If you fancy winning yourself a two hundred quid voucher from Hotels.com (redeemable in any of 260,000 establishments worldwide), then you should click along to "The Guardian's" website and, in no more one hundred words, offer your travel tip for Mallorca. The paper does this sort of thing regularly. There are tips, among other places, for Buenos Aires, Cuba and Sri Lanka, and now it's the turn of Mallorca. "From beautiful beaches to remote mountains, Mallorca is one of the Med's most beautiful islands." This is the blurb under the announcement for the tips. It is not totally inaccurate, but the wording is drivel. Is it so difficult to avoid using "beautiful" twice in the same sentence? It would appear that it is.
"The Guardian", being as "The Guardian" is, attracts a generally literate and quite sophisticated readership. (Or one presumes so.) It is a readership which, when presented with the opportunity to trouser a couple of centuries, arouses itself into a state of being a wannabe travel writer. The same, it should be said, would apply to several other newspapers, so I'm not just picking on "The Guardian", but it would be safe to assume that the top tips that emanate from this paper will not be including ones for going mamading in Magalluf written in a direct and graphic style but will be including vignettes that reveal hidden coves and charming and unexpected villages. Oh dear.
As wannabe travel writers, and someone from "Lonely Planet" is the judge, there is a formula to follow. It is the one of actual travel writers. Some of them at any rate. And some of whom would be best advised to never travel ever again and certainly not write about their experiences. These are the ones who share with writers of travel brochures an affliction of lexical limpness: a default desire, through sheer idleness (or so it would seem), to indulge themselves in diarrhoeal descriptions replete with adjectives and superlatives of the obvious and the repetitious.
In order to overcome this affliction, I have compiled a compendium of words that should on no account ever be used when describing anything to do with Mallorca. Well, maybe not ever used, but only as a last resort. Do feel free to add to them. There will be others. Here they are ...
Authentic. Awesome. Azure. Beautiful. Blue. Breathtaking. Buzzing. Centuries-old. Charismatic. Charming. Chic. City (or town or island) of contrasts. Crystal-clear. Dazzling. Delicious. Delightful. Deserted. Dream-like. Enchanting. Exciting. Exotic. Fantastic. Golden. Hidden. Lively. Lovely. Luxurious. Magnificent. Oasis. Oozing (for example, history). Phenomenal. Pleasant. Precious. Quaint. Real. Remote. Romantic. Rustic. Shimmering. Spectacular. Strange. Stunning. Superb. Surprise. Traditional. Turquoise. Typical. Undiscovered. Unexpected. Unspoiled. Unusual. Velvety-white (as in sands). Wonderful.
Going back to the blurb in "The Guardian", it includes two of the words in this forbidden list. "Beautiful" is so overused that it has lost any meaning or any power. Yet, the paper manages to use it two times. Lazy? Just a bit. Then there is "remote". The mountains of Mallorca are remote? Are they really? Mallorca isn't that big a place for anything to be remote. There may be remote parts of mountain ranges, but mountains' lack of remoteness is such that you can often find yourself right next to one or indeed on it.
It isn't easy, it must be said, to avoid the forbidden words. Even generally good articles can fall into the trap. Here is the author Helen Walsh from "The Guardian" last October: "S’Amarador has to be one of the most beautiful beaches on the island. Enclosed by pines and ancient, crenellated rock, this is the quintessential “postcard” beach that tourists can never find. At this time of year, with the best part of six months’ sunshine warming its turquoise shallows, the sea is lukewarm – almost body temperature."
A "beautiful", a "turquoise", and "quintessential" is a good one to add to the list. I'm not sure how the sea qualifies as being lukewarm if it is almost 37 degrees Celsius, but let's not be too picky: overall, the article wasn't bad.
The trouble is that a great deal is bad. Someone penning a hundred words for a newspaper review can of course be forgiven for adopting clichés or platitudes, but others cannot be. The writing has to be seen in the same way as Mallorca's marketing is. The island's offers are those of many parts of the Mediterranean. The marketing has, therefore, to transcend that of other destinations. It has to have a voice which creates an impression of uniqueness, even if this uniqueness doesn't exist. Writing about the island has to do the same. It is no good saying that beaches are beautiful, because this is a banality trotted out everywhere else.
Just as the marketing should be thoughtful and creative, so should the writing. Maybe there should be a competition.
Showing posts with label Travel writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
Saturday, March 02, 2013
An American In Pollensa: Temple Fielding
In Puerto Pollensa there is a street that connects the coast road to the Calle Juan XXIII just by the petrol station. To one side of this street is La Gola, the wetland and so-called "green heart" of the resort. La Gola is not the point of this story, though perhaps it could be. What might a travel-writer have made of La Gola as it was or of the view as you came to the end of what is now this street and had looked out over the bay of Pollensa?
