14 Topics for Heavy Discussions over Light Dinners

Something I wrote a long time ago, maybe 1994…

 

1.  Okay, so if you were president, how would you balance the budget?

2.  Should capital punishment be administered by the state under any circumstances?

3.  Should the actions of all government leaders be subject to approval by the World Court or the United Nations?

4.  If you had a choice, where would you like to have been born and raised?  Male or female?  City or farm?  Any preferred ethnic origin?  Oppressor or victim?  None of the above?

5.  Who makes the best kind of friend:  someone a lot like yourself, or someone very different?

6.  And what do you want your friends for, other than a lift home?

7.  If songs were people, which one would you marry?

8.  Is retirement overrated?  If maybe, this depends on what?  And whose?

9.  If people say they want the world to be better for their children, and the next generation says the same thing about their children, how come things are still so bad?

10.   Is fate just a concept people invented to rationalize the random chaos of the universe?  If so, how can you tell?

11.  Is it about peace, justice and the Cambridge Way, or is it about feeding your ego the way you stuff your face with bagels every morning?

12.   Let’s suppose that when you die, you meet everyone you’ve ever known in your life (who died before you, that is), and then you all go to a cast party.  That this is, in fact, the primary entertainment in the afterlife.

13.  If reincarnation is the rule, why shouldn’t more people remember their past lives, besides Shirley MacLaine and the populations of India and Tibet?  It might help them to avoid making the same mistake twice, or 33 times for that matter, thus bettering their karma.  Or, it might not.  Is it in the higher plane’s interest to help those on lower planes?  Does First Class care about Coach?  And where does Business Class fit in?

14.   After you die, will you miss having yourself around?  Will you think sadly, “Oh, that used to be my hat?”  Will you keep expecting yourself to walk through that door?

If none of these topics appeal to you, you could just have coffee.

“There will come a time when the past reaches out and grabs you”: My speech in Benrath, Germany

Outside Hauptstraße 46

During the last week of August, I was the guest of the town of Hilden, Germany for ceremonies centered around the installation of three Stolpersteine on the sidewalk outside the building that once housed my father’s family’s drygoods business on a main street in nearby Benrath (now a southern suburb of Düsseldorf but formerly an independent town). For those of you unfamiliar with Stolpersteine, the word means “stumbling stones” or “stumbling blocks” — they are, basically, small stones set in the sidewalk outside a house, bearing brass plates giving the names of victims of the Holocaust who once lived there (not necessarily limited to Jews, and not necessarily killed during the wartime period; Stolpersteine are occasionally placed for persons forced to emigrate, for example, who may still be alive today). The project was originated in 1994 by the Cologne artist Gunter Demnig, who has placed over 20,000 of them to date.

The history of my father’s family during the Nazi period in Germany, and afterward, is a long and complicated one, and the story of my father’s return to Germany after 66 years (in 2006) and his subsequent coming to terms with what the Nazis did in those terrible years, and the efforts at reconciliation by contemporary younger Germans,  is worthy of a book (and will actually be one, written by Karin Marquardt and published by the Verlag Stadtarchiv Hilden later this month; the following speech will make up its final pages). This was my father’s third Stolpersteine-related visit to Germany in three years, and my first; this was also likely the last for both of us. The three stones placed on August 27 were in honor of my grandfather Walter Eichenwald (1900-1943), his sister-in-law Helene Heumann Blumenfeld (1904-1944) and her husband Paul Blumenfeld (1902-1943). Walter and Paul were murdered at the Sobibor concentration camp on the same day in July 1943; Helene, in hiding in Holland, was a diabetic and died in October 1944 because of the unavailability of insulin. Besides my father and me, the ceremony was attended by the Blumenfelds’ daughter, my dad’s cousin Gay, who was herself making her first trip to Deutschland in 55 years.

As I note below, I was last in Benrath in 1994 on a private pilgrimage. Reading the following speech in German on the doorstep of my dad’s boyhood home, in front of a crowd of over 100 people, including video cameras, journalists and officials, ranks among the supreme moments of surreality in my entire life. But was it worth it? You bet. Am I glad I had the chance to participate in this unique opportunity, along with my father and cousin? Of course.

