I’m behind in my reading, which means I only recently read Yascha Mounk’s brilliant piece in the Easter issue of The Spectator: “Why the British think differently from Americans.” He notes that opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post are logical and unsurprising. “In American journalism, to be right – or, at any rate, to argue for the position that the right people consider to be reasonable at the time – is much more important than to be brilliant or entertaining.” Further on he states: “For American journalists, the cardinal sin is to be wrong. For British journalists, the cardinal sin is to be boring.”
I agree with him wholeheartedly (though I wonder how strongly writing in a litigious society contributes to an obsession with accuracy - and a tendency toward blandness). The two weeklies I read are The Spectator and The New Yorker, and I get more pleasure out of the former than I do out of the latter, which is earnest and informative but not especially enjoyable, even, lately, many of its cartoons. The one exception is Anthony Lane, but Lane is a Brit and, notably, was recently relieved of his movie reviewing chores.
I'm off to the nation's capital for a few days. Will be back here next week.
Last night we finished watching Midsummer Night, a charming, five-episode Norwegian series, and, because it came up, and because I knew it had been popular, we started watching Killing Eve. We gave it about 35 minutes, then turned it off. I have no patience for shows during which I envision a writers’ room full of hip young people – apparently many of them, these days, Ivy League grads – with no experience in the world they’re depicting. Their goal, it seems, is to churn out dialogue that is sharp and clever irrespective of whether it has any relation to reality. This is the problem I had with Succession; the writing was too good to be true. In The Sopranos, and the French series The Bureau, the writing was brilliant, but it also had the ring of verisimilitude.
This weekend Andy Golebiowski interviewed me about my new memoir on his delightful Polish American Radio Program. You can listen to the entire show, and hear some good music, or you can go to minute 42 and just listen to us: https://soundcloud.com/webrradio/sets/the-polish-american-program
At lunch the other day I asked my friend Dave, who is knowledgeable about the game of basketball, what he thought of Caitlin Clark. He had his criticisms: she doesn’t like to shoot once she gets inside the 3-point line, and she doesn’t play defense. But he was impressed by her passing, and the way she filled arenas that had previously been practically empty. Jordan, he said, couldn’t even take credit for that, as people watched the NBA before his arrival on the scene.
And Dave had asked himself if anyone else in sport had ever done that, and he thought of one person: Mia Hamm. And she did it in a sport that was so unpopular in America that no one paid much attention when it was played by men.
Now, I didn’t hear or read all the commentary about the phenomenon of Clark, yet what I did hear and read didn’t include any mention of Hamm. The human tendency is to believe that one’s age is exceptional – it’s why athletes are continually given the label GOAT – and the conviction is infinitely aided by an ignorance of history. Today, when we are bombarded with so much news and information, it’s easier than ever to lose sight of the past, and think that our times are unprecedented. When in fact they’re simply self-absorbed.
Perfect Days has less dialogue than any film I've seen in decades and it has stayed with me longer than most of them. It's about a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and lives a very contented life. And it's made me appreciate life’s everyday beauty - while inspiring me to clean my bathroom. The other day, seeing the cleaning woman in our corridor, I found my reflexive pity tempered, slightly, but the thought, the hope, that she may take pleasure in her work.
We had a small but very attentive group at PRIME Expo on Saturday. People nodded in recognition and laughed at my jokes. During the Q&A, a man stood up and, leaning on his walker, said that he had worked with the U.S. Embassy in Poland in the mid-70s. Then he told a story about one of his colleagues, on his morning jog through Krakow, stumbling across a man kneeling at a shrine. He apologized profusely, and the man not only brushed off the collision but asked him to stay and chat. In introduction, the American said that he worked at the American consulate. The Pole said that he worked at the cathedral. He didn’t mention that he was the archbishop, Karol Wojtyła – the man who in a few years would become pope.