Handwritten Letters Get Their Due: Notes For the Inevitable Trend Piece

I. 
When I go to check my PO box, I am literally running by the time I enter the building. My box is in the main post office in downtown Minneapolis, a long, squat building like an Art Deco fortress on the Mississippi riverfront. It was built in 1934 and has a gloriously cavernous, three-hundred-plus-foot-long lobby, and striding in there is like entering a movie set, honest to God, a dead ringer for city hall in a Batman flick or a brutal capitalist's corporate headquarters in an Orson Welles film, what with all the terrazzo floors and inlayed marble details on the walls and the little business-windows with brass bars and surrounds, like the kind you see at old-fashioned train station ticket counters. Stretching the entire length of the lobby is an immaculate brass light fixture, supposedly the longest in the world.

Even today, when some of those little brass-barred windows are boarded up, the place is beguilingly grand, alive with that elegant, Machine Age swagger that makes Art Deco so alluring. It's a thrill, it's a high, to walk in there. No lie.

But for me, it's not the aesthetics that make my heart race, at least not just the aesthetics. Most of all, it's the task at hand.

I've got mail. Real mail. Letters and aerograms and postcards that begin, "Hello, stranger." And in our own ever-connected era--a truer Machine Age than any prior claimants to that title--that little bit of tactile, handwritten, hand-delivered personal communication is enough to make me sprint and punch the air and grin a big, giddy grin. (You think I am exaggerating for effect but somewhere, I'm sure, there are YouTube videos uploaded from the Minneapolis post office security cameras, soon-to-be-viral images of a bespectacled mail-nerd doing his happy dance.)

The fact that people--strangers--keep sending me letters, many of them with notes about how much they miss getting real mail, makes me realize that I am very far from the only one thinking about this or doing something to keep it going.

II.
This cartoon has been making the rounds on the internet. Various friends of mine and the Oxford English Dictionary, among many, many others, have posted it on their Facebook pages.

[original here]

Yeah. Exactly.


III.
At what point is a trend a trend? It's tempting to see an article about a topic you've been thinking about, or overhear a conversation about a thing that you yourself did just yesterday, and to conclude, ergo, I AM AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF A NEW AND POPULAR THING! This magazine story includes a recipe for molasses cookies! And that guy at the store had a bottle of molasses in his cart! And I ate a molasses cookie for breakfast last week! That's three data points! Quick, someone set up a Tumblr and call the Times and get a trend piece in the Sunday paper! 

So I'm wary of drawing too many conclusions from my own biased, myopic observations. Nonetheless. There's something going on, the data points are widespread--the random people who write to me from the Netherlands and Bangladesh and Brazil (many of them young, I might add, lest you think this is just a nostalgic older-person thing) and the OED staffers and the esteemed New Yorker writers (hello, Roger Angell)--they're all over the place, people talking about letters and what a joy it is to send them and receive them.

Maybe it's a literary thing, specific to the bookish types whose days begin with Michiko Kakutani at the breakfast table and end with Gary Shteyngart in bed (... wait, that's not what I meant). People who love books, it follows, have specific romantic, wistful fixations on the printed word, and are probably--okay, damn near certainly--more inclined to hunger for handwritten letters, and to write them. There's certainly a common literary thread here.

Like: the publishing industry blog GalleyCat reported a few days ago that author Mary Robinette Kowal is launching what she calls The Month of Letters Challenge--starting today, she and anyone else who joins the cause will send at least one piece of Real Mail every day the US Postal Service is in operation in February.

Like: The Rumpus, that proudly idiosyncratic online magazine of culture--particularly the literary variety--has taken the nascent trend and run with it, in their own way. They're calling it Letters in the Mail. Five bucks a month gets you one every week or so.

Letter writers will include Dave Eggers, Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, Janet Fitch, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Cheryl Strayed, Marc Maron, Elissa Schappel, Wendy MacNaughton, Emily Gould, and Jonathan Ames. Think of it as the letters you used to get from your creative friends, before this whole internet/email thing.

The lede from BookRiot's story on Letters in the Mail: "What's the next arena for literary foment? Try your mailbox."

But even if there is that bookish tinge to all of this, even if the most obvious data points come from this specific area of culture of which I am a more than part-time inhabitant, those data points, in the aggregate, arguably add up to something bigger, something more widespread. I fully support letters being the next arena of literary foment, but the more important thing is that they be more than just that.