Here’s the speech, first in the original English and then in German.

_______________________________________________

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

No matter how modern and forward-looking you may consider yourself, if you live long enough there will come a time when the past reaches out and grabs you, saying, ‘Pay attention!’ And so it was with me.

I was first here fifteen years ago as a tourist. I had heard the stories from my father and grandmother; I had seen the old photos and postcards that my grandmother kept in boxes in her apartment. The tobacconist; the church; the hotel; the pharmacy; and the beautiful pink Schloss on the lake. A tidy little town with everything in its place.

And my family had their place here, too. The dry goods store with its bolts of cloth, furniture, pairs of socks, where the owners lived right above, in the handsome, sturdy house my great-grandfather had built in the early years of the last century. And finally I myself walked into the picture, but for obvious reasons, I felt it was no longer my picture. My experience was, in an odd way, like a dream of a time I had never known.

I returned to New York to tell my grandmother, Thea, about my visit to her home town. She was then 94 years old. It was the last time I saw her, as a few short weeks afterward she died peacefully.

My grandmother maintained an optimistic outlook on life for as long as I knew her; smiles and laughter came easily to her. Of course, I knew she had lost her husband Walter, and her brothers-in-law Paul and Henry, and her youngest sister Lene. And her other sister, my great-aunt Maddi, had lost both her husband and her young son Rolf, and she tried to put a brave face on things, traveling and visiting and corresponding with friends. But the darkness was close at hand; Maddi kept all the photos of her son hidden away in an old trunk in a closet, too painful to look at.

Who knows what their lives would have been, if they had been permitted to live them out here, alongside their neighbors and friends in Benrath. We cannot know. What we have come here for is to simply acknowledge their existence.

I think my grandmother and others of her generation would be astounded by the ceremony taking place today. But not displeased. To me, as the son and grandson of survivors, the work of remembrance and reconciliation that is going on now in this country is extraordinary. I believe that openness and honesty are good things, and sometimes not that easy to come by. But worth the effort.

I did not live the history of the war years, or have to make my grandparents’ hard choices, but yet it is part of who I am. With a few exceptions I did not know them personally, but I have heard so many stories about them and about similar people, with similar destinies, that they have become part of my story as well. And now, regardless of your own history and experiences, because you care enough to want to hear about them yourselves, they have also, in a way, become part of who you are, in 21^st century Germany. And so we, who have never met before today, have this connection through space and time.

We cannot change what happened all those years ago. But what we can do is to hold close the lessons of those times.

For the work of remembrance is never finished. It is up to all of us to keep the names alive, to say: these people lived here, and they mattered. This is set in the sidewalk, but is also finding its place in books, exhibitions, and people’s hearts and minds.

And I might add that just as it is not only the German people who need to remember the wrongs done in their past, it is not only the Jews who need to be saved.

We cannot and must not confine our humanitarian impulses, our empathy, to people who look and sound like us, but with all the peoples of Earth.

And so, on this day, in this place, we must open ourselves to kindness without thought of reward; to tolerance of differences; and to the value of recognizing our common humanity through the work of helping others who might need it. As there were heroic actions performed in those times by brave and selfless men and women, so we must keep our eyes and ears open to the challenges of our own time.

Although I know well the story of my family and their history here, it is not something I dwell on in every waking moment. I owe it to myself, my wife, and my two sons, twin boys not yet five years old, to live a meaningful, productive and, I hope, happy life. Some may think that the concept of the brotherhood of man, and “peace, love and understanding,” is an outdated and irrelevant cliché; I say it’s something still worth striving for – after all, what is the alternative?

My best wishes to you all.

