I can't imagine a more productive use of blogging than shilling your friends' books. Especially when you have friends who are kind enough to write genius books. Antoine Wilson is the author of The Interloper, which contains this description of a dinner party:
A current event absorbed, amoeba-like, all the other topics, and the small conversations became a big group conversation. There had been another suicide bombing in the Middle East. It had been all over the news that day. Dozens of people, many of them children, dead. The talk went round and round, with expressions of sympathy for the victims, shaking heads of halfway-around-the-world impotence, a few words about the news media, early symptoms of compassion-fatigue and its cousin, compassion-fatigue-fatigue. There is no group duller than one's peers."I cannot understand how someone would think it's a good idea to blow themselves up," said our host.
"And kill children," added our hostess. Various gestures of agreement.
"It's incomprehensible." This from a short and bearded Professor of Something.
"They're maniacs."
I hadn't said anything. I had been trying to cut the foil from a bottle of wine with the sharp tip of the opener's corkscrew. I had not yet learned that most foil tops can be pulled right off, sleeve-like. You have to keep your eye on that sharp metal tip if you don't want to spear your finger and give yourself tetanus. I sliced the foil and removed it successfully.
And words of wisdom like, "You can't just stick in your aphorisms and think they're going to slip by the editors."
I considered making this a theme, Words of Wisdom From The Interloper, but then I reminded myself that sometimes no one can tell when I'm joking.
Antoine Wilson is interviewed here.
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