In the just over two years since his tragic death, Bourdain has taken on a near-mythic stature as an emissary for food culture, an individual whose far-flung televised travelogues evolved over time from carousing misadventures into full-blown celebrations of genuine cultural exchange. By the time of his death, Bourdain had played a pivotal role in the mainstreaming and democratization of food culture, essentially bulldozing centuries-old elitist notions of fine dining by dint of his fierce advocacy and boundless enthusiasm. Bourdain’s overarching hypothesis—that political and social inequality could be both better understood and significantly redressed through an investigation of what and how we eat—has become so widely accepted that it can be strange to reflect that just two decades previous these ideas were largely alien. His big move from workaday chef to revolutionary frontiersman began in earnest 20 years ago, and the journey it would take him and his audience on was breathtaking.
Literature is full of weird afterlives. Franz Kafka died in 1924 believing that his manuscripts would be burnt. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) was originally a flop. But the 1960s embrace of Hesse ranks with the weirdest of them all. He never visited the United States. He didn’t speak Englisch. His only drug was red wine. But by 1968, as Der Spiegel observed, the hippies had pulled this fading writer ‘out of the doldrums’. Hesse went on to become the bestselling German author of the 20th century, and sits below only the Brothers Grimm and Karl Marx as the most translated German writer of recent decades.
Perhaps because I spend a lot of time listening to people with crazy opinions, I am sympathetic to the view that the only way to live a healthy intellectual life is to expose oneself constantly to weird or detestable opinions. But I never sign petitions or open letters. I told the letter’s organizers that if I have something to say, I will write my own damn letter. Open letters are terrible, and you should never write one or sign one.
Here are reasons why the genre of open letters should die.
“A Good Family” is a lively suspense diversion that provides the eternally welcome assurance that nobody has it all, at least not forever.
I am bathing again, burying my face
into the great nations of moss.