Paging through the volume, an author's name catches my eye: June Thunderstorm. Her essay is against anti-smoking laws, maintaining that they have always been "about social control." A former smoker who might very well have died from emphysema if I hadn't quit over 20 years ago, I rolled my eyes and was about to dismiss her and everything she ever stood for before reading the entire first page of her essay, but then I remembered that, on this very blog, I did something similar with an essay by Thoreau on Lincoln, and then later found out that I was mistaken to do so, because the essay begins ironically, with Thoreau posing as the sort of insufferable upperclass American twit, who sneered at Lincoln, which the majority of the text of the essay actually denounces while praising Lincoln highly. Then it also occurred to me that June Thunderstorm might be a Native American, and therefore entitled to some attitudes toward tobacco which are foreign to me. Anyway, I don't feel like reading her entire essay right now, but I won't diss it before I do. Learned my lesson with Thoreau. I can't remember whether I've yet added the necessary PS and apology to that essay.
Inside the front cover are listed 32 editors of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2017. I recognized 17 of those names. I've dissed at least three of them in this blog: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Christopher Hitchens. One of those 17, Edward Hoagland, I admire very much,
and several more have some level of my respect.
After I'd first looked at that list of 32 celebrity editors for a minute or so, it occurred to me that all 32 of them, and surely either all or almost all of the essayists whose work is printed in this volume, and surely many if not most of the hundreds of other authors whom Robert Atwan mentions in the back of the volume as having also written notable essays published during the year under review, and many if not most of thousands more writers either printed or mentioned in the other annual volumes of The Best American Essays published since the late 1980's, have one thing in common: they've written entire volumes which were published long before they reached age 57. I'm 57, and I'd always planned to become a big-time celebrity writer long before I got this old.
Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans, as William Gaddis or Readers' Digest or someone else first pointed out. (John Lennon wasn't the first.) Although I feel perfectly justified in dissing Sontag or Ozick or Hitchens as if I could do better, because I think I could, I think I can, I think I do, I think I have for quite a while -- nevertheless, I have absolutely zero credentials to support this attitude. And you, you either agree with me, or you regard me as a conceited crank, which really wouldn't bother me, which you may or may not believe. But not being published, not having any entire published volumes written all by me, that really irks me.
Some people have suggested to me that I self-publish a volume. I don't think that really counts as being published, nor does blogging, which anyone can do. Being published means that a publisher has selected your work and approved and that it gets published and that you get paid for it.
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