In 2002 and 2003, he travelled to Iraq (once before the American-led invasion and once afterward), in order to observe life there — and, on the second visit, to write about it for the Chronicle.
"Even gringos!" Mr. Penn's visit to write about Mr. Chávez follows others by Hollywood luminaries like Danny Glover, public intellectuals like Tariq Ali and film directors like Argentina's Fernando Solanas, all of whom have recently traveled to this country to take in the transformation of Venezuelan society that Mr. Chávez calls a "Bolivarian revolution".
But the film begins elsewhere, in a much older part of the country, Louisbourg, an early 18th-century French settlement in Nova Scotia, now largely a colourful holiday resort, which Margot is visiting to write material for a travel brochure.
Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit.
Last week I planned to visit Staples Center to write about what could have been a very nice moment for Los Angeles' women's professional basketball team.
Thompson visited three years later, to write an essay about his visit, What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?, exploring "just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America's most famous writer".
In 2008, I visited Alaska to write about Stevens for this magazine.
ON THURSDAY afternoon I joined a group of foreign journalists who are visiting Brazil to write about the elections.
He made a successful debut in 1789 in London, where he established a music shop and gave many concerts, prompting the visiting Joseph Haydn to write about him in glowing terms.
In 2014, Burkhard Bilger visited Oklahoma to write about youth-rodeo competitions, the boys (it's almost always boys) who compete in them, and the parents who cheer them on.
As described in my last couple of columns, I had visited Cambodia to write about one of the great scourges of the third world, human trafficking, which ensnares some 700,000 people worldwide per year.
