A while back, a strange thing happened in tv land. Food Network and the Travel Channel took advantage of a holiday by showing marathons of their popular shows. No, that’s not strange by itself. What was strange to me was the juxtaposition of the networks’ choices. Food Network showed viewers’ favorite episodes of media maven Rachael Ray’s travel shows, “$40 a Day” and “Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels.” The Travel Channel, on the other hand, showed episodes of chef Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.”

Ray and Bourdain couldn’t be more different if they tried.

Ray, as just about anyone with a television knows, made her name with her “30 Minute Meals,” wherein she whips up “delicious and healthy meals from start to finish” at a sometimes frenzied pace and always with a heaping helping of shortcuts. She is incessantly chipper and calls herself a cook, not a chef.

Bourdain’s show, on the other hand, is a travelogue. He embraces cultures as different as Iceland and India and the Texas/Mesico border and Las Vegas. He doesn’t just taste food; he experiences it and the people who make it. Bourdain is gruff (and a little sexy), and I honestly don’t think there’s anything the man won’t put in his mouth. But he’ll let you know if he doesn’t like something, as he did when he ate rotten, aged shark in Iceland.

Ray’s approach to travel is that of a typical American. She looks for bargains, spends a lot of time shopping, and doesn’t steer too far off the beaten food path. But I find it disturbing that she always enjoys every single thing she tries! How can someone travel that much and be happy with everything she eats? Is she really lucky, or does she not have discerning tastes? I can’t figure it out. But I do watch her, and she is the woman I credit with inspiring me to cook more and be more adventurous in the kitchen. Because of Rachael, I now know that I don’t have to measure everything exactly.

Bourdain, perhaps best known as the author of Kitchen Confidential, is an excellent writer, one any of us would do well to learn from. His story of how he got caught up in the Beirut war last summer was compelling and depressing.

He has a deep respect for the cultures he visits and he lets us soak it up with him. He’s as comfortable getting high in the desert in India as he is playing cards with some strange and shady characters in Vegas. He’s a hoot, and he’s refreshingly honest. A man who’s been seemingly everywhere, he has no problem expressing his hatred for vegans, as he did in an interview with Salon:

“How can you travel? Before you’ve even left home, you’ve already decided, ‘I reject most of the world’s bounty and the expression of their hopes and dreams and culture.’ Some nice, possibly impoverished Vietnamese rice farmer is nice enough to offer you the one chicken he can kill a month, or a week, and you say, ‘Sorry, I can’t'? It just seems antihuman. It’s antisocial.”

But Bourdain doesn’t just hate vegetarians (and fat people). He hates Ray, too (along with countless other celebrity chefs and Food Network stars). And I have to disagree with him there. If she inspired me to cook, Rachael can’t be all that bad, Tony. In the kitchen, I’m Rachael, not Bourdain, the former New York City chef.

That said, while I watch and enjoy them both, when I had to choose between marathons, I picked Bourdain. With no reservations.

Austen

Here’s a new word to add to your dictionaries, courtesy of my friend (and frequent commenter to this blog) Dickens:

friend shui — n. redecorating one’s home in advance of the arrival of friends or loved ones in order to increase the prominence of pictures of or gifts from the guests-to-be.

Dickens rarely posts on his own blog (I’m only linking to it out of some sense of blogging etiquette) because he’s busy being a professor, but funny little gems like this one are a treat.

Austen

There are some amazingly talented writers in the blogosphere. What did they, or people like them, do before blogs? Did their talents go unused? Probably so, in many cases. And I imagine there are plenty of bloggers out there who never would have discovered they were good writers without the chance to practice their craft on a regular basis.
Maybe these bloggers would have written long and vivid letters 200 years ago? Perhaps they would have created zines in the ‘90s? I had the good luck of having a job right out of college that required me to write on a daily basis. I was a reporter. Sure, it wasn’t fiction, but it was writing. I spent a lot of time on feature writing, learning how vivid descriptions and careful alliteration can make all the difference. Choosing the proper words, even for a town council story, helped me grow as a writer. Observing my fellow reporters, a few of whom had real talent (always the sports reporters, for some reason) and a great deal of whom couldn’t write worth a lick, also helped me. Many of the bloggers I read — most far better writers than I’ll ever be — haven’t had the luxury (if $8 an hour can be called a luxury) of being paid to write.

