My dismay over the changing of the guard at Conde Nast Traveler is more professional than personal. Klara Glowczewska had a nice long run, as did I in a far less luxurious branch of the business. When mine came to an end I wrote to her and proposed a column reflecting on the world and Americans’ often touching, sometimes comical, efforts to get to know it (a monthly version of the biweekly column that I had been able to pull off for 19 years in the Sunday Travel section of a midsized newspaper in Florida). She declined, saying that front-of-the-book space was extremely tight, the front-of-the-book being the part of the magazine devoted to products that often had only a tenuous connection to travel. This came from a woman who, in her spare time, translated Ryszard Kapuscinski. Now we wait to see how the magazine will fare under the direction of a woman who, in her past life, edited Martha Stewart.
"I saw your magazine the other day," my neighbor said to me in the elevator. "In church, of all places."
"Well," I thought to myself five minutes later, after we'd both returned to our respective apartments, "it is the Bible of Fort Lauderdale."
Saturday I picked up the Feb. 11 & 18 double issue of The New Yorker and found on page 63 a sepia-toned photograph of Joseph Mitchell standing in front of Sloppy Louie's seafood restaurant. I'm going to buy a frame at lunch today and hang it on the wall next to the photograph, cut from the same magazine last year, of Vera and Vladimir Nabokov.
When I didn’t have a job, weeks seemed to go by without my seeing a New Yorker. Now it feels as though a new issue arrives every few days. The proverbial pile of New Yorkers has gotten so big it’s intimidating. I may just choose to ignore it. I may end up doing to The New Yorker what The New Yorker has been doing to me all these years.
It was a good weekend for fans of Serena Williams, Svetlana Kuznetsova and David Ferrer, who all won at the French Open on Sunday in fairly routine matches, matches that were shown over and over again on the Tennis Channel long into the night.
Of course, the fan base for those three players - even with the explosive Williams in the mix - pales in comparison to that of Roger Federer, who won an exciting, five-set match over Gilles Simon that included an around the net winner by the Swiss champion.
But this match was shown once, live, on NBC. I assume the network did not give the Tennis Channel rights to replay it. If you didn't see it on NBC, then you missed out on one of the finest matches by possibly the greatest player in the history of the game.
And good luck finding tennis highlights on ESPN.
"Thank ya, ma'am," my friend Alan said to the waitress at Big City Tavern who brought him his soup. A long-time New Yorker, Alan grew up in New Orleans, and humidity and palm trees bring out his Southern manners. I reminded him he was not in the South; he was in South Florida.
Over lunch, we talked about writing. Alan had freelanced for me for nearly two decades. He said that editors now all want short articles, and he pointed out the irony of that, in the age of the Internet, which had made space a nonfactor. After centuries of having a finite space in which to place words, we now had a system in which words could go on and on. And publishing's response to that was to severely limit their number.