Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the first writer we’ve met who counts both Martha Stewart and Leon Trotsky as influences. We think this is unique. We don’t expect to meet another author who numbers among his (sparse) possessions a pink Kitchen Aid and a tattered copy of Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital.
We love the marriage of Martha Stewart style to a Socialist upbringing that Saïd writes about in his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. If you’ve read it, you know that these two ideologies aren’t mutually exclusive. Well, at least not in the continuum of a lifetime. Saïd and his wife, Karen, met while working for Martha Stewart’s empire at about the same time that Saïd was letting go of his socialist ideals. In place of the Party, he aligned himself with Martha’s principle of aesthetically pleasing randomness and gave himself permission to decorate.
Besides books about Communism, Saïd’s shelves boast a number of old-fashioned dictionaries–specialized dictionaries, everything you wanted to know about the U.S. military, or saints. He doesn’t keep them out of a sense of nostalgia. He needs them for reference because he disabled the Web from his computer. “So I can’t waste any time,” he said.
Stacked Up is noticing a trend among writers who disable the Web when they work. Both A. J. Jacobs and Ken Wheaton said that they keep a lid on the internet when they write. Saïd’s drastic measure means that he hits the public library to check his email. All this, he explained, so that he can avoid the tyranny of email that John Freeman describes. The topic of email leads Saïd to a story about a man at the library who regularly surfs porn under the watchful eye of the librarian. We learn that the porn-surfer is a large man, probably too large for the librarian to take down. As the story unfolds, we wonder if maybe the best thing about writers disabling the Web is that it brings them out into the world. Where they interact with potential characters in stories.
David Goodwillie tackles two of his favorite subjects, radicalism and New York.
