An interesting interview with Rick Steves in yesterday’s New York Times magazine, particularly when he talked about the personal costs of travel (though they were similar to those experienced by many workaholics). And he somewhat downplayed the environmental costs. He claimed that, if suddenly rendered unable to travel, he would embrace the situation, taking as much joy in the pleasures of home as he did those of the road. It reminded me of Jonathan Raban’s acceptance of, and fascination with, the stroke that ended his traveling life (which he brilliantly chronicles in his memoir Father and Son). Good travelers possess an innate optimism, and curiosity about things, that serve them well wherever they are.
Before heading to The Parker last night to hear David Sedaris, I went through my Best American Travel Writing anthologies to see if there were any in which we both appeared. I found three, but grabbed the 2002 edition, where our pieces appeared back-to-back. My plan was to have him sign the table of contents page, where – I would tell him – we were neighbors. Once at the Miami Book Fair I handed John Updike a quarterly in which he had a poem and I had an essay, and he wrote: “To Thomas Swick from John Updike” – then put a bracket around our two names and wrote “In this issue!”
Sedaris took the stage at The Parker without an introduction and, after a few perfunctory remarks, began reading from a sheaf of loose pages. The longest reading was of a piece I had recently read in The New Yorker, about a visit with friends in Maine, a cancelled flight to New York, and a long drive in a rental car with another stranded traveler, a young Chinese woman. This was disappointing; humor depends on the element of surprise. Yet the way he read it made it funnier than I had originally found it.
Also, there were some things in it that I didn’t remember. I had forgotten that the people gathered at the house in Maine had included a MacArthur fellow and a Pulitzer Prize winner. And I had completely erased from my memory the scene in which one of them expresses his dislike of Greta Thunberg and then does a mocking imitation of her.
There is a scene, on the drive to New York, in which they pull up to a gas station to use the restrooms only to find the gas station closed. Heading for privacy behind a dumpster, they spot two Orthodox Jews adjusting their flies. Sedaris shouts “Hasidim!” – “the way I might have said ‘Deer!’ or ‘Racoons!’” I didn’t remember the second animal.
When he finished reading, Sedaris revealed that The New Yorker employs a “sensitivity reader.” (He said the term three times, the first two times in a garbled accent that showed his disdain.) This reader, he said, had insisted that he take out mention of the prestigious prizes because they sounded too “elitist.” The reader – I don’t think Sedaris mentioned his or her gender – also took out the bit about Thunberg.
They had fought over his reaction to seeing Orthodox Jews emerging from behind a dumpster; Sedaris had been able to salvage ‘deer’ but he had lost ‘racoons” because, the reader said, they were viewed as furtive and shifty. “But,” he pleaded, now with his audience, “racoons are what you see around dumpsters.” For me – if not for him – this was not a big loss; one example is often better than two.
There is a discussion in the car, with the Chinese woman, about pandas; this was flagged by the reader because it touched on stereotypes. Sedaris defended it – and won – by saying it was the woman who had brought up the subject.
Sedaris said he was grateful to write for The New Yorker and noted that any cuts they make to his stories he will restore when he puts them in books. But his insights into the inner workings of the place explained why the writing is so often bland. (Unlike that in the British Spectator, whose new editor, in his introductory column, said that the best magazines are parties on pages.)
During the Q&A, someone asked how much he had walked that day, and, in answering, he praised the Riverwalk. “I love it – that walkway along the water.” In less than 24 hours, he had found one of the loveliest things in Fort Lauderdale.
The line for autographs stretched through the lobby. A man came around and handed everyone a piece of paper on which we were to write what we wanted his inscription to read. This was an attempt to save time, yet Sedaris is so friendly with fans, so giving of his time, that for five minutes the line didn’t move. I tucked the anthology under my arm and headed for the door.
It was a perfect weekend for the Miami Book Fair. On Saturday morning, David Kirby – following two poets not from the School of Uplift – read a poem about gratitude that listed the many things he is grateful for. Afterwards, his book The Winter Dance Party, was nowhere to be found, something for which he was clearly not grateful. But, unfazed, he said he would tell people it had sold out.
Kirby’s old friend Billy Collins read shortly after in the frigid auditorium. Among the poems were some very short ones, like “3 AM.”
My hand is asleep.
At least it’s a start.
During the Q&A, a teacher of writing asked for some tips. Collins told her to get the students to read, admitting that that is difficult these days. Young people don’t read books, he posited, because they don’t want to be alone. With their phones they never are.
The teacher specifically asked about novels, and Collins said that poetry and fiction are “two different countries.” He added that “being a poet doesn’t require any interest in other people,” while novelists need to look into other people’s lives.
Yesterday, I went to hear Charles Bock, Priyanka Mattoo, and Carvell Wallace. In an interesting twist, Wallace read an excerpt from Mattoo’s memoir and Mattoo read an excerpt from Wallace’s. This worked surprisingly well, considering that Wallace’s memoir is about growing up Black and queer, and Mattoo’s is about her family’s exile from Kashmir. She said that she had never written anything (besides screenplays) before she sat down to write her memoir, excerpts of which were subsequently published in the New York Times and The New Yorker.
Following them were Eric Weiner, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Shalom Auslander. Handler said that he carries a notebook with him wherever he goes; not a fancy leather notebook – he noted the Moleskin trailer outside at the street fair – but a cheap spiral notebook. I dug in my bookbag and retrieved the green memo notebook I had bought at Walgreen’s. An elegant notebook, he said, would make him feel even more pretentious than he already did taking notes.
Like many good writers, they had been precocious readers when young. Handler told of picking up Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal at the town library when he was a boy. Auslander said that, around the age of 16, he walked into Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan and asked the salesclerk if they had anything funny. The man gave him a book by Kafka. He enjoyed it so much that he returned and asked if they had anything else that was funny. The man gave him Beckett.
When I was a travel editor, writing a bi-weekly column, one of the ideas I kept in my back pocket was a column imagining a chance meeting, in some foreign backwater, between Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves. The two most famous American travelers presented an interesting contrast in styles, not unlike Goofus and Gallant, and I thought an invented conversation between them might make for an amusing column.
I was reminded of that unwritten column while reading Ann Patchett’s essay in Sunday’s New York Times. It was about email, and like many of the Patchett essays I’ve read, it illuminated her enviable life: a highly successful author – one of email’s benefits, she says, is that it brings her unexpected writing assignments – surrounded by love. She loves her neighbors, she writes, and she loves her sister, who loves her back; she enjoys “the warmth of husband and dog.” She is blessed, as not that many writers – or, for that matter, people – are, and she is appreciative of her blessings.
So l like to imagine a meeting, at some secluded writers’ retreat, between Ann Patchett and Annie Ernaux.
In the same column, David Hare said that he was applying for French citizenship - his wife is French - and that it required taking a test to gauge his knowledge of the language. He responded that they might think him arrogant, but the last time he had sat down to take a test was in 1968 and he could not bring himself to do it again. The consular officer replied: “Don’t worry, a certain arrogance isn’t a bad qualification for French citizenship.”
A standard question in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author interview is: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Most writers play along; a few dodge the question by claiming they don’t cook or like to socialize. Yesterday, Joy Williams wrote: “This is not a time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” She went on for another couple sentences.
Now I’m awaiting the writer who, when asked by the Times which three writers they’d invite to a literary dinner party, responds, “Not Joy Williams.”
I’m off to Poland tonight – will be back here the middle of August.