Do you ever get that feeling, this just isn't my town.  That feeling, put down well in the old expression, no one is a prophet...   Do towns have a kind of DNA?  This is the creative side of it, this set of people...  Each town has its imagination, its own codified way of getting things done, its own limitations on what can be done.  New York is different from Washington, D.C.  You have to find your niche, or live in obscurity.  You have to fit in.  And fitting in is fragile.

The old stories, of the Testaments Old and New, they too are a form of entertainment.  A tale told to keep an individual from getting too gloomy, as happens when one is entertained.

Otherwise, boredom sets in.  The old stories seem the best remedy, alongside good humor, an antidote for that feeling.  Any big city is a kind of Jerusalem.  An original home, but potentially a place of persecution, a place of strange valuations placed upon certain activities.

The kind of story the individual finds interest in is as much a product of their own DNA.  There are news people specializing in China or politics, and then there are comedians, who might be said to have a broader range, as educators potentially do.

What does one wish to occupy one's imagination with?

This is the problem the writer faces.  What interests him or her enough to  express an effort in.  What subject matter, and how to express it?

No wonder, then, writers suffer from boredom.  No wonder, the gravitation toward a soothing glass of wine, to let the wheels spin, to find the story where there seems hardly a breath of one.  The time, a mood relaxed and not distracted enough, to find a thread of coherence.

You can't really blame Hemingway for his flung adventures.  Not a government bureaucratic clerk was he.  Boredom.  Need for open waves of the Gulf Stream, open land for camping.

The collection of writers, Saramago, Kerouac, Pio Baroja, whoever you might name, comes across as a group of eccentrics.  That's how they work.  The common denominator might be that they have a strange sensitivity toward story.  Always looking for, able to absorb, the tangent detail from life, like Hemingway brings in  True At First Light's posthumous tales of interactions with the Masai, pictures not often found in general reading.  That a writer is instinctively careful, particular about his exposure, makes sense, whether it suits him well or less so.


Faulkner's example, the small town, the one county, sufficient, filled with all the archetypes known to humanity...  each form of disciple.

The sense of humor in Gospel, the accent of Galileans...  Larry David written all over that...  I swear, I don't know him....  And Jesus, a nice guy, really not wanting to be angry with Peter, joking with him...

The sexual identity of a person--their soul.  Not to be messed with.


And so the main battle of the writer, which is to find the story/the stories.  This is why the writer is tenacious about holding onto story, the personal history, things like that.  True engagement is rare, can easily go wrong.  The connection...  the most important human thing.


The genius of reality TV,  Moonshiners, to remind the city dweller of a local community, tangible.


I never really had any clue of what to be doing as a profession.