Writing about writing.

CNN must have just hired a Literature PhD candidate to bolster their travel coverage. Earlier this week, they featured articles on traveling to Robert E. Howard’s Cross Plains, TX and Ernest Hemingway’s Ketchum, ID.

Today, CNN’s fellow travelers turn their attention to Walt Whitman’s Camden, NY. “A tour offered this summer called ‘Walt Whitman & His Invincible City’ celebrates the man who wrote Leaves of Grass and the famous ode to Abraham Lincoln, O Captain! My Captain,” the article states.

While I’m glad to see this book-related coverage, I prefer my literary travels to have a bit more of an edge to them. While the Whitman tours are led by University of Pennsylvania grad students, I’d like to see a prostitute-guided tour of William Vollman’s Tenderloin district in San Francisco. How about a tour of Irvine Welsh’s shooting galleries in Edinburgh? Or, the skeleton-strewn wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s desert?