Far from home

• Rolf Potts takes on expat writer-types in Korea at Slate.

Good stuff here:

If you're a self-styled bohemian writer, however—if you aspire to live the life of a Henry Miller or a Charles Bukowski—you are by definition obligated to seek a seedy variation of authenticity. You can't settle for video games and fan conventions. To truly embrace your fantasies, you must actively booze, brawl, and womanize until you've achieved something resembling oblivion. And if you don't have the money, courage, or social cachet to do this in your hometown, moving overseas to indulge your inner misanthrope is a sensible and time-honored solution. In nearly every expat setting I've visited as a traveler—from Prague to Phuket to Porto-Novo—there seems to be this notion that being a writer has more to do with drinking and screwing than actually writing.

So, expat scenes invariably have plenty of writers and artists but a curiously scant quantity of writing and art. This isn't a new phenomenon: Ernest Hemingway alluded to it in The Sun Also Rises, when Bill Gorton jestingly upbraids Jake Barnes: "You drink yourself to death," he says. "You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes." George Orwell made a similar observation in "Inside the Whale" (an essay-length riff on Miller's Tropic of Cancer), pointing out that expatriate writers are disproportionately obsessed with "drinking, talking, meditating, and fornicating."

Hemingway the shill

• Paul Devlin details Hemingway's willingness to pimp himself at Slate.

From a review of a new collection of Hemingway errata called Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements:

Unlike, say, his retiring contemporary and chief competitor William Faulkner, Hemingway had many of his exciting exploits recorded by press photographers. He got in on everything, even the D-Day invasion. He was always showing up in some high-circulation magazine like Life with a big fish on the hook or hunting rifle in hand. His visage was (and is) immediately recognizable. And he had no problem letting that familiar visage appear in ads, for which he also wrote the copy. In one he promotes Ballantine Ale (while sitting in a deck chair with a book open) writing, "You have to work hard to deserve to drink it. When something has been taken out of you by strenuous exercise, Ballantine puts it back in." There's one for Pan American Airlines ("We started flying commercially about the same time. They did the flying. I was the passenger."), and another for Parker 51, "The World's Most Wanted Pen," to whose ad Hemingway lent his face and a paragraph (presumably in his handwriting) on the horrors of war.

This so-called writer's life

Early in the film Wonder Boys, adapted by Steve Kloves from the novel by Michael Chabon, a character named Q mounts a podium in front of an auditorium full of college students and faculty and announces, with fat-cat gravitas, “I... am a writer.” Dutiful applause follows, while the main characters roll their eyes at one another.

Make the mistake of telling people you’re... a writer... and the instant assumption is that you fall cleanly into whatever artist-stereotype category they’re familiar with, and most likely, it’s the Q type, the pompous know-it-all. Or the Proust type, the nutter holed up in a cork-lined room, slaving away on some epic, unintelligible monstrosity. Or the Mozart type, the genius-savant who rises phoenixlike into the artistic stratosphere, has a spectacular flameout and is dead by 30. Or, best of all, the Hemingway/Bukowski type, whereby life becomes a very simple progression: Drink. Fight. Fuck. Write. Repeat.

The second instant assumption is that a writer just sits down and unscrews the top of his head, and out onto the desktop falls a diamond called War and Peace, which of course is nonsense. It’s not like housework or gardening or carpentry where you sweat all day and end up with a clean living room, a rose bush and a deck chair. Sometimes you pound out fifteen pages in an hour and sometimes a sentence takes up a week. Writing is a strange, ever-fluctuating vocation. It’s like a relationship: it takes a lot of time and a lot of physical and emotional energy and a whole shitload of coffee. And yeah, sometimes you’ve gotta make that tough decision on whether or not to stick with it or move on.

The third instant assumption is that you specialize in just one thing, that you’re a mystery writer, or a western writer, or a thriller writer, that you only write comedies, plays, cookbooks, stereo instructions, cell phone ads, whatever, which drives us straight up the wall. The instinct of others to categorize, simplify and classify what we do runs exactly counter to our ambitions. A very small percentage of writers in the world are able to earn a living by just sitting at home and filling up pages. The rest of us Joe Six-Packs punch a clock so we can put food on the table, and write whenever we have a free moment, just for the sheer pleasure of release. It doesn’t matter if it ever gets published, or if anyone else even reads it; it just matters that you’re writing. That, or you have a blog, and you fill up entry after entry with endless masturbatory philosophizing. Like this one.

Writers can be miserable, hateful, bitter, spiteful, horrible people. Obsessed with their so-called gifts, buoyed by a fatuous sense of entitlement, convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority. But they’re also capable of incredible generosity, love and support. Willing to listen, ready to advise, happy to give everything they can to help another realize their dreams. They’re us. They’re everything that we are, composed of different shades, moods, ideas, temperaments: kaleidoscopes on legs, slaves only to the bizarre whatever-it-is that compels them to roll up their sleeves and put down one word after another. We don’t understand it, we can’t explain it, and we won’t even try. Why is there air? Because.