IV.

Dave Eggers. Of course Dave Eggers is on that list--of course he's at the top of that list. Because, with all due respect, Mr. Eggers's very name has become a synonym for a certain aggressively earnest, calculatedly quirky, and--let's just say it--oft-grating flavor of modern culture. It's not that he isn't a brilliant writer (he is) and innovative publisher (ditto), it's that there's something uniquely maddening about Eggers-style culture, precisely because it wants to be so good for you, combining intellect with self-aware whimsy and then hard-selling it to you as a product, arch preciousness as packaged good. 

And that's what kind of frightens me about the nascent rebirth of letters: I don't want this to be about nostalgia and wistfulness, alluring as they may be. I don't want this to be about affecting a specific pose, washed down with your neighbor's homemade craft absinthe to a retro-melancholy soundtrack of an intentionally-scratched EP by next year's South By Southwest darlings. 

Letter-writing is about specific personal connection. That's the allure. I don't care if your envelope is made from a "Dukes of Hazzard" poster and the letter is about your inspiring corndog lunch with Rick Santorum. If you took the time to put pen to paper and shelled out forty-five of your hard-earned cents for a stamp, and made the effort to find a mailbox, I really do appreciate it. (Anthrax and epithets excluded, of course. Just to be clear.)

V.

My girlfriend and I met on the internet but fell in love over letters. Handwritten, sometimes handmade, old-school letters. Even though we lived in the same city and saw each other in person all the time, we sent letters (still do--Maren, check your mailbox). Sometimes we go for walks and one of us will say, "Oh, we have to stop by a mailbox so I can send this letter to you." 

VI. 

Is it just nostalgia? Is that why I like to write letters? Is that why other people are writing letters? 

VII.

In part. Maybe. But I don't think so. And I sure as hell hope not because to a large degree, nostalgia is a wistful appreciation of something lost forever--it's a sequestering of that place or thing into the realm of memory, not present-day reality. It becomes self-pity: I wish I were alive in that time, doing that thing. But as, oh, everyone who has commented on nostalgia has pointed out, it paints a pretty picture, but not at all an accurate one. (I like modern medicine, I like not living in a time when state governors literally stand in the way of desegregation.)

My parents also wrote letters to each other in their courting days. My mother did a European Grand Tour for ten weeks in 1967 while my father stayed behind finishing up architecture school in Minneapolis, and the two sent letters to each other every two or three days. They've kept every last scrap of paper--letters, postcards, aerograms--in shoeboxes (literally, shoeboxes) for the last forty-plus years. (For anyone new here: this blog started as a means for me to document my own journey in my mom's footsteps, using those letters. Read all about it in my book coming out in April!)

As much as I'd like to pretend that everything my parents wrote to each other was dramatic and intriguing and elegantly-phrased (and written in quill-and-ink, on fine vellum), the truth is that much of it just isn't particularly interesting or quotable. They had a shocking disregard for the narrative-enhancing needs of the son they would have fourteen years later and who would grow up to be a writer. They wrote pages and pages to each other, but much of it was like this, from a letter Dad wrote to Mom in Vienna:

 Gee whiz, Sil [they both called each other “Silly,” or, shortened, “Sil”], nothing out of the ordinary has been going on for the last couple of days. I know you've heard that all to [sic] often, which would sound like life is dull, which it is not at all. In fact, it is not even really routine. But the little things which make life interesting and wonderful seem trivial when repeated without the benefit of all the background. Let me see. What was my point. Oh, yes. In spite of its seeming—and necessary—sameness of school, work, and study it is not. I hope you follow, because compared to three months of travel this type of life could seem totally worthless, which it is not. Or maybe dull is a better word, which it still is not."

Or, just picking another letter sent to Vienna, there's this text-message-like note from Mom's sister, Susan, then a student at the University of Miami (all punctuation and spelling are hers):

speaking of the other u of m and homecomings and all that, yours was last weekend, and your friend and mine . . . yes, you know who, called . . . he was lonely for you . . . boy, was i sad for him . . . you wicked thing, what are you doing running around europe while he's playing solitaire on homecoming night? (don't you feel mean?) . . . anyway, i was really glad to talk to him, 'cause that was right when the plague was setting into me 

Even more than travel or love, Mom and Dad wrote about the mundane minutiae of the day-to-day: missing library books, enrolling for classes, Dad's impending Air Force enlistment, a bus strike in Minneapolis, and Dad's current projects in architecture school. Much of the content was, quite frankly, precisely like today's Facebook status updates: comments on the latest local news, who went to what party last night, who ate what for lunch. The foundations of everyday life but not much of broader intrigue.

