Thursday, February 14, 2008

how a book gets born

an author walks home on 9/11:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.


At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - New York Times

we're not only hostile to knowledge, if we saw it, we'd light some torches, chase it though the streets and then tar and feather it. then we'd go home and drink a beer.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not only are americans hostile to knowledge, but they seem to have been conditioned to view facts, events, and knowledge sort of as legos...


In other words, you need a thing to explain another thing, you just locate what you need, unsnap it from here, re-snap it to there, and that'll fix 'er right up!

Course...it doesn't hurt to have the media's help making your new scenario seem real.

...or, real enough.


zeke