Word: writer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea of a joint U.S.-Soviet Mars mission is galling to other Americans who, glasnost notwithstanding, simply do not trust the Soviets. Their view was summarized in a recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by Space Writer Alcestis Oberg, the wife of James Oberg. "A joint mission," she wrote, "completely and utterly ignores reality." Among the concerns raised by the proposed mission, she wrote, are the "potential for spying, for technology transfer, for interference in our political system, for the 'hostage holding' effect it would have on our space program and on our future." Her conclusion...
...unsuccessful writers the postal service mostly outputs despair: rejection slips and royalty statements showing negative balances. For literature's grandees it mainly offers worldly delights: invitations to accept honorary degrees, chair a grant-giving panel or cash a nice subsidiary-rights check. The more typical professional writer, however, earns neither pity nor envy -- just a modest living, neither more perilously nor more glamorously obtained than anyone else's. For him, the postman's bag is ever a hilariously mixed...
...goes, through a list of correspondents that includes most of the types who dwell on the literary life's ragged edges. The unpublished writer who aggressively demands that Bradbury read her last seven novels (enclosed) is turned aside with a compliment ("Be reassured, a masochistic and paranoid temperament is a well-known sign of a great writer") and a practical suggestion ("May I recommend a pseudonym -- something like John le Carre"). The young academic confronting his first job interview is reminded that he must dress both down (there is always a raging egalitarian on the committee who resents Oxbridge college...
...guess that his dogs, if he had any, would be named Bromide and Quinine, that he would marry a brilliant and cranky actress and that he would make his last journey on earth in a load of shellfish. But it is not this magic element of predictability in a writer's destiny that concerns us but the stamina and courage he brings in an effort to vary this magic...
Cheever believed that most people, not just writers, live lives that are charmed with a daily interaction between reality and imagination, and that what impresses us in a writer is not the mystery of the interaction, but the slant that the writer applies to the mystery. Raymond Carver's brave experiments are well worth reading...