It's not often that I get to correct a political pundit, but it's not often that political pundits venture into the realm of literary quotation.
Yesterday on Fresh Air, Vanity Fair's political correspondent Todd Purdum said, in reference to some politician, "for those who like that sort of thing it's just the sort of thing they like," and attributed the line to Oscar Wilde.
He was close, closer than the people who cite Abraham Lincoln as the source. It was actually Wilde's contemporary - and caricaturist - Max Beerbohm, one of the wittiest, most elegant and most overlooked writers in English literature.
The Broward County Library's one copy of Tristes Tropiques was missing - obviously a popular beach read - so I went downstairs and bought a copy of A Moveable Feast for a dollar.
I'm going to Key West this Friday, so I thought it might make sense to read Hemingway, even on Paris. I was never a big fan: I recognized his revolutionary contribution to literature, but I preferred the elegance of Fitzgerald.
So Saturday afternoon I stretched out on the couch - my left thigh smarting with 10 dermatologist stitches - and began one of countless classics that have somehow managed to escape my attention. Hemingway, I realized, was greatly influenced by Impressionist painters, for he didn't describe a scene with lots of details (lots of work), instead he tried to capture its essence with a few quick brush strokes, a few representative lines. It was effective for conveying a mood but not for putting the reader there.
Also, the tone of self-satisfaction got on my nerves. A hugely successful writer in his 50s - when he wrote this book - Hemingway looked back on his early days in Paris with great affection and arrogance. He writes of sitting in cafes and finishing stories and knowing that the stories are good, and that he has worked hard to make them good, and that now he will drink a rum, or a carafe of wine - perhaps a rum followed by a carafe of wine - to celebrate the good work and the good story and his young life in Paris before becoming (if you read between the lines) the great American writer.
My ordered copy of Tristes Tropiques should arrive any day now.
My friend Alan Behr once lamented that ours is the first generation that has failed to produce a novelist who is a household name. In years past, he argued, even people who didn't read knew of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Updike and Mailer.
So I've been encouraged by all the attention being lavished on Jonathan Franzen.
There's the man, still modestly famous for snubbing Oprah after she endorsed his last novel, most recently seen gracing the cover of Time magazine. On NPR he has been interviewed not only on Fresh Air but on Marketplace.
There's the novel, which was given to President Obama by a bookstore on Martha's Vineyard and has since been reviewed, glowingly if somewhat unintelligibly, on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
And there's the controversy, as two popular female writers have complained of the, in their view, undue publicity that is given to serious novels, especially those that are written by males.
So it's been fairly difficult recently not to have heard or seen the name Franzen.
And yet, in the last week I've had conversations with four people who pleaded ignorance. Two were editors at a magazine (though one based in South Florida), one was a writer (though mostly in Spanish) and one was a member of a book club (though only nonfiction). Still. It struck me that we have moved from a time when people who didn't read knew the names of novelists to a time when people who do read, don't.
It is worth mentioning that all four people were under the age of 35. For the novelists of their generation I have two words: Good luck.
Going to a house of worship to see Christopher Hitchens is a bit like going to a house of ill repute to see a bishop. So naturally I drove to Temple Judea in Coral Gables last night to catch the literary journalist.
And I saw something I'd never seen before: Hitchens smile. It was before he took the podium, while standing next to Dave Barry - who introduced him and then led him in conversation (noting, at one point, that both their mothers committed suicide).
Hitchens was his usual curmudgeonly self, complaining about horoscopes in the Washington Post ("astrology in a journal of record") and suggesting that Ayn Rand's novels "are more difficult to read than they were to write." He answered the first question about his (anti) religious views - the questioner surprisingly compared him to Malcolm Muggeridge - but when more came he brushed them aside with a phrase that became a mantra: "Wrong book."
Even talking about himself (he was plugging his new memoir) he gave the impression of not just a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but the rare individual with the mental capacity to accurately calculate that weight. At the same time, he was, occasionally, almost playful, and he ended the evening in a way that I imagine few evenings at the temple have ever ended: with a recitation of limericks.
One hundred and nine years ago today, V.S. Pritchett was born in Ipswich, England. Known as a master of the short story, Pritchett was also a great memoirist and travel writer. (Oh for the days when travel writing was an accepted part of a writer's life.)
Midnight Oil, his second memoir, is a coming-of-age cum travel story, as it describes his working in Paris, learning another language, the difficult but intensely rewarding process of becoming intimate with another culture.
He later traveled to Spain and - through his books Marching Spain and The Spanish Temper - became something of an authority on the country. But it was his book Foreign Faces - about a trip through the Iron Curtain countries in the early '60s - that started me on my life-long fascination with Eastern Europe.
The book ends with chapters on Turkey and Iran. Of Istanbul he writes: "One realizes there are two breeds in Turkey: those who carry and those who sit. No one sits quite so relaxedly, expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits."
When I visited Istanbul in 1997, the men were still sitting, though now talking on cell phones while they did.