»  The Straggler

 

"I am a straggler. I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without being missed here or observed there."

                    — Boswell's Life of Johnson, 17 April 1778

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From October 2002 to March 2012 I contributed an as-I-please column to the back pages of National Review. The topics were anything I felt like writing about, though with a suitably back-of-the-magazine flavor—no heavyweight political or social commentary.

Asked to give a name to the column, I could only think of Johnson and his Ramblers and Idlers. Because I was bringing up the rear of the magazine, and perhaps also because of a nagging feeling that I am always a bit behind everyone else at taking in news and trends, I settled on "The Straggler."

The column ran in every other issue of National Review, alternating with Rick Brookhiser's "City Desk" column. The vague idea was, I think, that Rick should write about city life while I wrote about the suburbs, in the manner of those "Town and Country" columns you get in British literary/political weekly magazines.

It didn't work out exactly like that, since Rick spends a lot of time out of the city and I am frequently in it. Still I think we kept some of that flavor, since Rick, if not a totally committed urbanite, is more urban (and definitely less suburban) in sensibility than I am.

The magazine's format required that these one-page columns be in the range 1,050-1,100 words. That's a very good discipline for a writer to have imposed on him—especially a writer like myself, with a tendency to sprawl.

[N.B.—The Straggler column only acquired its name at column number 3, as listed below. Because the first two columns were in the same spirit, and at the same place in the magazine, I grandfathered them in to the Straggler family.]