just the two of us...

More on the young editor with whom I work…

As a person, I like him very much, and I think he is a talented writer in his own right.
But, in some ways he is the wrong man to work with me. For one thing, he is very young, and like a lot of young people who have recently graduated from the best of American schools, he has been taught to believe that the author has no right to appear in his own works. In other words, the letter "I," is forbidden. To write "I thought," or "I believe," or "I felt," or even "I experienced" is considered most offensive.

Yet, I am at my best when I am most self-referential. At heart, I am a diarist, a journalist (in the original meaning of the word, in the sense of one who keeps a personal journal), and, yes, a blogger.

Thus I am troubled. I fear that if the book gets published, it will actually be inferior to what I write about it…that what follows the title page will be less than what appears here, in Xcargo…to be know only to a few. By, in other words, I who write this, and you …you few and dear …who read it.


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Actually, on looking at that last sentence, I feel an odd comfort. There are not many people who have read Xcargo from its beginnings as an ezine to its present status as an odd entry in the blogsphere.

There is something pleasant in that. In your presence, my readers, I feel that I am in a very select group…among friends… even something akin to family.

How rare a thing that is. I am grateful.