The name of this street is Calle Temple Fielding. How many people nowadays remember Temple Fielding? He did after all die 30 years ago. Will there be, on 18 May this year, an appropriate tribute paid to him? A tribute by Pollensa town hall, by the Balearics regional government or even the Spanish national government?
Street names reveal all manner of history and any number of personalities from the past. And one of these personalities is Temple Fielding, an adopted son of Pollensa. For many years, he lived with his wife Nancy in a fourteen-room villa in Formentor. He rented an office in Puerto Pollensa. Temple Fielding was American, an American travel-writer. He published the Fielding's Travel Guides, one of which was to Mallorca.
Temple Hornaday Fielding was 69 when he died. By then, he and his wife had moved to a penthouse in Palma, as the villa had become too much for them to look after. He was, nevertheless, buried in Pollensa, on 20 May 1983.
Fielding began his guide-publishing business after the Second World War. It was he, more than perhaps anyone, who revealed Europe to American tourists. He started writing about Spain at a time when the country was still, so one would think, very much in the darker days of Francoism. However, in 1952, Fielding observed that, despite the reputation that Spain might have had, political matters would never cross the path of the vacationer. That vacationer could go where he wished to and do what he wanted. There were no shadows to frighten him as there were in the Soviet states, Yugoslavia or, intriguingly, Vienna.
Spain's tourism boom of the sixties was partly the product of a desire on behalf of the Franco regime to attract foreign exchange, but it is wrong to suggest that this benefit was was only appreciated at the end of the 1950s. The regime had been well aware of it several years before; it had been brought home to it by important players bringing American tourists to Spain - American Express, TWA and Conrad Hilton.
Into this American mix came Temple Fielding. Though fiercely anti-Communist, Fielding was initially guarded about Franco. Nevertheless, he was so taken with Spain that he chose to make it his base and home. In 1951, he set up that home in Mallorca. Two years later, he had shed any misgivings in making the case for the strategic importance of Spain to the USA. He offered, to what he considered to be American Communist-dupe anti-Francoites, a defence of Franco. The regime had had "to wrest the land from the Communists" and it had built "a firmer and better-balanced nation than some others into which we (American governments) have poured millions - without five cents of outside help".
The Franco regime could scarcely believe its luck. Fielding had already become an established name and now he was acting as an apologist for the regime and as a promoter of tourism - by wealthy, currency-exchange-strong Americans. He was given a chauffeur and afforded every courtesy as he travelled around Spain researching his guide.
Though his style was sometimes criticised, Fielding was enormously influential. And in his style and in what he believed, I find some echoes of my own thoughts. In articles, I use the word "tourist" because it is convenient to do so, but I don't really care for it. Fielding never referred to tourists, only to vacationers, voyagers or travellers. He also wondered how much these travellers cared for culture. They paid lip service to it, giving far greater priority to their hotels and their comforts.
Today, there is not a great amount of American tourism - sorry, vacationing - to Mallorca. There are some Americans who live on the island, a few of whom are in Pollensa. Thirty years on from his death, and coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Mallorcan missionary to California, Fray Juniper Serra, should there be a concerted effort to boost this American tourism and influence? This will be the year of Juniper Serra, but, important though Serra was, Fielding was arguably as important. Serra took Christianity to a part of America, Fielding brought Americans to Mallorca.
* Fielding featured on the cover of "Time Magazine", June 1969: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19690606,00.html
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The name of this street is Calle Temple Fielding. How many people nowadays remember Temple Fielding? He did after all die 30 years ago. Will there be, on 18 May this year, an appropriate tribute paid to him? A tribute by Pollensa town hall, by the Balearics regional government or even the Spanish national government?
Street names reveal all manner of history and any number of personalities from the past. And one of these personalities is Temple Fielding, an adopted son of Pollensa. For many years, he lived with his wife Nancy in a fourteen-room villa in Formentor. He rented an office in Puerto Pollensa. Temple Fielding was American, an American travel-writer. He published the Fielding's Travel Guides, one of which was to Mallorca.
Temple Hornaday Fielding was 69 when he died. By then, he and his wife had moved to a penthouse in Palma, as the villa had become too much for them to look after. He was, nevertheless, buried in Pollensa, on 20 May 1983.
Fielding began his guide-publishing business after the Second World War. It was he, more than perhaps anyone, who revealed Europe to American tourists. He started writing about Spain at a time when the country was still, so one would think, very much in the darker days of Francoism. However, in 1952, Fielding observed that, despite the reputation that Spain might have had, political matters would never cross the path of the vacationer. That vacationer could go where he wished to and do what he wanted. There were no shadows to frighten him as there were in the Soviet states, Yugoslavia or, intriguingly, Vienna.
Spain's tourism boom of the sixties was partly the product of a desire on behalf of the Franco regime to attract foreign exchange, but it is wrong to suggest that this benefit was was only appreciated at the end of the 1950s. The regime had been well aware of it several years before; it had been brought home to it by important players bringing American tourists to Spain - American Express, TWA and Conrad Hilton.
