Before reading from his memoir at the Miami Book Fair on Saturday, Peter Godwin explained the difference between memoir and autobiography. With autobiography, he said, you’re like the news reporter on TV: The camera is focused on you, and wherever you move, the camera moves with you. With memoir, you’re behind the camera, moving it wherever you wish.
There can be no better illustration of the disdain editors now have for travel writing than the appearance in the New York Times Magazine’s special Voyages issue of a story about a three-day retreat in an all-dark room.
The Oct. 20 New Yorker features a dog on the cover, about to do a cannonball into a pile of leaves, and more stories inside than I have read in a single issue in a long time. There is an entertaining appreciation by Anthony Lane of the half-forgotten poet Violet Ranney Lang and a typically thorough (i.e. long) profile of Zohran Mamdani. I even read the fiction, a quiet but strangely compelling story about a friendship between two writers. The two things I usually enjoy, “Shouts & Murmurs” and “Takes” – in which a current writer pays homage to a classic from the past – I found unmemorable. The article that really interested me was the review of the new biography of Peter Matthiessen. Best known for The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen held his novels in higher esteem. “Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet,” he's quoted as telling the Paris Review. “It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture.”
I read a lot of articles about AI but only articles written by writers, as its employment by members of my tribe is what interests as well as disturbs me. I understand why, at universities, students are thrilled with the technology (at least the non-English majors). And in the professional world, it’s clear why people who find writing difficult are also embracing it.
Writers find writing difficult; Thomas Mann said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” But we take great satisfaction in capturing a thought, or a feeling, or a moment in words; we feel like a pitcher who hits all the corners with his impressive arsenal of pitches. The writers I’ve read on AI all praise its capabilities, and say they use it for things like planning, even critiquing (which apparently includes a great deal of flattery), but not for writing. The ones who use it for writing are probably not writing about it.
Though in a recent article, one writer admitted that he had been having trouble, in another piece, with his ending. After he came up with one, he asked ChatGPT for some other endings, a few of which, the writer confessed, were better than his own. But to use them, it seems to me, would have been the same as plagiarism, which is one of the cardinal sins of writing. I have never been tempted to plagiarize – for ethical as well as egotistical reasons. Why use someone else’s words when I can come up with better ones? Will my thinking change with ChatGPT? I doubt it. Even if its writing is superior to mine – it won’t be mine. And the primary pleasure of writing – giving meaningful expression to personal experience – will disappear.
I wrote for Literary Hub about the surprising connections between writers and tennis players (just in time for the U.S Open finals): https://lithub.com/failing-better-on-the-tennis-player-and-the-writer/
The funicular accident that killed 17 people in Lisbon yesterday hit home for me. Lisbon is one of my favorite cities, the one, I always say, in which I became a travel writer. In 1989 it was the last stop on an Iberian tour that was my first assignment as a newspaper travel editor. In Madrid, Barcelona, Seville I had had the typical tourist experiences, moments that would do nothing to distinguish my story from those of other travel writers. In Lisbon, I called a friend of a friend, a poet, and spent a long evening with him and his girlfriend that ended in a dive listening to fado music. “It smells of Lisbon,” Casimiro translated one song for me, “it smells of flowers and the sea.” That night I discovered the secret of travel writing: you experience, as best you can, in the short time allotted you, the life of a local.
A few years ago I returned to Lisbon, this time with Hania, and stayed in an Airbnb just steps from the funicular.