Tuesday morning I dropped my car at the garage and walked with my book to the nearby café. The book, A Sunny Place for Shady People by Ryan Murdock, is about Malta. I left it on an outside table and went inside to order.
“How’s that book you’re reading?” a young man asked me.
I told him it was very good, written by a Canadian who spent four years on the island.
“I noticed the title,” the man said. “You know, that’s been said about this place.”
I told him that “a sunny place for shady people” was, originally, Somerset Maugham’s description of the French Riviera. He nodded as if that – or at least the author’s name – rang a bell.
I took my iced tea outside and noticed that the man at the neighboring table was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.
It’s day six of the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and I’ve seen seven films – most of them entertaining, two of them excellent. I thought that having to see a film every day – sometimes two – would get to be a chore, but the experience has been quite the opposite. When I don’t have a movie to go to I feel at a loss.
There’s a house in the neighborhood that marks every holiday with a lovely lawn display, usually involving inflatable figures. The current one features a turkey in a pilgrim’s hat standing atop a toppled Santa, and the handwritten sign: “Wait your turn, big boy.”
I am a judge for this year’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which opens tonight. It would be hard to find a better time to lose oneself in movies.
On my way back from Lancaster last week, I stopped in Wayne, a pretty Main Line town I used to hitchhike to when I was a student down the road at Villanova. Back then there was a paperback bookstore on Lancaster Pike; now there’s a bookstore, Main Point Books, on the perpendicular N. Wayne Ave.
Walking in I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while: a display of all the new Best American anthologies: Essays, Short Stories, Mystery and Suspense, etc. The one that caught my eye was Food and Travel Writing. Food had always had its own anthology, as had Travel, before it was discontinued in 2022. The return of travel writing was encouraging, even if it had to hitch its wagon to food.
Opening up the anthology, I found that almost all of the stories were about food – not surprisingly, as few writers had known about travel’s rebirth. One of the travel pieces was an essay on the fate of travel writing by the former editor of the Travel series, a man who, tellingly, now writes about wine and spirits.
Next year, presumably, there will be more of a balance. True, everybody eats and not everybody travels. But eating is almost always more pleasurable than reading about eating, while reading about travel is frequently more enjoyable than travel itself.
Peggy Noonan’s pre-election column in the Wall Street Journal last weekend was defiantly optimistic. She despaired of the choice – finding fault with both candidates – but took solace from the fact that the nation’s institutions were strong and would survive whatever happened on Tuesday. As would our democracy, which she claimed was in extremely good health.
I wish I shared her optimism. For an effective democracy you need a well-educated citizenry, and our schools have been in decline for decades. A lot of the campaign speeches were about the supposed dangers of a porous border while nobody talked about the obvious damage to a society when it pays its teachers so poorly that few people want to – or can afford to – enter the profession.
Add to a failed education system a declining sense of community – which inevitably results in a rise in self-interest – and you have two essential ingredients for national decline.