While I Was Busy Making Other Plans

I'm looking at a copy of The Best American Essays 2017, editor: Leslie Jameson. The name didn't ring a bell -- is she the woman who wrote that ridiculous piece in The Atlantic praising Jordan Peterson and dissing The Left? No, that was Caitlin Flanagan.

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.

Some American Essays Judged "Best"

In The Best American Essays 2004, In his essay "Against Cool," Rick Moody spends 32 pages making it absolutely clear that he doesn't even know what cool is. Not counting 2 pages of footnotes.

Moody begins his long essay by assuring the reader that he himself is not and has never been cool. But I don't think a person can judge his or her own level of coolness. One doesn't say, "I'm cool!" or "I'm not cool." One recognizes it outside of oneself, and says, "She's so cool!" or "Hey, man, that wasn't cool." In his song "Life's Been Good," Joe Walsh remarks, "Everybody's says I'm cool." But he gives the impression that he definitely considers the possibility that "everybody" says that to him just because he's a rock star. The whole thrust of the song is Walsh saying that he knows that he is lucky, that he doesn't claim that he has earned every penny he has by good old American hard work and grit, or by being a genius. He may be tremendously hardworking, and, at least in my opinion, he is a musical genius. But if the impression given by "Life's Been Good" is correct, he doesn't go around patting himself on the back for his success. He just gets on with it. Which is pretty cool.

What is cool? It's kindness, openness, quiet gentle awareness of whomever or whatever is beautiful or touching or edifying or otherwise cool in the moment.

In his Introduction to this 2004 volume of essays, guest editor Louis Menand says that an essay is good when the pain of not continuing to read it would outweigh the pain of continuing to read. It was around that point that I stopped reading Menand's Introduction. I found Moody's "Against Cool" quite painfully bad from its title to the very last word of its very last footnote. Moody says we should abandon the use of the term "cool" -- with the exception, I assume, of continuing to use it to describe ranges of temperature.

I think that's just not cool.

In The Best American Essays 1994, guest-edited by Tracy Kidder, Cynthia Ozick has an essay entitled "Rushdie in the Louvre," in which she, ostensibly, describes meeting Rushdie in the Louvre, after Rushdie has been elected a member of the Academie Universelle des Cultures. But only a handful of fragments of sentences spoken by Rushdie during that meeting held in the Louvre in his honor make their way into Ozick's essay, which has much more to do with the Louvre and terrorism and Henry James and Zola and Rushdie's security detail, which was extremely extensive at the time, than with Rushdie. I don't mean that all of those other subjects added together are given more space than Rushdie, but that each of them is given more space. I feel cheated by the title of Ozick's essay, which is pretty dull except when those few fragments of Rushdie's sentences light it up the way lightning lights up a dark cloudy sky.

Perhaps Ozick would have come up with a better essay if she'd concentrated on terrorism, given the essay a title such as "Terrorism," begun it with a short paragraph about how she met Rushdie at the Louvre, and then gotten on with the actual subject on her mind. At least then the reader wouldn't have been disappointed by an essay with a thoroughly misleading title.

By stark contrast, in the same 1994 volume of officially best American essays, Paul Theroux's "Chatwin Revisited" is actually above all about Bruce Chatwin, Theroux's deceased friend and fellow travel-writer, and it's actually quite good.