In the evening, we usually stream something on Netflix or Prime because there’s nothing of interest on network TV. Yet Sunday night there were three things we wanted to watch: Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special on NBC, PBS’s All Creatures Great and Small, and the first episode of the new series of The White Lotus on HBO. We watched SNL, knowing we could stream the other two later in the week. Last night we watched All Creatures Great and Small, which quoted lines from Lewis Carroll and Hughes Mearns (“I met a man who wasn’t there.”) You don’t get nonsense poetry from The White Lotus.
The New Yorker is observing its 100th birthday at the same time that “Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th. The former institution has paid tribute to the latter – with a long profile of Lorne Michaels – while the latter has not reciprocated. Though, according to Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times, Michaels offered an office to William Shawn in 1987 when he was ousted from the magazine after 35 years as editor.
People don’t come here for politics (for the most part people don’t come here, period), but in observing our president’s actions I have moved from shock to revulsion. Not all USAID programs were worthwhile, but providing medicines in poorer countries is not only a humanitarian act, it’s one that builds good feeling for the United States around the world.
This week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – a man with no scientific training, and some dangerously outlandish views – was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. In a similar disregard for qualifications, Trump put himself in charge of the Kennedy Center. Then he spoke with Putin – a dictator and war criminal who is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands – about the war in Ukraine, suggesting in his comments that ‘there are good people on both sides.’
A nation’s health, its culture, the stability of the world are all at risk because of a man who is in way over his head.
To see the negligible, nearly invisible, presence that literature has in contemporary life one need only watch Jeopardy! I am constantly astounded by answers that seem obvious to me but are out of the reach of people with much greater stores of knowledge. Last night, under the category “The New Yorker at 100,” the clue was about a staff writer who wrote a classic essay on Ted Williams’ last at-bat as a Boston Red Sox. They showed a picture of the writer, along with the information that his dream as a boy growing up in a small Pennsylvania town was to one day write for The New Yorker. No one buzzed in. Though, later in the show, one contestant was able to identify “A Room of One’s Own” as a famous essay by Virginia Woolf.
I usually pull for the underdog, but when it comes to the Westminster Dog Show I root for the big dogs. So yesterday I was delighted to see Monty the Giant Schnauzer win Best in Show. Though I would have been even happier if Mercedes the German Shepherd had won.
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.