I've been a very delinquent blogger these last two weeks, what with houseguests and my biannual visit to Bascom Palmer yesterday (out by sunrise and back home with enlarged pupils that made reading impossible so I watched baseball). And next week I'm flying to Pennsylvania to visit my mother.
But if not here, I can be found in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, which came out last week. The story, "My Days with the Anti-Mafia" from the winter issue of The Missouri Review, paints a portrait of Palermo and the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo. It is always nice being in the anthology, but especially so when it's a story that I did on my own because none of the editors I queried showed any interest.
The first I spent in Winter Park, driving past live oaks dripping Spanish moss, admiring the collection of Tiffany glass in the Morse Museum, strolling Park Avenue and passing the occasional lawyer (or banker) in coat and tie. The only disappointment was that the bookstore I remembered from my last visit - about ten years years ago - was gone. Bookstores not only sold books, they provided a refuge, a place where someone looking to kill time could happily lose himself in the pages of a poetry or essay collection. In the evening I returned with Hania (who had spent the day in training) and we had a delicious small plate dinner at Prato - polenta, roasted eggplant soup, gluten-free pasta - as light from the setting sun filtered through the trees of the park and gave the restaurant an evanescent glow. By the time darkness fell we were sitting with the Italian party at the neighboring table, chatting happily as Amtrak's Silver Meteor pulled into the station across the park.
Yesterday morning I headed into downtown and visited the library, which had some lovely black-and-white photographs of the pre-Disney city. In the used bookstore on the third floor I bought Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and a Rosa Passos CD. I drove - to the sounds of "Chega de Saudade" - to Colonial Drive, where I wandered in and out of pungent Vietnamese grocery stores. Then I made my way to Thornton Park and found all the restaurants I remembered plus a few new ones, but the bookstore had been replaced by a kind of arts cafe. Thank God I had a book.
The main difference between watching the U.S. Open on TV and watching it live is the addition, in the former case, of commentators. Last year, when I was covering the event, I'd see their backs as they sat silently in their studio that resembled a treehouse while I hurried between courts and press room (which they never entered). To my experience of the event they were completely peripheral, a brightly-lit collection of well-dressed bobbleheads, always seen from behind.
Now I'm a TV viewer again, and the U.S. Open comes filtered through garrulous people in makeup. They talk and talk and rarely say anything of note, especially when sitting around a desk (as opposed to covering a match, when, especially if John McEnroe is announcing, and particularly if it's a lopsided match, you sometimes get an offbeat remark). But I heard more memorable quips in one typical morning in the press room than I've heard in the first three days of this year's tournament.
And, because a camera hates nuance, the commentators overstate almost everything. Yesterday they treated the announced retirement of Andy Roddick as if it were the abdication of a king. His occasionally boorish behavior on the court - and also in press conferences (which commentators rarely attend) - was explained as simply, and commendably, Andy's way of being honest.
The bland and reverential treatment of players is explained by the fact that most of the commentators were players themselves, are or have been coaches of players, and are currently friends with players. (Mary Joe Fernandez was seen at one tournament sitting in Roger Federer's box - the box of the man it is her job to cover.) Writers - those perennially nonaligned, nondescript types tapping on laptops in the windowless press room - are the ones to follow if you want frank and lively coverage of the game.
For its 25th anniversary issue, Conde Nast Traveler has replaced the usual model on its cover with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Inside, the editor writes of the magazine's commitment, throughout its quarter century of existence, to "truth in travel," noting correctly that before 1987 the free trip was an accepted part of the world of travel writing.
Contributors remember meaningful trips; Pico Iyer describes a Christmas in Ethiopia, and concludes that "travel is ultimately about going to a place from which you'll never entirely come back." Twelve people are presented as visionary global citizens. There is a long article about a bird watching trip by Jonathan Franzen.
It is a beautiful example of what a travel magazine can be - topical, thoughtful, engaged, literary - until you get to the back, page 222, and read the "Places & Prices" box for the article on Myanmar. For lodging in Rangoon, three hotels are recommended, none of them under $300 a night. This in the capital of one of the poorest countries in the world. I wish the magazine had the same dedication to reality that it has to truth.
Thirty years ago today (the Feast of the Assumption) I wandered about the monastery of Jasna Gora in Czestochowa. The day before I had arrived in the city with thousands of other pilgrims from all over Poland. The majority of us had walked from Warsaw, covering 150 miles over nine days, and we had been greeted on arrival like a liberating army. Poland was under martial law in 1982, and the annual religious rite took on a strong political significance.
High atop the fortress walls I came upon a young man who told me that things would have to change now; the government could not last when almost the entire population was against it. I thought he was being overly optimistic; the government had already survived nearly 40 years of unpopular rule, who was to say it couldn't double that?
But the young man was right. By 1990 the government was gone.
One of the lines carpeting the stage for the closing ceremonies last night, and requiring a degree in English literature to decipher, was Samuel Johnson’s, “When a man tires of London he tires of life.”
I grew a little weary watching, though, and wondered why John Lennon’s Imagine (“Imagine there’s no countries…”) was sung at the end of an Olympics where virtually all of the winners, in a now almost obligatory act, draped themselves in their national flags. Much more appropriate would have been Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, dedicated to all the athletes who failed to win a medal.
Though the long ceremony allowed me to reflect on some of the fortnight’s highlights. I thought of Ashton Eaton (did you just say “Who?”) and of how the decathlon is the Olympic equivalent of travel writing in that you have to excel at a number of disciplines. And of how decathletes get overshadowed, just like travel writers, by the flashy specialists. (The last page of the Miami Herald's sports section today features pictures of nine American gold medalists, including a tennis player and two beach volleyball players, but not the world’s greatest athlete.)
One of my lasting memories of the games will be seeing Matt Lauer sitting with his colleagues atop a sightseeing bus and looking abashed, as if he were Wilfred Thesiger joining a tour group.
And I was disappointed that Jim Cantore, visiting London’s oldest pub, gave us the name of the barmaid who poured him a beer (Hanna), but never told us where she was from. I have a good idea – having met my own Hanna across the bar of a London pub – and suspect that a Polish immigrant didn’t fit NBC’s idea of merry old England. But aren’t the Olympics about international understanding? Imagine there’s no editors.