Category: writing
I was amused to hear on NPR yesterday that The New Yorker online had asked people for words that should be eliminated from the language. The winner, oddly, was "slacks."
A word that needs to be silenced should be one that is used frequently, and when was the last time you heard anyone - especially anyone under the age of 50 - refer to pants as slacks? My choice, as faithful readers of this blog will know, would have been what's in a pair of pants, namely "butt."
My amusement was caused by the fact that the longtime editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, had a number of words he would not allow to appear in its pages. As a mnemonic device, staff writers came up with the following sentence, which I read to every writing class I teach (as an example of the power of words to annoy):
"Intrigued by the massive smarts of the balding, feisty, prestigious, workaholic tycoon, Tom Wolfe promptly spat on the quality photo above the urinal and tried to locate his gadget."
Recently in the New York Times Book Review, Geoff Dyer complained about the ubiquity of the word "tireless," and wondered if it was unique as a single-word cliché.
I immediately thought of travel writing, where there are a number of words that, through overuse, have become cliches. Most are adjectives: magical, mystical, charming, exotic. But there is at least one verb: nestled. And there are a handful of nouns: adventure (people rarely write about trips anymore; every excursion outside of town is invariably an "adventure"), wonders and – the most irresistible of all – paradise. I thought its days were numbered after National Geographic Traveler used it on its cover story about Bali the same month as the Kuta Beach bombings. But "paradise" made a speedy recovery and now appears in almost any story about a place where palm trees grow.
I had lunch yesterday with a former freelancer who was visiting from Chicago. In his 20s Steve traveled around South America and sent me funny stories about his adventures.
He told me that he was thinking of gathering these stories into an ebook. We talked about how technology has democratized the publishing business, but agreed that now, with so many voices in the marketplace, it's the loud ones that tend to get heard. Humility and subtlety have a tough time.
"I can be obnoxious," Steve admitted. "But I can't sustain it."
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.