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
People occasionally say that life has become so absurd it’s immune to parody, and it’s usually in reaction to the antics of a celebrity or a politician or the recent, hideous combination of the two – not the contents of the esteemed New York Times. But the Book Review – which every week interviews an author about his or her reading habits – featured this past Sunday Deion Sanders (co-author of a new inspirational book) who said the best book he ever received as a gift was The Little Engine That Could. Asked what three writers, living or dead, he would invite to a literary dinner party, he named as the third his co-author.
I love finding shows to stream that nobody talks about, and the latest is Julie Delpy’s On the Verge. It is a smart, funny look at the lives of four women in their 40s. The fact that one of them – Delpy – is French, adds an interesting perspective.
On the last episode I watched, she is attending her son’s soccer practice and the ball keeps rolling over by her chair. She kicks it back, telling the kids to move farther away. Shortly after, the ball comes flying over and hits her in the face. She gets up and lashes the kids with insults. One of her friends, trying to calm her down, says: “You can’t talk like that to children here.”
Watching that scene it hit me: The show is like a realistic Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's puzzling that Netflix cancelled it after one season.
Yesterday evening, turning from All Creatures Great and Small to Curb Your Enthusiasm, I wondered if there were two more dissimilar shows on television.