Last week, as part of my hurricane preparations, I went to Bob’s News and bought a copy of The Spectator. In addition to comfort food, I need comfort prose. Opening the magazine I was immediately rewarded by the Competition on page 50 (I always read the Speccie back-to-front), which had invited readers to imagine the Hokey Pokey (in England, the Hokey-Cokey) as written by a famous poet. Alanna Blake rewrote the lyrics in the style of Kipling’s If. A reader who didn’t win got a mention in the introduction for the title of his effort, Walt Whitman’s “Song of My Self-Humiliation.”
Last night I watched the Israeli drama “Our Boys” on HBO, followed by a documentary on PBS about holidaymakers in Sicily – two rare glimpses, on American TV, of life outside the United States.
Not having access to CBS is like not being able to buy Cheerios. Both have been in my life for as long I remember, and the television station, unlike the cereal, was for a long time one of only three options. How many years have I spent watching its programs? Not the ones the Herald listed in its July 20 article – NCIS, Big Brother, Elementary, Love Island – but 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and, yes, football. The blackout seems antithetical to America – land of plenty, and free choice – yet it’s caused by the most American of things: a dispute over money.
The cluster of letters about Madonna in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine ended with this line, written by a man in Forest Hills, NY: “There’s only one Madonna, and she’s it.”
Apparently he’s never been to a church, or art museum, in Italy.
I came late to Instagram but now it’s the site on which I am the most active. I am forever looking for interesting photos to take, which has made me more attuned to the world around me – rather the opposite of the effect social media is accused of having on us.
Terry Gross on the radio: “You write about Pompeo in a recent edition of The New Yorker…”
Me in the kitchen: “ISSUE!!!”
Terry Gross on the radio: “… and in a previous issue…”