Home & Away

For Monika H. A. Lehmann, who helped make Berlin feel as comfortable as New York

Portions of this book previously appeared in Bennington Review, Boston Review, Brooklyn Bridge, Chronicles, Columbia University Forum, Congress Bi-Weekly, Exquisite Corpse, House & Garden, Liberty, Menu, New York Times (in both the Sunday travel section and Sophisticated Traveler), North American Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Twentieth Century, and Zitty, as well as the website of the Fullosia Press and Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, edited by Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (Ohio State University Press, 1985).

The anxiety that generates interesting, dramatic conflict in travel writings--which generates plot, I suppose, and which is, after all, why we continue to read them (we certainly don't continue to read them in order to hear again about the wonders)--is an anxiety generated by a sense of being displaced, dislocated, alienated from the tribe, from the neighborhood, from the family, from women and children. Travel writing is a search, I think, by the homeless for the route home. At its best it's a kind of peripatetic novel.

--Russell Banks, in a symposium (1991)

It is much to be regretted that he never undertook the full travel book he often thought of writing.

--John Haffenden, introduction to William Empson, The Royal Beasts and Other Works (1986)

Preface

Not unlike other essayists preoccupied with the peculiarities of the real world, beginning in my case with the mechanisms of my profession, I have written about my travels, not only to places far away but also to those closer to home, if not, indeed, about my own home. In contrast to too many other travel writers, I have also focused upon what I knew very well, less because I researched it, as a journalist might, but because I experienced it, often for a considerable length of time. Perhaps I am less a traveler than a resider, and nearly all of the following pieces are about places in which I've resided, or have resided in me. It follows that even though most of these pieces were published in magazines, all were written on my own initiative.

In poetry as well as fiction, I have been concerned with doing it differently, radically differently; and though departures in my travel writings are less frequent and generally more modest, pieces such as "The East Village," which really began as a visual poem, implicitly broach the question of possible alternative forms in he genre. "Resounding New York City" is also a recollection of composing a sort of audio travelogue.

My principal regret, as I put this book together, is that I was not able to do more travel reportage; so rather than let good ideas be forgotten, I include here two fairly elaborate journalistic proposals for pieces which, a magazine commission willing, I would have gladly written: one about the Berlin Wall (that no longer exists), a second about the Rio-Copacabana beach. Even though these chapters are outlines, may they be no less readable than the rest of the text.

—Richard Kostelanetz, SoHo, New York