For people who don’t believe in national decline I present the March 2nd issue of The New Yorker. On page 55, Ian Buruma writes, in a memory of his beloved Dutch soccer team losing to the Germans in 1974: “To be beaten by the krauts felt like the Second World War all over again.” (The Germans apparently are one of the last nationalities that can still be called by a demeaning nickname.)
Then on page 60, there appears a quote from a letter written by Walter Benjamin after his arrival to Paris in the early ’30s: “The Parisians are saying ‘les émigrés sont pires que les boches’”– which is translated as “the immigrants are worse than the Krauts.” Why now capitalize the word when the original was in lower-case? There can be no clearer sign of our impending doom than editing inconsistency in The New Yorker.
I found last night’s Academy Awards less annoying than usual, perhaps because the political comments were, considering the current leadership, more than warranted. The In Memoriam segment was well done, with full-screen views of the deceased, though it omitted some prominent people like Brigitte Bardot. There were some moving acceptance speeches, particularly from best actors Michael B. Jordan and Jessie Buckley. And I was pleased that awards were given to a few of the movies I actually watched this year: Sentimental Value and One Battle After Another, which has stayed with me despite the fact that I found it ridiculously implausible while I was watching it. And Conan O’Brien, as host, for the most part kept his silliness in check.
Though I frequently thought back to Bill Maher’s show on Friday, which ended with a brilliant rant against the Academy Awards. Maher suggested that the hashtag #oscarssowhite should be changed – now that that’s no longer accurate – to #oscarssowrong. And then he listed all the great movies that, over the decades, have been snubbed by the academy. He also noted that awards are often given not for the quality of the work but for the nature of the subject. If you play a great historical character, or a person with an illness – physical or psychological – you have a distinct advantage. Though this year that bias didn’t apply.
The other evening we had drinks with a friend who is renting a house in our neighborhood. She and her husband are boaters, and had sailed their boat across the Atlantic in November (her husband is European). They are not young, but the prospect of spending weeks on a small boat in the open ocean doesn’t faze them. They’ve done it a number of times, our friend said casually.
At one point she mentioned an exhibition of murals they’d seen at the Hirshhorn in Washington last year. I mentioned the murals in Wynwood, and she said she’d never been there. I found this surprising, as she loves art and stays here every winter.
“I won’t drive on I-95,” she said.
The bombing of Iran is causing massive destruction of not only its military installations but also its vital infrastructure – in a country that before the war was experiencing a dangerous shortage of water. All Iranians – supporters and opponents of the regime – are suffering, and will be for a long time to come. Iran will need years, and billions of dollars, to recover. And what purpose will all the destruction and killing have served?
In January, after waking up, I turned on the TV to catch late-night matches at the Australian Open. Mornings last month I watched Olympic skiers racing down mountains in the Italian Alps. Currently to accompany breakfast I have World Baseball Classic games from Japan, often featuring the greatest player who ever lived. Games from San Juan, Miami, and Houston are shown in the afternoon and evening, when they compete with college basketball (professional, too, if you’re into that) and tennis (the BNP Paribas Open from Indian Wells). For a child of the ‘60s – who had sports only on Saturdays (on a black-and-white TV) – it’s a beautiful thing. Though it can make it hard to get any work done.
Every week the New York Times Book Review interviews a writer – or, sometimes, a person from another profession who’s written a book – about their reading habits. These latter interviews can be somewhat embarrassing. Yesterday the interview subject was Sam Heughan, an actor who has written five books. One of the questions, which I have rarely seen posed, was: “Do you have a favorite travel writer?”
Heughan said “Anthony Bourdain,” which was fine. Bourdain was a good writer and an excellent host of a travel show. But then he followed it with “was the greatest.” I am tempted to write to the Times for Heughan’s address so I can send him works by Robert Byron, Rebecca West, Norman Douglas, Freya Stark, Kate Simon, M.F.K Fisher (since he’s apparently a foodie), Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban and Colin Thubron.