In his interview with Arianna Huffington on Friday, Bill Maher kept mentioning how rich she now is after the sale of her Huffington Post to AOL. Which made it all the more puzzling why the man who, according to his ads, "does ask" and "does tell," didn't pose the obvious question: So now are you going to start paying your bloggers?
Maher is one of those bloggers, one of the few who doesn't need the money. So the idea of payment for his contributions never entered his mind. (I can't believe he was just being polite to an invited guest.) It was a depressing indication of how far out of touch the wealthy - even those who pretend otherwise - are with the rest of us.
"Less bullets!" Hania exclaimed last night in a tone of disbelief. She was in the kitchen, listening to a discussion about gun control on NPR's "On Point." I was in the living room, and couldn't tell if it was the host or one of his distinguished guests who had made the mistake that had ruffled Polish ears.
"Fewer bullets," Hania corrected the speaker. "The last I heard the police could still count them."
Reading, she is also good at catching dangling modifiers. Though I'm afraid all this says less about her command of English than it does about Americans' lack of it.
For most people traveling to New York City over the holidays, the attractions are the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, the skaters, the Rockettes, the window decorations of department stores. For me the thrill is buying the Christmas issue of The Spectator.
I started reading The Spectator in 1980 in the British Institute in Warsaw, Poland. I subscribed for over a decade after my return to the States, until it got too expensive; then I'd sometimes buy copies at Bob's News. (From Aleje Jerozolimskie to Andrews Avenue.) But a few years ago Bob's stopped carrying it. I tried reading it online but it wasn't the same. (Also, as I tell people all the time, I spend most of my working day staring at this screen; when it's time to read I want to be elsewhere.)
In Manhattan I found the Speccie in the first chain bookstore I entered. It was like coming upon an old friend. As usual, I started on the last page - "Dear Mary: Your Problems Solved" - and saw with delight that the friend hadn't changed. "Q. As I get older I find myself more and more afflicted with dindinitis, which is probably best defined as a morbid dread of dinner parties."
A few pages in Toby Young was recalling family Christmas dinners with homeless people his father had rounded up, and Basil Ransome-Davies, I was happy to see, was still winning the competitions. (For the special Christmas issue, readers "were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas.")
Per usual, I scored miserably on the - admittedly Anglocentric - Christmas Quiz.
I skimmed quickly over the trite travel section (the best argument in print against taking freebies) and happily read Deborah Ross on The Way Back, the new Peter Weir film about "a journey of 12 months and 4,000 miles ... that will bring into sharp focus the domitability of your own crappy spirit, particularly if you always take the bus two stops up the hill, as I do."
Julian Barnes' Christmas Short Story "Carcassonne" was brilliant, and had nothing to do with Christmas, which was only half-true of the cartoons. One showed a new group, The three worldly-wise men, remarking in turn: "Not ANOTHER savior of mankind." "Seen it all before." "Always ends in schism and war."
Paul Johnson wrote of a party in 1843 at the home of Nina Macready - possibly "the best Christmas party ever" - at which Charles Dickens performed magic tricks.
My favorite piece came at the end (beginning for most readers) when Quentin Letts kindly offered overworked (and overly kindly) vicars a Christmas sermon that they could use on the seasonally faithful. One passage went: "So let me address your narrow self-interest: property values. ... House prices in a town with an attractive, functioning church are higher than those in areas without. Just think: if you apply yourselves to the life of this church ... you could be adding thousands of pounds to the value of your home. And you still think Christianity can't make you happy?"
Tonight Joel Osteen and his wife are appearing at the American Airlines Arena in Miami. I know this because the front page of Monday's Miami Herald ran a note about it, with the headline: A NIGHT OF HOPE WITH THE OSTEENS, which prompted me to write a letter to the editor:
"Newspaper readers know that when the book fair takes place there is no such thing as a boring book. And when Art Basel comes to town there is no such thing as a bad painting. And we accept this, with resignation, as the paper playing its part as civic booster.
"But that doesn’t explain the mini-headline in the Nov. 29 Herald: A NIGHT OF HOPE WITH THE OSTEENS. It sat above an item on the front page alerting readers to the fact that the religion-to-riches preacher Joel Osteen and his wife are bringing their “A Night of Hope” tour to Miami on Friday. When the title of a tour is so self-congratulatory, using it as part of your headline (without quotes or italics to set it off) is worse than lazy because it risks coming across as editorializing. You wouldn’t write A NIGHT OF HUCKSTERISM WITH THE OSTEENS, even though that may be a more accurate description."
The Herald didn't publish my letter. But a note in today's paper reads simply: "Televangelist Joel Osteen at the American Airlines Arena, 7 p.m." A small victory.
The December issue of Conde Nast Traveler is devoted to luxury. I know, I too thought every issue was devoted to luxury. (This is National Critique Travel Publications Week.)
A number of people - writers, designers, restaurateurs, TV personalities - tell what luxury means to them. Paul Theroux is not among them. "Luxury," he writes in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, "is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world."
Joan Juliet Buck notes "the presence of books." Frederick Vreeland suggests enthusiastic and expert guides. Matt Lauer, not surprisingly, says lack of surprise.
Pico Iyer, characteristically sane and against the grain, writes: "simplicity," echoing, in his own unabrasive way, Theroux. Patrick Symmes claims that the highest luxury is "the kind that follows traveling in hardship."
No one said: speaking the language of the country you're in. Being able to understand, and to be understood, is to me the greatest luxury. But that takes work, and time, and a willingness to be embarrassed. And in the world of five-star hotels and sumptuous spas and celebrity chefs - Conde Nastland - everybody speaks English anyway.