In his review of Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything, Dwight Garner quoted George Orwell: “An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
I am pleased and embarrassed to say that my memoir passes the test.
I have mixed feelings about the cancellation of “The Late Show” because I have mixed feelings about Stephen Colbert.
Colbert is one of my favorite people on television: smart, funny, decent, openly religious in a fiercely secular industry – he is a welcome correction to the idea that nice guys finish last.
But I’m not a fan of him as a host of “The Late Show.” I had hoped that, because of his intelligence and thoughtfulness, he would become the Dick Cavett de nos jours – leading lively discussions with prominent people in the culture – but instead he has kept the one-on-one format of celebrity chit-chat, raising the level from time to time, but also coming across as less amusing (to me at least) than his predecessor David Letterman. His monologues became overwrought attacks on Trump that I rarely laughed at (even though I agreed with them).
Of course, I don’t like the whiff of censorship that clings to CBS’s decision to cancel the show, despite the fact that, according to yesterday’s New York Times, it is “racking up losses of tens of millions of dollars a year.” And I realize that, had Colbert taken the show in the direction I would have liked, those losses would be even greater.
In a strange way, his situation reminds me of mine at the Sun-Sentinel 17 years ago. (Though I had a day to pack up and Colbert’s been given 10 months.) I was the first specialty section editor at the paper, and one of the first travel editors in the country, to be shown the door. And I was let go for financial reasons – the Sun-Sentinel, like most newspapers in 2008, was not losing money, but not making nearly as much as it had been – that were tied, I suspect, to ideological ones: My practice of favoring stories over tips – prioritizing reading over bargain-hunting – did not make me popular with management.
Entertainment industry experts say that the cancellation of “The Late Show” does not bode well for “The Tonight Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, which makes sense; most newspapers no longer have travel editors – or editors of food, fashion, and home & garden. It is very likely that Stephen Colbert will become like me: a harbinger of extinction.
My hope is that another network, or more likely a streaming service, will hire Colbert and provide him with a format in which he can showcase his humor and his intellectual curiosity. Given a real, substantive talk show, he would be a more nuanced, less abrasive Bill Maher.
Connie Francis died yesterday in Pompano Beach at the age of 87. She was the celebrity most associated with Fort Lauderdale; though she grew up in New Jersey, she made the city famous (long before Chris Evert) with the 1960 song, and movie, Where the Boys Are.
I saw her years ago at an event on the beach for one of the film’s anniversaries (the 50th perhaps?). I believe she sang the trademark song, but my most vivid memory is of the crowd that surrounded her as she somewhat shakily made her way back to her limo. She looked frail and overwhelmed. A man in the crowd shouted “We love you Connie!” and I remember being struck not just by the passion of his declaration but by his use of the first-person plural.
I recently received an email from a travel editor with the subject line: “What’s wrong with travel writing?”
The answer, according to the editor, was that there is little diversity in the group of people writing it. “What about traveling while Black, or queer, or disabled?” she asked.
My complaint about contemporary travel writing is that it is often more focused on the traveler – his or her experiences, feelings, epiphanies – than on the people traveled among. If the identity of the writer becomes a matter of importance, the level of self-centeredness will only rise. The one modern travel book that is hailed as a literary masterpiece – In Patagonia – would not have been improved by Chatwin writing about his homosexuality.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried a review of a new book, The CIA Book Club, that tells the story of the agency’s efforts during the Cold War to smuggle books and magazines into Eastern Europe in hopes of promoting not just the Western ideology but also its way of life. Among the magazines was Cosmopolitan.
The review, like the project, focused on Poland, which I found interesting but also a little puzzling. In Warsaw, where I lived in the early ’80s, Poles had free access to the British Council and the library in the American embassy, where there was no security check or request for ID; you simply walked in the side entrance, past the marine, and entered the brightly-lit room filled with books, periodicals, and days-old copies of the New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald-Tribune. I don’t recall that Cosmopolitan was available, but Time, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly all were.
The British Council was more popular with Varsovians because it was located far from the British embassy and so carried no obvious governmental association. I assume the political classics mentioned in the review were available – 1984, Brave New World – but, because I had read them in college, I was drawn to other works: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (which remain, 45 years later, two of my favorite books). I also read, as every Anglophone Pole could, Timothy Garton Ash’s stylishly insightful reports from Poland in The Spectator.
I will read The CIA Book Club to see if any mention is given of the valuable role these libraries played in the Cold War.
In Sunday’s New York Times, David Brooks bemoaned the decline of great novels – and “big-time” novelists. And he put the blame on writers, for not being audacious, and progressivism, which encourages conformity.
It was astonishing to me that Brooks, a man who makes a living from his wits, failed to cite the obvious: the post-literate world we now inhabit. Books, and perhaps especially novels, no longer hold the place in the culture that they once did; they were supplanted years ago by TV. There is, and always will be, a small core of readers, but the vast majority of Americans do not look to novelists for profundity, solace, or even entertainment. When people meet – including Boomers, who grew up in the last great age of reading – they don’t talk about the books they’ve read but about the shows they’ve watched. And no generation of writers, however audacious, is going to change that.