Into this American mix came Temple Fielding. Though fiercely anti-Communist, Fielding was initially guarded about Franco. Nevertheless, he was so taken with Spain that he chose to make it his base and home. In 1951, he set up that home in Mallorca. Two years later, he had shed any misgivings in making the case for the strategic importance of Spain to the USA. He offered, to what he considered to be American Communist-dupe anti-Francoites, a defence of Franco. The regime had had "to wrest the land from the Communists" and it had built "a firmer and better-balanced nation than some others into which we (American governments) have poured millions - without five cents of outside help".
The Franco regime could scarcely believe its luck. Fielding had already become an established name and now he was acting as an apologist for the regime and as a promoter of tourism - by wealthy, currency-exchange-strong Americans. He was given a chauffeur and afforded every courtesy as he travelled around Spain researching his guide.
Though his style was sometimes criticised, Fielding was enormously influential. And in his style and in what he believed, I find some echoes of my own thoughts. In articles, I use the word "tourist" because it is convenient to do so, but I don't really care for it. Fielding never referred to tourists, only to vacationers, voyagers or travellers. He also wondered how much these travellers cared for culture. They paid lip service to it, giving far greater priority to their hotels and their comforts.
Today, there is not a great amount of American tourism - sorry, vacationing - to Mallorca. There are some Americans who live on the island, a few of whom are in Pollensa. Thirty years on from his death, and coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Mallorcan missionary to California, Fray Juniper Serra, should there be a concerted effort to boost this American tourism and influence? This will be the year of Juniper Serra, but, important though Serra was, Fielding was arguably as important. Serra took Christianity to a part of America, Fielding brought Americans to Mallorca.
* Fielding featured on the cover of "Time Magazine", June 1969: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19690606,00.html
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Saturday, February 09, 2013
The Formula For Writing About Mallorca
Travel and tourism are such big industries, they are such big parts of many people's lives that they have spawned their own media bigness. This has been assisted by the sheer bigness of media that nowadays has to be filled. A consequence of this is the frantic search for parts of the globe over which a writer can swoon; touristic nooks and crannies to be revealed, the writer might hope, for the first time. A further consequence is the endless listing of the ten this-and-thats. Go to pretty much any newspaper and you'll find evidence of both these phenomena. Or go to a blog, a website, wherever. Travel has eaten the conventional media and is now also consuming the internet.
A further consequence is that, when not sending writers on expensive trips to remote parts of the globe (or just getting them to research YouTube and other parts of the internet), media bosses and editors are engaged in a constant rotation of destinations, the sort that most readers might actually be able to afford to go to. I have a theory that offices of travel editors are hooked up to databases which schedule when a particular destination should be given a treatment. I also have a theory that there is a different database, one which outlines how writers should treat their subjects. There is a formula, and nowhere better demonstrates this formula than Mallorca.
I don't mean to pick on one article, but there was one recently in the "Daily Mail" which serves as a template for precisely this formula. The template could have been chosen from a host of other articles and from a host of other newspapers or websites.
The formula goes something like this. The article starts with the writer expressing surprise that he or she had even contemplated going to Mallorca or by highlighting the surprise that has been expressed by others that he or she would be going to Mallorca. The reason? Well, Mallorca is the epitome of high-rise, Brit-bar, lager-lout tourism, isn't it. Or something along these lines. The writer then spends the rest of the article revealing that actually it isn't and that Mallorca has all manner of wonderful hidden secrets. And more often than not, they involve Pollensa.
The article quite frequently also adopts a coy style: let's hope no one finds out about these hidden secrets. No one, that is, apart from the many thousands of readers, assuming the article has appeared somewhere that can boast many thousands of readers, and I guess the Mail is an example of a publication which can.
This coyness is matched in its daftness only by the formulaic step-by-step approach of the article (and steps are themselves quite important to the formulaic article, as the Calvari steps in Pollensa invariably feature). Because the article has been written many, many times before by different writers and for different publications, there can surely be no reader anywhere in the world who believes that Mallorca is just high-rise, Brit-bar, lager-lout excess. Just as there can be no reader who doesn't already know that Mallorca has hidden secrets, ones which are that hidden that everyone knows about them.
Then there are additional bits of information, those that might have the reader think: "ooh, I never knew that." Except of course, they will know, because the additional bits of information will have also appeared previously. Hence, in my Mail template, we learn that Agatha Christie used to stay in Pollensa (see, I told you that Pollensa was part of the formula) and that she was inspired to write, I quote, "her novel Problems At Pollensa Bay". Ah, but what's happened here? A slight slip. There was only one problem at Pollensa Bay, and it was a short story not a novel. But let's not quibble too much.
