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.
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.