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Blogs by Ronald Dondiego
The New Yorker 4/13/2005 12:34:04 PM
The other day I drove a passenger, a lady I might add, a dozen or so blocks down 7th Ave. in Manhattan. I don't remember exactly how but the conversation turned to literature. Oh yes, I'm reading Million Dollar Baby, F X Toole's collection of short stories about the fight game, and told her that I thought Toole had the potential to become one of America's greatest writers, instead all he got for his trouble were forty years of rejection slips. He was published at seventy and died at seventy two. The lady said at least he knew he was accepted. "Yeah," I said that's true, but he could have written a lot more than just a collection of great short stories. He could have written novels on the level of a Hemingway or a Faulkner." "You seem to know a lot about literature." "I make it my business to know because I write myself." "You must be good," she replied. "Because you can recognize good literature." "Maybe," I said. "But I might not be in the same league as an F X Toole or a Hemingway."
Then the conversation turned to the fare increase and how it was upsetting most New Yorkers. Even though they got the bucks they're now down in the subways, down in the trenches with the rest of us wage slaves.
So towards the end of the ride she tells me to read an article in The New Yorker Magazine by Jeffrey Saks about how to end poverty. Like that's really a possiblility. So as she's leaving the car I yelled out to her: "If my name were Jeffrey Saks I'd be published in the New Yorker too!" She just smiled and nodded in agreement and walked off. I got pissed as usual about the whole it's not what you know but who you know syndrome and drove away - ready to take on another night of empty cell phone convesations and revelers from spoiled backgrounds and the world of privilege, you know, the ones who are totally self absorbed.
