Landmarkings #7.2
Annotations on how we 'see' the world and tell its stories.
Writers on the road
I don’t remember now how I first heard of Girish Gupta, but when I did, I asked to meet him. This was back in London, I think sometime after I had interned at The Guardian in 2012. I had learnt that he was having a go charting his own path as a freelance foreign correspondent in Latin America, and wanted to hear about his experiences, and he happened to be in London for a while before heading back to Venezuela. In the end, I never did exactly what he did, but I was similarly inspired by place in my search for stories, so there was some overlap. He was gracious and encouraging when I shared my ideas. In a nutshell, his advice was, “Just go.”
It worked for him, for a while. These days, he seems no longer to be reporting, and has gone on to do other interesting things (I think he was already doing varied interesting things before his foray into journalism), including, now, writing his memoir as a newsletter, Always Go—see? It’s candid and fascinating, written with enough distance to cast a critical eye over himself and a field he once wanted so much to be part of, and gives an insight into an era of freelance foreign correspondence that already feels slightly bygone (this might just be an effect of my growing older, haha). A passage, from his rookie days:
I’d done the backpacking thing two years earlier so I had plenty in common with the other twentysomethings passing through my hostel. But I was here to become a foreign correspondent. I spent the first few days calling and emailing every international editor I could find, telling them where I was, pitching ideas, and letting them know that I was open to theirs.
I was excited for my new start, though the lack of a plan was beginning to show.
“I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here,” I wrote to a friend, adding that I felt lonely at times; it was a sentiment I’d feel again and again over the coming decade, be it in a major move like this or a quick reporting trip. Emails and Skype calls came at me from the UK, so I was very much still thinking in that time zone; I hadn’t yet made it to the Americas in anything but body.
From Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep by Ted Conover:
I like to travel and I like to hang out and Whitman helps me understand why. Whitman, as many Americans still do, nurtured an idea of a country where nobody is better than anybody else, where everyone can meet and engage. It strikes me as a democratic ideal worth keeping alive. When I’m out there talking to people I feel as though I’m emulating, and in turn maybe modeling, a kind of democratic discourse.
From Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is walking around the world as part of his Out of Eden Walk project:
But what walking has emphasized to me as a continuum of storytelling is that all these boundaries that you and I and our colleagues in the media put around these stories, whether it’s water issues in a state in India, or whether it’s gender rights in Afghanistan, those boundaries are more or less arbitrary, because if you just tug hard enough on any story in the world, no matter whether it's in Manhattan or in Toronto or in a village in Ethiopia, it's connected to another story that is itself connected to another story.
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
Because of the pandemic, many journalists and writers have had to do some of our reporting remotely. This reminds me of a piece I read some years back about how Laura Hillenbrand—the writer of Seabiscuit (yes, there’s a very good nonfiction book on that darling racehorse!)—researched and reported her second book, Unbroken (also made into a film, directed by Angelina Jolie), about World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini, who was held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war for more than two years. Hillenbrand suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, which has confined her indoors for the last three decades or so. It’s astonishing, considering that she writes the kinds of immersive narrative nonfiction books for which details, details, and more details are absolutely necessary. The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand by Wil S. Hylton offers a look into her process, and here’s a passage I found quite illuminating of phone reporting:
Hillenbrand, who recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Zamperini, experienced a similar effect. “I thought it was actually an advantage to be unable to go to Louie,” she said. Because neither of them had to dress for the interviews and they were in their own homes, their long phone calls enjoyed a warmth and comfort that might otherwise be missing. She could pose the deeply personal questions that even her father had trouble answering. “I would ask a lot of questions about his emotional state,” she said. “ 'What did you feel right in this moment? Were you frightened?' ” The distance also allowed Hillenbrand to visualize Zamperini in the time period of the book. “He became a 17-year-old runner for me, or a 26-year-old bombardier,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at an old man.”
On beginning with image by Rachael Uwada Clifford:
I start with an image, or language around an image, that simply enchants me—that is downright arresting in its clarity and in its musicality. Sometimes I will carry it around for days and days, or even years. Sometimes I do not remember that I am carrying it. I will be in the midst of creating some “new” story—really, all my stories are old—and suddenly the image will return to me. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the image will turn to me, as it never truly left me. Most often, when the image does turn, it is at the right moment, in the right place. Because all of that time spent carrying it has allowed me to understand it—its air, its weight, and the work it must do.
Dog collar or slave collar? A Dutch museum interrogates a brutal past by Ye Charlotte Ming:
“The history of the Netherlands is international history, and our society is the legacy of that history,” says Smeulders, a specialist on underrepresented stories from Dutch slave history. Born in Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that is still part of the Netherlands, Smeulders says that to properly tell the stories of a diverse society, museums need staff with varied cultural and professional perspectives, and change should not stop at exhibitions about race. “By making these changes permanent, the broad, diverse knowledge gets to be imbedded and used in all areas,” she says.
Reader rolodex
Daniel Alekow, a concept artist in Berlin who specialises in environments and architecture and does some great personal inking work too, was the Visual Director for the new Netflix animated Witcher film, Nightmare of the Wolf. I am not at all familiar with the Witcher-verse, but this was darkly entertaining!
Don’t forget the first part of this letter.
Meanwhile, I’m editing another guest letter and working on a couple of essays I’ve wanted to finish. Thanks for your patience while this newsletter shapes up. Because of you, this has been a great source of cheer and motivation for me, and I’m working to keep it going amid the other work—and non-work, let’s not forget!—I need, and want, to do.
Until the next,
E.
Enjoying these round-ups? So much. So many good reads. How do you find these things?