It's a pretty good gig writing travel articles. Sometimes you even get to visit the places you are writing about rather than simply cobbling together research extracted from the internet (and I am convinced that I have come across such examples in the past). And what is more, some benevolent business or businesses might have contributed to the cost of the visit, which may have something to do with why their website address appears at the foot of the article.
If you want to write about Mallorca, it is really very simple. Start with the naffness proposition, refute it by means of discovering, to everyone's amazement, the unspoiled Mallorca, and slip in Pollensa along with a smattering of appropriate adjectives (attractive, gorgeous and so on). Job's a good 'un and here's the invoice.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
A further consequence is that, when not sending writers on expensive trips to remote parts of the globe (or just getting them to research YouTube and other parts of the internet), media bosses and editors are engaged in a constant rotation of destinations, the sort that most readers might actually be able to afford to go to. I have a theory that offices of travel editors are hooked up to databases which schedule when a particular destination should be given a treatment. I also have a theory that there is a different database, one which outlines how writers should treat their subjects. There is a formula, and nowhere better demonstrates this formula than Mallorca.
I don't mean to pick on one article, but there was one recently in the "Daily Mail" which serves as a template for precisely this formula. The template could have been chosen from a host of other articles and from a host of other newspapers or websites.
The formula goes something like this. The article starts with the writer expressing surprise that he or she had even contemplated going to Mallorca or by highlighting the surprise that has been expressed by others that he or she would be going to Mallorca. The reason? Well, Mallorca is the epitome of high-rise, Brit-bar, lager-lout tourism, isn't it. Or something along these lines. The writer then spends the rest of the article revealing that actually it isn't and that Mallorca has all manner of wonderful hidden secrets. And more often than not, they involve Pollensa.
The article quite frequently also adopts a coy style: let's hope no one finds out about these hidden secrets. No one, that is, apart from the many thousands of readers, assuming the article has appeared somewhere that can boast many thousands of readers, and I guess the Mail is an example of a publication which can.
This coyness is matched in its daftness only by the formulaic step-by-step approach of the article (and steps are themselves quite important to the formulaic article, as the Calvari steps in Pollensa invariably feature). Because the article has been written many, many times before by different writers and for different publications, there can surely be no reader anywhere in the world who believes that Mallorca is just high-rise, Brit-bar, lager-lout excess. Just as there can be no reader who doesn't already know that Mallorca has hidden secrets, ones which are that hidden that everyone knows about them.
Then there are additional bits of information, those that might have the reader think: "ooh, I never knew that." Except of course, they will know, because the additional bits of information will have also appeared previously. Hence, in my Mail template, we learn that Agatha Christie used to stay in Pollensa (see, I told you that Pollensa was part of the formula) and that she was inspired to write, I quote, "her novel Problems At Pollensa Bay". Ah, but what's happened here? A slight slip. There was only one problem at Pollensa Bay, and it was a short story not a novel. But let's not quibble too much.
It's a pretty good gig writing travel articles. Sometimes you even get to visit the places you are writing about rather than simply cobbling together research extracted from the internet (and I am convinced that I have come across such examples in the past). And what is more, some benevolent business or businesses might have contributed to the cost of the visit, which may have something to do with why their website address appears at the foot of the article.
If you want to write about Mallorca, it is really very simple. Start with the naffness proposition, refute it by means of discovering, to everyone's amazement, the unspoiled Mallorca, and slip in Pollensa along with a smattering of appropriate adjectives (attractive, gorgeous and so on). Job's a good 'un and here's the invoice.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Monday, March 19, 2012
The Lazy Man's Guide To Travel Writing
The reasons why I refer occasionally to items from "The Guardian" are: a. it is free online, unlike a certain other "quality" British newspaper; b. it isn't the "Daily Mail"; c. following on from b., I don't therefore have a desire to throw the computer out the window.
Another reason is that it does come up with the odd inspirational piece. Not inspirational in the way that it is written, but inspirational in giving me something to talk about. So it is with a short thing entitled "Spain's best festivals and parties", written by a certain Rachel Dixon who "works for the life & style site" at the paper. What this means is that she gets gigs to go and sample tourism and travel opportunities that few people would ever consider and would still not consider once they have read Rachel's contributions.
The other day, Rachel was enjoying "gourmet horse riding in Andalucía" (and how nomenclaturely correct of the paper to opt for Andalucía, with its c and its accented i, rather than its s and no accent). Never fear, it isn't the horse that is being gourmeted, or at least I don't think it is. As if this wasn't enough travel for one day and for one person, Rachel then departs Andalucía and heads around Spain for her tour of the best festivals and parties.
These, it mainly turns out, are publicity for music concerts. Not boring ones with sombre-looking gents in tuxes and equally sombre-looking ladies in evening gowns but pop, rock, dance and what have you. Best they all are, even if one of them claimed by Rachel to be among the best has never actually taken place before.
