New York Cleanliness disaster.

 Dear Wyzard,

My aim is to write a short paragraph every day on this blog.

Here is today's paragraph.

2 days ago, I went out for a nice meal at an Australian Cafe with a new friend. I was thirty minutes late, but he didn't seem to mind. My new friend, Nick, is an entrepreneur and podcaster in Berlin. He spends most of his year traveling around economic centers raising money for his new venture capital fund, and preaching the gospel of progress and productivity. However, despite his deep affection for our fine city, he was taken aback by its recent troubles. "New York has declined, but it is unlike San Francisco." We started walking down the street after we finished our french fries. After three or four blocks, he realized he was walking the wrong way. After we went our separate ways, I began walking down towards a lovely pre-war building and ended up in Gramercy. Unlike the nearby neighborhoods, the streets were spotless, and the buildings looked fresher and better maintained. New York City has always been divided along economic and ethnic lines, but it never felt this stark and blatant. The city has long stopped cleaning everyone's roads and keeping every neighborhood safe. 

The Fire Man

 

GOOD TO HEAR FROM YOU, FIRE MAN

In writing an introduction to provide a setting for our conversations, I thought you might have some response. I deliberately tried to set it up to provide a context for a dialogue.
I suppose "waking up" is a good start, especially if we take it metaphorically.

But when you make an entry, PUBLISH IT. By clicking on Publish at the right. When you publish, I will respond. You can edit anything you publish. Have you Blogged before? 

Give a Title to your entry. That way, the Blog will log our conversations in a way that they will be easy to find..

My first question for you is which story in Einstein's Beach House would you like to discuss first? 

My second question is: Did you read what I wrote to initiate this project? Is this something you take seriously? If not, let's be done with it as of now, and we will chalk it up to a bad idea.

 

2/9/2023

 LG: Dear Prof Gilbert,

Today, I woke up ...

...FIRE MAN

 

EINSTEIN'S WRITERS DEN

This Writer's Den is inspired by EINSTEIN'S BEACH HOUSE, a book of stories by Jacob M. Appel. It is a place for discussion about the craft of these stories. Two aspiring writers are using this space as a workspace. All of the stories were published earlier in Reviews or Journals, so they were refereed to a certain extent. They were collected in this volume and published in 2014.

Allison Lynn, author of The Exiles and Now You See It, comments in the frontispiece: "Impossibly keen... a collection that takes a sharp look at the moments when we, whether child or adult, see who we truly are, and the inevitability of who we will become. Appel's achy, skewed, sometimes heartbreaky world is dense with truth and humor---the stuff of great literature."

High praise, indeed. My own experience in reading the book was one of amazement at the originality of the style of the stories, but distinctly feeling they were not all equally well-written. I detected flaws (of course from my particular perception), and I felt I was learning from the flaws as well as the excellence of his story telling. I was especially impressed with the range of subject matter. Appel is clearly an intelligent observer. Regardless of the verdict of excellence or not, I think observing the craft of his stories might help my friend and me as we pursue writing projects on our own.

So when a young friend of mine indicated an interest in becoming a writer, I was intrigued by his wide-rage of interests and that he impressed me as an intelligent observer. At the this point in his young career, he writes what he describes as essays. For me, an essay suggests a work of non-fiction. At one point essays were topical such as Yoshida Kenko's ESSAYS IN IDLENESS (1332), Ralph Waldo's SELF-RELIANCE (1841), William Hazlitt's ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING (1823) Joan Didion's ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK (1968) or David Foster Wallace's CONSIDER THE LOBSTER (2005). Not too long ago, in noting how definitions sometimes change over time, I came upon Ashley Shannon's THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SHORT STORY AND A PERSONAL ESSAY, which in itself is an essay published on the Internet.

I suggested we might mutually explore the craft of writing by focusing on Appel's book of short stories. Jacob M. Appel is a very interesting author who wears many hats and pursues diverse careers, possessing medical, attorney-at-law, scientific research degrees and more, at the doctoral level. Wikipedia describes him: "Jacob M. Appel (born February 21, 1973) is an American author, poet, bioethicist, physician, lawyer, and social critic... he is best known for his stories..."

 

I have a background as a composer, poet, professor, administrator, blogger, researcher and writer---many different hats because I am enjoying a long life. 

 

This Blog is intended as a private conversation, a dialogue, maybe even dialogical inquiry. I'm interested to see where this experiment takes us.