\u00a0<\/p>\n

OK, I\u2019m a dude, and I\u2019ll admit that I just watched Eat, Pray, Love.<\/em> In my own defense, I received an email from a friend that prompted me to do this, so it wasn\u2019t under my own free will that I entered the theater (or maybe it was). Now, to avoid kicking a dead horse regarding this movie, it did serve me a purpose. Stay with me everyone.<\/p>\n

Within my friend’s email was a Foreign Policy<\/em> article<\/a>, titled \u201cTravel Writing is Dead.\u201d The subheading read: Eat, Pray, Love was just the nail in the coffin. I’m still not sure what he was trying to tell me by sending me this — I like to think he meant well by it. The article came off a little hard, but brought up a point I’ve been swirling around in the recesses of my mind for quite a while. This particular post isn’t about how brutal the genre is and that it is an exercise of the past. I just couldn’t ever bring myself to write that, but let’s just say that I began an inner dialog surrounding what this modern version of travel writing has become.<\/p>\n

I can’t agree with the article when it says travel writers are some kind of prophet “reporting realities abroad that don’t register at home.” I also don’t necessarily agree with the statement that “when the travel writer is not prophesying our futures, he is recording pasts we never knew.” In regards to both of these, I can see a travel writer as a humanitarian telling stories of their travel through a minimally distorted, less agenda driven lens. We, the general traveling population of “we,” tend to seek those situations to which we can shed our cloak of individual culture and broaden our understanding of the world.<\/p>\n

Eat, Pray, Love<\/em> is an example of travel writing operating underneath a whole other definition. I would say it is something along the lines of: traveling to seek one’s understanding of oneself within different contexts. The article itself describes the Eat, Pray, Love<\/em> phenomenon as “is a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul.” It goes without saying, this is a far more narrow-minded, self serving goal, which has infiltrated the genre so much, it has almost become the norm.<\/p>\n

I say this with technology in mind. We’ve all heard about how small the world is, but picture your last hostel lobby. Was it a group of travelers rekindling their adventures of the day or was it filled with a cacophony of the droning taps of computer keys? In this age, I’m willing to say it was the latter. With the onset of blogs — and this isn’t a new concept — this gives rise to any traveler with wi-fi becoming a published travel writer. This, paired with the increasing ease of travel, people are on the go far more rapidly than ever before, and becoming travel writers by default. Consequently, the quality of travel writing and the depth of insight to a place has virtually vanished. Gone are the days of Chatwin-esque writings, whose pages are crinkled from time, and spines deteriorated from an endless readership.\u00a0Australia has become The Outback Steakhouse and\u00a0travel writing has become a shallow, narcissistic endeavor.<\/p>\n

We are fully engaged in the Eat, Pray, Love <\/em>age of travel writing. Perhaps it isn’t all that bad, though. More people are getting out there, which means more talented people are getting out there. That leads me to believe — glass half full —\u00a0that within this de-evolved age of travel writing, there will still be those works that strike at the heart of what the genre is all about. As a fellow traveler and travel writer, we should seek these works out, and strive to create them ourselves. Other wise, the art of the travel writer will be finding shelf space in the self-help section of bookstores, and what a shame that would be.<\/p>\n

[photo by elycefeliz\/Flickr<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 OK, I\u2019m a dude, and I\u2019ll admit that I just watched Eat, Pray, Love. In my own defense, I received an email from a friend that prompted me to do this, so it wasn\u2019t under my own free will that I entered the theater (or maybe it was). Now, to avoid kicking a dead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,2578],"tags":[1935,19],"yoast_head":"\n