I spent most of yesterday writing an essay. An essay! Earlier in the week I’d been busy with other things – letters, queries, research, World Cup – and felt guilty for not writing. Yesterday, struggling to get out eight hundred words, I felt guilty writing.
Writing used to be such a worthwhile endeavor, the essay a very noble form. Lamb, Emerson, Chesterton, White. But who has the time to muse these days, and who has the inclination to care about anybody else’s musings? It seems ridiculous, self-centered, unproductive to labor over a lead in the 21st century, to try to put complex thoughts into words. In the time it took me to write one paragraph I could have sent a hundred tweets. The wordsmith is going the way of the blacksmith in our new techno-video-info-mundo.
I've always liked Andy Roddick. Not his tennis - that herky-jerky power game - but his dealings with the media, which are generally free of cliches and often quite funny.
But Monday, during his press conference after his loss to Yen-Hsun Lu, his usually refreshing bluntness turned caustic. When a reporter asked about his serve, he fired back in a harsh, scolding tone that the problem had been his return of serve. He lashed out at another who asked him to speculate on how he might feel when he woke up the next morning. Like a bitter, frustrated schoolmaster, he looked out over the assembled writers and mocked them for not being able to come up with anything better than that.
Of course he was transferring his criticism of his own performance onto theirs. But it was still absurd, a man who hits a fuzzy ball for a living abusing people who work with their brains. An athlete can create beauty, but because it's physical, it's evanescent; a writer's aesthetic triumphs live forever. I hope the tennis writers told themselves that as they filed, chastised, out of the press room.
I spent the weekend traveling with three journalists, one of whom was rarely seen without her BlackBerry. She texted and tweeted constantly: during bus rides, during meals, during concerts.
Forget taking time to reflect on your experience; she was so busy expressing herself that she wasn't able to have an experience. Much of the city passed by her unnoticed, so focused was she on her toy keyboard. One morning one of the other journalists said to her: "I know you're on your second cup of coffee from reading Facebook," and I couldn't decide who was the more lame: she for writing that news bulletin or he for reading it.
The more time passed, the more annoyed I became with her. It wasn't just the rudeness, preferring communication with imagined readers to interaction with the people around her. It was the aura of industriousness that she created. Tapping away on the bus, while the rest of us gazed out the window, she looked like the diligent one. She made me feel idle, observing and taking mental notes of the city while she sent off inconsequential tweets.
And even if I was idle, at least I was keeping it to myself.
The news of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is too painful to read, so instead I'm dipping into one of my favorite books about the region, Frederick Turner's A Border of Blue.
In the early 1990s, Turner traveled the Gulf's rim - from Key West to the Yucatan - and produced a beautiful travel book. Unlike some travel writers, he didn't depend solely on chance encounters; he sought out knowledgeable locals like Robert Davis, the creator of Seaside on the Florida Panhandle, and Barry Ancelet, the authority on all things Cajun.
On the Mississippi coast Turner wrote that he felt none of the "profound and unrelieved sorrow" he tended to associate with the state:
Partly, it was the presence of the water, which always offers at least the illusion of freedom or escape. With the wind blowing in off a wide, watery expanse whose horizon is apparently limitless, it is possible to believe that fate may be avoided and that if need be you can change your circumstances.
Of course, he hadn't imagined fate coming, inexorably, in the form of black water.
One of the most difficult aspects of freelancing is coming up with ideas - especially for travel stories. I can understand a magazine's reluctance to send me somewhere not knowing what I'll write, but how do I know what I'll write until I've been there?
When I was my own editor, I'd pick a place and find my story once I got there. This made it challenging, but it introduced an element of surprise and, I think, verisimilitude. If you go somewhere with an idea in mind, that's what you focus on, blocking out other, often more important stories. Also, you may uncover a lot, but it's in service to a story that's already been written (which is how you learned of it in the first place).
I used to arrive in places unbound by expectations. That's how I found the Cajun Woody Allen in Lafayette, Louisiana; the Dubrovnik sculptor known as Pero Limunada (because he once ran a lemonade stand); the beautiful young woman in Penang whose goal in life was to "upgrade" her husband. No one had written about these people, at least not in English, and I felt a real sense of discovery that gave my stories, I thought, a certain freshness. Now, journeys have to be plotted and planned, objectives stated, sources given, scenes sketched out before they happen. It robs travel of one of its most lauded features (serendipity) and makes it just another predictable, programmed activity. Is this why travel writing is suffering?
Last night I was breezing through The New Yorker - skipped over Shouts & Murmurs, flipped right past the piece on graduation gifts, ditto the stories on the Mexican drug cartel and Danica Patrick - when I came to a screeching halt in front of an appreciation of Somerset Maugham. Once an English major, always an English major.