None of the obituaries I’ve read for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at the age of 101, mentioned George Whitman. The two men were friends in Paris in the post-war years, and Whitman opened Le Mistral (the name later changed to Shakespeare & Company) in 1951, two years before Ferlinghetti opened City Lights in San Francisco. For the next half century and longer – Whitman died in 2011 – the two men were the most famous booksellers in the English-speaking world: one at the edge of North America, the other in the center (at least according to the French) of Europe. People visited their shops not just for books but for glimpses of their owners, which were easy to come by in Whitman’s case, as he often manned the cash register. (He also gave young travelers shelter.) From their distant, cluttered sanctums they nurtured writers, championed literature, and inspired a new generation of booksellers who have seen that days spent surrounded by books, and people who love them, can be conducive to a long life.
In his latest novel, Inside Story, Martin Amis ranges far and wide, with riffs on everything from cancer to writing. He also attacks our current age of anti-elitism, which he calls “a kind of Counter-Englightenment.” He writes: “Are these anti-elitists, I wonder, feeling anti-elitist, feeling anti-expertise, when they go to the doctor? Or when they board a plane?”
Paul Kildea, in his review of Jan Swafford’s Mozart: The Reign of Love, writes: “One critical development of the Enlightenment was that art escaped from religion and into the larger world.”
Yesterday afternoon, looking for things to put on Giftster, I read the "Books of the Year" feature in a month-old issue of The Spectator and came across Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee. I promptly added it to my list, even though I had never heard of the author.
In the evening I picked up Martin Amis's Inside Story and on page 69 read: "Twelve months earlier, along with four other British writers (Martina Warner, Hermione Lee, Melvyn Bragg, and Julian Barnes) I was a guest of the Friends of Israel Educational Trust."
We were in St. Petersburg over the weekend, visiting friends. (Which explains the two days of silence.) In one home I watched our friends’ sons – 11 and 13 – play video games on a large-screen TV. And I wondered: How can anyone these days expect boys to read books?
Here is a link to one of those events, my conversation with author Eric Weiner about his new book The Socrates Express.
https://booksandbooks.com/virtual-event/a-virtual-evening-with-eric-weiner-and-thomas-swick/