It was a perfect weekend for the Miami Book Fair. On Saturday morning, David Kirby – following two poets not from the School of Uplift – read a poem about gratitude that listed the many things he is grateful for. Afterwards, his book The Winter Dance Party, was nowhere to be found, something for which he was clearly not grateful. But, unfazed, he said he would tell people it had sold out.
Kirby’s old friend Billy Collins read shortly after in the frigid auditorium. Among the poems were some very short ones, like “3 AM.”
My hand is asleep.
At least it’s a start.
During the Q&A, a teacher of writing asked for some tips. Collins told her to get the students to read, admitting that that is difficult these days. Young people don’t read books, he posited, because they don’t want to be alone. With their phones they never are.
The teacher specifically asked about novels, and Collins said that poetry and fiction are “two different countries.” He added that “being a poet doesn’t require any interest in other people,” while novelists need to look into other people’s lives.
Yesterday, I went to hear Charles Bock, Priyanka Mattoo, and Carvell Wallace. In an interesting twist, Wallace read an excerpt from Mattoo’s memoir and Mattoo read an excerpt from Wallace’s. This worked surprisingly well, considering that Wallace’s memoir is about growing up Black and queer, and Mattoo’s is about her family’s exile from Kashmir. She said that she had never written anything (besides screenplays) before she sat down to write her memoir, excerpts of which were subsequently published in the New York Times and The New Yorker.
Following them were Eric Weiner, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Shalom Auslander. Handler said that he carries a notebook with him wherever he goes; not a fancy leather notebook – he noted the Moleskin trailer outside at the street fair – but a cheap spiral notebook. I dug in my bookbag and retrieved the green memo notebook I had bought at Walgreen’s. An elegant notebook, he said, would make him feel even more pretentious than he already did taking notes.
Like many good writers, they had been precocious readers when young. Handler told of picking up Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal at the town library when he was a boy. Auslander said that, around the age of 16, he walked into Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan and asked the salesclerk if they had anything funny. The man gave him a book by Kafka. He enjoyed it so much that he returned and asked if they had anything else that was funny. The man gave him Beckett.
When I was a travel editor, writing a bi-weekly column, one of the ideas I kept in my back pocket was a column imagining a chance meeting, in some foreign backwater, between Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves. The two most famous American travelers presented an interesting contrast in styles, not unlike Goofus and Gallant, and I thought an invented conversation between them might make for an amusing column.
I was reminded of that unwritten column while reading Ann Patchett’s essay in Sunday’s New York Times. It was about email, and like many of the Patchett essays I’ve read, it illuminated her enviable life: a highly successful author – one of email’s benefits, she says, is that it brings her unexpected writing assignments – surrounded by love. She loves her neighbors, she writes, and she loves her sister, who loves her back; she enjoys “the warmth of husband and dog.” She is blessed, as not that many writers – or, for that matter, people – are, and she is appreciative of her blessings.
So l like to imagine a meeting, at some secluded writers’ retreat, between Ann Patchett and Annie Ernaux.
In the same column, David Hare said that he was applying for French citizenship - his wife is French - and that it required taking a test to gauge his knowledge of the language. He responded that they might think him arrogant, but the last time he had sat down to take a test was in 1968 and he could not bring himself to do it again. The consular officer replied: “Don’t worry, a certain arrogance isn’t a bad qualification for French citizenship.”
A standard question in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author interview is: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Most writers play along; a few dodge the question by claiming they don’t cook or like to socialize. Yesterday, Joy Williams wrote: “This is not a time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” She went on for another couple sentences.
Now I’m awaiting the writer who, when asked by the Times which three writers they’d invite to a literary dinner party, responds, “Not Joy Williams.”
I’m off to Poland tonight – will be back here the middle of August.
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.