We read all this travel-writing stuff and think "I wish I could do a job like that". Gourmet horse riding one day, the best festivals the next day, or even the same day in Rachel's case. But it's the appearance of the not-having-taken-place-yet festival that helps to prove what I have believed for some time. Travel writers don't in fact get gigs to go and sample tourism at all. What they do is spend all day in their studies in Hackney pied-à-terres and look at YouTube.
This may sound as though writers are being rather duplicitous in suggesting that they have been horse riding when the only riding they have been doing is taking the Central Line, but we should applaud them, especially if they work for the life & style site at "The Guardian". Life & style (strangely always ampersanded) in a Guardian style requires attention to carbon emissions. What better than to never leave home but still appear to have, as though you are a current-day Judith Chalmers wishing your readership that they were there but having Photoshopped yourself onto an entire landscape of Andalucía, preferably with the odd gourmet horse or two chewing in the background.
With most of it, as with gourmet horse riding, you can be on pretty firm ground. No one is clearly ever going to do it, as no one ever does anything that is suggested in the travel pages of newspapers. So no one can challenge the accuracy of the report. Not that they would, because the report would be accurate, unless someone had, as a joke, posted gourmet horse riding in the Shetland Islands onto YouTube and called it Andalucía.
The travel-writer's research is today done for him or her. As well as YouTube, there are the likes of Pinterest. What an astonishing resource this is. Just go to the travel & places section (more of the ampersand, note) and a whole world awaits your typing skills to convert the images into someone's next dream holiday. How about Niue for example? Don't know where it is. Nor did I, but I now do, thanks to Pinterest, and studying the photos I could conjure up a world for you of velvety white sands and electric-blue sea (see also Trip Advisor re Puerto Alcúdia).
I wouldn't even need to plagiarise the text. I am quite capable of writing my own, thanks very much. And realising quite how easy this can all be, I have decided to issue my "Lazy Man's Guide To Mallorca", to be published this summer. While I know a fair bit about Mallorca, I can't claim to know it all, but why should I bother spending the petrol money to find out when it's all there on the internet, awaiting my transformation into an indispensable guide for tourists from all good bookshops at the reasonable price of 9.99 euros (IVA included). With any luck, I can find some charitable souls willing to hand over their photos for free as well.
But why stop at Mallorca? My next project will be a guide to the Russian Steppe. Have I ever been to it? Are you kidding? Of course not. I don't even know where it is, but Wikipedia can tell me.
So, thank you, "The Guardian", and thank you, Rachel. A moment's attention paid to Spain's best festivals and parties, and you have shown me the light. And it's on YouTube.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Another reason is that it does come up with the odd inspirational piece. Not inspirational in the way that it is written, but inspirational in giving me something to talk about. So it is with a short thing entitled "Spain's best festivals and parties", written by a certain Rachel Dixon who "works for the life & style site" at the paper. What this means is that she gets gigs to go and sample tourism and travel opportunities that few people would ever consider and would still not consider once they have read Rachel's contributions.
The other day, Rachel was enjoying "gourmet horse riding in Andalucía" (and how nomenclaturely correct of the paper to opt for Andalucía, with its c and its accented i, rather than its s and no accent). Never fear, it isn't the horse that is being gourmeted, or at least I don't think it is. As if this wasn't enough travel for one day and for one person, Rachel then departs Andalucía and heads around Spain for her tour of the best festivals and parties.
These, it mainly turns out, are publicity for music concerts. Not boring ones with sombre-looking gents in tuxes and equally sombre-looking ladies in evening gowns but pop, rock, dance and what have you. Best they all are, even if one of them claimed by Rachel to be among the best has never actually taken place before.
We read all this travel-writing stuff and think "I wish I could do a job like that". Gourmet horse riding one day, the best festivals the next day, or even the same day in Rachel's case. But it's the appearance of the not-having-taken-place-yet festival that helps to prove what I have believed for some time. Travel writers don't in fact get gigs to go and sample tourism at all. What they do is spend all day in their studies in Hackney pied-à-terres and look at YouTube.
This may sound as though writers are being rather duplicitous in suggesting that they have been horse riding when the only riding they have been doing is taking the Central Line, but we should applaud them, especially if they work for the life & style site at "The Guardian". Life & style (strangely always ampersanded) in a Guardian style requires attention to carbon emissions. What better than to never leave home but still appear to have, as though you are a current-day Judith Chalmers wishing your readership that they were there but having Photoshopped yourself onto an entire landscape of Andalucía, preferably with the odd gourmet horse or two chewing in the background.
With most of it, as with gourmet horse riding, you can be on pretty firm ground. No one is clearly ever going to do it, as no one ever does anything that is suggested in the travel pages of newspapers. So no one can challenge the accuracy of the report. Not that they would, because the report would be accurate, unless someone had, as a joke, posted gourmet horse riding in the Shetland Islands onto YouTube and called it Andalucía.
