just went live. It’s a nice piece, and I think Jeff did a great job. How does one boil down an hour’s worth of a rambling author into something that makes sense? You get Jeff Salamon on the job.
I’m surprised that he got the sequence of bio-materials correct. As I read some sentences, I kept predicting a flub of some sort. None existed. And as a writer myself, I appreciate how he constructed the piece, beginning and ending with a quote, so it starts & stops on a dime.
But no matter how good it is, I think one is probably always surprised by how an interview sits on the page. For example, I kind of forgot that I’d told a lot about my personal life, some details of which haven’t made it out to readers of this blog, or some old friends I need to get around to emailing. And the line about Austin friends wasting their talent on the altar of dope smoking—what I meant was that it became too easy for friends to fall into the wake, work, bake, sleep lifestyle, leaving little-to-no time for their paintings, music, etc. Given the talent of the people I’m thinking of, that was more of a crime than the actual illegality of the pot-smoking.
And of course there’s the opening quote, which a Romanian site has pointed to within minutes of this post…well, yeah. I did say that. I also said that this was how I saw it in 1999, and from what I’d heard things were looking up there these days.
Jeff lamented to me that he didn’t have enough space to deal with the books themselves in much depth, and had to focus on bio, but I think the result’s quite nice, and I’m pleased to add it to my clippings.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)