There have been many tributes to Annie Dillard, the brilliant essayist who died on Tuesday. My favorite recalled that, when young people told her they wanted to be writers, she asked them, “Do you like sentences?” To me it was an obvious question, but apparently many people were taken aback by it.
Last week at my event at Books & Books in Coral Gables, during the Q&A, I got the most unexpected question I’d ever been asked. It was from my friend Javier. “I know you like Portugal a lot,” he said, “so what do you think of Fernando Pessoa’s comment that he hated to travel?”
After laughing loudly, I said that Pessoa was such an iconoclast, and fixture of Lisbon, that it was perfectly understandable.
The New York Times ran a story, which the Miami Herald republished, about Key West and how it has gotten too expensive for writers to live there. I’m now waiting for the Herald to do a story on how Key West has gotten too expensive for writers to visit.
An excellent essay Sunday in the NY Times Magazine on the cult of Anthony Bourdain. (The biopic Tony is now out, though it depicts just one formative summer in Provincetown.) The author of the essay, Aaron Timms, presents a sharp overview of Bourdain’s life – he describes his Hanoi dinner with Barack Obama as an “encounter of the high-liberal megafauna” – and offers a brilliant analysis of his lasting popularity, which, Timms claims, is based on our fascination with, and envy of, his transition “from a life of work to a life of play.” His post-kitchen vocation – writer, traveler, eater, TV star – “was still ‘a job’ in the strict sense,” Timms acknowledges, “but it had none of the drudgery of work as most people experience it.”
Travel writers, reading those words, could all relate. Though most of us get the envy without the adulation.
I watched Bill Maher receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a man who – whatever your feelings about him – adheres closer to the spirit of Twain, in his biting social commentary, than most of the previous recipients. Though he is, like all of them – with the exception of Neil Simon – primarily an entertainer. Looking over the list – Billy Crystal, Carol Burnett, Kevin Hart, Tina Fey – you wonder why there are no writers like Nora Ephron, Garrison Keillor, Roy Blount Jr., Dave Barry, David Sedaris, or even Fran Lebowitz who, like Twain, now makes a living as a public speaker.
The “By the Book” column in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review featured a writer I had never heard of citing authors I had never heard of. The book on her nightstand, the last great book she read, the book people might be surprised to find on her shelves, the book she would most like to see turned into a movie, the last book that made her laugh, the last book that made her cry, the last book that made her furious – they were all written by people unknown to me. Even the three guests at her imaginary literary dinner party were writers I was unfamiliar with.
My first thought, as a fairly well-read citizen, was that there is an enormous population of writers these days. Fran Lebowitz has complained that there are way too many books being published. The problem, as she sees it, is that young people have been taught self-esteem, which leads them to believe they have something to say.
I tend to agree with her, though it’s hard for someone who writes books that get published (most of them) to admit that there are too many books in the world. On the other hand, the thought occurred to me that the author the Book Review interviewed was simply taking advantage of the opportunity to give her friends some needed publicity.