There will be a lot of talk this weekend about the first moon landing, and none of it, I'm guessing, will include Vladimir Nabokov.
The Russian novelist was one of a number of writers that Life magazine contacted, before the launch of Apollo 11, and asked for suggestions on what the first man on the moon should say.
Nabokov, with his impeccable grasp of American idioms (and tendencies), replied: "I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack."
Federer's triumph on Sunday nearly eclipsed the birthday of the great linguist and travel writer George Borrow. But in the afternoon I took my copy of Wild Wales down from the shelf and carried it out to the pool (where a man sitting under an umbrella talked hospitals with a woman standing in the shallow end the way other people talk restaurants: "You can't beat Holy Cross." "Oh, I love the Cleveland Clinic.").
Borrow is best known for The Bible in Spain, an account of his five years in Iberia - "the most happy of my existence" he wrote in the book's preface - working for the Bible Society. He spoke not only Spanish - he picked up languages the way other people pick up change - but the language of the Gypsies in Andalusia, whose company he enjoyed and whose culture he penetrated as few English speakers had.
Wild Wales is the account of a trip he took in the summer of 1854 with his wife and stepdaughter. He of course had learned Welsh, and read the national poets in the original, and rambling around the place (often after getting the women comfortably settled in an inn) he talked to everybody, an antecedent of Paul Theroux who once used the verb "buttonhole" to describe the travel writer's modus operandi.
At the bookstore yesterday I picked up the summer issue of Lapham's Quarterly and was delighted to see that it was devoted to travel.
Inside there were about 80 writers - everyone from Herodotus to Pico Iyer - on almost as many destinations. Though there was one, for me, annoying omission: Eastern Europe. Not even Prague was represented. Of course, if Poland had been there I would have been upset that the piece wasn't by me. No one reads an anthology more critically than the person left out of it.
June may be the most popular month in which to get married, but it also seems to be the most popular month in which to be born - at least for travel writers.
Earlier this month I noted the shared birthday - June 14 - of perhaps the two greatest living travel writers: Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban.
Last Thursday marked the 106th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, known primarily for his novels and essays. But like many British writers of his time - Waugh, Huxley, Greene - he spread his wings. In works like Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia, he brought politics to the travel memoir.
Friday would have been the 95th birthday of Laurie Lee, who wrote one of the most beautifully titled travel books: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
And Sunday would have been the 101st birthday of Norman Lewis, who died in 2003. He is one of the few modern travel writers who produced what are now generally considered classics: notably Naples 44 (a vivid portrait of the Italian city in the aftermath of WWII) and A Dragon Apparent (an alternately studious and droll account of his journey through Indochina in the late 40s).
And while I'm at it, it's worth mentioning the birthday, today, of the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). Milosz wrote in The Separate Notebooks: "Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so comic that I cannot understand how literature could expect to cope with it."
While the rest of you (Americans) were celebrating Flag Day yesterday, I was celebrating a remarkable day in the history of travel writing - one that saw the birth of Colin Thubron in 1939 and Jonathan Raban three years later.
Raban has moved on to fiction, for the most part, a genre Thubron has also done some time in. But they are both known primarily for their travel books, which combine fierce intelligence, acute observations and brilliant writing. Raban took the United States as his subject (Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak) and then made it his home, while Thubron has put on his back that huge territory occupied by China and the former Soviet Union.
While eminently serious writers, both possess a fine sense of humor. Thubron's story of asking a Chinese woman if Westerners smell, and her response (thinking he said "smile") is one I always read in writing workshops as a beautiful example of how humor can be used not just for laughs but for revelations.
When I was a travel editor I interviewed both men: Raban in Seattle (where he lives) and Thubron in Philadelphia (where he was speaking at a conference). Raban was fascinating and prickly; he spoke disparagingly of newspaper travel sections (he had never seen mine). Thubron was gracious, thoughtful, modest, learned. You experienced in person what was so evident in his books: a mind that enabled him to comprehend, and a heart that allowed him to connect.
Orhan Pamuk, the great writer and Nobel Prize winner (the first does not guarantee the second, and vice versa) turns 57 on Sunday.
I discovered Pamuk 12 years ago when I took his novel The Black Book to Turkey. He came to Books & Books a few years later, and I drove down to hear him. Five years ago I bought his memoir Istanbul and read with astonishment - "I was born in the middle of the night on June 7, 1952" - because I was too.
I also packed a tie to Turkey, and on June 7 I put it on and took a taxi to the Pera Palas Hotel, the grand hostelry built for passengers who arrived to Istanbul on the Orient Express. (Legend has it that Agatha Christie wrote part of her famous novel there.) I went in to the elegant bar and toasted my 45th year with a glass of raki. Little did I know that, somewhere in the city, Turkey's greatest living writer was also celebrating his 45th birthday.
Years later, describing his hometown, Pamuk would write: "For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own."
Which of course makes Istanbul the ideal city in which to mark a middle-aged birthday.