As I wrote on TGBSW yesterday (The Art of Travel), art is often the best way to begin to get to know a place. A little over a year ago I wrote a paper on Walker Evans’s time in Cuba that I thought I would share as an example of how the eye of the artist can enlighten the soul of a place. Continue reading
I have been reading a rather obscure travelogue from the 1930s entitled Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, which documents the travels of two Soviet journalists across the Depression-era United States. The account is fairly objective and somewhat propaganda-free. As we have seen repeatedly since de Tocqueville, it seems we learn the most about our national character from outsiders. Continue reading