I like to keep well-informed, so when I putter around the kitchen I listen to our local NPR station, WLRN. Yesterday morning, while fixing a late breakfast, I heard John Hockenberry on The Takeaway ask listeners to tell him which Superhero they would most like to be.
I thought for a moment, and decided: Media mogul. So I could get rid of shows like The Takeaway.
Last year I wrote a long essay on travel writing - the misunderstood workings and the under-appreciated triumphs of those who practice it - which was accepted by The Wilson Quarterly.
It appeared at the beginning of January in the winter issue. I received one e-mail, from a fellow travel writer, commenting on the piece. The magazine sent me one letter which they had received about it.
This past Monday World Hum, the online travel magazine, ran the piece. It received about a dozen comments, and I got e-mails from friends I had not heard from in years. On Wednesday it was linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, which garnered more reactions. I received two e-mails from radio stations - one in San Francisco, one in Melbourne, Australia - requesting interviews. Then yesterday, The New Yorker online linked to the piece. At the moment it has received 29 comments on World Hum and may get more because - just as Gary Shandling said he would do if he ever experienced priapism for more than four hours - I'm calling everybody.
I love unsung cities, immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic festivals.
So Friday I e-mailed several magazines proposing a story on Buffalo's Dyngus Day. I learned of the celebration only last year, when I met a woman from Buffalo at a conference, though I recognized the name from Poland, where the Monday after Easter is referred to as Smigus Dyngus, the day when, traditionally, boys chased girls and doused them with water.
Buffalo, with its large Polish population, has turned Dyngus into a kind of post-Lenten Mardi Gras, with parades, parties, dinners, tours and water pistol fights. I suggested a story about Buffalo's historic Polish community as told through the activities of its most colorful festival.
Saturday morning I found an e-mail from the editor of a major travel magazine:
"I'm sorry, Tom. Sounds like a cute item but hardly a feature for us. More like fodder for a newspaper column. May have been a while since you've seen the magazine—just designed—but you would know that we wouldn't devote a feature to an obscure festival that few readers would practically attend."
The e-mail had a familiar tone: testy and condescending. Though the grammar was interesting. I pondered for a while the phrase "practically attend." Did that mean showing up in sensible shoes?
I do see the magazine - "see" being an accurate description - and I knew my proposal was a long shot. But I keep hoping that travel editors will discover the value of the offbeat. (I did.) If you reject the obscure you end up relying on the obvious. You keep saying the same old things about the same old places, and you wind up with people who see rather than read your publication. Most travel magazines are not written for readers, or even for travelers, but for a particular type of unadventurous, unoriginal, and usually wealthy vacationer. They are the journalistic equivalent of Willie Sutton, going only where the money is.
I was so irritated by Pete Hamill's "review" of the new Willie Mays biography that I wrote a letter to The New York Times Book Review.
Yesterday the Book Review ran three letters about the review, none of them mine. One was from a man in San Francisco writing about home runs and Candlestick Park (they don't name stadiums like they used to). The other two were from New Yorkers. The first began: "My eyes welled up with tears as I read Pete Hamill's beautiful review..." and ended with the words "which might be the difference between Harlem and the Bronx." The second ended with the sentence: "That was New York."
As in the review, the greatest baseball player in history took a backseat to the vainest city in the world.
When word arrived that Robert Benchley's older brother Edmund had been killed in the Spanish-American War, his mother's first grief-stricken words were: "Why couldn't it have been Robert?"
Similarly, when I heard that Conde Nast was killing Gourmet, my first thought was: Why couldn't it have been Traveler?
Both are high-end magazines, but Gourmet exuded a passion for its subject - food - that Conde Nast Traveler doesn't. Instead of a passion for travel, you get a love of luxury. It is impossible to imagine Jane and Michael Stern traveling the country and reporting for Traveler on down-home inns. (Even though they're as plentiful as diners.)
Gourmet was edited by a writer, Ruth Reichl, and the language (like the dishes it discussed) was something to be savored. Traveler is edited by a translator, Klara Glowczewska, but the writing is dry and more concerned with amenities than it is with atmosphere. (A huge disappointment, considering that Glowczewska was the American translator of Ryszard Kapuscinski.) Space is sometimes given to well-known authors, who upgrade the property, but the majority of stories are bland, unambitious, forgettable rambles along the surface of some attractive place inhabited by people you rarely meet. The perspective is always that of the tourist, never the local.
Both magazines bulge with consumer information, but Gourmet's was something most cooks could use. Traveler's front of the book is filled every month with briefs about expensive and frivolous accessories that seem more geared to advertisers than to actual travelers. Which explains both the magazine's inferiority and - sadly - its survival.
Reading foreign publications not only broadens your perspectives, it extends your holidays. (If you still prefer paper.) Last night I finished the Christmas issue of the London Spectator. I subscribed for about two decades, until the cost became too high. It had gone online, and I told myself I could read it there. I never do.
So for the holidays I splurged and bought the special double issue at Bob's News. I started in the back - old habits die hard - with the sports columnist, who hailed 2008 as "one of the best years ever." And he didn't even mention the Super Bowl - or the Phillies winning the World Series. Though I was happy to see that he gave Andy Murray the Robbie Fowler award for attention-seeking celebration for flexing his muscle at Wimbledon.
In the competition you were "invited to submit a carol titled The Last Noel." Celeste Francis wrote: "On the last Noel, when the white snow fell,/All snowmen were banned in a non-racist stand."
The High Life and Low Life columns were joined by Wild Life, Real Life, and Slow Life, which, appropriately, extolled the joys of jigsaw puzzles and pantomime.
I read an appreciation of the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, a review of a biography of Coco Chanel, a gallery of cartoons by Michael Heath ("I'm afraid Uncle George couldn't make it - no, that's not quite true, we've just eaten him."), Beryl Bainbridge's odd assessment that time "flies when one is young and drags when old."
Paul Johnson remembered the days when you showed respect to bankers and Matthew Parris argued that English journalism is better today than ever. (He didn't say if it was healthier.) Elizabeth Hurley wrote of her "four labradors, two cats, three geese, eight chickens, 49 cows, 63 sheep and 82 pigs" and said that her former beau, "the best ex anyone could ever have: my gorgeous, my angelic, my long-suffering Hugh" had contributed "a dovecote, a hen house and a goose house" for the winged creatures.
Tom Stacey suggested that we need "the occasional war or economic collapse" and Barry Humphries mused that San Franciscans see their homeless as lending "their city its special identity, like flower children of the Sixties." (Though it would have been more interesting if he'd asked the homeless if they agree with Stacey.)
Ten people were invited to give reasons for cheerfulness. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, mentioned bicycles for hire and bacon sandwiches. Michael Grove, MP, said "Malbec Pinot Noir, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon. Cheddar, Stilton, Shropshire Blue and Red Leicester. ... iTunes, iPods, iBooks, and Apple Macs." Three people - including Joan Collins and the Leader of the House of Lords - noted Obama.
I'm off to an inauguration party. Hope I prolonged your holidays.