A big dilemma
It's life's small dilemmas that occupy most of my time these days: What to have for lunch. What time to go to get out of bed. Whether to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken while I'm driving around town. You know, the kind of decisions that make the earth tremble a little.
Today (actually right this second) I'm grappling with a particularly tough decision. I celebrated a birthday recently, and one gift I received from my mother was The Complete New Yorker, which is an electronic compilation of every page of every New Yorker magazine ever published. All I had asked her for was a subscription to the magazine (which she also got for me), so I was stunned when I unwrapped the hefty-yet-sleek volume. I knew about the set from seeing ads in the magazine, but I never imagined owning it myself. Only recently have I become an avid New Yorker reader. This past summer, I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle at their lake house in western Connecticut. They receive a free subscription to the magazine, which neither of them reads. So there are piles of New Yorkers lying around their cabin stretching back literally for years. Each morning, I'd grab a few copies to take with me to read as we boated or lounged around by the docks. I spent many a warm summer day sprawled out on a towel reading Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris, wishing, as I often do when I discover something that most other people have discovered long before, that I hadn't joined the party so late.
Now is my chance to catch up. It might take a few years, but if I really wanted to, I could go back and read every word every published in The New Yorker magazine. But I'm not going to do that. I'll probably just stick to the highlights. Plenty of amazing authors cut their teeth at The New Yorker, and I look forward to going back to see how those people that I admire wrote at the beginning of their careers. The list is awe-inspiring: John Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Raymond Carver. Dozens of writers, any one of which I could only hope to emulate in my dreams.
I realize how ridiculous it is to think of this set as anything more than a thoughtful birthday gift. But I can't help but wonder whether there's something to be gained here. One miniscule grain of understanding, one instant of clarity, that lights a tiny little spark...
I'm incredibly anxious to begin scouring the archives for that one bit of inspiration that will catapult me into a career as a respected, successful (dare I say beloved?) writer.
But here's where that dilemma comes in: where to start?
Today (actually right this second) I'm grappling with a particularly tough decision. I celebrated a birthday recently, and one gift I received from my mother was The Complete New Yorker, which is an electronic compilation of every page of every New Yorker magazine ever published. All I had asked her for was a subscription to the magazine (which she also got for me), so I was stunned when I unwrapped the hefty-yet-sleek volume. I knew about the set from seeing ads in the magazine, but I never imagined owning it myself. Only recently have I become an avid New Yorker reader. This past summer, I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle at their lake house in western Connecticut. They receive a free subscription to the magazine, which neither of them reads. So there are piles of New Yorkers lying around their cabin stretching back literally for years. Each morning, I'd grab a few copies to take with me to read as we boated or lounged around by the docks. I spent many a warm summer day sprawled out on a towel reading Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris, wishing, as I often do when I discover something that most other people have discovered long before, that I hadn't joined the party so late.
Now is my chance to catch up. It might take a few years, but if I really wanted to, I could go back and read every word every published in The New Yorker magazine. But I'm not going to do that. I'll probably just stick to the highlights. Plenty of amazing authors cut their teeth at The New Yorker, and I look forward to going back to see how those people that I admire wrote at the beginning of their careers. The list is awe-inspiring: John Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Raymond Carver. Dozens of writers, any one of which I could only hope to emulate in my dreams.
I realize how ridiculous it is to think of this set as anything more than a thoughtful birthday gift. But I can't help but wonder whether there's something to be gained here. One miniscule grain of understanding, one instant of clarity, that lights a tiny little spark...
I'm incredibly anxious to begin scouring the archives for that one bit of inspiration that will catapult me into a career as a respected, successful (dare I say beloved?) writer.
But here's where that dilemma comes in: where to start?
posted by temporarily unemployed at 14:38
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