This podcast has been running for almost a decade. There are some real gems buried in the catalogue that I am happy to have a chance to rerelease. This is one of those episodes. It has a new intro.
I recorded it with J. Maarten Troost in April 2020 and published it as S2E9, "Travel writing a disappearing Oceania". It remains a personal favorite of mine.
Maarten wrote four travel memoirs: The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004), about the two years he spent in Kiribati after his partner got a job at an NGO who operated there; Getting Stoned with Savages (2006), about their move to Fiji and Vanuatu; Lost on Planet China (2008) where Maarten ends up wandering around quite a bit of China; and Headhunters on My Doorstep (2013), a Treasure Island retracing written in recovery.
We talk about his time in a huge place that very few have visited to the depths he has, and how the world was changing (or maybe beginning to change) since his time in the region.
Travel writing when it's good, acknowledges both difference and universality. It helps us understand Other, and mocks the way that we are in taking our Otherness for granted. Maarten does a wonderful job at both.
And he hates the f*@!ing Macarena.
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Resources
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J. Maarten Troost at Penguin Random House
J. Maarten Troost at BJ Robbins Literary Agency
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (2004)
Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006)
Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (2008)
Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story (2013)
What became of the Kiribati land purchase in Vanua Levu
Kiribati's Office of Te Beretitenti on the Fiji land purchase
Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)
Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper, 2019)
David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out," Harper's, January 1996, later collected as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
John Jeremiah Sullivan, "You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!", The New York Times Magazine, 2011
Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador, 2015)
407: Charles C. Mann on the wizards & prophets of climate change, the first rerelease
326: Confronting our shadow: Jung, the Vietnam War & climate change, w/ Karl Marlantes, the other author episode Maarten's intro name-checks