Rede anlässlich der Stolperstein-Verlegung für Walter Eichenwald, Paul Blumenfeld und Helene Blumenfeld, geb. Heumann,

am 27. August 2009 in Benrath

von Wes Eichenwald

Hochverehrte Gäste, meine Damen und Herren,

Ganz egal für wie modern und fortschrittlich man sich hält: Wenn man lange genug lebt kommt für jeden der Moment, in dem die Vergangenheit einen einholt, einen festhält und zu einem sagt: „Pass auf!“. So war es auch bei mir.

Zum ersten Mal war ich vor fünfzehn Jahren als Tourist hier. Ich kannte die Geschichten meines Vaters und meiner Großmutter; ich hatte die alten Fotos und Postkarten gesehen, die meine Großmutter in Kartons in Ihrer Wohnung aufbewahrte. Der Tabakladen, die Kirche, das Hotel, die Apotheke und das hübsche rosa Schloss am Teich: eine ordentliches Städtchen, wo alles an seinem Platz ist.

Meine Familie hatte dort auch ihren Platz. Der Kurzwarenladen mit seinen Stoffballen, Möbeln und Strümpfen, darüber die Wohnung in dem stattlichen Haus, das mein Urgroßvater zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts baute. Zu guter Letzt trat ich nun selbst in dieses Bild ein, aber aus verständlichen Gründen hatte ich nicht mehr das Gefühl, dass es mein Bild sei. Ich erlebte hier etwas, das auf merkwürdige Weise wie der Traum von einer Zeit war, die ich nie gekannt hatte.

Ich kehrte nach New York zurück um meiner Großmutter Thea von meinem Besuch ihrer Heimatstadt zu erzählen. Sie war damals vierundneunzig Jahre alt und es war mein letzter Besuch bei ihr, denn nur ein paar Wochen später starb sie friedlich.

Solange ich sie kannte, hat meine Großmutter immer eine positive Einstellung zum Leben behalten; sie hat oft gelächelt und gelacht. Ich wusste natürlich, dass sie ihren Ehemann Walter, ihre Schwäger Paul und Henry und ihre jüngste Schwester Lene verloren hatte. Und ihre andere Schwester, meine Großtante Maddi, hatte ihren Mann und ihren jüngsten Sohn Rolf verloren, versuchte aber tapfer zu sein, reiste viel, besuchte Freunde und blieb mit ihnen über Briefe in Kontakt. Aber das Dunkel war nicht weit, Maddi hielt all die Fotos von ihrem Sohn versteckt in einem Koffer, der in einem Wandschrank stand, es war zu schmerzvoll sie anzuschauen.

Wer weiss, wie ihr Leben ausgesehen hätte, wäre es ihnen erlaubt gewesen es hier mit ihren Nachbarn und Freunden in Benrath zu verbringen. Wir können es nicht wissen. Wir sind einfach hergekommen, um ihre Existenz anzuerkennen.

Ich glaube, dass diese Feier heute meine Großmutter und andere aus ihrer Generation sprachlos machen würde, aber nicht unzufrieden. Für mich als Sohn und Enkel von Überlebenden ist der Prozess der Erinnerung und der Versöhnung der jetzt in diesem Land vor sich geht außergewöhnlich. Ich glaube, dass Offenheit und Ehrlichkeit gut sind, aber oft schwer zu erreichen. Aber sie sind diese Mühe wert.

Ich habe die Geschichte der Kriegsjahre nicht gelebt und musste nicht die schweren Entscheidungen meiner Großeltern treffen, aber trotzdem ist es ein Teil von dem, der ich bin. Mit wenigen Ausnahmen kannte ich sie nicht persönlich, aber ich habe so viele Geschichten über sie gehört und über ähnliche Menschen mit ähnlichen Schicksalen, dass sie Teil meiner eigenen Geschichte geworden sind.  Und jetzt, dadurch dass Sie sich dafür interessieren und selbst diese Geschichten hören wollen, sind diese Menschen in gewisser Weise  auch ein Teil von Ihnen im Deutschland des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts geworden, unabhängig von Ihren eigenen Erfahrungen und Ihrer Geschichte. Obwohl wir uns vor dem heutigen Tag nie getroffen haben, besteht so eine Verbindung zwischen uns über Zeit und Raum hinweg.

