Today marks the start of Polish American Heritage Month, one of the less promoted of the themed months. Hoping to set up October talks about my memoir, I spent part of the summer contacting bookstores. A few show special consideration to the marginalized and underrepresented. In my pitch to these, I noted that there are few groups more underrepresented in American publishing than the Poles. No bookstore I contacted invited me to speak.
It was a slow night at the café. The 20-something waiter was sitting at the hostess station scrolling through his iPhone.
“The Harry Potter woman died,” he said to the waitress, and immediately I thought: J.K. Rowling?
Then I realized he was talking about Maggie Smith.
In the same column, David Hare said that he was applying for French citizenship - his wife is French - and that it required taking a test to gauge his knowledge of the language. He responded that they might think him arrogant, but the last time he had sat down to take a test was in 1968 and he could not bring himself to do it again. The consular officer replied: “Don’t worry, a certain arrogance isn’t a bad qualification for French citizenship.”
When looking for something to stream, Hania will always gravitate toward murder mysteries, while I much prefer spy stories. The other day, reading The Spectator, I came across a column by the English playwright David Hare who noted that Margaret Drabble once proclaimed that “boys like spy stories because they’re about derring-do” (I’m quoting Hare paraphrasing Drabble) while “girls prefer detective stories because they’re about psychology.”
Last week I received an email from an editor asking if by chance I had anything to send him. (The editor is a friend who's started a new online magazine.) The subject line read: "Submit (but in a good way)."
Yesterday I drove to Sawgrass Mills and bought the summer issue of The Hedgehog Review at Books-A-Million. (One of Martin Amis’s writing rules is to write sentences that other people don’t write.) The theme of the issue was travel and, sitting outside while Hania shopped, I turned to the essay on travel writing. It was rich in academic mind-twisters (even though the author was not identified as an academic) that state the obvious, or the dubious, in a complicated fashion that seems more intent on demonstrating the brilliance of the writer than in making a point. “Travel writing, like travel, is all about the negation of partiality,” the author proclaimed, “ – how a partial and limited perspective can expand and communicate while remaining incomplete.”
A lot has been written about travel writing over the years - some of it by me, sometimes in quarterlies - and this writer found something new to say about it. She had penned a sentence that other people wouldn't write. But it didn't give me new insight into the nature of my profession. Clearly, travel writers experience only a fraction of the places they visit, but even that small sampling can be of value. That is both the nature of travel, and part of the reason we write about it.