Words Unsaid

A few years ago, my father-in-law, who is quite erudite, introduced me to a phrase that the French have: L’esprit de l’escalier, which is often translated as “staircase wit.”

The phrase refers to the clever comeback that occurs to us only after the best moment for delivery has passed — after our opponent has walked away or left the room, say, or we have. There’s also a German equivalent, treppenwitz.

We’ve all had this experience: a situation flusters us, takes us out of our game. The moment passes and when it’s too late that great comeback line hits us and we wish we could re-live the opportunity.

The phrase L’esprit de l’escalier originates, apparently, from Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comedien, where he tells the story of just such an occurrence, an argument upstairs in a mansion where he didn’t regain his wits until he was down at the bottom of the staircase alone.

No Comment

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, said the famous artist whose works — lo, thirty years later — command tens of millions at auction.

In the present, everyone has fifteen opinions on everything, said the not-yet-famous author, though I’m working on it.

Well, maybe I’m not working hard enough on it. And maybe not everyone has fifteen opinions. Just those who inhabit the land of the comment culture.

In the comment culture, writers write things and readers are not content to appreciate another point of view without sharing their own. They post a comment, and sometimes the writer comments back, and sometimes this goes on for a while, and the comment count gets run up.

Choosing to Write in Oil or Watercolor

It’s spring in Delaware. Azaleas and primrose in bloom, warm days and cool nights. In celebration of their beautiful garden, some friends recently hosted a large party under a big white tent. They seated me at a table filled with people whose passion is painting pictures.

A few of these people were retired, painting as a serious hobby. Some were studying painting. Others were making a living at it, their work represented in galleries. I found it especially interesting that when asked, “What kind of painting do you do,” the answer was never “abstract” or "landscape" or “figurative,” etc. It was always “oil” or “watercolor.”

One of the oil painters said to a watercolorist, “I could never do that. I prefer the freedom to paint over my mistakes.”

Come the Volcano

In the past week, two things happened at about the same time, but very far apart in geography and scale. First, an Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name began spewing ash into the atmosphere. Nearly at the same time, my wife’s Kindle died.

Two disparate events. Yet I am tempted to connect some dots.

The volcano you know about as well as I. Downwind in Iceland, the landscape looked like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. Farther downwind, air traffic in much of Europe ground to a halt, many billions of dollars worth of infrastructure rendered useless.

E-telling on the iPad

Does the iPad change everything? Of course not. By now we should have learned that NOTHING ever changes EVERYTHING. But I’ve been playing with this device for a day now, and I can say with confidence that it does this: it expands possibilities for the storyteller.

To begin studying this issue, everyone should view the remarkable video created by Penguin, entitled iPad Imagineering. From the perspective of a book publishing fan, I found it heartening. It deserves to go viral. Too often book publishers have run scared from new technology, then ventured in one toe at a time, as if the water were too hot for their metabolism.

Not Penguin, not now. Here is a publisher acting, rather than reacting. Here is a publisher asserting that it will have a role in the new paradigm, a role it will seize itself, which is how all business gets done in growing markets, where nobody hands you anything — where, as Jack Welch famously said, you eat your own lunch or someone else will.

Defying Categorization

I recently read a Facebook mini-rant from an accomplished novelist expressing frustration that people insist on categorizing her book as “women’s lit.” She noted that there’s no such category as “man’s lit,” and suggested just plain “lit” would be a more appropriate description for what she’s doing, and a whole lot less condescending.

Fool that I am, although I don’t really know her (we have a professional connection that makes us “friends”) I waded into the infested water with a comment of my own. (By the way, I have deleted my link to the thread on my Facebook page to protect her privacy.) My thought was that if being put in a category like “women’s lit” is tantamount to being condescended to, then men are condescended to plenty. Maybe, I suggested, there’s more to this issue than sexism.

Well, naturally, that made me the skunk at the garden party, with several other women asserting the presence of a great sexist conspiracy. In fairness, no one used the word “conspiracy,” but the implication was there.

The Story Business

Q: Why don’t book publishers own Hollywood studios?
A: Because they realized too late that they were in the story business.

I was struck by news last week in the Wall Street Journal that Random House, “eager to cash in on the lucrative videogame business, has set up an in-house team to create original stories for videogames and provide story advice for games in development.”

In the first instance, this is an eerie sign that the cash cow of backlist books has begun to resist further milking. Random House publisher Gina Centrello comments, “We need new revenue streams.”

Gulp. There’s a thought every writer can dig. But maybe there’s something we can learn from this move. Let’s take a look.