Was vor all diesen Jahren geschehen ist, können wir nicht mehr ändern. Aber wir können uns die Lehre, die wir aus diesen Zeiten ziehen, zu Herzen nehmen.

Denn die Arbeit des Gedenkens ist niemals abgeschlossen. Es liegt an uns, die Namen am Leben zu erhalten and zu sagen: Diese Menschen lebten hier und sie waren wichtig. Das wird in den Bürgersteig eingelassen, aber es findet auch seinen Platz in Büchern, Ausstellungen und den Herzen und Köpfen der Menschen.

Und ich würde gerne hinzufügen, dass es nicht nur die Deutschen sind, die sich an die Fehler in ihrer Vergangenheit erinnern müssen, es sind nicht nur die Juden, die gerettet werden müssen.

Wir können und dürfen unsere humanitären Regungen, unsere Empathie nicht auf Völker beschränken, die aussehen und reden wie wir, sondern auf alle Völker dieser Erde.

Und so müssen wir uns, an diesem Tag und an diesem Ort, der Freundlichkeit gegenüber öffnen, ohne eine Belohnung dafür zu erwarten; der Toleranz gegenüber den Unterschieden; und gegenüber dem Wert unsere gemeinsame Menschlichkeit zu erkennen, indem wir Menschen helfen, die es brauchen. So wie damals heroische Taten von mutigen und selbstlosen Männern und Frauen vollbracht wurden , so müssen wir heute unsere Augen und Ohren für die Herausforderungen unserer eigenen Zeit offen halten.

Obwohl ich die Geschichte meiner Familie und ihrer Zeit hier gut kenne, beschäftige ich mich doch nicht in jedem wachen Moment mit ihr. Ich bin es mir selbst, meiner Frau und meinen zwei Söhnen, die noch keine fünf sind, schuldig ein sinnvolles, produktives und, wie ich hoffe, glückliches Leben zu leben. Es gibt Menschen, die glauben, dass die Idee von der Brüderlichkeit unter den Menschen und von „Frieden, Liebe und Verständnis“ veraltete und irrelevante Klischees sind; Ich finde, dass es immer noch etwas ist, nach dem es sich zu streben lohnt – was ist schließlich die Alternative?

Ich wünsche Ihnen allen alles Gute.

(Aus dem englischen übersetzt von Emilia Ellsiepen/Translated from the English by Emilia Ellsiepen)

Live blogging the Holocaust

It seems to me that the Holocaust was made possible by a unique historical intersection. The politics of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis aside, it’s indisputable that the mass murders were facilitated by the technological advancements of the time, the Age of Machines, that made gas chambers and death camps possible — but also by the limited communications technology that frustrated the victims’ attempts to get out the word about the slaughter to the outside world. Even with television around, Hitler’s Germany might have gotten away with it as late as the early 1960s. But even taking into account the Nazis’ efficiency and prioritizing of secrecy, could Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and Sobibor have withstood the advent of live blogging, Twitter and social networking? Not likely. At least a few prisoners would have succeeded in sneaking in cell phones, BlackBerries and miniature transmitters. In the era of 24-hour cable news and broadband Internet access, the outside world would have found out about the death camps in weeks, not years, and well before the end of the war.

The question is, how much of the world would have cared?

The Pretenders at Stubb’s, 3/1/09

Me? I just stood off to the side somewhere, scribbling notes about whatever popped into my head. Then I went home and looked at it the next day and scribbled some more.

This was the result.

Das ist alles for today.

If they come to your town, go…

31 things about me

1. When I was about 11 or 12, I ran a race with my sister in the driveway of our house, racing toward the garage door, and stopped by putting my hands out on a window of the selfsame garage door. My right arm went through the window, slicing open the underside of my arm. I required stitches at the hospital. I still have a long, curving scar reaching nearly from elbow to wrist, plus a small scar shaped like a fish on the underside of my right wrist. I don’t mind the scars. They’re part of me now.

