for the article in question. See Fatuous Snob Train Article.  You can read it for yourself and see if I am overreacting. After all, this wouldn’t be a rant if I weren’t to some extent.

The article chronicles a woman’s trip from NYC. She apparently decides to travel across the US to LA on Amtrak trains in order to put an article into The NY Times Magazine section, always a good reason to do something new.  I will put aside her inability to gauge correctly whether the cost of the train trip is more or less expensive than other travel options. (She gets it very wrong.) I will deal with her trip impressions mainly.

In the article we find mention of a fellow passenger that for 2 nights and the better part of 3 days sits in the sleeper roomette just opposite hers and the only thing she mentions about him is her first impression that he was wearing leather pants and declared his profession to be a prophet, which she claims to not to be bothered by. Well, okay, maybe she actually was creeped out by that, because though she mentions his curtains were open, she indicates the lack of any further conversation between them, the whole time. We don’t even get to know what sort of prophet he might have been. She thought his participation in her trip important enough to mention but not because she actually interacted with him but because she had an initial and seemingly only one mildly comic impression. He was a placeholder simply for her observation that “oddballs are riding the trains.”

So what else do we get? A snide mention (with photo) of a grain silo amidst the corn fields of Illinois that has a large painting of none other than an ear of corn on it. She facetiously claims it to be a great monument, “the single best thing in the Untied Staes” she ironically enthuses, without any introspection over the fact that she is from (or at least writing for the residents of) a city that includes Times Square.

Instead of any record of real conversations with anyone, we get a blow by blow description a full paragraph long of how to get into bed. And a poke in the eye over safety announcements.

We also get a full paragraph on smoking breaks, as if this helps define the whole experience for her and presumably then for us.

The dining car experience is compared to sitting awkwardly at a communal table at Benihana, as if sitting at a table and having other people to talk to has to be something made fun of.

While having dinner with an Amish couple, people pretty much entirely removed from her own life and so possibly a window on other worlds and experiences, the only thing she could come up to talk about was herself. And about the only window on their world offered to us was that the Amish wife could not understand our author’s life and that, I guess surprisingly, she ordered cheesecake. Not sure what that was supposed to reveal but apparently it was unexplainable.

We do get some kind words generically referring to other passengers as relaxed and happy to enjoy the scenery, though even that exercise is fraught with hidden dangers and disappointments it seems. The whole topic is introduced by the observation that “[t]rain people are content to stare out the window for hours, like indoor cats.” That isn’t exactly a very nice thing to say about her fellow passengers. Especially when she was staring out just like them.

I think the highpoint of the article are two full paragraphs for the readers of the NYT Magazine section devoted to her newly gained revelation that Colorado and Kansas share a border. Two paragraphs.

It’s as if they made a sequel for Mean Girls that takes place on a cross country train ride.

Basically, the New York Times Magazine took in and published an article about a cross country train trip written by someone who never really was able to connect with that experience, she didn’t get it. I do think the point of view of someone that doesn’t get it is important too. Especially if it is a voyage of discovery and enlightenment. But it really can’t be that this limited point of view is very enlightening all by itself. Instead it’s just written for laughs. And the rest of the world other than the readers of the NYT are the joke.

They didn’t need to only send out a writer that already knew and loved train trips. The skeptics and die hard fly-over types get a point of view too. But I think someone might have done some responsible editing to force the piece to explore just what real connections were made other than simply making fun of everything encountered.

I am not trying to take the NYT down a peg or two. I am trying to point out that they could have done so much better by seeking to discover characters rather than giving us only caricatures, with exaggerated comical surface features that exploit the most obvious and amusing parts of us.

Once identified, for me the joke is no longer on the people being written about. It’s on the author. He or she is worthy of being, well, ignored. Which is the most seriously bad thing that they could ever dread.

At the end of the trip and in the article itself, there seemed to be glimmers there that she was actually having a good time and was regretting that the trip was almost over. It was hard to tell actually. Whether written that way or the editors at the NYT were less enthused with selling that particular message, that impression at the end was somewhat ambiguous. It just didn’t read as interestingly as the mention of some prophet guy wearing leather pants or a picture of corn on, of all things, a corn silo. Subjects which the NYT Magazine section readers can be presumed  to understand were laughable.

At the end of the day, the whole business of travel writing for many people can be summed up neatly by a paraphrase of the penultimate scene  in John Ford’s true classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. When confronted with a real story in conflict with what his public wanted to hear, a reporter says. “This is the West, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For some urbanized travel writers, their editors and their publishers, that maxim might be restated as: “This is the Big City, when the jokes become real people and actual places, print the jokes.”

©️2020 copyright D Abbott