The travel-writer's research is today done for him or her. As well as YouTube, there are the likes of Pinterest. What an astonishing resource this is. Just go to the travel & places section (more of the ampersand, note) and a whole world awaits your typing skills to convert the images into someone's next dream holiday. How about Niue for example? Don't know where it is. Nor did I, but I now do, thanks to Pinterest, and studying the photos I could conjure up a world for you of velvety white sands and electric-blue sea (see also Trip Advisor re Puerto Alcúdia).
I wouldn't even need to plagiarise the text. I am quite capable of writing my own, thanks very much. And realising quite how easy this can all be, I have decided to issue my "Lazy Man's Guide To Mallorca", to be published this summer. While I know a fair bit about Mallorca, I can't claim to know it all, but why should I bother spending the petrol money to find out when it's all there on the internet, awaiting my transformation into an indispensable guide for tourists from all good bookshops at the reasonable price of 9.99 euros (IVA included). With any luck, I can find some charitable souls willing to hand over their photos for free as well.
But why stop at Mallorca? My next project will be a guide to the Russian Steppe. Have I ever been to it? Are you kidding? Of course not. I don't even know where it is, but Wikipedia can tell me.
So, thank you, "The Guardian", and thank you, Rachel. A moment's attention paid to Spain's best festivals and parties, and you have shown me the light. And it's on YouTube.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Luis Salvador And The First Tourists
Luis Salvador María José Juan Bautista Domingo Raniero Fernando Carlos Zenobio Antonio. A name for each month of the year. Or a name for each member of a football team plus a sub. Are these the names of a football team? Actually not. They are, were, the names of an Austrian archduke. A Habsburg. One of Mallorca's most famous adopted sons.
It is an unpalatable truth for the patrimonially obsessed Mallorcans that the most notable figures in the island's history tend not to be Mallorcan. To a Frenchwoman, George Sand, you can add her Polish beau, Chopin, and the noble Luis Salvador. Unlike Sand and Chopin, whose contributions to Mallorcan culture are vastly overstated, Luis Salvador remains one of the most important figures in the island's history. Together with the remarkable and mystical mediaeval polymath Ramon Llull and the missionary Fra Juníper, who were both Mallorcan, the archduke forms a triumvirate of Mallorcan greats.
For Brits, however, and much like both Llull and Juníper, he is a largely obscure figure who is most likely to be known, if at all, as a street name.
The Germans, however, will know all about him. It was his opus "Die Balearen", a colossal travelogue and regional and ethnological survey, that endeared him to the people of the islands and to a succession of German visitors. Luis is credited with having introduced tourism to Mallorca; he went on to become honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourism Board).
Luis was not your typical royal wastrel. He attracted to the island not a cast list of late nineteenth century scoundrels but a diverse group of artists, poets and scientists who joined him at the Miramar finca in Valldemossa. Appropriately enough, given his association to him by Mallorcan fame, the finca included the monastery founded by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century.
The interdisciplinary range of these first tourists to the island, as they are sometimes referred to, helped to forge Luis's ambitions to being a polymath in his own right and in a style similar to Llull. It was a combination of the arts and sciences that formed the basis for his interest in Mallorca and which went into the compiling of the astonishing "Die Balearen".
Luis, much though he was captivated by Mallorca and the islands, extended the scope of his inquiries into natural and social sciences and took off around the Mediterranean in his boats, Nixe I and Nixe II.
Nixe III is currently retracing Luis's travels in the Med. It set sail for the first time last year, departing from the yacht club in Puerto Pollensa; its five-year mission to boldly go where an archduke had gone before and to draw comparisons with what he discovered in examining the diversity of the Mediterranean and also in questioning whether there is such a thing as a Mediterranean culture.
This summer Nixe III has journeyed from Venice to Montenegro and to Lipari and the Aeolian islands which were also visited last year. The head of the Nixe team is himself from Pollensa. A doctor in the social sciences, Juan Ramis is journeying with a German expert on the archduke and a specialist in environmental studies.
The scientific nature of the expeditions is in keeping with the way in which Luis conducted his enquiries. And one of his greatest contributions was the fact that, travel writer that he was, he was an objective observer. This is what was said of his approach: "He observed everything with an absent, distant gaze and a contemplative attitude ... (he) never lapsed into the speculative, subjective introspection of romanticism. Instead he personally examined reality in the most direct manner possible."
I quote this because it is a strong statement of how a critical eye and an inquisitive mind can produce, as it did, some of the best travel writing that has ever been committed to print. Luis showed, and it should be a lesson to those who fall into the trap of adopting the indulgent and romanticised styles that one commonly encounters in describing Mallorca, that objectivity and knowledge plus a love of a place are what count.
