After all the doom of bookstore closings and Australian and Brazilian floods, I was relieved to read an article that introduced a new word into my lexicon of ‘authorisms’. It was in a NYT article about two French intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq, and the word is a delightful mingling of moaning and boasting – ‘moasting’. One example would be: “I cannot believe the state of security at LAX. I mean I had to stand on line for an hour and nearly missed my flight back from taping my interview with Oprah. You’d really think in First Class the lines wouldn’t be so bad!”
As you can imagine, the host of social networking sites – from Facebook status updates to Twitters – allow for a plethora of ‘moasts’ to occur – and let’s face it almost all of us have been guilt of a wee bit of moasting now and again. But reading the article made me think of all the fun moasts I could inflict on my next author panel as well as some of the best ‘moasts’ I have heard in my time. Is there anything more despair inducing to an unpublished writer than to hear famous authors lamenting about their publicity schedules or deadlines? You know the kind of thing – “I didn’t even have time for lunch between taping the Today show, being interviewed for The New Yorker and my photoshoot with Vanity Fair.”
So I thought we could have a bit of fun (after all the horrors of the last week or so, I could do with some) with all this…Tell me what are some of the best/worst moasts you have heard or read? What sort of moast would you like to inflict on a particularly annoying friend or rival?
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