BENEFITS OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION

“Certainly I was delighted, when we had dinner once in New York (the only time I met him), that in person he was as quietly funny as his writing. He said that one of the elements of English life he most liked was English humor. ‘What is German humor like?’ I asked him. ‘It is dreadful,’ he said. ‘Have you seen any German comedy shows on television?’ he asked. I had not. ‘They are simply indescribable,’ he said, stretching the word in his lugubrious German accent. ‘Simply indescribable.’”

— From James Wood’s entry in the Threepenny Review’s W.G. Sebald Symposium, published the spring after his untimely death.

• 11 August 2010 • 2 notes

The Food Issue

Something I don’t take advantage of nearly enough as a New Yorker subscriber is the ability to sift through their 85-year-strong archive on the magazine’s website. The other day, I was reading Roger Angell’s great essay/memoir “Dry Martini” in Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (a book that combines many of my interests) and I thought I’d look it up online so I could send it to a friend.

Sadly, the article wasn’t available for non-subscribers (you can read one of their incredibly detailed abstracts though—who writes/edits these?), so I checked out the original issue itself, via my magical subscriber powers. It’s pretty cool; you see the issue as it was printed, with original layouts, ads, and everything. (Incidentally, it’s amazing how fast print ads look incredibly dated.)

What struck me though, was how great this Aug. 19 & 26, 2002 “Food Issue” was. I mean, this is an epic issue. First off, there’s the Angell piece, which veers from King George VI and F.D.R. sharing martinis on the eve of WWII to Angell himself, sipping one at the same time, then aged 18, to watching The Philadelphia Story in the movie theater during its first run, to the Pacific theater of war where Angell was a pilot, to “entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze,” to Angell’s own great recipe for the cocktail.

You should read that piece; it’s fantastic. So what else? John Seabrook’s fascinating “The Fruit Detective,” about mythical ex-heroin addict and eccentric fruit hunter David Karp, a story that would go on to impact my life in ways I could only have imagined when I first read it (and which I’ll explain some other time). Alma Guillermoprieto’s story about Diane Kennedy.

There’s also Calvin Trillin’s hilarious “The Red and the White,” about a possibly-apocryphal study indicating that most people, and even wine experts, couldn’t tell the difference between red and white wine. And last but not least, Bill Buford’s “The Secret of Excess,” his profile of celebrity chef Mario Batali that would turn out to be the seed of his great book Heat, about a year he spent working in the kitchen of Babbo.

Rediscovering this was like finding a Holy Grail of modern food writing. Best single New Yorker issue ever?

• 11 August 2010 • 1 note

The mysterious, subterranean “Snack Bar Kino” in Karlovy Vary’s labyrinthine, Communist-era Hotel Thermal, which I wrote about here.

• 9 August 2010

Banned!

According to a friend of mine who is shooting a movie over there, this website is now banned in China. What’d I do?

• 7 August 2010 • 1 note

Anonymity on Tumblr

Tumblr is really, surprisingly anonymous. Very few people seem to fill out an “About Me” box. For the most part in Tumblr-land, unless your name is in your Tumblr URL, I have no idea who you are. I wonder how many people do this on purpose—whether they really want to stay anonymous, or whether it’s an oversight. And whether this is by design on Tumblr’s part, or not.

• 5 August 2010 • 9 notes

Writing about restaurants

When I tell people I write about restaurants for a living (or for at least part of my living; I’m not privileged enough to live off my stomach entirely and I doubt I ever will be), they always ask the same questions. I know what they’re going to say before they even open their mouths; they get a curious look on their face and I just know what they’re going to say next. It’s one of four things.

They ask, “Do the restaurants know you’re coming? Do you tell them who you are?”

Then they ask, “Do you pay for the meals yourself?”

And then, “Do you get to bring your friends?”

Finally, “Do you get to choose where you eat?”

Sometimes the order changes, but they always ask all of those questions. I don’t know, if our positions were reversed, whether I’d ask the same things, but I’d bet good odds that I would. I like asking people about their jobs, and the four big questions really speak to what people, including me, are always curious about: secrets, money, companionship, free will.

So I will answer them for you here.