But a series of (much better-paying) editorial and web jobs since I left reporting meant that my writing went dormant. I’m not a fiction writer, as much as I may want to be, so I simply didn’t write for years. Anything. But this blog has made me realize I missed writing — even if the blog has been dormant for a while. I still don’t miss the reporter’s salary, but I miss writing. This is a new outlet for that process. I’m glad it’s here for me and all of the wonderful writers I enjoy on a daily basis.

Austen

I am an avid reader of National Geographic. When I was a kid I just went through each issue to look at the pictures and read the captions. As an adult, I almost obsessively read every article. Surprisingly, I generally find them all interesting, even if I had absolutely no interest in the subject to start with. An article in the March 2007 issue of National Geographic, “Orlando Beyond Disney”, had a section on mega-churches. When I read it, I was struck with an idea/concept about the America we live in.

I know there are few new ideas under the sun — generally the ideas have been around forever. The means to make them realities are usually what are lacking. I once read that in the Apollo program, the engineers had to create the tools to create the tools to build moon-shot-worthy equipment. So my thought was surely not new to the world, but it was new to me.

In the article, there was a photograph of people at worship in a huge church. When I saw that picture, I remarked to my wife about how few of the people looked happy. Now, it could have been the timing of the shot (people thinking about lunch, or work the next day or whatever), but I could see how attending a service with a few hundred or thousand other people could really be an impersonal experience. I am sure watching the preacher on a big-screen or projection TV is a real “fellowship” activity. I was struck by my idea then and there: Those churches are little more than big-box Christianity. Though those people were (hopefully) there for worship, they were just there to pick up a jumbo box of it, then get back home. The article even mentioned that the preacher has to watch the clock for parking lot traffic management. I mentioned this thought to my wife and wondered how long it would be before those churches just put in drive-through windows. Seriously, they could have an express lane with just a credit card slot for the tithe, and maybe just a “message of the day” pamphlet.

Now don’t get me wrong — I know Orlando mega-churches provide some much-needed community services, which the article expounded on. My point is those churches, like the Orlando area detailed in the article as an avatar of modern America, are indicative of our culture in general: “Get in, get out, fast — don’t talk to me, I do not want to know you.” That idea scares and saddens me — I participate in it, I enable it, and I loathe it.

Faulker (Austen’s husband)

A few years ago I was at a book festival and came across a novel — a prequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice — that was written as the diary of Mr. Darcy. I immediately scooped it up, but put it aside after only thirty pages when Mr. Darcy found himself in the company of a prostitute. My Mr. Darcy does not patronize prostitutes. It was then and there that I swore off sequels or prequels written by anyone other than the original author.

Contemporary retellings of classic novels, however, are a different matter. The matriarch of the chick lit explosion, Bridget Jones’ Diary, was based on Pride and Prejudice. Clueless, the nineties movie classic (if something from the 1990s counts as a classic) is a modern version of Emma. And Paula Morantz Cohen’s Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs is a rendering of Jane Austen’s Persuasion set in Westchester County. Protagonist Anne Ehrlich meets Ben Cutler, the love of her life, while she is a student at Columbia. Ben, a graduate of Queens College who works in a travel agency, isn’t quite what Winnie, the matriarch of Anne’s high-society family, has in mind for her granddaughter, so Anne breaks off the relationship.

Now thirteen years later, Anne is a high school guidance counselor and spends her days motivating students and managing their high-strung parents who will stop at nothing — including last-minute ADHD diagnoses and the hiring of professional “Ivy packagers” — to get their progeny into the right college. Ben again crosses Anne’s path when his nephew transfers to the high school where she works. A successful writer and publisher of a line of high-end travel guides, Ben is much more pleasing to Winnie, but he has come to Westchester with a fiancée in tow. Although the ending won’t come as a surprise, this is an enjoyable read, especially for fans of Austen. Cohen is able to channel Austen’s satirical touch, aiming it at the college admissions process rather than early nineteenth century social customs. And it is light-years better than any book that sends Mr. Darcy into the company of prostitutes.

Montgomery

Perhaps no one has put the spotlight on the publishing industry and its personalities more in recent memory than Judith Regan, the recently fired publisher of the now defunct Regan Books. Regan was scheduled to publish O. J. Simpson’s now infamous memoir/hypothetical confession If I Did It. After a public outrage and threats from bookstores not to carry the book, HarperCollins, the parent company of Regan Books, pulled the plug. Regan was fired shortly thereafter, after a tirade to one of the corporate lawyers that supposedly included several Jewish slurs. Gossip-column-style reports of the firing said that the Regan Books staff was called into a meeting where Regan’s dismissal was announced while she was sitting in her office wondering why her computer wouldn’t work. (The network had reportedly been shut down on purpose.)

