Knicks Fever; the joys and horrors of English Food; Old books in Cambridge and London
Reading, Watching 06.07.26
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
First off, I have to address a small controversy.—
I apparently caused a little bit of an upset online due to my teasing comments about English food. I’d theorized that the British people actually enjoy eating bad food: that it’s in keeping with their national character to shun sumptuousness and prefer modesty, and also to show their grit by getting down what others find inedible. This is surely due to some nostalgia for the sacrificing spirit of the War. But I will also remind you that sadomasochism was once known on the Continent as “the English vice” or “the English disease.” I qualified this immediately by saying I knew that there was a lot of great food available in the UK, especially in London, and that I am aware that British cuisine is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with talented chefs using top-shelf ingredients and putting imaginative spins on pub classics. The thing is, I actually like a lot of British food: I am one of the few Americans who enjoys a full English breakfast, beans and all. A sandwich that’s just bacon on a roll seems rational to me, if in a slightly infantile way. And, of course, there is terrific ethnic food here: I had two of the best Indian meals of my life on this trip—and not in London. I found unassuming pubs in Cambridge with gourmet menus. On Friday, at St. John Bread and Wine in the East End, I had a lunch that consisted of Welsh Rarebit, cod roe with fried potatoes, rabbit offal and lentils, crispy pig’s skin with sorrel and chicory, and finally roast lamb with vegetables in the style of a “Sunday Roast.” It was all delicious. But be that as it may, I’ve also eaten absolutely disgusting and flavorless things on my trips here. I had something called “field mushrooms on toast” at one of the most charming-looking pubs I’d ever been to in London that looked like something that came out of the Exxon Valdez disaster and tasted like it, too. I stared in astonishment at a breakfast sandwich consisting of egg, bacon, and sausage, which somehow managed to have no flavor. Usually, breakfast meats, even at their lowest quality, deliver the cheap satisfactions of salt and savory, but I’ve bitten into bits of bacon here that seemed to have been boiled at length to remove any hint of seasoning. The relationship of British cooks to salt in general is curious: it is totally absent and, then, suddenly, delivered in overpowering concentrations. So, I submit that, yes, while British food has improved a lot, and the British are generally pretty adventurous and cosmopolitan eaters, they do revert, from time to time, at least, to their old, vile comforts.
Also, for what it’s worth, my remarks were meant to be in good fun.
All of New York thrums with Knicks fever. I recommend two essays: one by Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker on the excitement of these Knicks—
I admit it: I do feel a kind of nativist, automatic kinship with whoever’s wearing the blue and orange, something to do with my everlasting allegiance to the city-state of New York. I try (and, just ask around, often fail) in life to restrain my judgments and act fairly and think before I speak; when the Knicks are on, playing prettily or not, I am a foulmouthed partisan, pumping my fist and pacing the living room, issuing imprecations at the team’s opponents (in the privacy of my home, I speak about the Philadelphia 76ers’ center Joel Embiid in ways that should embarrass me, but don’t), or at whichever Knick is playing poorly and souring my mood. My connoisseurship plays second fiddle to my status as a member of the clan.
—and one in a more elegiac mode by Thomas Beller from several years ago in the same publication about Latrell Sprewell, troubled star of the last Knicks team to reach the Finals:
Using a word as nebulous as “tone” when assessing a basketball player is almost heretical these days. It’s the era of analytics, moneyball, and basketball conferences at M.I.T. I’m confident that the numbers would bear out my claim about Latrell’s significance, at least to a point. But what makes me love him goes beyond basketball.
There was something about Latrell that was from another time. It’s not so much that he had an old soul. It’s more that his game, and especially his game face, was Old Testament. There was something harsh and unforgiving about him. He had a face that had seen the plagues and the Red Sea part. He was leading the Knicks out of the desert.
I somehow got on the subject of Sprewell with the author Scott Spencer, who told me that he had pitched Sprewell as a subject to Jann Wenner back when Sprewell was a Knick. He said that Wenner lowered his forehead to his hand and said, “You’re the fourth middle-aged Jew who has pitched Sprewell to me this week.
