Writers

I read a lot.  I love words and they way they are used to create worlds.  A couple of years ago a friend gave me The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.  The book is very well written but hard to read.  The atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II are hard to read about and even  harder to understand.  This book started me reading about history, especially the history we don't hear about.  This led me to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  At the same time I went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival and heard Utah Phillips sing and talk about the labor movement and terrible struggles like the Ludlow Massacre and The Haymarket Tragedy.  Studying this terrible time has had a profound affect on me.

To get back to Iris Chang, she killed herself a few days ago and I mourn her loss.  She had been suffering depression and was found in her car with a self-inflicted gunshot.  I understand depression but I can't imagine her leaving a two year old son.  After reading Chang's book I would have loved to meet her and talk.  Last week I read Margaret Atwood's Negotiating With The Dead: A Writer on Writing, a wonderful book.  In it she says,  ""Wanting to meet a writer because you like their work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate."   I found this fascinating.  She goes on to say,  "All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person." The person who killed herself in her car was not the same person who wrote that wonderful book.

A week before he died  I read Rodney Dangerfield's autobiography,  It's Not Easy Bein' Me : A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs.  I enjoyed it a great deal being a huge fan of Rodney's.  I didn't like the way it was written.  Every story was told as if it was a joke.  The whole book was written like that.  The rhythm of the story was set-up, story, punchline.  I got some out of his book but would have preferred a writer doing the actual writing.

I'm sitting here working on an old Leadbelly song, Take a Whiff on Me.  It's been recorded by everyone but I'm going to try and put my own spin on it.  I'm getting used to not working.  It's a rough life drinking a little Southern Comfort, playing a little guitar and typing on the computer.  I could get used to it.

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