From CJR's Cultivating Lonliness: "With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines" -- not Gangrey! -- "rare is the commentator who does the field work necessary to earn his opinions -- or even his prejudices."
"Above all, it is the lack of appreciation for geography in the broad, nineteenth-century sense of the word that is basic to an age of journalism increasingly given to summarizing from above rather than reporting from below."
"Barry Lopez, the nature writer, notes that in the current climate even such a seemingly obvious notion as the American landscape is a concoction of the media and advertising industries: in truth, the American landscape is a product of many little landscapes, each with its local genius, so that only the ignorant would reduce 'the Triassic reds of the Colorado Plateau . . . the sharp and ghostly light of the Florida Keys . . . and the aeolian soils of southern Minnesota' to a single geography."
"Just listening to people, to their stories -- rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions -- forms the essence of these and all other good travel books."
"The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You'll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don't know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves."
Rather than interrogate strangers ?
He's talking about travel writing.
But he's not JUST talking about travel writing.
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