Writing in a Coffee Shop
Still, the early-20th century expats don’t have a monopoly on writing in cafés. There plenty of more contemporary examples: Jo Nesbø, Malcolm Gladwell, everyone in your MFA. And whether it’s because of the pedigree or the ubiquity or both, writing in cafés gets a bad—read: pretentious, performative, unserious—rap. “The problem with writing in coffee shops is that everyone hates the kind of people who write in coffee shops—especially the kind of people who write in coffee shops,” explained Gladwell, who writes in coffee shops. “You see the guy in the corner hunched over his laptop and you think (forgetting, for the moment, that you are also hunched over a laptop): ‘For chrissake, get an office.’”
The astoundingly prolific Harlan Ellison also did some of his work in public: he famously wrote short stories in the windows of bookstores—partly as a promotional stunt, although he produced at least one award winning story this way, but also to demystify the idea of the Writer.
“I do it because I think particularly in this country people are so distanced from literature, the way it’s taught in schools, that they think that people who write are magicians on a mountaintop somewhere,” he explained in 1981. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much illiteracy in this country. So by doing it in public, I show people it’s a job … like being a plumber or an electrician.”
Despite Ellison’s efforts, the romantic idea persists. The “literary café” is an entire tourism industry. Or at least it used to be.
The Covid-19 pandemic has stripped everyday life of many of its public spaces, especially the indoor ones. It’s profoundly changed how we live, and how we move around in the world—and whether the change is permanent or temporary or somewhere in between has yet to be determined...
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