If I am ever interviewed by James Lipton I will tell him without hesitation that my least favorite word is "butt." (You may have noticed I didn't use it yesterday.) It is such a hard, abrupt term for something that is soft and curvacious. And there is the unacceptable fact that it takes an alluring part of the human anatomy and has it double as the end of a cigarette.
True, it's usually used in a negative way. "Move your butt!" "Well maybe if you got up off your butt..." But when used lovingly it's an abject failure. Culo has a nice rounded look to it, but the sound is disconcertingly harsh. The French say fesses, which has the appropriate softness. But my favorite is the alliterative Polish pupa.
In my seniors' writing class this morning Elaine, who just got back from a Mediterranean cruise, said: "Europe doesn't care about us old people." I told her that would make a good opening line for a travel essay.
Reading Ken Auletta's profile of Jill Abramson in the Oct. 24 New Yorker, I came across this line: "The two sisters have the same cackle of a laugh, and every year they go off alone on adventurous trips - to China, Morocco, Budapest."
I'm going to e-mail this to my Hungarian friends. And I will read it to my travel writing students, who have already been read the list of words - magical, exotic, adventurous - that have become cliches through overuse. Though using the last to describe a visit to a major European capital is something new.
That will be all for this week, as I'm flying to Portugal tonight. TAP recently started direct flights from Miami to Lisbon, so I get to fly from the edge of one continent to the edge of another. A pleasing prospect.
A writer at the conference spoke of meeting Isaac Singer when he was teaching writing at the University of Miami. (From the Jewish quarter of Warsaw to the Canes' campus - that's a novel in and of itself.) Asked what he was doing at the school, Singer replied: "I am teaching what cannot be taught."
I recently published an essay (now available at www.worldhum.com) in which I complained that travel writing doesn't get the audience it deserves. I suggested that it has become like poetry, read primarily by those who write it.
Poetry, however, gets more respect, in part because it has no "consumer division." No poem ever comes with hotel recommendations.
But poetry doesn't get a free ride either, I realized this weekend at the writers' conference in Grand Cayman. One of the poets in attendance, talking about writing classes, noted: "Poetry is always foisted on children, seniors and prisoners."
Na co czlowiek sie naraza kiedy meza jest pisarza.
(How a woman sure does suffer when her husband is a writer.)
- old Polish saying
Driving down to Coral Gables last Thursday we listened to Marketplace on NPR. The host was on an LA bus talking to passengers, one of whom was a musician/writer who didn't have a steady job but went from gig to gig. "You're part of the gig economy," the host told him. "Me too," I said to Hania: "I'm part of the gig economy."
On Coral Way Hania pointed out a sign affixed to a building which, under the company name, read: "Nurses Wanted" followed by a phone number. "That's a permanent sign," Hania said. "Imagine if it said: 'Writers Wanted.'"
Yesterday was our 31st wedding anniversary.