Inside the Book:
Title: Fuji, Sinai, Olympos
Author: Michael Hoffman
Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com
Genre: Essays
Format: Ecopy /Paperback
Travel companions on my journeys are four in number: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Basho.” (Travel) “He walked in priestly garb. Arriving towards evening at a town or village, he’d chant sutras until passersby gave him, or flung him, enough money for a flophouse bed, a little food, a bath and enough saké to induce a measure of forgetfulness. ‘A beggar,’ he admonished himself, ‘has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar.’” (Walking) ‘“The pleasantest of all diversions,’ said the fourteenth-century Japanese priest Kenko,“ is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.’ Reading is inseparable from reverie. ‘Sitting alone under the lamp,’ I was soon not alone at all, but hosting, I venture to say, as vivid and varied a company as ever gathered under one roof. (Genji, Myshkin and Jones) “Everest is nothing, mere seismology.” (Fuji, Sinai, Olympos)
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THE INTERVIEW:
THE INTERVIEW:
Do you listen to music while you are writing?
Yes, often. Classical music through headphones. Nothing like it to cut you off from the world “out there.” But not always. When there’s silence to listen to, I’ll listen to that, with no less pleasure.
Do you have suggestions for upcoming writers?
Seems too obvious to need saying, but: WRITE. I’ve met “upcoming writers” who are always “going to write.” Secondly: read. It sometimes surprises me how many don’t. Maybe they fear what they read will swamp their originality. That’s not likely. Third – this works for me but may not for everybody: set aside a specific time of day for writing and nothing but writing. Make it inviolable. It becomes a habit – you can’t not write when that time comes. You don’t have to force yourself to write; time itself initiates the flow.
What do you like to do when you are not reading/writing?
Cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in winter, swimming in summer, long, long walks in all seasons.
Who are the authors that inspire you?
Many, many. My book is dedicated to Don Quixote, so Cervantes. Dostoevsky. Very much Dostoevsky. Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Melville of Moby Dick. Kafka. Lately I’ve been reading Jane Austen. She’s amazing. Her novels are extraordinary – and yet peopled by the most ordinary characters doing the most ordinary things in the most ordinary places. There’s much, much inspiration to be drawn from her.
What did you want to be as a child?
First, a hockey player. Then a rock’n roll drummer. After that it was pretty much writing all the way.
How do you handle bad review?
Depends – on what the review says, on the mood I’m in. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it hurts very much. Sometimes I shrug it off. Sometimes I say, “That’s true, why didn’t I think of that?” Sometimes I get my back up and say, “If you didn’t like it I must be doing something right!”