VIII.

No, it's not the content of our communication that has changed. It's the audience and the immediacy.

A postcard or a letter goes to one person—maybe a household, at most. It can't be forwarded with the click of a button. It can't be read in an RSS feed or on a mobile device by the whole world. 

Writing to my father in 1967, my mother often drew little flowers next to her name or added additional comments along the side of a card. She sketched sheep and churches. Her handwriting was shaky when she was on a bus, large and loopy when she was trying to express a particularly important idea (usually, “I LOVE YOU”). She wrote on postcards, on wine labels, on tickets, on paper bags, on toilet paper. Dad wrote on aerograms (those sheets that fold into envelopes; here is an aerogram template for you), on a long piece of drafting paper, on stationery from work. He sketched, too, including one card sent at the end of Mom's trip, with a forlorn Charlie Brown lookalike “welCOME BACK.” There was no concern for a catchy subject line. There were no links or embedded videos to pull the reader away. There were no ads on the side begging to clicked or pop-up chat boxes with salutations from bored friends-of-friends. It was not intended for a broad audience; it couldn't easily be cut and pasted or forwarded on to someone else. It was personal, the doodles and handwriting and surfaces providing an intimacy that blogs and e-mails simply cannot; it's the difference between dancing and lockstep marching or, more aptly, between a human and a machine. 

IX.

The key, as I said, is a specific personal connection--and that's something that (I sure hope) knows no era and has no concern for trend. That's why my girlfriend, Maren, and I send letters to each other even though we see each other nearly every day--because it's a physical reminder of each other and our thoughts and our stories, a piece of ourselves that we can pin to a cork board or place on our shelves. It's a small handcrafted good that says, "When you weren't around, I was still thinking of you--and I made this for you."

It's the knowledge--or at least the presumption--that this particular person has written this particular thing to you. There's an implied intimacy there that can never be articulated in emails precisely because it is unspoken--it's about the act as much as the content. The effort and literal expense (money-wise but also time-wise) of sending a letter make a world of difference. This physical item was in the other person's possession, and now it is yours. There's a transfer of ownership--a gift of sorts, a memento. (I have a rather hard time imagining my mother saying, “Oh, just open my e-mail and do a search for the dates September through December 1967 and then read our notes!”)

Tactile, three-dimensional objects--especially letters, as manifestations of our ideas and personality and voice, captured in our unique scrawling writing--will, I respectfully submit, always be more ineffably soul-stirring than their pixelated, code-created counterparts. 

X.

I want my own kids--whenever I have them, and no matter how digital the world has become by the time they grow up--to understand that, to agree. And to dance through through their own hallways on those frequent occasions when they receive a handwritten letter. 

---

Notes: 

1. If you send me a letter or postcard, I promise I will (a) do that happy mail-nerd dance when I get it, and (b) write back. My address is over there in the side-bar at right.

2. Many thanks to the various friends who have forwarded me the mail-related stories referenced in this post. Cheers, John Neely, Pam Mandel, Eva Holland, and Jason Albert. 

3. N.B.: I make these points better, faster, and with more storytelling and less pontificating in the book.

Not-So-Flattering Photos of Famous Landmarks: Plaza de la Revolución (Havana)

It's a parking lot.
Not kidding.

Postcard Gallery: Bangladesh, New Zealand, epic four-page letter

Forgive me, Postcard Gallery--I have neglected you too long. But even though I'm a slacker, my mailbox runneth over. Highlights include a homemade postcard from Bangladesh, a note from an actual postcard archivist (!), and a four-page masterpiece of a letter, written in dip pen and featuring a half-page illustration. It's glorious. Click on the images for higher resolution.

From Renee in Bangladesh (who took the photo on the front):

Yes, this is the first postcard I've received from Bangladesh. Thanks, Renee!

From Eva Holland way up in the Yukon, where it's been snowing since, like, August:

The "historic Minneapolis train bridge" is the Stone Arch Bridge, one of
my favorite spots in the city.

