This section of sobsey.com holds a series of writings about my travels, overseas and in the US, in the fall of 2001 -- although it begins by leapfrogging forward to Los Angeles, November 2002, by way of announcing my circumstances at the time of writing.
But before you read the journal entries, I suggest starting with the five original email 'dispatches' I sent to friends and family from Southeast Asia. The dispatches introduce material that becomes assumed knowledge throughout the journal. They can be found along with the journal, reprinted verbatim except for typos, on the Southeast/Southwest Archive page. I resisted my strong temptation to revise the dispatches, including their mistakes. For example, I later discovered that the given number and portion deaths during Cambodia's 1975-1979 upheaval seems to vary with every book, brochure, and report. And I got a few things about Indonesia completely wrong. Factual accuracy increases in the journal.
One of my fiction professors at the University of Texas, the Scottish writer James Kelman, often inveighed against our persistent use of the present tense. It destabilizes the story, he argued. Write in the past tense, and you achieve a certainty of events: this has happened. I'm still not sure I agree with him, but Kelman heightened my sensitivity toward the temporal context of narration. I am in Los Angeles now, editing and posting stories I wrote months ago, in Texas, about year-old travels through Asia and America. Thus the narrator performs a kind of space-time ventriloquism, throwing his voice from Southern California in 2002 to Southeast Asia in 2001, and all through the continuum between. Which is to warn the reader that the "present" tense changes as it goes, and as I went. It's my hope that the Storyteller's elusive voice fits the Traveler's uncertain mood.
Although naked impatience helped motivate my choice, I use the internet as a medium for a deliberately formal reason. These articles are rather desultory, and very personal -- this is a journal, after all. The web, with its nonlinear dimensions and its natural consonance with short-form writing, seemed the best host. To ease navigation, some marginalia runs on a parallel track at the right of the main text, and I've removed longer digressions to pop-up windows which you can choose to read or skip.
A last caveat: this is writing about travel, but not writing for travel. Although I may in passing offer an incidental tip or pointer, my goal is not to guide. I do not recommend cheap airfare brokers or clean Phnom Penh guesthouses. I can't tell you how to diagnose malaria. I have not seen enough of the world to make reliable comparisons and assessments. (I make unreliable ones instead.) If you have traveled much, you may find me preoccupied with the mundane, or repulsed or surprised by things you yawned at. In any case, you won't find here the kind of organized, practical information that travel guides provide. I went erratically around the Southeast and the Southwest -- making great leaps then doubling back, bending to time and money and the anxious issue of 9/11; succumbing to illness; integrating the advice and itineraries of relatives and fellow travelers. Your movement through this writing may also hopscotch. In short, I drew the map, but you plot the course.
Thank you, so much, for reading.
-- Adam Sobsey
November 2002
