'Writing on What Pleased Me Best'

The internet has taught me an ugly, useful transitive verb, to monetize: “To exploit (a product, service, audience, etc.) so that it generates revenue,” the OED explains. This usage is new, though ancient in digital terms, with the earliest citation dating from 1998. Online, people are forever monetizing something or other, turning a hobby, skill or character flaw into cash, and I have nothing against that (though I haven’t monetized this blog, the very idea of which sounds like a joke). My entire career, in fact, is based on monetizing my sole marketable gift – fluency with language. Give me a topic and no more than sixty minutes and I’ll give you twelve column-inches of reasonably competent prose.

I recently (and privately) observed the fortieth anniversary of my occupation as a writer. Earlier I had cooked, sold books, tended bar and pumped gas but for the rest of my life I’ve been a pen for hire. I started as the editor of a weekly newspaper in a small town in Northwestern Ohio. I’ve always had models in mind when writing, which is not the same as influence or plagiarism. Guy Davenport speculated that every book is a response to another book, whether or not the writer is conscious of his motive. In those early days I kept in mind A.J. Liebling and William Hazlitt. The latter’s essay “My First Acquaintance with Poets” was especially inspirational, as when he describes his younger self as “dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding lifeless . . .”

It seems significant that the first thing I wrote that was monetized – that is, for which I was paid – was the obituary of a man named Miller. I’ve spent a lot of time since then writing about dead people, who sometimes seem more substantial and interesting than many of the living. Another sentence from Hazlitt’s essay now reads prophetically:

“So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.”