2. In 1983, while driving down a mountain on Maui, my sister drew my attention to a picture in a magazine of a pig at a luau, and I looked at it, drove off the road and down a cliff. The car was stopped by a thicket of bushes, and we were both fine. A few feet in either direction and we would have probably died there.

3.  Despite the evidence of #1 and #2, I do not consider my sister to be a jinx.
4. My wife and I were born eight minutes and about 25 miles apart on a hot day in July.

5. I spent my last birthday ending in a zero alone at the Pivo in Cvetje (Beer and Flowers) Festival in Laško, Slovenia. It rained.

6. Although that had its charms, my next birthday, which also ends in a zero, will be spent someplace else.

7. I am good at putting on accents and imitating voices, and have a pretty good ear for pitch. Or think I do.
8. I believe I have suffered some hearing loss from my years of clubgoing (mainly in Boston), although not badly enough for it to be a serious handicap.

9. Politically, I am more liberal now than I was in high school.
10. I didn’t go to a funeral until I was 29 years old. Over the following six years I went to three more.

11. I like drawing cartoon heads and have done so from an early age. My wife thinks I missed a calling as a cartoonist.

12. I like to sing, but have never done so in public apart from one evening of karaoke in the Water Tank bar in Austin, Texas. My wife tells me I could be a good singer if I took it seriously.

13. I lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from the fall of 1996 to the end of 2001.

14. And I haven’t shut up about it since.

15. I saw Bill Clinton speak in the center of Ljubljana to a massive crowd in the pouring rain on a June day in 1999, and later wrote about it for publication. A photo I took from the press bleachers shows a sea of umbrellas in Kongresni trg.

16. I have visited 20 countries in the world aside from the two I’ve lived in. I’d like to visit many more before I die.

17. On my short list of places I’d like to visit that I haven’t previously: Russia, Bali, Bulgaria, Thailand, Turkey, Israel, Serbia, Iceland.
18. One of the most daring (or craziest) things I’ve ever done was spend two weeks as the second-oldest camper participant in Outward Bound Romania in the summer of 1998. I think the main reason I stuck it out was that I didn’t want to be talked about as “the American who quit.” (You can read an extended diary of my experiences here.)
19. Most people think I’m younger than I actually am. Including me.

20. I’m probably the only person who has interviewed both Richard Hell and Joel Osteen. (Not at the same time, alas.)
21. I saw Bambi for the first time at the age of 31. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone younger than that see that sick movie.
22. In person I may seem quite introverted, although not nearly as much as I used to. I am more comfortable as an observer than as a participant, in the way of writers.

23. I interviewed Joan Jett at a club in New Hampshire in 1984. It wasn’t one of my better interviews.

24. I participated in plays and musicals in high school and can still sing much of the score from “Guys and Dolls.”

25. While in high school, I amused myself by writing parodies of the plays I was acting in and showing them to my fellow performers for their amusement.

26. One of these fellow performers suggested I abandon plans to become an actor and focus on writing instead. This was good advice.

27. I like all different sorts of music, but always seem to come back to new wave, punk and garage rock (both original and neo).

28. Since marrying, my wife’s tastes for cabaret, classical music and opera have rubbed off on me. To a certain extent.

29. My wife never ceases to amaze me.

30. I am the proud father of two nearly four-year-old fraternal twin boys who couldn’t be more different, yet delight me in equal measure. Yes, it’s worth it.

31. My favorite quote is from Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, yeah, whatever, blah blah blah it’s 2009

Today I received another in a frequent series of amusing e-mails from my brother-in-law Jeff in the Twin Cities, who is at least as much an omnivorous observer of pop culture and the absurdity of the passing scene as I am. This time, Jeff alerted me to this story in the Huffington Post about the inevitably fast-approaching apocalypse of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2009,” featuring this teaser:

ABC-TV’s 3½-hour live extravaganza will include performances by Natasha Bedingfield, Fall Out Boy, Jesse McCartney, Ne-Yo, Pussycat Dolls, Solange and Robin Thicke. Fergie hosts the Hollywood segments.
To this, Jeff (who is eight years younger than me, by the way) appended simply, “WHO?”

