I bought my first Lonely Planet guide in 1995 when I set off on a round the world trip that could better be described as “New Zealand plus a few places I can’t remember”. I thought I was one of the first to discover Lonely Planet as “Rough Guide” was the dominant force in travel literature back then. So imagine my disappointment when I climbed onto my first tour bus in Christchurch and found every other passenger studying the same freshly printed edition as me. That summer the Planet caught the Zeitgeist and became the standard reference book for backpackers.
Something similar happened to Google in 2001. I can still remember where I was when I heard that word for the first time. I was outside Lansdowne Road in Dublin on my way to watch another brave but fruitless display by Ireland against the All Blacks. I was boring some kiwi with my knowledge of Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, when she mentioned a new kid on the block. I’ve never looked back and have been a loyal Google customer ever since. Future generations will not even know that there used to be alternatives, just as we once had 8 track tape cassettes, or tape cassettes of any description for that matter. Hell, I’m even old enough to remember a time when computers came with a choice of operating systems, none of which were called “Windows”.
As Google is to my on-line searches for pornography and gossip, Lonely Planet is my constant companion on my world travels. I’ve bought or borrowed the Australian edition, the Vanuatu edition and the books covering various European countries that I used to visit as part of my research into the best beer in the world (that’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it).
I’ve even guiltily browsed the Irish edition in bookstores, checking to see what praise they were heaping on my home town. “Dundalk, you should avoid. You’ll have low expectations when you visit and they will be entirely met,” is generally all it merited.
You might think that such purveyors of the “off the beaten track” tourist market, would have their head office in New Caledonia or Kathmandu, but actually you’ll find them in a non descript warehouse in the industrial part of West Melbourne. And, if the scandal sheets are to be believed, it’s in that warehouse that most of their guidebooks are written, without ever visiting the places they critique. That might explain how they missed Dundalk’s true beauty.
In an effort to restore their reputation, the founders of Lonely Planet have helped set up “The Wheeler Centre”. This is a building committed to Books, Writing and Ideas and confounds the notion that Australia is full of bogans with as much culture as a pot of yogurt. Melbourne is designated by UNESCO as one of the World’s Cities of Literature, an achievement not yet reached by the birthplace of Joyce and Beckett. One of my mates back home describes Melbourne as Australia’s home of “Aaaarts and Culthaaa”, although he says it in a derisory tone. The Wheeler Centre adds to this image and better still, most of its program is free. So all those hippies who think they are the next Jack Kerouac will have somewhere to go in the evening.
I don’t see myself as a hippy or the modern embodiment of a beat era writer. But I’m planning to go along to try and find out more about this writing game. I recently published my 100th blog and at 1,000 words a go, I now have enough writing to publish a small book. Whether anyone would want to read it when it’s free on the web is another matter of course. It wouldn’t be as beautifully written as the most recent book I’ve read (Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”) although it would be as disjointed and grammatically incorrect.
As the centre also deals in ideas, I might try and discover what it is that makes people write. Is it a core part of our humanity that we need to have our story told? And that some people are unable to do this through speaking and have to resort to the written word? Do we write as a means of massaging our ego or as desperate attempt to hush the voices within?
Whatever reason we do it for; writing has become a more public event in the last ten years. We used to consign our writing to private diaries or angst ridden poems passed only to those we were actually writing the poems about. These days we blog, twitter and post intimate details of our lives on social networking sites. The spoken word has been replaced with email and text messages, to the point where Alexander Bell’s great invention is becoming redundant.
But I think we write for the same reason we read books like the Lonely Planet. It can take us anywhere, to far off lands and people or to the limit of our imagination, if indeed there is a limit to that. I start each week wondering what I’ll write about here and find myself, 1,000 words later; in a place I’d never dreamed off when I started out. Writing releases us from the confines of the daily grind and allows our spirit to soar.
Try it out sometime, it’s hugely liberating. And if you want to learn from the master, search for Joe O’Connor’s podcasts on www.RTE.ie . He makes those us who toil on blogs like this seem like tongue tied simpletons. But more importantly he is making verse acceptable again. I thought of this as I lay by the beach in Sorrento last weekend. It sums up a weekend and is a little tribute to Joe.
Come to Sorrento when the tide is out
And swim in the waterholes by a full moon’s light
Forget all your troubles of the daily grind
And remember to leave your blackberry behind.
Stop at Glaces for a refreshing ice.
If it wasn’t for the flies, it would be feckin paradise!
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