Dear Diary: Shocked (But not shocked, shocked)
Something interesting happened to me today. Let’s see if I can make it interesting to you.
A few months ago — in late April or early May — I decided that I had better make a practice of reading the fiction in The New Yorker. I knew that I was getting old, and I didn’t want to get out of touch. I’d been reading The New Yorker for over forty-five years, but I’d stopped reading the stories — reading them as a matter of course, that is, simply because they were published in The New Yorker — decades ago. As you get older, that’s what happens. Every now and then, you take up something new, but for the most part you let go of things that used to be very important. When you give them up, you sigh a sigh of relief: you’re free. Your sense of well-being is no longer dependent on whether or not you have, say, read this week’s New Yorker story.
And it’s fine for a little while; but then you begin to wonder: what are those kids up to? Can you still even read the stories in The New Yorker? I found myself asking this every time a story by T Coraghessan Boyle appeared. I really cannot stand Mr Boyle’s work. It’s not that I think that he’s no good — not at all. I can tell that he’s very good. But I can’t stand his stories. (The real mystery man for me is Philip Roth. I can’t stand him, either — but I can’t begin to understand why he’s as highly regarded as he is. To me, the fiction of Philip Roth is nothing but a mound of slipshod vernacular.) Worried about the T Coraghessan Boyles out there, I thought that I had better start policing the perimeter, as one old dodger puts it in an old Miss Marple episode.
The only way to force myself to read the stories in The New Yorker — each and every one of them, whether or not I was in the mood to do so — was, I knew, to commit to writing them up as a weekly thing at Portico. And that’s what I did. Or it’s what I thought I did.
As I was publishing my write-up of this week’s New Yorker story today (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House“), I looked back at the other stories that I’ve written about. This is where the challenge of making the interesting thing that happened to me interesting to you gets tricky.
You probably couldn’t care less about the difference between a Web site and a blog, but, as you know, I operate one of each, and the work that I hope will last appears at the Web site, not here. One difference between a Web site and a blog is that Web sites require handwritten navigation. If you post a new page at a Web site, you have to update the associated menu page, or else nobody will be able to find what you’ve just written. (Blogs automate this business.)  So, after I wrote up Ms Petrushevskaya’s story, I added the title (as a link) to the list of New Yorker stories that I’ve written up. (The page has no permalink, but you can see it here.) Then I wondered why the oldest entry on the list dated to the issue of 8 June. Hadn’t I started writing up the stories in May? Or earlier?
Usually, when I dream up some new feature for my sites, I start out with blog entries. Both the Friday movies pieces and the Book Review reviews ran for ages on the old Daily Blague before I decided that they really belonged, permanently, at Portico. So I figured that there were a few Daily Blague entries that discussed New Yorker stories — written during May of this year — and I thought that I would simply transfer their contents to their proper destination. All I had to do was find them.
But the contents did not exist. I hadn’t lost the pages; I’d never written them. The first interesting thing that happened to me today was the shock of discovering that I had never written up a month’s worth of stories. I’d planned to write them up, hoped to write them up; but I’d never got round to writing them up. The second, much deeper, shock was realizing that I’d completely forgotten how different and difficult things were, three months ago.
It hit home when I found a draft appraising Jonathan Lethem’s story in the issue of 25 May, “Ava’s Apartment.” I’d written the story up, but I’d never edited it or formatted it or uploaded it or done any of the seven or eight things that have to be done to transform a raw piece of writing into a published Web page — at a Web site, without the help of a blogging platform. So I took care of that today, this afternoon.
It’s a little thing. Today, I wouldn’t let a week go by without making sure that every new piece of prose got published. I have worksheets and tickler files to make sure that regular weekday projects (such as writing up the week’s Book Review, or the latest story in The New Yorker) are completed. In the spring, that competence was beyond me. Never mind why — just as long as you don’t think for a moment that I’m more disiciplined now than I was in May. Over the summer, by dint of concentrated effort, I’ve learned how to do a few things that I didn’t know how to do in April. It’s that simple. The surprise was that I’d completely forgotten what it was like not to know how to do the things that I can do now.
It’s the shock of reading history: we can’t believe that people used to be stupid enough to enslave other people. And so on. When we learn something, we forget what ignorance was like. We can’t quite believe that ignorance is the explanation. It’s hard to know that you didn’t know. But if you can manage the trick of it, nothing is more interesting.
Three months ago, there were all sorts of things that I wasn’t getting round to. That’s why I decided to take the summer off — from everything but work. The result is that I find it almost incomprehensible that I didn’t write up those stories and get the pages up onto Portico.