And there is a twist to the tale of Luis. In Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna", often said to be the first European novel, the knight of the story turned out to be an emperor. He was in fact Rudolf of Habsburg, from whom Luis was descended. Nixe III might be said to be continuing a story of Mallorca itself that goes back to the thirteenth century.
Follow the journeys of Nixe III at http://www.nixe3.com which I acknowledge for the quote in this article.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
It is an unpalatable truth for the patrimonially obsessed Mallorcans that the most notable figures in the island's history tend not to be Mallorcan. To a Frenchwoman, George Sand, you can add her Polish beau, Chopin, and the noble Luis Salvador. Unlike Sand and Chopin, whose contributions to Mallorcan culture are vastly overstated, Luis Salvador remains one of the most important figures in the island's history. Together with the remarkable and mystical mediaeval polymath Ramon Llull and the missionary Fra Juníper, who were both Mallorcan, the archduke forms a triumvirate of Mallorcan greats.
For Brits, however, and much like both Llull and Juníper, he is a largely obscure figure who is most likely to be known, if at all, as a street name.
The Germans, however, will know all about him. It was his opus "Die Balearen", a colossal travelogue and regional and ethnological survey, that endeared him to the people of the islands and to a succession of German visitors. Luis is credited with having introduced tourism to Mallorca; he went on to become honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourism Board).
Luis was not your typical royal wastrel. He attracted to the island not a cast list of late nineteenth century scoundrels but a diverse group of artists, poets and scientists who joined him at the Miramar finca in Valldemossa. Appropriately enough, given his association to him by Mallorcan fame, the finca included the monastery founded by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century.
The interdisciplinary range of these first tourists to the island, as they are sometimes referred to, helped to forge Luis's ambitions to being a polymath in his own right and in a style similar to Llull. It was a combination of the arts and sciences that formed the basis for his interest in Mallorca and which went into the compiling of the astonishing "Die Balearen".
Luis, much though he was captivated by Mallorca and the islands, extended the scope of his inquiries into natural and social sciences and took off around the Mediterranean in his boats, Nixe I and Nixe II.
Nixe III is currently retracing Luis's travels in the Med. It set sail for the first time last year, departing from the yacht club in Puerto Pollensa; its five-year mission to boldly go where an archduke had gone before and to draw comparisons with what he discovered in examining the diversity of the Mediterranean and also in questioning whether there is such a thing as a Mediterranean culture.
This summer Nixe III has journeyed from Venice to Montenegro and to Lipari and the Aeolian islands which were also visited last year. The head of the Nixe team is himself from Pollensa. A doctor in the social sciences, Juan Ramis is journeying with a German expert on the archduke and a specialist in environmental studies.
The scientific nature of the expeditions is in keeping with the way in which Luis conducted his enquiries. And one of his greatest contributions was the fact that, travel writer that he was, he was an objective observer. This is what was said of his approach: "He observed everything with an absent, distant gaze and a contemplative attitude ... (he) never lapsed into the speculative, subjective introspection of romanticism. Instead he personally examined reality in the most direct manner possible."
I quote this because it is a strong statement of how a critical eye and an inquisitive mind can produce, as it did, some of the best travel writing that has ever been committed to print. Luis showed, and it should be a lesson to those who fall into the trap of adopting the indulgent and romanticised styles that one commonly encounters in describing Mallorca, that objectivity and knowledge plus a love of a place are what count.
And there is a twist to the tale of Luis. In Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna", often said to be the first European novel, the knight of the story turned out to be an emperor. He was in fact Rudolf of Habsburg, from whom Luis was descended. Nixe III might be said to be continuing a story of Mallorca itself that goes back to the thirteenth century.
Follow the journeys of Nixe III at http://www.nixe3.com which I acknowledge for the quote in this article.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Travellin' Light
More inspired by "The Sunday Times". I was reminded of a recent email correspondence on Sunday morning. A.A. Gill was lauding a new television series by Jonathan Meades. In that correspondence, I had, by coincidence, lumped Gill and Meades together as the finest examples of travel writers with whom I am acquainted. That Gill sees fit to praise Meades suggests that there is at least one side of a possibly mutual admiration duality.
The point I had made about the two authors was that, when they are writing ostensibly travel pieces, it is not necessarily obvious that "travel" is their theme. Both have an eye for the surreal and bizarre, and in Meades' case the bizarre is heightened by a fascination with low-life. But they also bring together in their writing a range of the arts, humanities and science. Travel writing is literary polymer, a combination of language, culture, art, music, society, people, history, politics, food and drink, geography, geology, topography, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, town planning, engineering, natural history, botany and meteorology - to name but some. Above all, and Gill and Meades are masters of the art, it is a process of observation and of de- and then re-construction of the familiar with imagery composed of influences often far removed from the subject. (And just to explain, even when one is not directly familiar with, for instance, a particular landscape or building, one is nevertheless familiar with the notion of landscapes and buildings.) Gill's role as a TV critic can inform his descriptions with the everyday of soaps and reality shows. A background as an architectural journalist guides Meades in the performance of such re-buildings of images. Both also, naturally enough given their preferences for the bizarre, have a penchant for seeking out the odd, and it is the odd that can give rise to the richest of written picture-painting.
