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I'm reading a biography of Jerzy Kosinski at the moment: he was a Holocaust survivor who wrote The Painted Bird, a best-selling autobiographical novel about his horrifying experiences as a child in occupied Poland. According to Kosinski he spent years wandering around on his own, abused by almost everyone he came into contact with. The only problem is that, according to his biographer, James Park Sloan, none of the sodomy and beatings he described in the book ever happened; rather, his resourceful father successfully concealed his family in a village of Catholic Poles, and afterwards, took a position of power in the new communist regime. Kosinski, meanwhile, received an excellent education, emigrated to the U.S. where he married a rich widow, became famous, appeared in a film with Warren Beatty, and was then exposed as a fraud in an article in the Village Voice. He wrote one more book, and killed himself. Shades of the fate of James Frey, whose readers acted like so many shocked virgins when they learned he had invented a lot of his bestselling memoir. (Though, happily, Mr. Frey is still alive and with us.) ...

Yesterday I mentioned that I was at a wedding in Michigan recently. While I was there, I met a lot of new people and found myself telling many of the old stories again. That can get tiring, even when I'm talking to interesting characters. That's why, as a foreigner, I am always looking for something current to link me to a new place. You can coast on stories about where you've come from for only so long. You need some common, shared experience with the locals. In Russia I found that the cockroach was the main way in.

Let me explain: in Scotland it is too cold for cockroaches to thrive, so it was quite a shock when I came home to my grubby flat in Moscow and found the things crawling all over my bread and sugar. Then I located a nest of them behind the fridge. Going into my workplace the next day I discovered that this worked a lot better as an ice-breaker than my naïve efforts to open up a conversation on all the literature I had been diligently reading. Most Russians don't want ...

Last week I was in Dearborn, Michigan to attend the wedding of one of my best friends. I was glad to be present, but still, I was a bit disappointed that the ceremony was not being held in nearby Detroit, where I hear there's a lot of industrial decline and some really scary neighborhoods. But it was just a flying visit and there was no time to hit the town: I was reduced instead to gazing wistfully from my hotel window at the soot-black smokestacks in the distance, as if they were the towers of some remote city on the hill. As for the hotel, it was a Hyatt Regency. That was rather swanky for my tastes: there was a $5 penalty for cracking open the bottle of water in the room. I was only there for the wedding — usually I stay in the cheapest places I can find. I can't see the point of spending money on a room I am only going to sleep in. If I'm not going to be conscious, then what's the point of having nice furnishings, etc? But there's more to it than that. The truth is: I love bad hotels.

At first

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Frank Zappa once said that the most common element on the planet is stupidity. I suspect it's boredom. I got bored today myself. Maybe you did too. If so, we're not alone: last year some guy at the Vatican published a paper on the 'Empire of Boredom,' suggesting that ennui could be the major existential problem facing Western Youth today.

This could be true, and yet it's not dealt with much in modern writing, which though frequently very boring, is not about boredom per se. Tales crammed full of drugs, sexual extremism, or literary drivel about middle-class familial dysfunction mask the essential ingredients of modern life: hours spent watching the manic blabber of TV, or consuming useless information on the Internet, or sitting in a cubicle, or shopping for food, or eating food.

I have a long and rich acquaintance with boredom. I grew up in a small and exceedingly crap town, with no cinema, no bookshop, no nothing. For young folk this could be harsh, leading to experiments with bags of glue and violence. When I was young weapons were not yet commonplace in Scotland so it was possible to fight for pleasure. ...

Hello. My name's Daniel Kalder. I am the author of Lost Cosmonaut, a blackly humorous 'anti-travel' book about my wanderings in four surreal (but real) wastelands. It also contains a manifesto for Anti-tourism, which you can read at my website www.danielkalder.com. Over the next five days I'll be contributing daily dispatches to Powell's about Russia, Scotland, Central Asia, and America, where I am currently residing after 10 years in Moscow. First, however, I want to discuss the joy of the wasteland, which is a major theme in everything I do. Today I'm going to talk about three formative wastelands I have encountered; those that opened up the possibilities of the white zones on the map to me. So, without further ado:

1) The Necropolis (Glasgow, Scotland)

I was born and grew up in Scotland during a period of sustained industrial decline. This has since turned into sustained population decline, as each passing year more people die than are born in my homeland. Immigration from Eastern Europe can massage the figures only so far: soon the Scots will be extinct, living on as a legend of a mountain people whose men wore skirts. ...