Welcome to the fourth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter.
As polls open in the United States, we’ve got an eye-opening new book about dodging tornadoes and crossbow-wielding weirdos to get up close and personal with an America that’s too often reduced to blue or red.
We’ve also got a story about the legend of Bath’s mud-loving pigs, a podcast about reading a book from every country in the world and, for your sense of nostalgia, a reflection on the in-flight magazine’s demise.
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For your sense of perspective | BEYOND THE BALLOT BOX TO “UNAMBIGUOUSLY AMERICAN” HOSPITALITY
When journalist and award-winning travel writer Simon Parker set off on a 4,373-mile cycle across the US, ahead of election season, he hoped to remedy the way Americans are all too easily put into little blue or red boxes.
Ten weeks and eleven states later, Parker had met hundreds of “(extra)ordinary Americans behind the clickbait news posts,” helping him to understand what he describes as “a nation whose portrayal has become vastly oversimplified.” His second book, A Ride Across America: Small Towns, Big Issues and One Epic Adventure, tells the story.
It opens with a gripping vignette about a man he met at a gas station. What started as the offer of a cold beer and a couch after a long day on the road ended with Parker making a run for it when, back at the man’s home, the conversation turned to conspiracy theories and his crossbow.
“My fleeting exchange with a man I’d only just met could be described as foolhardy or blasé. Is a 30-second meeting enough time to judge a person’s motives or character? Let alone agree to an overnight stay in their home? Almost certainly not. But travel, especially on one’s own, has the peculiar power to cloud normal standards of human discourse.”
Travelling with an open mind and a shoestring budget, Parker “was forced to embrace a style of happy-go-lucky living” that opened him up to “a world of incomprehensible generosity.” He left not with a sense of the country’s divisiveness, but with memories of “a brand of kindness and hospitality that [he] would come to regard as being profoundly and unambiguously ‘American’.”
🔗 Read a sample of Parker’s eye-opening book here (US or UK). Or watch this video, filmed on the final day of his epic 10-week adventure.
For your sense of delight | THE LEGEND OF BATH’S MUD-LOVING PIGS
Plenty of historical cities have origin stories, but how many include a glut of pigs enjoying a mud bath? This audio track of how Bath came to be has it all: a swineherd, a prince, oinking pigs, and a fairytale ending about the legendary healing properties of the city’s hot springs.
It comes from a passionate Bathonian’s first (and hopefully not last) VoiceMap, which was my favourite part of an overnight visit to the ancient English city last month.
🔗 Listen to the story here or find Daniel’s full tour, Bath’s Canal Walk: Highlights from Pulteney Bridge to the Towpath, here.
For your sense of nostalgia | THE FINAL FLIGHT OF THE AIRLINE MAGAZINE?
In-flight magazines began their slow descent thousands of airline miles ago, but I didn’t feel any real sense of nostalgia for this dying medium until I read about United Airlines printing Hemispheres’ final words. Nor did I know that this US airline’s magazine was produced by the same London-based publisher where, at 22, I spent nine long months trying to sell advertising space.
My nostalgia definitely doesn’t stem from the job, where I’d watch headset-wearing colleagues ring a bell on the sales floor whenever a signed deal came through the fax machine, hoping that my turn would come.
In-flight magazines are wrapped up with other quirks from an analogue world, when watching television — at home, or in the sky — was a communal activity.
“You could watch a movie on an airplane but they’d fold down a screen every three rows and everyone would be watching the exact same thing at the same time… It was a sense of connection.”
The days when passengers all paged through the same magazine – “an object of simultaneous aspiration and reassurance” – were an era of more time and less choice. Flying came with the guilt-free, no-strings-attached gift of ‘bonus time’. I liked being a “captive audience”.
Writer Max Rubin remembers the response he’d get when he wrote for American Airlines’ magazine:
“People out of the woodwork would send me photos on a plane being like, ‘Is this you?’ The work was potent and ephemeral: I could find no records of those pieces online.”
I received my own text messages from distant friends when, on one occasion, something I wrote about Cape Town’s ties to Asia appeared in Sawubona, South African Airways’ magazine. For one ephemeral moment it was in the hands of thousands of passengers, the next it was a nothing but a humble PDF, which I scanned myself and uploaded for digital posterity.
🔗 Read more about “the case for these magazines [and] the case for print in general” in this insightful article by Lucy Schiller. (And here’s my article about Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s ‘village in the city’ which – spoiler alert – I was inspired to write after taking one of the first tours VoiceMap ever published.)
For your sense of connection | READING THE WORLD
Writer and novelist Ann Morgan began to worry that she was a “literary xenophobe” when one day, glancing up at her bookshelves, she found “a host of English and North American greats staring down at [her].” She decided to embark on a quest to read one book (translated into English) from each of the world’s 195 UN-recognised countries.
Morgan recently appeared on the Zero To Travel podcast to talk about what she learned from “reading the world,” and the two books she’s written about the experience. In this wide-ranging conversation, she and host Jason Moore talk about travelling versus holidaying, reading and (un)learning, and how we tend to have a different sense of humour when we speak different languages.
🔗 Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and find out more about Morgan’s quest (and which books she read) on her website.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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