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.”
One of the tributes on the Vineyard Gazette website to Tony Horwitz, who died Monday two weeks shy of his 61st birthday, called him “one of the most astute and interesting storytellers of our time.” It is a description to which every travel writer, indeed every nonfiction writer, should aspire.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from someone at The Steinbeck Review expressing interest in reviewing The Joys of Travel. I slipped a paperback copy into a padded envelope and drove it to the post office.
A few days later an email appeared telling me that the book had arrived and asking if it contained any Steinbeck references. (Odd time to ask, I thought.) I wrote back that the chapter on Movement includes a mention of Travels with Charley with, I added to prepare him, “a slight, joking dig at the author.” I didn’t say that I list the four great American road books – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – and note that Kerouac’s approach is sometimes described as novelistic but it was Steinbeck who made up many of the encounters that he wrote about. (This was discovered a number of years ago by a journalist who had innocently set off to trace the great writer’s route.) “As someone who finds Travels with Charley depressingly short on dialogue,” I write in the book, “I almost wish he had fabricated more.”
Yesterday I got an email informing me that my book would not be reviewed because it doesn’t contain enough about Steinbeck.
Last Saturday at Books & Books Pico Iyer, after presenting his new book, Autumn Light, spoke critically of his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, noting that he had written it quickly and claiming that, as a result, it didn’t have a lasting effect on readers. (I would disagree with that assessment.) But it is common for writers to dismiss their early efforts. Back at the bookstore last Thursday, I heard four young writers present their first novels and, during the question and answer period, I was tempted to ask them if they could imagine a time when they would look back with dismay at the book they had just read with such pleasure from.