I watched the final Late Show with Stephen Colbert – actually, I watched the final week – and, sad to say, rarely laughed. I found the humor silly rather than clever or witty. Colbert comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent man, which makes his silliness particularly disappointing. (Though I read an interview with him once in which he claimed a great affinity for silliness.) Last night’s finale featured cameos of celebrities sitting in the audience, an awkward interview with Paul McCartney – who was the opposite of thoughtful – and a tedious video in which all of the other talk show hosts appeared. Only the final 10 minutes were memorable television: a taped segment of Colbert, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato singing Costello’s “Jump Up,” followed by Paul McCartney and everyone singing “Hello, Goodbye.” Though, considering Colbert’s legendary goodness, it should have been “The End”
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
Sunday we went to the European (aka Russian) Market in Hollywood. As the cashier started putting our few items in a plastic bag I said, “I have a bag,” and produced the small green bag with handles I always take to the store for small purchases.
“It’s OK,” she said, like a parent talking to a child who has just knocked over his glass of milk. Then she dutifully, begrudgingly, disapprovingly placed our groats and cold beet soup into our bag.
I was pulling for the Sabres - since my visit for Dyngus Day I have become a big fan of Buffalo - but at least now we'll still get to hear the Canadian anthem before playoff games.
My favorite Jan Morris passage is from Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (I used as the epigraph for A Way to See the World):
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or0 Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know that you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if only they knew it.
The review in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review of Sara Wheeler’s new biography of Jan Morris noted that the great travel writer was “a terribly flawed human being,” “a narcissist and a snob” who “could be cruel.”
All probably true, but she could also be kind – kindness being a quality she prized above all others. I interviewed her after her panel at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1991 and she apologized profusely for keeping me waiting while she graciously fielded questions from a pack of admirers. One Sunday afternoon in 1994, while I was reading about Vietnam before my first trip to Asia, the phone rang; it was Jan, apologizing again, this time for not doing more to promote my first book, which she had just reread and found much better than on the first reading. I told her I was headed to Vietnam, and she said it was a country she had never visited. It thrilled me that I would be traveling somewhere Jan Morris had never been. (Though her specialty was the British, not the French, empire.) When my second book came out, she kindly gave it a blurb. We emailed occasionally over the years, short messages about a new travel book, or an upcoming trip; I reviewed her book Contact!, a small, overlooked masterpiece, and got a warm note of gratitude. Often she would close her emails with an invitation to visit her in Wales, which I assumed was a nicety and never took her up on. Idiot. Wheeler contacted me while she was researching her biography, and I sent her the meager Morris-Swick e-correspondence, but there was nothing in it that was worth putting in the biography. Which was a shame, as it would have been an honor to find my name connected to Jan’s.
A fellow travel writer recently wrote about the decision he made years ago to go it alone, i.e., to stop sending his work to newspapers and magazines and to publish it himself in newsletters and blogs. Back then he could see, he wrote, where mainstream media was headed.
I admire people who possess the entrepreneurial skills to make a go of it by publishing themselves. Though I sometimes wonder if their dissatisfaction with mainstream media, their frustration with editors, their desire to “take control over their work” were all caused by a poor success-failure ratio when selling their work. One never sends rejections to oneself.
When you self-publish, you are a true independent, which means you miss out on the thrill of getting an acceptance from an editor at a magazine. And the delight is tied to a feeling of accomplishment that, no matter how proud you are of the piece you’ve written, doesn’t come with self-publication. No writer goes out for a celebratory dinner after appearing in his own newsletter. Also, publishing in a magazine, especially a general interest magazine, gets you “accidental readers” who would never have found you on the internet because they had – or thought they had – no interest in your subject.
And then there are the economics. To make a go of it as a writer/publisher, you have to appeal to a large audience, which in travel means focusing heavily on information and tips, the practical stuff that the majority of travelers want. The writer referred to earlier has been very successful since going independent. “Sponsored posts and brand deals have been flowing like a wide-open faucet,” he wrote, “and I'm having trouble keeping track of the orders. I'm actually glad I'm not traveling this month because I've got so much content to crank out that I'm getting paid well for.”
There were words and phrases in that passage that gave me pause. “Sponsored posts” and “brand deals” suggest corporate partnerships, which are probably a necessity in his chosen field but smack to me, an old newspaper guy, of a conflict of interest. So perhaps he’s not that independent after all. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not all that eager to read the “content” that any writer is about to “crank out.” When I was a travel editor, I used to complain about the freelancers who took free trips and then “cranked out” articles that all sounded the same. Ah, but I was an editor, the stickler this writer no longer has to deal with.