Last weekend I was in a place where I depended on trains and subways to get around, and waiting on platforms I noticed the large number of people glued to smartphones. It looked as though, as a society, we have become the opposite of Henry James' ideal of "someone on whom nothing is lost." On us, everything is lost. As a travel writer, I saw this in a positive light. For years now people have been saying there's no longer any need for travel writers because everyone has been everywhere. But, increasingly, they're not seeing what's around them.
A bottle of wine stood on the counter before my reading in Key West on Friday, but just in case one woman brought her own wine in a glass jar.
Public speaking is a bit like figure skating: You perform solo before a live audience a routine that you've worked on repeatedly in private. In the course of your performance you may leave out a few things that no spectators know about (happily, there are no judges or announcers in public speaking) and you win the sympathy of people who, for the most part, are glad it's not them up there in the spotlight.
The similarities became clear to me Friday at Books & Books as I neared the end of my talk. I had chosen to talk about my book, rather than read from it, which is the authorial equivalent of figure eights - following pre-set lines. When I go to readings I always prefer to hear the authors speak. I can read what they've written; I want to hear what they have to say. ("Never read at a reading," Julian Barnes once told a fellow writer. "People would rather hear what you had for breakfast.")
There are writers who are not comfortable speaking in public; it's part of why they became writers. So they use their written words as crutches. Over the years, I've gotten to enjoy public speaking. As I wrapped up Friday, it was with the joyful feeling that I had delivered my talk more or less as I had practiced it - only this time some of the lines had been punctuated by laughter. I was almost sorry that there were no judges.
Speaking of actors, tomorrow morning I'm off to Los Angeles, where they may be temporarily outnumbered by writers. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs is holding its annual conference downtown, an event that draws over 10,000 people in the writing biz. Though I doubt that any of them will appear on Jimmy Kimmel.
Will be back here on Tuesday.
Last week I noticed that Evelyn Waugh was trending - odd, I thought, for a man who died in 1966 - and then I discovered that it was because he had landed on Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Popular Female Writers.
It made me wonder if college English professors have stopped teaching the brilliant novelist, essayist, and travel writer because of all the trigger warnings that would have to be employed in this delicate and, consequently, benighted (not to mention humorless) age. If that is the case, students are missing out on the pleasures of reading one of the greatest - and funniest - prose stylists ever to pick up a pen, all because of political correctness.
Everybody has a book in them, the old saying goes, and in most cases that's exactly where it should stay. Yet at the San Miguel Writers' Conference last week, which was full of aspiring writers, I kept running into people with interesting stories to tell: the Australian woman who walked the camino de Santiago with the ashes of her son, the Canadian pilot who built his own plane, the Mexican acupuncturist who is also a poet, the woman who wrote about growing up in Teheran during the revolution, the American grandmother who lived for two years in Mali, the woman from Little Rock who used to babysit Chelsea Clinton, the young psychotherapist from Texas who grew up on a cattle ranch. "Yea," she said casually, "I know how to castrate a bull."