I suppose [I replied] you can consider yourself officially out of the Desired Demographic when you don’t recognize a single one of the “names” on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. (In truth, the names Natasha Bedingfield, Jesse McCartney, Pussycat Dolls and Fergie ring vague bells, although I couldn’t name one of their songs or tell you what they sounded like if my life depended on it).

In any event, I was amused by the quote from Dick Clark (who is now four years older than my parents’ favorite Guy Lombardo was at his death, and is, as the headline put it, is “still ‘rockin’” (definitely in quotes) despite walker, wheelchair”) about the musical entertainment he prefers to take in in his off-hours:

“My wife and I may join friends for dinner at a restaurant, attend a movie or just grab a bite to eat by ourselves away from home,” Clark wrote. “Occasionally, we’ll attend a music concert. Recently we’ve seen Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Frankie Valli and Cher.”

Now that’s cutting edge for you (I also appreciated Clark’s qualifying word “music” before “concert,” to distinguish it from, say, a trigonometry concert). As for me, I’m old enough to have seen Guy Lombardo in person, though not on New Year’s Eve — it was one summer in the mid-70s at the Jones Beach Marine Theater on Long Island, at which he would arrive in his boat, and post-show, lead his orchestra in a few dance favorites for his myriad of fans in an adjoining tent. I’ve long forgotten even the name of the show we saw, but Guy on the bandstand lives on in my memory.

It may have been at this concert, or a similar one, that I picked out a middle-aged man strolling back to his car and asked him for his autograph. He protested that he was not with the show (as I well knew), but finally relented and signed my program. Walking away, I heard the guy’s wife exclaiming to him, “You’re crazy!” Wish I still had the program signed by the distinguished Mr. Cohen, but time’s a bitch.

Back in real time, almost four-year-old Luka, on my lap, is ready to play the “movers game” and also informs me that “I’m ready for my hula dance” and “I’ll fix your head.” (And not a moment too soon.)

Happy New Year, and see you around the aether in ‘09.

Thought that suddenly came to me last evening

Memories are stories that we tell ourselves in our dreams.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Let me tell you about my town, Part II

My latest impressions of Austin have just been published in the December issue of Executive Travel magazine, a monthly geared towards frequent business travelers. The magazine is a class act and I’m very happy with the way it came out. (This is about as good as my travel writing gets, folks. Of course, it helps immensely to be writing about a subject you know not just rather well, but intimately.)

The article includes brief sidebars on Austin’s airport and recommendations on what to see, do and buy, not to mention hotels and restaurants.

You’re welcome!

Eleven reasons why Barack Obama is Jewish*

Nobody anymore (with the exception of some people over in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Fox News building) really believes that our next president is a secret Muslim. But let’s look at the reasons why our Barack is actually Jewish at heart, or, at the least, a sympathizer with the tribe:

1. He was mainly raised in a high-rise apartment by alte kackers who called him “Barry.”

2. His zayde was a furniture salesman and his bubbe worked in a bank. Sound familiar?

3. The name of the chief architect of his presidential campaign? David Axelrod. A card-carrying Yid born on the Lower East Side.

4. His incoming Chief of Staff? Rahm Emanuel, a Hebrew-speaking son of an Israeli fighter with the Irgun. ‘Nuff said.

5. He won Florida handily even without the help of that schmuck Lieberman. Boca Raton and Boynton Beach came through in the end.

6. Barack, Baruch…what’s the difference?

7. He wrote a book about his family.

8. His wife has a cousin who’s a rabbi in Chicago.

9. His family home in Chicago is across the street from a synagogue.

10. He went to Jerusalem, prayed at the Western Wall and left a message there (which was promptly retrieved and placed on the Internet, oy, such a shondeh)

11. How else to explain this T-shirt and this one.

[Note: Unlike most of this kind of stuff that circulates on the Internet, I composed most of this email myself...it's probably 70 percent original, so sue me]

*For the terminally serious, anti-semites, racists and assorted Nader and Ron Paul supporters reading this: This post is an attempt at humor. I like Barack Obama, voted for him with enthusiasm, and don’t really believe he’s Jewish. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (either being Jewish or not being Jewish). OK?

