Category: writing
Yesterday I had coffee with a freelancer friend who is younger than me and his a wife and two kids. To support his family he has been editing books for iUniverse. "They're terrible," he told me.
His one steady freelancing gig is writing up interviews he does with people about their personal fitness training. His most recent subject was one of the women from Jersey Shore.
"Tom," he said to me plaintively, "when I was in j-school this wasn't what I imagined myself doing."
Yesterday I drove down to Miami to tape an interview with Joseph Cooper at WLRN. (It will air on March 27th). The subject was my essay in the current issue of The Missouri Review about Palermo and the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo.
I am indebted to literary quarterlies for their interest. My first travel story, about the Tatra Mountains, appeared in The North American Review in 1981. Later that decade I published essays - on Warsaw and Madrid - in The American Scholar. These magazines provided - and continue to provide - a home for travel writing that travel magazines won't publish. There is much to be said for publications that aren't dependent on advertising.
The only problem is that fewer people read quarterlies than read glossy magazines, and so travel writing gets a frivolous, boosterish reputation. Not long ago I read excerpts from my Missouri Review essay at a writers' conference. The man who introduced me mentioned my books and then, instead of citing awards and praise (as he had with the poet and the novelist who had preceded me), he said: "The thing about Tom is, he's a great person to talk to about travel. He gets so enthusiastic about places." It was with immense pleasure that I got up and read about the worst slum in Palermo.
I'm a blogger, not a student of blogging. So I have no idea why my post about a brief encounter in the gym got more traffic than anything I've written in months. Are there more people searching for "equine dentistry" than are looking for mentions of Alec Baldwin?
I usually don't blog about my blogs (the form seems self-referential enough) but I'm also confused as to why people think spam comments will advance their interests. The first three, as of a few minutes ago, seemed to span the spectrum of the genre: insulting ("You just copied someone else's story" - this after a blog post about a tie that's been out of fashion for over half a century); complimentary ("Subscribed to your blog, thanks."); and nonsensical ("Really worthwhile article. Pay attention.")
I used to delete the spam, but it now infiltrates the comments in such high volume that I can no longer keep up with it. So if you ever have something to say - and I hope you will - just send it to me in an e-mail and I'll print it in the blog. And then I will be just copying someone else's writing.
Christmas Eve we were sitting around our neighbors' table when conversation turned to the subject of citizenship. (Our neighbors are French.) I mentioned the replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in the lobby of the Oakland Park office next to a vending machine for junk food and one for sodas. Because I'd blogged about this, I already had my punch line, which I casually tossed off as if I'd just thought of it. The plodding writer as witty conversationalist.
And immediately I thought of the character in the Peter de Vries novel who, before a dinner party, gives his wife lines that he has already come up with brilliant ripostes to, with the instruction that she feed him the lines throughout the meal. He called this "prepartee."
Resorting to blog-enabled prepartee didn't give me pause; rather it gave me pleasure, in part because the digital age has not been kind to de Vries, one of America's great humorists who once said that he loved writing, what he couldn't stand was the paperwork.
Last night I read a remarkable short story, "Bright Goddess At Your Rising," by Jack Roberts (http://casgroup.fiu.edu/pages/docs/105/1321985821_Conference_Anthology.pdf) in which one of the characters is described as "more thought-free than free-thinking."