Travel writing, and it is obvious to say so, needs to paint pictures without the aid of pictures. But it is the superficiality or the depth of this painting that distinguishes the mundane from the lively. Much good travel writing also draws on the novel - the story telling of a Bryson or a Theroux, for example. And these authors share with Gill and Meades the essential quality of ferocious wit. There may be an apparent excess of cynicism, sarcasm and satire about the output, but these are all vital in presenting a view of a subject that runs contrary to the blandness of much travel writing. And it is wrong to assume that such styles do not at the same time embrace affection. It is often a very affection for the subject that enables the alternative "take", be it sarcastic or surrealistic.
Where am I going with all this? To Mallorca naturally enough. And that is because much of what one ever encounters about Mallorca in the written form is stripped of any depth, of any challenging imagery, of any alternativism. It is writing that suffers from prejudice in that the writer is too blinded by what he or she believes should be the accepted norm or by his or her own attachment in order to attempt to paint pictures that are more than just light, first touches of the brush on the canvas. To return to the notion of familiarity, one is familiar with mountains or with seascapes, even if one has no first-hand experience of the Tramuntana or the bay of Pollensa. To simply apply standard adjectives or metaphors to either is far from sufficient, but that is what one usually gets - the default setting of limited imagination, creativity and personal thesauri. There is a form of fascism when it comes to Mallorca which has it that if the words "beautiful" and "lovely" are not repeated in every paragraph, then the author is being unfairly critical. And such fascism occurs not just in travel writing but in pretty much any writing about the island.
Gill or Meades on Mallorca. Now that would be something.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Beautiful South, "Song For Whoever", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysM9cSR6YqM. Today's title - probably been loads, but for whom was this a number one in the '50s?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
The point I had made about the two authors was that, when they are writing ostensibly travel pieces, it is not necessarily obvious that "travel" is their theme. Both have an eye for the surreal and bizarre, and in Meades' case the bizarre is heightened by a fascination with low-life. But they also bring together in their writing a range of the arts, humanities and science. Travel writing is literary polymer, a combination of language, culture, art, music, society, people, history, politics, food and drink, geography, geology, topography, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, town planning, engineering, natural history, botany and meteorology - to name but some. Above all, and Gill and Meades are masters of the art, it is a process of observation and of de- and then re-construction of the familiar with imagery composed of influences often far removed from the subject. (And just to explain, even when one is not directly familiar with, for instance, a particular landscape or building, one is nevertheless familiar with the notion of landscapes and buildings.) Gill's role as a TV critic can inform his descriptions with the everyday of soaps and reality shows. A background as an architectural journalist guides Meades in the performance of such re-buildings of images. Both also, naturally enough given their preferences for the bizarre, have a penchant for seeking out the odd, and it is the odd that can give rise to the richest of written picture-painting.
Travel writing, and it is obvious to say so, needs to paint pictures without the aid of pictures. But it is the superficiality or the depth of this painting that distinguishes the mundane from the lively. Much good travel writing also draws on the novel - the story telling of a Bryson or a Theroux, for example. And these authors share with Gill and Meades the essential quality of ferocious wit. There may be an apparent excess of cynicism, sarcasm and satire about the output, but these are all vital in presenting a view of a subject that runs contrary to the blandness of much travel writing. And it is wrong to assume that such styles do not at the same time embrace affection. It is often a very affection for the subject that enables the alternative "take", be it sarcastic or surrealistic.
Where am I going with all this? To Mallorca naturally enough. And that is because much of what one ever encounters about Mallorca in the written form is stripped of any depth, of any challenging imagery, of any alternativism. It is writing that suffers from prejudice in that the writer is too blinded by what he or she believes should be the accepted norm or by his or her own attachment in order to attempt to paint pictures that are more than just light, first touches of the brush on the canvas. To return to the notion of familiarity, one is familiar with mountains or with seascapes, even if one has no first-hand experience of the Tramuntana or the bay of Pollensa. To simply apply standard adjectives or metaphors to either is far from sufficient, but that is what one usually gets - the default setting of limited imagination, creativity and personal thesauri. There is a form of fascism when it comes to Mallorca which has it that if the words "beautiful" and "lovely" are not repeated in every paragraph, then the author is being unfairly critical. And such fascism occurs not just in travel writing but in pretty much any writing about the island.
Gill or Meades on Mallorca. Now that would be something.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Beautiful South, "Song For Whoever", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysM9cSR6YqM. Today's title - probably been loads, but for whom was this a number one in the '50s?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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