I’ve jumped a lot of waves in my windsurfing days, but I’ve never gotten air like this. A kitesurfer jumps a pier.

Fascinating interview conducted recently at UC Santa Barbara. Among the many highlights is Herzog’s response to an audience question about personal happiness (1:56:33). American culture has always held up happiness as among the greatest goals in life, but like Herzog, I think I’m more interested in a life that feels meaningful.

One of the pleasures of living in San Diego is being a short drive from the Mexican border, and while I found myself visiting Tijuana less frequently as the drug war escalated in recent years, I never gave it up entirely. In fact, I crossed over not too long ago to have lunch at Carnitas Uruapan, my favorite carnitas and mariachi restaurant. It was a good lunch, as always. I snapped this photo of mariachis that day.

I’m delighted that the story I wrote about that lunch, “Tijuana Terroir,” is featured in the new Lonely Planet collection, A Moveable Feast: Life Changing Food Adventures Around the World. I didn’t visit Carnitas Uruapan because the carnitas are any better than those I could find in San Diego, I realized in writing the piece, but because there’s something about eating food and listening to music in the country that inspired them that you just can’t replicate elsewhere.

Edited by Don George, the book features stories from Anthony Bourdain, Simon Winchester, Rolf Potts, Elizabeth Eaves, Doug Mack and others. At Book Passage in Corte Madera Nov. 14, I’ll be joining friends and writers Don George, Larry Habegger and Amanda Jones to celebrate the book’s launch and read. Details here.

Terry Gross asked the host of The Daily Show about a typical day at the office. I loved his take on the importance of structure in allowing for creativity:

To be able to weed through all this material and synthesize it and try to come up with things to do, we have a very kind of strict day that we have to adhere to, and by doing that, that allows us to process everything and gives us the freedom to improvise. I’m a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think, you don’t know what to do with yourself. But when you have a structure, you can improvise often and feel confident enough to come back to that.

I was on a flight home from Germany last week after speaking at the Society of American Travel Writers’ conference when the pilot made an announcement: We would be reversing course and flying more than an hour back to Iceland to drop off a sick passenger. The elderly man stood on his own before being led off the plane, which I took to be a good sign. In any case, it made for an unusual sight on the flight-tracking graphic on the seat back in front of me.

Nice to see four World Hum stories included as notable selections in the new Best American Travel Writing anthology, just published. This year’s book was guest edited by Bill Buford, founder of Granta and author of the excellent memoir, “Heat.” The World Hum pieces honored in the book are: On the Perils of Travel Writing, by David Farley (a story whose origin dates back to a conversation I had with Farley in a New York City bar in 2008); Where no Travel Writer has Gone Before, by Rolf Potts; and Cycling India’s Wildest Highway and Face-off on the Congo, both by Jeffrey Tayler.

Great video about the making of Neil Young’s new album. Producer Daniel Lanois notes that it was recorded over four full moons because, “Neil has noticed that he’s written his best songs during that potent time.” He also talks about his use of “dub sonics” to arrive at a rich sound. As he has said elsewhere, “I extract from the track—I’ll take an available ingredient, extract it, process it, do what I want with it, and then stick it back into the song surgically.” Lanois says that Young “very kindly encouraged me to supply him with sonics that were descriptive to the landscapes that he was building with his lyrics.”

The great novelist Don DeLillo, in a new interview by PEN:

The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

Is the internet killing our brains and driving us to distraction? Or does it promote creativity and innovation? The trailer for the forthcoming book, Where Good Ideas Come From, addresses these and other questions. (Via Kottke)