Way to put my ideas to shame, Ted Conover.
One of my all-time literary heroes is Ted Conover, who's done things like hop freight trains and cross the Mexico-US border illegally several times over just so he could write about it. Here's a bit about his latest project, taken from a recent NYT interview.
What are you working on?
There’s a moment in “Newjack” where I’m driving a prisoner from Sing Sing up to a different prison upstate. We eat dinner at a service area on the Throughway and he comments that once he’s out, he wants to be a trucker. In other words, after confinement he wants to move, constantly.
And once I finished at Sing Sing, I felt the same way. I took an assignment for National Geographic about a new road between the east and west coasts of South America, and got to thinking there was a book to be written about roads - their power to change the places they connect and the people who use them. Now I’ve finished the research and am completing the writing of it. There are five roads, in five different countries, and I traveled each one in the company of someone to whom the road means something special. So it’s passages through some cool parts of the world as well as a meditation on the meaning of roads, now and in the past: how the same road that brings medicine allows for the spread of AIDS, how a road that helps develop the Andes speeds destruction of the rain forest. Every road is an intention; each is a path of human endeavor.
That is some brilliant shit. Read and learn.
What are you working on?
There’s a moment in “Newjack” where I’m driving a prisoner from Sing Sing up to a different prison upstate. We eat dinner at a service area on the Throughway and he comments that once he’s out, he wants to be a trucker. In other words, after confinement he wants to move, constantly.
And once I finished at Sing Sing, I felt the same way. I took an assignment for National Geographic about a new road between the east and west coasts of South America, and got to thinking there was a book to be written about roads - their power to change the places they connect and the people who use them. Now I’ve finished the research and am completing the writing of it. There are five roads, in five different countries, and I traveled each one in the company of someone to whom the road means something special. So it’s passages through some cool parts of the world as well as a meditation on the meaning of roads, now and in the past: how the same road that brings medicine allows for the spread of AIDS, how a road that helps develop the Andes speeds destruction of the rain forest. Every road is an intention; each is a path of human endeavor.
That is some brilliant shit. Read and learn.