From Debra Gust at the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, which is apparently a real thing and which I must visit at once, at the Lake County Discovery Museum:

From ... I honestly don't know who, other than someone channeling Garrison Keillor while driving through Saint Peter, Minnesota (although the picture is of Denmark):

From Jane in New Zealand (who also sent me that delightful bear-o-gram a while back; the bear has settled in among the travel books on my shelves and seems quite content, although it does occasionally commandeer my computer to look up the latest news about the All-Blacks):

And, finally, the letter. Now, let me introduce this by saying that I get giddy every time I see a piece of paper in my mailbox. Few things (chocolate croissants, for example) make me happier than getting a postcard or a letter, even from people I know (hi, Mom!). But. There is still something particularly wonderful about getting mail from absolute strangers, especially when they've clearly gone above and beyond in the effort. Every now and then, I get a letter that makes me not just smile but do a little jig right here in the post office--or, in this case, basically sprint outside and do a triumphant, sprinting lap around the building.

Brendon Ly is, I hereby decree, the coolest 15-year-old in Ottawa. He's the one who sent me the postcard from there a few weeks ago, the one beginning, "Hello, Stranger." When I opened his latest letter, this was the first thing I saw:

Crappy picture on my part, but you get the idea.

An authentic, mint-condition vintage air-mail envelope. Unused. Just ... for me to add to my collection (or, you know, send to someone). And then there was this:

A four-page letter. In old-style script writing. (Note at the top of the first page: "Pre-script: Usually I print.") Needless to say, no e-mail could possibly convey the same sense of personality and, well, charm as this letter, and even a high-resolution scan can't capture its nuances and details. Like the ink. As he notes on page three, "By the way, if you run a finger over the words, they will have a raised texture to them. I think this Chinese ink has shellac in it ... The thickness added by the shellac also helps it cling to dip pens, but will apparently clog up a fountain pen." Sure enough: it's raised. (NB: I had no idea fountain pens and dip pens were not the same thing. When I read that, I wanted to click over to Google to do some quick research--ignoring the rest of the letter for a sec, as I would have if it were an e-mail, only to return to it half an hour later after getting hopelessly distracted--but, this being a letter, I couldn't just move my mouse a few inches and click away. I couldn't be distracted. Score one more point for letters: they're more immersive.)

That blue pen you see above is a calligraphy pen, just to show off the differences in texture and stroke and style.

Finally, on the last page, the show-stopper. A hand-drawn illustration perfectly sized to make into a postcard. Included in the envelope was a piece of card stock with a the back already formatted.

"You know the rest," he says. "Send it to whomever you want to."

In other words, continue the cycle. Keep it going. Keep writing. Keep sharing. Not in the easy, mindless digital form--"sharing is caring," says all the 18-point Arial above a row of icons for FaceTwitPlusWhateverElseWasInventedYesterday. But in the more tangible, more physical, more personal sense. More texture, quite literally.

What a joy to get this letter--any letter, any postcard, of course, but especially this one.

And, yes, I will send the postcard on to someone else. Part of me wants to keep it for myself and not take scissors to paper. But that would defeat the entire point. A tear will trickle down my cheek as I release it into the mailbox, just like in those Disney films, the ones with the whales or the lions or the what-have-yous, and the benevolent caretakers who know the animals must be returned to the wild. Go free, young postcard! Venture forth! Godspeed! Find your place in the world! 

Keep writing.

So. Thanks, correspondents! Much appreciated. My own stamp-affixed messages are already en route in some cases; the rest will be on the way in the next day or two--although, Brendon, it might take me a bit longer to come up with something to match your awesomeness.

The Authoritative Guide to Being an Expert Tourist (vol. 1)

Congratulations on advancing this far, young tourist. You've done well.

You have mastered the Security Line Rumba, that dance of slipping off your shoes and emptying your pockets while pirouetting to avoid the trio of hungover conventioneers whacking you with their carry-ons as they try to dig out their laptops.

Your internal Irish Pub radar is so well-honed that you can smell the Guinness and County Cork tchotchkes from three miles away.

You have perfected the Goofy Tourist Picture Pose, every bit as ridiculous and labored as a supermodel's pout-strut, but accessorized so much more creatively, with the Eiffel Tower as a hat or Manneken Pis pee(r)ing over your shoulder or Mary Tyler Moore as your bronzed arm-candy (see fig. 1). (See further reading section below.)

