tavie.com

Sarah Vowell is wonderful. I highly recommend The Partly-Cloudy Patriot, which was lent by erin several weeks ago and which I finally started last night, beginning with the essay on Al Gore, nerds in popular culture and Buffy, and then skipping back to the beginning. This woman has the kind of brain I wish I had, is living the kind of life I wish I led.

How wonderful it must be to be an Essayist for a living. Don't we all-- "we all" meaning people who are roughly my age and share roughly my tastes-- partly revere people like her and like Sedaris because they are able to articulate our conceptions of our culture so well, and be funny and make a living from it, to boot? Become successful based on their observations? And don't-- admit it-- don't some of us in the blogosphere secretly fancy ourselves to be amateur Essayists? "I don't write," we insist, "I just blog." Okay.
But man, do I wish I had some witty observations that I could transform into publishable gold.

The problem with it is that a blog is not a shortcut to Fame and Fortune. To be a successful Essayist, you have to pay your dues. You have to get a degree in Journalism or Media or Communications or English, and you have to get crappy jobs at magazines and newspapers, and write a whole bunch of dumb movie reviews and articles that are assigned to you, for years and years. Depressing, isn' it-- the fact that you have to actually work to attain success? Most of us don't have the mettle, nor the talent.
I know I don't.

(I do know people
who may be well on their way, if they so chose such a path. I envy them. The best I can hope for is a mention in one of their essays. Don't forget me... I had faith in you when you were starting out.)

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:14 AM | shower me with attention