Is everyone in publishing so theatrical? Having worked in publishing for five years — albeit stationed on the West Coast, 3,000 miles from the main action in New York — I can safely answer no. But you wouldn’t believe it after reading two recent novels about the industry: Bridie Clark’s Because She Can and Debra Ginsberg’s Blind Submission.The first is a boss-from-hell roman à clef about Judith Regan written by a former editor at Regan Books, and the second is a cross between assistant lit and a mystery loosely based on the Sandra Dijkstra agency in Del Mar, California, another diva of the publishing world.

In Clark’s Because She Can, Claire Truman goes to work for Vivian Grant, publisher of Grant Books, when her boss retires. Vivian Grant is the polar opposite of Claire’s first boss and mentor, Jackson Mayville, a mild-mannered editor of literary fiction who takes his red pen to published books and even a bit of graffiti scribbled on the side of a bus stop. Vivian is brash, famous for her obscenity-laced tirades, and only cares about a book’s sales potential, figuring someone can brush up the writing later. It is during these tirades that Clark’s writing is most engaging . . . and the steady stream of four-lettered words probably helps.

Like Regan, Vivian Grant publishes books aimed at the lowest common denominator, with such gems as Sex Ed, an account of a fourteen-year-old’s affair with his teacher; Naughty Habit, a memoir from a nun turned stripper; and a dieting book penned by Alexa Hanley, an anorexic Nicole Richie-type celebutante to be marketed to teenage girls. “You’ve got to come out of your ivory tower and think about books in a more commercial way, or you’re never going to find best sellers. Smut sells. Whether you like it or not, that’s what people want to read these days,” Vivian tells Claire after she pitches one too many literary novels for acquisition.

Vivian expects her staff to be on call 24/7. “Don’t give her your home phone number,” is one of the first pieces of advice Claire receives when she starts at Grant Books. The editorial director has even put a cot in his office and spends as many as five days without leaving the office. Of course, it’s good for the reader that Claire has to spend so much time in the office, because the plot outside those walls falls flat. Clark’s description of Claire’s love life feels compulsory: she is engaged to the man who is perfect on paper — rich, handsome, from an influential family — but finds herself drawn to one of her writers, a novelist named Luke Mayville who happens to be her former boss’s nephew. The ending is predictable as Claire struggles to free herself from Vivian’s death grip and regain some balance in her life, but it will satisfy fans of this kind of book.

Ginsberg’s Blind Submission starts out as a boss-from-hell story but takes a few twists to become a mystery. After the independent bookstore she works for closes, Angel Robinson takes a job at the Lucy Fiamma Literary Agency. Lucy is formidable; upon meeting Angel, she says “Surely that’s not your real name. You must have changed it, yes?” When Angel assures her that it is the name given to her at birth, Lucy advises, “Then maybe you ought to change it.” Lucy has already christened her assistant Kelly as Nora and insists she use the new name in the office. Like Vivian Grant, Lucy expects her employees to work around the clock, sending home piles and piles of manuscripts with them to be read before they return to the office the next day. Ginsberg works a lot of humor into the book proposals Angel reads — drawing, no doubt, on her own experience working in a literary agency — such as a cookbook proposal by a woman who claims her cat told her what ingredients to use in the recipes. Going one step further than Vivian Grant, Lucy outs one of her employees as actually being anorexic in the middle of a staff meeting when she asks her to work on a memoir by a diet book author who now suffers from the disease.

Life starts imitating art when a novel set in a literary agency is submitted anonymously, chapter by chapter. Slightly reversed from Angel’s story, the novel-within-the-novel features a manipulative assistant who is trying to undermine her boss. The plot twists become a messy tangle, and the ending seems a bit far-fetched as Angel frantically works to uncover the identity of the writer. Still, it is an entertaining view into the publishing world, and makes one feel ever so slightly more grateful for one’s job with a nice, normal boss.

Difficult though they may be, both Vivian and Lucy are brilliant and successful at what they do — as are their real-life counterparts. One is a blockbuster publisher who will any minute rise from the ashes, and the other runs the most successful literary agency on the West Coast. Still, one wonders if they couldn’t accomplish as much with a bit of a softer edge, as Claire wonders in Because She Can: “She was a genius. Vivian had a unique ability to see opportunities that others didn’t . . . and yet I’d never encountered anyone who exuded so much misery and anger. And that was the shame of it all. What if a woman as capable as Vivian was also able to treat her employees with some respect and decency? There’d be no stopping her.”

Montgomery