Fig. 1

But those were just the basics. You have proven your interest and commitment. Now you must prove yourself. It is time to move on to the Advanced Touristing Techniques. And I, your Touristing Guru Master Expert Dude, am here to help. Master just a few more skills, young camera-toting, globe-trotting, guidebook-waving grasshopper, and you, too, will be able to call yourself a true Advanced Expert Tourist.

This will be an ongoing set of lessons--the wisdom of the ancients cannot be explained in a single blog post, nor can true proficiency be attained if your focus is not pure and constant. I ask--nay, implore--you to begin practicing forthwith and to dedicate yourself to the cause with singular vigor. More lessons will follow shortly.

TODAY'S LESSON:

Get out of the way or join the dance: Two methods of interacting with other camera-toting tourists.

Method 1: The camera-duck/tourist-pivot
The scenario: You're walking through a busy tourist area and you spot someone seemingly staring--hard--into space, a big, cheesy grin affixed to his or her face.

Rookie mistake: After staring hard at the person, trying to determine what that demented Jack Nicholson-in-The Shining grin is all about (and whether or not you should be sprinting away), you realize that said person is posing for a picture. You stop abruptly so as not to walk into the frame, but your halting, flustered demeanor makes the poser and the photographer both become self-conscious, and the poser starts to apologize just as the camera shutter clicks, necessitating a do-over or ten. The spontaneity is lost, the moment ruined, and it's all your fault.

Advanced technique: After much time on the tourist trail and much practice spotting the assorted and multitudinous but not-very-elusive breeds of photo-posers, you will hone your vision and instinct and be able to spot them from a minimum of twenty strides away. Pretend you don't see them but stay out of the frame. Don't break stride, don't make eye contact, just duck or pivot around them.

Recommended practice: Ducking and/or pivoting without breaking stride. I suggest at least five reps of ten pivots and fifteen walking-ducks per day.

The best postcards are the ones that begin, "Hello, Stranger"

This? This is fantastic. Utterly charming. It hit my mailbox not long ago, from a teenage correspondent in Canada.

(Name and address redacted.)

Update: Here's the front:

Postcard Gallery: Bear-o-gram, clog-o-gram, and snail-mailed e-mail

The handwritten letter revolution continues! Can't stop, won't stop, etc. Take a look at some of the mail that's showed up in my mailbox in the last few weeks. Actually, before you do that, know this: my mailbox is currently empty, but I have ten--count 'em, ten--postcards just itching to be sent in response to ... someone. So write to me and I promise I'll write back!

And now, the Gallery-O-Handwritten (well, mostly handwritten) Awesomeness:

Clockwise from top left (with selected ones singled out below):

•  "Snail Mail My Email" letter (a concept I discussed earlier) from Susan and Tom
• Door County (Wisconsin) postcard from Shirley
• Bear-o-gram--a very cool paper bear sculpture that came in an envelope with assembly instructions--from Jane in New Zealand
• Iceberg Lake (Glacier National Park) postcard from my father
• Clog postcard (!) from Jean 
• Fenway Park (Boston) postcard from Mike
• Minneapolis postcard from Sebastian
• Postcard with a lovely drawing of a restaurant by Jane in New Zealand
• Lefse postcard (by Minneapolis's favorite illustrator, Adam Turman) from, uh, Garrison Keillor (see below)
• San Diego postcard from Susan and Tom

Okay, now a few close-ups, with notes. First of all, that bear-o-gram. That's one adorable and sharp-looking, bear, no? And it looks no worse for the wear despite the long journey from New Zealand: 

Then there's this, from my friend Sebastian, who works at the intersection of technology and travel: 

Does the use of a handwriting font make this better or worse? Discuss.

And that sweet lefse postcard is, as mentioned, signed by Garrison Keillor ... whose handwriting looks suspiciously similar to that of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison:

It says: "Doug--Love the blog! As you are aware, I'm looking
for someone to take over for me as host of A Prairie Home Companion.
Interested? You'll have to work on your stereotypes of Minnesotans.
Best, Garrison Keillor."

