Any time I get to feeling good about my writing I’ll get smacked down by an encounter with some really good prose. This does me good and makes me try harder. So many writers write better prose than I can, but there are hordes of writers who write worse. Pseudo-literary crap. Luckily it ain’t a marathon or a race. There are a few winners, a lot of losers, but in the end we all die.
Geoff Dyer is a British writer and I love his stuff. He, like me, is a jazz fan, and his book of kinda-novelistic stories of the lives of several jazz geniuses is on my shelf right next to the essays of Montaigne. The title of the book is “But Beautiful”. Online vendors will ship you a copy of the book for a pittance.
As much as I like Dyer’s writing, about half of his output involves sports. Oh, well, we all have our flaws! Here’s a great essay Dyer wrote while the TV was off: