Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Humans are born bullshitters

11.07.2011 by David Murray // 3 Comments

A second-grade writing assignment last week. First whole paragraph the Scout has ever had to write. Has to be about animals that do useful work. Police horses, we decide. (Though the Saint Bernard with the whiskey barrell might have been a cooler subject.)

Scout begins to compose.

"My dad and I were interested to learn about why police officers—wait, let me think of a fancy word."

No! I screamed. But it was too late. It was seven years too late. Because, like all human beings, Scout was a bullshitter at birth. And maybe in utero.

All that's left to be done now is to try to teach her how bullshit better.

Categories // Uncategorized

Friday Happy Hour Video: Gonzo, going bald

11.04.2011 by David Murray // 3 Comments

Going to Copenhagen tomorrow, to do my Speechwriting Jam Session for Danish scribes attending Rhetor Logograf 2011.

For the two-b.m. plane ride, I'm taking one last volume of Hunter S. Thompson's letters. Why last? What was once a young freelance writer's inspiration has become a middle-aged dad's guilty pleasure. More of an anxious pleasure, really.

Here's Thompson, in a drunken panic, trying to be the thing he pretended to be at 28, at 43.

I'm determined not to cling to a dying branch because there's no live branch within reach and the dying branch is better than no branch at all and the dying branch got me up this far, didn't it?

Like every older, heavier man who still insists on climbing fucking trees, I need to reach for big green branches. Publicityphoto--Algren(In my most recurring dream, I am unable to bring myself to reach for something for fear I'll fall off the thing I'm holding onto.)

My writing hero Thompson never found the next branch—just kept holding, awkwardly, onto the first one until it broke and he fell out of the tree looking mostly like an asshole—and that's why Fear and Loathing in America (1968-1976) is the last batch of his letters I'm ever going to read.

Kurt Vonnegut seemed like a pretty graceful old man. Maybe I'll pick up the new biography And So It Goes in the airport bookstore, for the ride home.

Postscript: Just read the review in The New York Times: “And So It Goes depicts [the aging Vonnegut] as living in his 'own private rain,' stuck in a 'hexed' second marriage, nursing grudges and running out of writerly inspiration."

Maybe Robin Leach has a book out?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // And So It Goes, biography, Fear & Loathing in America, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut

I could be a contender!

11.03.2011 by David Murray // 9 Comments

I agreed with the dentist to get my wisdom teeth out after the first of the year.

They've needed to come out for years, and I haven't gotten it done, partly because—I hesitate to divulge it—I've harbored a secret notion that the wisdom teeth are causing a low-grade infection in my head. An infection that affects the brain in a subtle way, and has been holding me back just that little bit, maybe, I don't know—just say it!—keeping me from becoming the next Kurt Vonnegut.

I think I've been avoiding getting the teeth removed on the very real chance that there isn't any low-grade infection that is keeping me from becoming Kurt Vonnegut.

And what will I do if I don't have that hope?

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