A peek into the referral log:

• pastel driver
• Hank Stuever
• "anthony lane"
• exhibit 13 blue man group
• McDonald's vending machine Adams Morgan
• "tim rutten"
• Gidget the Chihuahua

I'd also like to extend a big thank-you to the reverse cowgirl for lassoing all those doggies she sent my way.

You Are a Writer
The rise of literary aspiration in America
By Jason Sholl
July 1, 2002

Joseph Epstein is not the first to notice the explosion of the authorial epidemic. Earlier this year, Mr. Sholl analyzed this malaise and came out with revealing medical data I shall relay:

Symptoms

If the ballooning market for literary instruction is any indication, popular interest in writing is at an all-time high. Today's amateur novelists, screenwriters, essayists and poets support steady sales of more than 3,000 books available on the craft and commerce of creative writing. They subscribe to over 100 periodicals devoted to the subject. The largest of these, Writer's Digest, by itself enjoys a circulation of 220,000—or roughly seven times that of the prestigious Paris Review, where many of the former publication's readers hope one day to see their work published. More than 240 U.S. universities now offer MFA programs in creative writing (up from just six in the mid-1980s), and it's harder to get into the best of these programs than into Harvard Medical School. For those who don't make the cut, some 1,200 open-enrollment writer's workshops and conferences are held yearly. Even as fewer and fewer Americans incline to read serious literature, evidently more and more of us aspire to write it.

Diagnosis

There are... good reasons why record numbers are picking up their pens. For one thing, technology and affluence have made the writing impulse easier than ever to indulge. Thanks to the word processor, the once laborious task of setting thought to paper (and the doubly laborious task of later revising it) is now essentially painless. And thanks to the Internet, the one-time drudgery of research is now both cheap and largely hassle-free. In the wake of a twenty-year economic expansion, more Americans than ever have the time and money to take up a writing hobby. And more of their children have the luxury of a parental safety net while exploring career options, like creative writing, whose rewards may be more intellectual than financial.

For another thing, the difficult literary arts have come to appear less intimidating than ever. Among the reams of unfiltered content online, amateur authors now have little trouble finding a public outlet for their work—or concluding that their work deserves a public outlet. And among the books, newsletters, websites, and workshops of the new writing-for-publication genre, anyone with an interest can now find ample encouragement. The titles of popular how-to manuals say it all: How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method, Fast Fiction: Creative Fiction in Five Minutes, You Can Write a Novel. Advises one popular guide, "All you need is the willingness to be labeled 'writer,' and with that one word, you are a writer." You are? I guess I am.

Prognosis

...The writing bug, when it bites, passes on an infectious logic of its own. For those bitten, making sense of the world (what all writing, regardless of form, in some manner attempts) comes to be its own compensation. And turning one's gaze away from immediate economic necessity, real or imagined, (what all writing, regardless of motivation, to some degree demands) comes to contain its own reward. Myself, I'll confess I'm not above the occasional fantasy about my soon-to-be-written blockbuster. But more often, I value my writing precisely as an escape from such exhausting fantasies. They tend to be as much about the bitterness of failure, I've found, as about the anticipated pleasures of success.

Will America's swelling ranks of amateur authors produce work of any value? Does it really matter? Among our attempts, I’d like to think, lies evidence of a certain maturation of the American psyche: a turn to intellectual life by a country that recently seemed more intent on making millions than finding meaning. And surely we could do worse than to encourage it.

Bravo, Dr. Sholl! I should now logoff from this weblog and return to finishing my memories, my novelization of the Starr report (retold in the voices of both Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton's penis) and my history on our changing views of martians as science proved their inexistence.

Just don't expect them at your closest bookstore anytime soon.

Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again
By Joseph Epstein
September 28, 2002

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them — and that they should write it.

I was raised on the idea that every person must achieve three things during their lifetimes: plant a tree, raise a child and write a book. Though the current state of parenthood puts a doubt on the merits of breeding, the tree part is plain common sense: strip it of fruit to nurture you as you mull over your manuscript and, when you are ready for the printers, chop it down to provide the pulpy pages for your galleys.

Alas, it might be better to leave the tree alone and instead cut those authorial dreams on the stem, considering the current barrage of tomes Mr. Epstein mentions:

Why should so many people think they can write a book, especially at a time when so many people who actually do write books turn out not really to have a book in them — or at least not one that many other people can be made to care about? Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.

But the impulse to bring forward a book of their own, apparently to compensate for the lack of parental skill, itches furiously in many a mind. As the Raven put it today, "[Mr. Epstein] cites our increasingly secular orientation as being the culprit and acknowledges that for many, words left to posterity may be the only hope of achieving a kind of immortality." And yet, returning to Epstein:

...this isn't the most felicitous way to do battle against oblivion. Writing a book is likely, through the quickness and completeness with which one's book will die, to make the notion of oblivion all the more vivid.

A terse summation I have to agree with. Writing a book on the hopes of it becoming a testament is a lost enterprise, even before sitting in front of the blank page (or a new word processor document, as it were). Mr. Epstein's final advice is "Don't write that book... don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs."

Still, the idea of not having to write for anyone can be liberating, in a twisted way. Free of the concern of trying to appeal to an unexisting reader, we could write all we wished to: Streams and streams of unedited words, run-on sentences, terrible spelling and even worse grammar. All in the name of removing the burden of those thoughts we weighted so dear from our minds, and be able to set down our heads lithely when we lay down for the final sleep.

Besides, we might get one last laugh from the executioners of our wills, asking them to edit our manuscripts and submit them for publication. Let them deal with the rejection letters.

Joseph Epstein teaches at Northwestern University and is the author, most recently, of "Snobbery."