Katherine Koch
Sep 9, 2018 · 1 min read

Gail, thanks for laying out as clearly as you’ve done here the persistent romantic ideas we’ve inherited about travel which need to be made new. That photo of the cruise ship docked by and overwhelming the Piazza San Marco in Venice is nightmare stuff. Wow. I like some of your suggestions about more thoughtful ways we can do the things travel used to give us. Bruce Chatwin changed a lot of things for me, too, and like you I felt his work was enough — naive New York artist me didn’t have to literally go blundering down to Australia looking for Aboriginal wisdom…in fact Aboriginal paintings came to New York! And last time I went to Paris I thought, well, this is an enormous expense of time, money, energy, just to go back to the Musee d’Orsay and have a croque-Madame…Have you looked at Porter Fox’s online magazine, Nowhere? There’s some interesting travel writing in it, and he’s just come out with a book about traveling the US/Canada border (he grew up in northern Maine) which looks good. Also, have you read any of Sybille Bedford’s travel writing? Different era, complex and super smart woman, great and witty insights about what we do when we go places…

    Katherine Koch

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