The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
In the sago palms, you'll often find sago beetles which are about the size of your little finger. The Karowai put those on the fire until they're crispy and eat them. They taste a little bit like creamy snails. But compared to sago, the sago beetle is really pretty good.
My first book was called 'Buried Dreams,' about a serial-killer, which was probably about ten years ahead of the serial-killer curve. It was a national bestseller, but it was three years of living in the sewer of this guy's mind.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed 'Dr. Strangelove' as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.
It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.
I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.
Stanley Kubrick, I had been told, hates interviews. It's hard to know what to expect of the man if you've only seen his films. One senses in those films painstaking craftsmanship, a furious intellect at work, a single-minded devotion.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'
When I read about how 200 people died on a polar expedition, I wonder why they didn't get to know the Inuit people who were around and presumably know something about surviving in the Arctic after living there for thousands of years. Talking to people is a survival mechanism.
I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth.
My idea of a vacation is staying home and doing short day hikes, floating the river and things like that.
I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.
As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.
Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.
For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.
My first real writing job was at 'Rolling Stone,' so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism.