Susan and Tom, who live on a boat, sent this to me after I posted about the "Snail Mail My Email" program a while back. (Basically, you email your note to someone else, who then does the writing and mailing for you.) I was ambivalent ... okay, no, I kind of thought it was absurd, offering the appearance of a handwritten note without the effort. But Susan and Tom make a valid point: not everyone has easy access to a post office or otherwise finds it hard to send mail the old-fashioned way (like, say, if you live on a boat). 

And finally, baseball fans NOT from Boston will enjoy this postcard from Mike, sent about a week before the regular season ended (with the Red Sox, indeed, pulling an epic collapse): 

So. Who's next? 

Nicollet Island: my secret garden

This summer, I've been working as a Segway tour guide on the Minneapolis riverfront.

That's right. I'll pause while you stop laughing--Segways are inherently humorous; no way around that.* 

Okay, giggling over? Thanks. Moving on. It's been most interesting to see the other side of the tourist experience--to be the guide showing people around my city, to be the spectacle in the tourists' viewfinders. (I figure that on every single tour, I'm in at least 100 photos.) 

More on that some other time. But one of the best things about doing the tours is that they give me a chance to show off one of my favorite places on the planet, Nicollet Island. What makes it so great? I'm so glad you asked. Here, go read this Onion AV Club article I wrote about it! 

* To answer the frequently asked questions:
1. No, the inventor did not die in a Segway accident. But the owner of the company did.
2. No, it's not that hard to ride, in spite of the mishaps you saw on Arrested Development or the Ellen show or when George W. Bush tried to do it.
3. About $7,000.

Two-hour tourist: Chicago

I won't pretend that you can get any sense of a place in two hours, but sometimes that's all you've got. You're taking a road trip and have to keep moving, or you have an extended layover with just enough time to dash from the airport to the city to see one or two things.

The question is, what do you see? What one or two things are readily accessible and can be experienced in a short period of time (that is, no huge historic sites or ten-course tasting menus or all-day tours) but still offer something unique to that particular place?

Last weekend, I was in the Chicago area for my girlfriend's brother's wedding (congrats, Peter and Katie!). The day after the wedding, my girlfriend, Maren, and I took the train into the Chicago Loop and had about two hours to be tourists. There wasn't time to explore the neighborhoods. There wasn't time for a Cubs game.

For me, one of the must-sees in any city is the landmark park. They make for great people-watching, and there's something about the dichotomy of nature and surrounding urbanity that I find impossibly alluring. Central Park in New York, Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, Retiro in Madrid, and so on. (Come to think of it, one of my favorite things to do in any given city is to find a pastry shop and eat my gluteny goodness in that landmark park--and I've done so in each of the above parks.)

In Chicago, the lakefront area has two adjacent parks, Millenium Park and Grant Park, which are always crowded, even on a brisk, rainy fall afternoon. We opted for Millenium, because I wanted to see the famous Cloud Gate sculpture, popularly called the Bean because, indeed, it looks like an enormous, metallic bean, fit for consumption by some Brobdingnagian robot hiding behind the Hancock Building (Jerry Bruckheimer, you're welcome to that visual for your next movie--no charge). The last few times I've been to Chicago, the Bean or the park have been closed for various reasons, and I was starting to take it personally. But this time, there it was, open, uncovered, and just begging us to pose in front of it for roughly 2,531 photos.

If I can't think of any new topics for blog posts, I'm just gonna start
posting the other 2,530 photos one at a time.

Next stop: the Chicago Cultural Center, at the suggestion of my friend Charlie. Formerly a library, the building is now, well, a cultural center, with various exhibits and a cafe, not to mention a whole hell of a lot of really cool interior details--like, for example, the world's largest Tiffany art-glass dome. For starters. And glass mosaics like you'd expect in some sort of Nero-worthy Roman villa. Except it's all free and open to the public, and conveniently located just across Michigan Avenue from Millenium Park. As Maren and I wandered around, we could hear what sounded like some sort of Enya-esque calliope music reverberating throughout the building. Eventually, we tracked down the source: a public concert, in one of those mosaic-covered rooms, of a Javanese gamelan group. There were some twenty or thirty musicians in all, some playing xylophone-like instruments, some chanting, some hitting gongs. (And, it must be said, they were all conspicuously, emphatically white--it was as though some Chicago book club read Eat, Pray, Love, then all went to Bali to soak up some Eastern Spiritual Wisdom Stuff and, having achieved enlightenment, came back to Chicago to resume life as investment bankers who got together on weekends for gamelan jam sessions, just to relive those heady, magical days in Bali. Just guessing.)

