Last night’s World Series game was played in Dodger Stadium, the third oldest in baseball, which I remember being built. The Canadian national anthem was sung by a white-bearded Rufus Wainwright, whose grandfather, Loudon Wainwright Jr., I used to read in Life magazine.
I recently had lunch with a friend at Coconuts. Sitting on the outside terrace, we talked about the current situation in the country. Greg asked me if it reminded me of Poland in 1982.
“No,” I said. “Then everyone was affected. And everyone – with a very few exceptions – was against martial law.”
I looked around at the people in T-shirts and shorts, the Arnold Palmers and Bloody Marys, the Intracoastal gleaming behind them. “And you didn’t have this,” I said.
There can be no better illustration of the disdain editors now have for travel writing than the appearance in the New York Times Magazine’s special Voyages issue of a story about a three-day retreat in an all-dark room.
Yesterday the New York Times Magazine published its special Voyages issue. The lead story was about a father-and-son trip to the Badlands and it began with a scene of the son spilling gasoline on himself at a gas station. This was followed by the father’s description of the boy’s personality. Turning the page, I read the father’s reminiscence of a mugging he'd experienced at the age of 13, an event that, clearly, had left its mark.
The next story was about a three-day retreat in an all-dark, sensory deprivation chamber.
The next story, about the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, might have been interesting had it not been a photographic essay.
The final story was about a skateboarding park in Sweden that had been imported from Philadelphia.
So I finished the magazine knowing only a very little more about the world than I had when I started it.
Since this is the week of quotes – John Cheever, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Matthiessen, the Florida Department of Transportation – I’ll end with one from Jan Morris, from her 1974 essay on Washington, DC:
“Capital of a violent nation, Washington is accustomed to violent values. Its general air is easygoing, but its bad men are truly bad, and brute force lies always near the heart of it.”
The Oct. 20 New Yorker features a dog on the cover, about to do a cannonball into a pile of leaves, and more stories inside than I have read in a single issue in a long time. There is an entertaining appreciation by Anthony Lane of the half-forgotten poet Violet Ranney Lang and a typically thorough (i.e. long) profile of Zohran Mamdani. I even read the fiction, a quiet but strangely compelling story about a friendship between two writers. The two things I usually enjoy, “Shouts & Murmurs” and “Takes” – in which a current writer pays homage to a classic from the past – I found unmemorable. The article that really interested me was the review of the new biography of Peter Matthiessen. Best known for The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen held his novels in higher esteem. “Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet,” he's quoted as telling the Paris Review. “It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture.”