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.
As someone who takes the occasional nap, I was pleased to read in A.N. Wilson's memoir Confessions that V.S. Naipaul slept 15 hours a day.
Fran Lebowitz spoke at the Boca Festival of the Arts yesterday evening, answering questions posed by a host followed by questions posed by members of the audience. The former noted that Lebowitz sometimes takes her act abroad, and asked her what the rest of the world makes of us Americans. Lebowitz said that everyone in England asked her if we were going to have a Civil War. “No,” she told them, “we’re not that organized.”
After answering a question about what she was reading, she asked the host, “Are you still allowed to have books here?”
On her financial situation: “I have friends who say, ‘My father died and left me the house on the lake.’ Or ‘My father died and left me an apartment on West 63rd Street.’ My father died and left me my mother.”
She grew up in Morristown, NJ, and had a very happy childhood. Kids back then – the 1950s – were allowed to run wild. She also had a library card. At the beginning, she didn’t realize that people wrote books. She thought that books were like trees. When she learned the truth, she decided immediately she wanted to be a writer. “Writing a book is one of the greatest things a human being can do.” Later, she said, “To me, a book is the closest thing to a human being. I know people think a dog is but I don’t. When I see a book in the trash, I want to call 911. ‘There’s a book in the trash!’”
She never liked Andy Warhol. But he had a magazine, Interview, that she wanted to write for. One day in February, 1987, a friend called her with the news that Warhol had died. “I sat up in bed and thought: ‘I just sold all my Warhols. For nothing. I think that’s why he died.” Of his work, she said, “The more you look at it the less there is to see.”
She said that people don’t read correctly these days, and blamed Oprah Winfrey, who, she admitted (obligingly), was wonderful, and had made a lot of money for authors. “Though not for me.” But Winfrey had taught people to identify with characters. “People say they love a book because they see themselves in it. A book is not a mirror. It is a window. You need to make your world bigger, not smaller. Reading is an escape – an escape from the smallness of being one person.”
Most of the people who lined up to ask questions were millennials, with a few perhaps from Generations X and Z, though, like Lebowitz, I have a hard time distinguishing among the three.