A couple months ago I received an email from a Facebook friend I've never met announcing the publication of her new book and listing the various ways that I - and all her other friends - could help her promote it. The result, at least on my end, was this piece that appeared yesterday on Literary Hub: https://lithub.com/herman-melville-how-to-promote-your-future-classic-about-whales/
When I teach travel writing, and get to the all-important ending, I always refer students to Sue Hubbell’s New Yorker story, “The Great American Pie Expedition.” After eating pies throughout the eastern United States, the author arrives in Oklahoma, where she is pulled over by a state trooper for speeding. Knowing the profession’s fondness for the quintessentially American dessert, and hoping to make the most of a bad situation, she asks the officer if he can recommend a good place for pie. “Sorry ma’am,” he tells her, in a line that closes out the story, “but you’re in cobbler country now.”
I was happy to see that yesterday’s New York Times honored the writer with an obituary, and delighted that it mentioned cobbler country.
The article in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review on the Nobel Prize for Literature – which is not being given this year because of a sex abuse scandal within the Swedish Academy – cited Clive James as a worthy if unlikely recipient. Unlikely because he’s very funny. (The members of the academy may be into sex but – judging from past awardees – they’re not into humor.) Then this passage of James' was cited:
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”
Which makes one wonder if it’s worth bringing the prize back at all.
About the only good that might come out of Florence is a story on hurricanes by David Sedaris.
I discovered V.S. Naipaul in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland. The book, A House for Mr. Biswas, would have dazzled me anywhere, but reading lush descriptions of Trinidad in Cold War Warsaw ensured it was a novel I would never forget. The author, through his evocative writing and colorful characters, seemed to be a kind of Dickens of the Caribbean.
Returning to the States, I discovered his travel writing, beginning with The Middle Passage. Naipaul was part of that great British tradition of novelists who also wrote travel books, but he brought to it a new perspective: that of the colonized instead of the colonizer. This didn’t make him any softer on his subjects, as his books on India demonstrate. But wherever he went – including the American South – he brought his piercing intelligence and moral imagination.
When I became a travel editor in South Florida, Trinidad was the one place in the Caribbean I wanted to visit. Port-of-Spain’s Carnival gave me a pretext, and I went to observe it in 1995. On Ash Wednesday, I made the pilgrimage to the Naipaul house in St. James, and then the Queen’s Royal College that he and his brother Shiva had attended.
“Slabs of late afternoon sunlight filtered through tall jalousied windows; three plain chandeliers swayed high above a sea of wooden desks. Printed atop a side wall was the long list – going back to the turn of the century – of scholarship winners. Next to the year '1948' appeared the name 'V.S. Naipaul.' It glowered like an admonishment to work and learn and escape your small, ragamuffin world.”