Snob

Two people called me yesterday to ask if I was all right. It had been five days since my last blog post and they were concerned. Thank you! I am not dead or wounded. I am just boring. I couldn’t think of anything.

The truth is I’m a snob. There. I said it. Tomorrow is Yom Kippur so you can consider this my apology to the world. I’m a snob. I have no tolerance for mediocrity and since mediocrity is what most people are content with, I simply can’t cope.

I heard an ad on the radio… (I do that a lot and report it to you as if it were a revelation; the voice of God giving me ideas. It is not. It is WCBS radio which I put on in the car primarily to make sure I’m not heading into any traffic jams but which gives me the opportunity to hear the same news over and over again several hundred times depending on the length of the trip. I would listen to music but once again, I can’t stand mediocrity and have you listened to a music station on the radio? You’d think nothing new had been written since 1965. Anyway, yesterday’s news was the Town of Bedford is suing Donald Trump and Bellweather Estates because they erected a tent without permission; twice!; it had NOTHING to do with Kaddafi! Cough, cough… and the Yankees face the Red Sox, pre-game at 6:30, the Yanks magic number down to five but it would be tough because Joba was on the mound and hadn’t won since August 6th while John Lester would pitch for the Sox and he was 11 and 2; Post mortem: Joba was great; Lester sucked, nyah nyah nyah, raspberry… and Iran has more nukes than they admitted …Really?... etc. etc. etc. There was more but I forget. They rarely ever report anything very important. There’s an entire world out there and they bring it all to you within 22 minutes including ads so they have to be leaving something out, right?)

Anyway, the ad I heard was an intensely serious, romantic, passionate deep voice introducing the latest book by Nicholas Sparks which was already “soon to be a movie” so why anyone would buy the book is beyond me except if you take the bus or the train and so desperately need to escape from those dismal surroundings that you’d stoop to disappearing into mindless drivel.

I don’t mean to single out Mr. Sparks. I’m a little envious that he can turn out a bestseller a little faster than I can bake a cake. I started one of his books once. I had seen “The Notebook” and liked Ryan Gosseling so much I figured I’d try a book. Hello? Is there a connection here? The thing that makes decent movies out of books like that is that you can cut out all the words! (I screamed that.)

There are some books that, when you turn them into movies you have to lose some of the beauty, many of the ideas, sometimes whole characters and storylines. Corelli’s Mandolin, Exodus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, etc. I just read Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific; you almost have to use a magnifying glass to figure how they got “South Pacific” out of these pages. Not with these cotton-candy books. The story is a one-page outline and the rest is blah blah blah. They are accessible! Their vocabulary would not challenge a fourth grader. I read a magnificent book by deBernieres (the name escapes me right now; sorry) that did and did not require me to have a dictionary on hand at all times. It did in the sense that I didn’t know at least 25% of the words he used. It didn’t in the sense that each word was so well chosen for its sound and placement as well as its meaning that you really didn’t need to stop reading and look it up to know exactly what he was talking about. It was brilliant! I can’t do that!

So, at the crux of my snobbery is a conundrum: If I can’t write as well as the greatest writers in all mediums, then I can’t write at all. And that is why I disappeared for five days. I was reading.