REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

Buy My Book. Please!

AS YOU KNOW if you've subjected yourself to many of these columns, I love books. I love them for their contents. I love them as a superior content-delivery system. I love them even as decor elements and as industrial-strength fly swatters.

But I don't trust them as travel guides. I should know; I've written one.

My labors in the vineyard of the printed word recently yielded a worthy little guidebook to my city. It boasts intense color, spicy aroma, a flavor somewhat acidic yet faintly fruity, with a short finish. Trouble is, like a vin de table, it won't be consumable for long.

Vintage is everything for utilitarian travel writing. A guidebook ages swiftly and gracelessly. It is an unchangeable object whose subject is a world in flux.

In the few weeks between my completion of the manuscript and the return of the proofs, a couple of restaurants and one nifty coffeehouse/retailer died on the streets of Tucson. But they lingered as ghosts on the page proofs, and a quick exorcism was in order.

So we deleted those entries and replaced a couple of them with something new. Of course, three or four more businesses shut down while the book was being printed. Even the author photo fell out of date when I grew a goatee to conceal a scar from a bicycle accident.

Now, this doesn't mean that the entire 200-page book is useless. It's just that people are bound to be disappointed when my vivid descriptions of a very few local attractions lead only to disconnected phone numbers or boarded-up storefronts. It's happened to me as a guidebook user, and surely it's happened to you.

This will all be fixed in the second edition, but while that version is at the printer still more restaurants will die, more parks will close for renovation, more nightlife venues will go dark, and new attractions will open without benefit of mention in my book.

So it must be. A book is a record, a chronicle, a jar in which the past can be pickled, stored decoratively on a shelf and preserved for future consumption. By its physical nature, a book cannot serve up the present.

The Web can -- in theory. The future of the guidebook should be right here on your computer screen. If my guidebook were a Web site, restaurant obituaries and birth announcements could be posted within minutes of confirmation.

In practice, though, Web travel guides tend to be as undependable as books. Few sites are updated regularly, let alone daily. Once up, they tend to receive some maintenance for a few months until their creators lose interest or are distracted by other projects. The Web guides then become eternal flames in cyberspace -- constant, unchanging, ultimately fueled not by solid matter but by the gas of good intentions.

The municipality of Scottsdale, Arizona, for example, paid good money to develop a promotional Web site. The well-designed pages offer several attractive features, including detailed restaurant listings. But the copyright date at the bottom of each page is 1995, and there's no update notice anywhere to be seen. How can we trust travel information that's four years old?

Quite a different problem for writers and Web publishers, even those who would update their sites as religiously as monks observing matins and vespers, is how to make money. If it's a free site, we'd have to sell advertising, a route that so far has led Internet entrepreneurs mainly to frustration and insolvency. The alternative is to make the users pay up. Yet I doubt that many travelers would care to register at a pay site without knowing the precise extent and quality of the information that will be available, or to download the information and print it out on bulky eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets of paper -- not the most convenient thing to travel with.

It's so much easier to run down to the bookstore, browse through the guides to your destination, and choose one that best suits your interests. You'll know exactly what you're getting into if you open my book to, say, page 123, and look at the entry for the ASARCO Mineral Discovery Center: "If you dig mining and aren't terminally offended by the ecological damage wrought by strip mines, check out this facility's earth sciences exhibits, historic and modern mining equipment, multimedia theater shows, and tours of ASARCO's Mission open-pit mine. Even if you fantasize about filling this enormous hole with the corpses of ecorapists, it pays to know your adversary, and this is a fine place to get the inside scoop."

You can tell right off whether the writing style is going to annoy or amuse you. If you're undecided, you may read through as many more examples as you wish before having to put down your money in delight, or put down the book in disgust. You'd be denied this essential freedom to browse with your Web browser at a pay site.

So what's to be done about travel guides? I haven't the faintest idea. I do encourage you, though, to buy mine now. Purchase several copies, in fact. The sooner the first edition sells out, the sooner I can put together a revision. And I can really use the royalty checks this year.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

Reel Politik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

Reel Politik 14: The Merchant-Ivory Connection (ML 100, Round 1)

Reel Politik 15: Who's Stuffing The Ballot Box? (ML 100, Round 2)

Reel Politik 16: Interactive Fiction: It Still Doesn't Compute

Reel Politik 17: Feel The Burn

Reel Politik 18: Whose Life Is This, Anyway?



James Reel's new book, Tucson: A CitySmart Guidebook, is published by John Muir Publications. Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare, and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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