Category: media
The Australian travel magazine get lost arrived in the mail yesterday with my article on travel in 70s, those halcyon, pre-Internet days when total separation made total immersion a whole lot easier.
Immediately preceding my piece is one you would never find in an American travel magazine, as it lists the 10 countries with the most beautiful people. The authors write about the men as well as the women, shielding themselves from charges of sexism. Still, judging nations on their citizens' attractiveness is not something an American publication would dare to do.
Lebanon was #10, giving credence to stories my old newspaper's foreign correspondent used to tell me. Japan was #9, an uninspired choice (I would have chosen Korea). They were followed by Ethiopia, Italy, Israel and Colombia (Secret Service men are no dummies). Denmark was #4, which perhaps explains, better than a culture of low expectations, why the Danes are also said to be among the world's happiest people. Argentina was #3, Ukraine #2 (though almost any Slavic country could have taken its place) and Brazil was #1, giving South America three of the top 10 countries for male and female pulchritude. Regarding the latter, I found one glaring omission: India.
Our neighbors went away for the weekend and asked us to collect their newspaper. (They had recently found a great deal on Groupon for the Sun-Sentinel.)
Yesterday the paper was unusually big and, picking it up, I saw that the bag contained three small boxes of cereal, one of which was Reese's Puffs.
If you subscribe to the Sun-Sentinel you no longer get a full-time classical music critic, or pop music critic, or film critic, or theater critic, or book critic, nor do you get a Home & Garden editor, a Food editor or a Travel editor. But you do get a sugary cereal. Instead of increasing literacy, my old newspaper is contributing to obesity.
Yesterday I drove down to Miami to tape an interview with Joseph Cooper at WLRN. (It will air on March 27th). The subject was my essay in the current issue of The Missouri Review about Palermo and the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo.
I am indebted to literary quarterlies for their interest. My first travel story, about the Tatra Mountains, appeared in The North American Review in 1981. Later that decade I published essays - on Warsaw and Madrid - in The American Scholar. These magazines provided - and continue to provide - a home for travel writing that travel magazines won't publish. There is much to be said for publications that aren't dependent on advertising.
The only problem is that fewer people read quarterlies than read glossy magazines, and so travel writing gets a frivolous, boosterish reputation. Not long ago I read excerpts from my Missouri Review essay at a writers' conference. The man who introduced me mentioned my books and then, instead of citing awards and praise (as he had with the poet and the novelist who had preceded me), he said: "The thing about Tom is, he's a great person to talk to about travel. He gets so enthusiastic about places." It was with immense pleasure that I got up and read about the worst slum in Palermo.
In a way it's a good thing that the HBO series "Bored to Death" was cancelled, because it may show people in the business the harm that is done by going for the sensational.
The first season was a delight, a show about a struggling writer (who wore plaid sportcoats and narrow striped ties). You can't make a realistic show about a writer - way too much down time - so Jonathan doubled as a detective, following, in one episode, an Indian man who had lost his job and was too ashamed to tell his wife, who in turn thought he was having an affair. But the detective work was almost a sidebar to the real story of Jonathan's relationships, particularly with his cartoonist friend and a father-figure editor modeled on George Plimpton.
There was a show in which Jonathan taught a creative writing class (sparsely attended by characters who were only slight exaggerations) and one in which his editor got laid off after his magazine was purchased by an out-of-town consortium. (Here the show demonstrated more fidelity to the real world than Plimpton's life had ever done.)
But in the last season, the human interactions and social commentaries were pretty much lost in a blaze of shoot-outs and chases. There were still some wonderful moments - the cartoonist with his sperm-child joining a group of breast-feeding mothers in the park - but the show that had been fun and occasionally touching became silly and implausible. The writers should have taken a cue from Downton Abby: Action isn't always where the action is.
Egypt was in the news a lot this year. We watched the demonstrations and hoped that democracy might be the result. Much was made of the fact that the demonstrators used social media - just like we do. Peacefully electing their own leaders and instituting the rule of law seemed to be the logical next steps.
I visited Cairo once, in the early 90s, and a lasting memory is of the traffic. Not just the amount of it, but the sound. Every driver was enamored of his horn; every street was a cacophony of beeps. They were so persistent that they seemed to have transcended their original purpose and become something else: a desperate cry for recognition. In a city teeming with people, each beep seemed to say: "Look, it's me! I'm here! I'm alive!"
Just the way our tweets do today. Rather than Egyptians becoming like us, we have become like Egyptians.
Since Tina Brown took over Newsweek, the magazine has acquired a definite British flavor. This is not really a complaint, especially since, never having subscribed to the magazine, I am now for some reason finding it in my mailbox every week.
The issue that arrived yesterday features, on the cover, Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Inside you will find Amanda Foreman on Lady Thatcher, Simon Schama on Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson on Newt Gingrich (a Yank!), and Martin Amis on the entire field of Republican presidential hopefuls (more Yanks). Ben Kingsley writes on the last page about his "favorite mistake," which he made while a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Elsewhere, Americans Anthony Weiner, Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen are all called "Twits" (in "2011's Epic Wins & Fails"). And Patrick Leigh Fermor is included as one of the "Visionaries Who Changed Our World."
I was thrilled to see my favorite travel writer remembered in an end-of-the-year roundup. And I am quite sure that the man who devoted nearly half his life to capturing, in breathtakingly baroque and recherche sentences, a walk he took in the 1930s would be as amused as I was to find himself described as a visionary.