There’s a fashion on social media now for authors to film themselves eagerly opening the just arrived box containing their new books. I'm not a fan of the self-congratulatory display (I’d dislike it even more if I were still searching for a publisher), and I also question the emotion. I’m familiar with the thrill of seeing one’s new book for the first time, but for me it’s coupled with the dread of opening that book and finding a typo. Often, I don’t open it. I let it sit around, sometimes for days. Eventually I crack the spine, bravely glance at a few pages, then a few more. So my cartoon shows a man looking at his smartphone and saying to his wife: “Instead of a video of an author opening a box of his new books I’d like to see a video of an author opening his new book and finding a typo.” The expression of surprise would be much more authentic.
For St. Patrick’s Day, Books & Books posted a quote from Oscar Wilde: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
These lines also appear in my memoir, along with the ones that precede them, which I discovered in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland, in 1978. “With the abolition of private property, then,” Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.”
When I finished, I put the book back and headed out into the drab, unhappy streets of Warsaw.
Got home last night from the Key West Literary Seminar. It was my third time at the annual seminar – the first was in 1991 – and I invariably thought of the writers I saw, in some cases met (I covered that first one for the Sun-Sentinel), who are no longer with us: Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Barry Lopez. Walking past St. Paul’s Episcopal Church I remembered the morning I ran into Jan Morris doing her power walk down Duval Street.
The writers at this year’s seminar were younger, for the most part, far from the realm of literary lions. (One had published only one book, another peppered her sentences with the word “like.”) Dave Barry, a rare elder statesman, walked to the lectern and said: “Hello. I’m Dave Barry. If you don’t know who I am, I’m a famous author.”
It was a funny line that also said something about the position writers hold in contemporary society. (A 20-something volunteer from Miami told me she’d never heard of Dave Barry – but her mother had. Though she was a fan of Campbell McGrath.) When Styron’s picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, most Americans knew who he was. Should Lauren Groff’s visage ever appear on that cover, the majority of readers will be clueless. But then most Americans no longer see Time.
I watched the Tony Awards last night, in their entirety, on my JetBlue flight home from New York City, where I had seen two of the plays with nominations: Leopoldstadt and Summer 1976. I was happy to see the first win Best Play, in large part because it meant hearing from Tom Stoppard, whose remarks were as sharp, astute, and measured as the dialogues in his plays.
Yesterday I was at an event and a friend introduced me to her friend as a “journalist.”
Even when I worked for the Sun-Sentinel, I didn’t like being called a journalist. I was not a reporter; I didn’t cover the news; I wrote long, evocative, (ideally) timeless stories about the places I traveled to.
“More of a writer,” I corrected my friend.
“I don’t know the difference,” my friend said, a little abashed.
I didn’t want to get into a long discussion, nor to sound boastful.
“Journalists have jobs,” I said, sounding, I hoped, the opposite of pompous. “Writers freelance.”
Paul Theroux is 82 today and, no doubt, working on his next book.