Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour listening to Paul Theroux on Sophy Roberts’ podcast “Gone to Timbuktu.” He talked about George Orwell (and why he was not the saint people think he was), Ernest Hemingway (a poseur, a tourist in Africa who shot a lion when he would have been better off learning Swahili), Bruce Chatwin (who never traveled alone and craved attention), his first bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar, the evolution of travel writing. I listened in admiration of his dedication (he writes every day), his wide-reading, his on-going curiosity (he’s off to Canada soon, to research a book about his ancestors), and, at 83, his ocean-paddling, his bike-riding, his daily swims, and his undimmed enthusiasm for people, places, books, life.
I have always liked John Dickerson, but as a news analyst, not a news reader. Putting him behind the desk of CBS Evening News seems like a massive misuse of talent. And there’s another man sitting next to him, Maurice DuBois. Can’t he do it himself? Two people delivering the news is not as odd as two people writing a book – “like three people having a baby,” one wag once said – but it is wasteful. It means not only an extra salary, but extra time in the daily news meeting, as decisions must be made on who is to read what.
Yesterday we had lunch with friends who were down from Massachusetts. Like Hania, they left Poland in the early ’80s, and, like Hania, they are distraught at what is happening in their adopted home. They constitute a forgotten segment of the immigrant population: people who are not threatened with expulsion – they came legally and now have citizenship – but who find themselves living in a country very different from the one they moved to, a country they would probably not choose to immigrate to today.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured a profile of Curtis Chin, author of Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. Chin apparently sent the manuscript to 90 agents, none of whom were interested in it. He added the subject of racism, and the story of his coming out, and he got four offers. I am no longer surprised when I read things like this, but I am dismayed. How many good books are going unpublished because they fail to check the obligatory boxes?
Someone posted on social media recently that she was on a beach in Brazil, toward the end of the day, and heard people clapping. She thought they were applauding the sunset. Then she learned that they were in the vicinity of a lost child, and the custom is for people to clap so the parents will know where to find their wayward offspring.
I liked this story for two reasons. One, it showed the special cohesiveness of Brazilian society. And it also demonstrated to travelers that going where the locals go – even when it’s the beach – can be illuminating about the culture.