As Javanese gamelan groups go, they were the best I've ever heard. Also the only ones. We headed out after one song. Back to the train station--by way of a bakery, of course.

And, honestly, I think that was a perfect two-hour tourist itinerary--two big, unique landmarks, some good people-watching, some cultural education. Plus a doughnut.

So now I'm trying to think of what I'd recommend for a two-hour tourist in other cities I know well. 

Minneapolis: Downtown riverfront. Walk along the Saint Anthony Falls History Trail, through Mill Ruins Park and across the Stone Arch Bridge. Read the various historic markers that explain how the city grew up right here, around Saint Anthony Falls. Get some coffee or a tea-infused cocktail on the patio at the Aster Cafe or some gelato at Wilde Roast. Go out on the endless bridge at the Guthrie Theatre. 

(UPDATE) Or ... Eat Street and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Eat Street is a roughly mile-long section of Nicollet Avenue lined with restaurants of every variety; the main stretch is centered at 26th Avenue and extends a couple of blocks up and down Nicollet. It's an eclectic mix of eats, a veritable United Nations: Caribbean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, German, Chinese, Mexican ... you name it. And there's a pretty wide price range in terms of price range and ambiance--if you want Vietnamese food, for example, you can choose between the hole-in-the-wall Jasmine Deli or the swankily modern, bistro-y Jasmine 26 (which has has bubble tea cocktails, and they're every bit as fantastic they sound). So grab a bite to eat. And then walk three blocks to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I know your time is waning, especially if you lingered over your food, but the MIA is free, so don't feel too bad about spending a limited amount of time there. The museum covers a full range of important art eras--not so different from any other big-city museum, to be honest, but it's still an impressive collection--but make a beeline for section dedicated to Prairie School design (I think it's on the fourth floor) for proof positive that the sense of place here in the Midwest is every bit as inspiring as mountains or the sea. 

Seattle: Pike Place Market. See the flying fish. Touristy as hell, it's true, but get over it. I, for one, will never get tired of watching those fishmongers toss massive salmons to each other like fish Frisbees, never dropping them, joking all the while. You'd probably have some extra time, though, and the surrounding areas of downtown Seattle aren't that interesting, although you could go walk around by the waterfront, even if it is rather covered up with piers and such in that part of town. 

Okay. Question for the masses. I have two hours in your hometown. Maaaybe three. Where should I go? 

That *other* writer and his *other* outdated guidebook

So. This.

A new book has come to my attention. It's a humorous memoir by a writer who traveled around a continent using only "the guide that started it all." Hilarity ensues. Lessons are learned. History is explored. So much has changed. So little has changed. And so on. Stop me if this sounds familiar.

Nope, that's not my book. That's some OTHER guy who did the same thing I did, but touring Southeast Asia with a 1975 copy of Lonely Planet. His name is Brian Thacker and his book came out, uh, two weeks ago. It's called Tell Them to Get Lost: Travels with the Lonely Planet Guide that Started it All. From the book synopsis on Thacker's web site:

When Tony Wheeler wrote Lonely Planet's first-ever shoestring guidebook, South-East Asia offered 'cheap and interesting travel without the constantly oppressing misery of some of the less fortunate parts of Asia'. Certain 'hotspots' in the region attracted the tourist crowds, but there were many 'untouched places' too.

So have Tony's recommendations stood the test of time? Just how much has South-East Asia changed since the Wheelers ambled through the region in flared pants? Brian Thacker decides to retrace Tony and Maureen's footsteps through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Burma using the original 1975 South east Asia on a Shoestring as his only guidebook.

Part of me wants to read this right now, because it sounds hilarious and insightful, etc. The other part of me ... the other part of me wants to go test the structural integrity of his wall by giving it some massive smacks with his cranium. But I presume there's plenty of room in this nascent genre for both of us.

To be clear, I'm more amused by this coincidence than annoyed. It was inevitable that someone else would also have the--if I may say so--great/bad idea to travel in this willfully-misguided way. Brian Thacker, I hope we meet someday and have the chance to swap outdated-guidebook stories. And when we do, you're buying the beers.