Picking up the mail yesterday I discovered that the perfect antidote to the paucity of Christmas cards is a royalties check.
When your book is published in November you watch as the lists of the year’s best books – which you don’t expect to be on because yours came out too late – are quickly followed by lists of the new year’s most anticipated books.
My essay in the current issue of The American Scholar prompted one reader to write: "I never thought I'd enjoy reading about Florida." No comment could have been more successful in telling me that the essay did what I wanted it to do.
Cord Jefferson was just on CBS Morning talking about his new film American Fiction. In it, a Black writer has his latest novel rejected because, according to his editor, it’s not Black enough. So he writes another, full of all the worst Black stereotypes, and not only does his editor love it, but it becomes a bestseller.
The CBS Morning hosts discussed with the director the movie’s themes of racism, and stereotyping, but none of them mentioned what I see as one of its most important critiques: the pernicious greed of American publishing.
But then I would.
I’m meeting friends for dinner tomorrow after the book fair and they were ready to make reservations for four until I told them Hania wasn’t coming. It would require her spending the entire day at the fair, and she finds gatherings of writers often pretentious.
I understand her. Just walking on a stage, or sitting at a dais, writers take on an air of superiority, like sages ready to enlighten the unwashed. It is the only time I feel like an imposter, looking down from my perch as the audience gathers. I know that many of them have higher IQs than I do, and often more knowledge. (Though the ones with really high IQs are probably off listening to somebody else.)
Writers by nature are riddled with self-doubt, but for many of them self-doubt vanishes when they become “authors.” Especially authors feted at a book fair and seated at a dais. When I’m in the act of writing, with all the self-doubt, I don’t question what I’m doing; I’ve been doing it so long that I now believe that it’s something (about the only thing) that I know how to do. But presenting what I’ve written, talking about it to an audience, is very different. I like what Kafka said: Before the work, the writer doesn’t exist. After the work, the writer is no longer there.
I was a fan of Frasier because of the smart writing and the deft depiction of the relationship between a working-class father and his more sophisticated offspring – a situation many people can relate to but rarely see presented in popular media. Also, it was the only TV show I ever saw that quoted Peter De Vries. Frasier and Miles are eating in a museum cafeteria and one asks the other: “Who was it who said ‘The food in museums is usually on a par with the murals in restaurants’?”
So of course last night I watched the first two episodes of the new Frasier. The first was silly and slapsticky, but the second seemed to get back to the old show’s strengths, this time with a sophisticated father and his Everyman son, who dropped out of Harvard and became a fireman. Per the old formula, they end up living together and there are predictable disagreements over home decoration. The son wants to display his glass cube containing dirt from Fenway Park. The father says it clashes with the piano. Relenting in the end, Frasier places it above the keyboard. “Fenway,” he says, “meet Steinway.”
As long as there are lines like that, I’ll keep watching.