I had a dream that I was at a small book fair with P.J. O’Rourke. I asked him for suggestions on where to send my memoir, forgetting to mention that he appears in it.
I haven’t read American Dirt – I read Paul Theroux’s empathetic (and true) On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – but it seems to me that when we start telling authors what they can and cannot write about we’ve entered the old world of the Soviet Union.
Yesterday at the Miami Book Fair I listened to an impassioned defense of immigrants from Suketu Mehta and then heard two Florida poets – English professor David Kirby and cattle rancher Sean Sexton – deal with truth and beauty.
Yesterday I received an email from an editor I have submitted to (without success) telling me how I can pre-order his book, write a review, follow him on social media, and listen to a podcast and a TED talk he gave. The book, he noted, is about “how the internet broke our democracy.”
Halfway through the message he acknowledged the irony, adding “but we live in a fallen world.”
Perhaps, but clearly some people's worlds are less fallen than others'.
Reading The New Yorker yesterday evening I learned of the death of James Atlas. The Talk of the Town tribute spoke mainly about his life as a biographer – his exhaustive study of the life and work of Saul Bellow sent me back a few summers ago to the great writer’s novels – but also mentioned his “bawdy wit.” Many years ago Atlas spoke at the Miami Book Fair and mentioned that, as a young writer in New York, he often went with friends to poetry readings. After a number of these, he said, his six favorite words in the English language became, “And now for my last poem.”