Another Activity of my Life

Here is a parochial version of the end of Voltaire’s Candide. After all the horrendous events of that tale, it ends with “. . . we must cultivate our garden.” So much for the Trump election—for now.

On Writing

   I have said more than once that I am addicted to writing. There is lots of evidence in support of this claim, but the existence of my blog is probably the best. I started it just three years ago, prompted by an annoying event. I had submitted an essay for publication to the magazine, Granta; it was of the kind they frequently publish. One year minus one week after they received it they let me know that they were not interested. Mind you, a rejection doesn’t upset me; it wasn’t the first one in a long career of submitting articles. But the time they took to say “no” was excessive.

   That rejection was the stimulus for me to create my blog. The first blog ever only goes back to 1994 with its label shortened from weblog in 1999. But the invention  of that medium came in plenty of time for me to indulge my desire to write. That is actually somewhat more urgent than my need to be read, especially when being read doesn’t also lead to a conversation. The creation of my Home of Strong Opinions took place three years ago and I quickly came to appreciate not only that I would be “published” whenever I wanted to be, but that I could post items of any length, within reason, and on just about any subject. The result, as of the time of writing this draft of a future post is 175 posts on a considerable variety of subjects or one post about every six days. Surely, addiction is the correct diagnosis.

   This “disease” manifested itself early. I can’t say about high school. The only thing I remember about writing at Brooklyn Tech is that in the middle of an assigned paper, I inserted a totally irrelevant sentence about George Washington. No notice was taken of that “trap.”

   I wrote a lot during my  year in the Navy, after graduating from high school. To my surprise, I found a packet of 145 letters I had written to my parents. They were in a box in my mother’s house, packed in temporal order and neatly labeled by my father. Those letters home are mostly in English, but they do include longish patches in German, mostly when I was replying to my parents’ German letters. Those letters home, most of them while my ship was in Chinese ports are moderately interesting and are now collected as an e-book.¹

   At Columbia College, after I had been discharged, I chose an elective writing course that called for handing in one assignment a week. The instructor, Quenton Anderson, scrawled a few words at the bottom of our assignments, and in class made oracular statements in a basso profundo voice while looking out of the window—instead of at our small class. I did indeed learn something, primarily because I had to write quite a bit and on a variety of subjects. And so with the rest of my courses. The professors’ comments taught little, but the practice was valuable. Jacques Barzun was a notable exception. Even though he was a professor of history, he taught me writing tricks that are still with me. I was very proud when he took a seminar paper of mine to get it published. It became my first publication; the subject was Gebrauchsmusik, associated above all with Hindemith. Look it up if you are interested.²

   There was much more writing in college, but after my dissertation—that was turned into my first book—came a sprinkle of articles and a couple of books, mostly in philosophy. But since I got into administration quite early, as assistant chairman of philosophy at SF State College even before I was tenured, I started an (almost) life-long career of writing memos. Added to these were columns for the Arts and Sciences magazine we started at Northwestern. But before then, in September 1968  I published what I believe to be the longest letter ever in the New York Review of Books about the Sixties problems at SF State.³

   Much of the above refers to writing done in performance of a job and says nothing about an addiction. So, to get back to that theme, I had forty-nine op eds published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I don’t think that John Craig, the paper’s editor and a good friend expected to be so inundated when he agreed that I could do an occasional op ed.

   Well, my blog is a continuation of that streak. Lots of prose, but no fiction. My imagination doesn’t go in that direction. The closest I came to fiction is my invitation to have others do the work, my odd-ball book entitled What’s the Story? Again, all I can say is that if you are interested, check it out.⁴        

  There’s lots more: lots of autobiographical stuff. But it’s also a good time to quit.

Bon soir, mes amis.

       

¹A Sailor Writes Home from His Time in the U.S. Navy: Letters of 1945-1946, Aftermath of World War II,

    an ebook. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2015.

² "Gebrauchsmusik as a Reaction to the Nineteenth Century," American Music Teacher 2 (1953).

³http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/09/26/contd/

⁴https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Story-Fiction-Learn-Writing-ebook/dp/B009L8L7AY