Let me tell you about my town…

Although when I started this blog I intended it as a personal outlet with which to sound off about anything and everything, rather than as an adjunct to a resume or one of those websites that shouts, “Here I am, look how great I be,” I don’t see anything wrong with occasionally trumpeting things I’ve done that I’m proud of — it is, after all, my website and if I don’t talk about this kind of stuff, who will?

This past year I’ve been lucky enough to have been keeping quite busy as a freelancer specializing in travel and business-oriented writing; I even restarted a long-dormant sideline (which used to be a main gig back in the day, in another life) of writing about music and musicians, this time for Austin’s daily newspaper, which I’m very happy about — it gives me an excuse to chat with and ask nosy questions of people like Nick Lowe and Amy Rigby, not to mention attending the occasional free concert in the middle of the week (I wouldn’t want to be out nightclubbing every night, even if I could stand to do that anymore, but once in a while is fine, it keeps the juices flowing, especially while feverishly scribbling in the dark as I listen to the goings-on on stage). I’ve also done quite a bit of writing about my adopted city of Austin for a variety of magazines, from Voyageur (the house organ of Carlson Hotels Worldwide) to Ty Pennington At Home.

In any event, back in April of 2007 I was approached by an editor at Fodor’s Travel asking if I’d like to update and expand listings for their Austin website — which I did, using the old, dated text as a framework, deleting closed restaurants (there were several), making notes of which hotels had changed ownership (quite a few), editing at will and adding reams of new copy.

That fall, I was tapped to write the Austin chapter of a forthcoming actual print guidebook; Fodor’s had published a guide to Texas over a decade ago, but it had been so long that this new project was treated as a first edition, which, essentially, it is. The book was published in July, and you can buy it here. A smaller guide to San Antonio, Austin, & the Hill Country, with expanded listings for those areas, came out in August.

Full disclosure: I only wrote what I estimate to be 85 percent of the Austin chapter (another writer handled most of the nightlife/entertainment section, because it was such a huge job and deadlines were short), but, yeah, I’m the guy you can blame if the chapter steers you wrong. It was a lot of work that felt at times like a final exam in being a Real Travel Writer, as I zipped around from one hotel to another like a lunatic (no, I didn’t stay in every one of these hotels overnight, but I did check out the rooms and public spaces thoroughly, from historic landmarks to highway off-ramp crash pads), dashed from one Austin Attraction to the next, gave some ink to a host of new shopping opportunities, laid down the Basics of Getting There and Getting Around (uh, no, you don’t need a car downtown), and familiarized myself with good and bad, cheap and luxe restaurants alike (and no, in case you’re wondering, I did not end up eating dozens of meals on the cuff). I took great delight in deleting two restaurants from the listings that in my opinion, had become faded tourist traps (I’m not saying which ones; if you know Austin well, you might deduce them from their absence), and a hotel or two with exceptionally rude front-desk staff.

I tried as hard as I could to be as current with the listings as possible, but of course, right after the deadline things happened like long-time restaurants closing and the city’s arena football and hockey teams (both minor-league affairs) folding. Chefs leave, shops close; what can you do. Call ahead. Check the web site.

In any case, I can now say that I’ve probably seen the interiors of more hotels in Austin than almost anyone except serial masochists and temporary maids.  During the course of my research, by the way, I determined that nearly all of these hotels either: a) have recently completed a major renovation, b) are in the middle of major renovations, or c) are planning major renovations next year.

Or at the least, they’re getting new carpeting and some chairs for the lobby. Oh, and Sleep Number beds are big. And if the place doesn’t have in-room flat-screen TVs yet? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Looking for a place to stay? Get in touch.