School books

Also I don't think I linked here to the essay I wrote about why I wish I could read more novels set in classrooms, Crossfit boxes, etc,  I wrote this first as a talk about a year and a half ago (it was my literary classrooms talk) and I am pleased to see it now available to a wider readership!  There are so many things I didn't get to talk about there - Diana Wynne Jones's Magid committees for one which in my theory must have been strongly influenced by how many of her close friends and family were professional academics, there is nothing so much like my day-to-day work life as the administrative conversations in the great underrated Deep Secret!

Hazlittiana

Short notice I'm afraid - have been too busy this week to deal with email and announcements properly, and am due some catch-up - but I am leading a workshop tomorrow at the CUNY Graduate Center on two of my favorite of Hazlitt's essays, 12-2pm. More information here.

Greatness

I'm leading a class at the CUNY Graduate Center in a couple weeks: reading will be two of my favorite essays by Hazlitt, "On My First Acquaintance with Poets" and "The Indian Jugglers," plus an essay I wrote many years ago now about Toni Schlesinger's Shelter columns. In some alternate universe I am an essayist predominantly rather than any other kind of writer - in fact really I think I should be writing a lot more in that mode, along a spectrum from intellectual/analytic to more like this one. Something to ponder....

Retinal

Teju Cole's blind spot.

Late May lassitude

I forgot how I always can only work at a snail's pace (a back-of-the pack snail!) in May - this essay is taking me forever to finish! A glimpse at what I have been doing this week - click for a bigger (but still probably illegible) view...

Light reading miscellany

Slightly procrastinating on getting out for my long run, so will instead do the roundup on recent reading. (Have to log 'em so I can return 'em to the library!)

Belatedly realized that actually there is an earlier Inspector Winter book by Ake Edwardson, Death Angels, only translated into English after the later ones. Quite good, but returning to the earlier installment in a series gives the sense of decreased subtlety due to the character development that has in the meantime happened in subsequent installments.

James Thompson's Snow Angels. Quite striking, and yet also wildly implausible!

Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon, left for me by a visitor. Billed by Edmund Crispin (an old favorite of mine) as "One of the dozen best crime novels that I know" - certainly I would not endorse that statement, but I found it worth my while - curious and interesting narrative voice, at any rate.

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. Very good indeed, but I stalled on it because it is perhaps bleaker than I really want even in my crime fiction reading...

Deon Meyer's Blood Safari, really the best of this bunch I'd say (at least in terms of immediate reading satisfaction - Fallada, as I have suggested, is a bit more complicated) - I am really blown away by Meyer's books, how come I didn't read 'em sooner?!?

Finally an odd one out - it arrived on my doorstep from FSG and I pounced upon it immediately. It is a physically lovely book (a particularly attractive dust-jacket, texturally as well as visually!) and I found the essays all very compelling - it is John Waters' Role Models. I especially enjoyed rereading last year's Huffington Post essay about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, but it's a high-quality collection throughout (I think my other favorite was "Outsider Porn," but the essays on Johnny Mathis and Little Richard are stand-outs as well).

Finally, on a related note, Tony Barrell profiles the founder of Taschen Books in last week's Sunday Times.

Bonsai relationships

At the Millions, Anne K. Yoder interviews Phillip Lopate about his new book Notes on Sontag (the first volume in Princeton University Press's new Writers on Writers series).

(Hmmm, I think I am not prominent enough to do one of these, and also that I have too many projects in the pipeline already - but I want to write one on Anthony Burgess!)

The fabric of the world

The day's page quota came fairly easily today - I am having a productive week of novel-revising, though still with a slightly anxious eye on my August 1 deadline. Right now I'm in the midst of a stretch of entirely new writing, which is enjoyable though somewhat nerve-racking (due to the aforementioned time issues) and causes me to contemplate Samuel R. Delany's description of what it means to revise fiction, which seems to me by far the best thing I have ever seen on the topic.

I read a great book this past week, Peter Terzian's collection Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. I've been looking forward to this book ever since I first heard about it, and it well lived up to expectations. Only a handful of the albums written about here play any significant role in my own internal discography, so it is perhaps not surprising that two of the essays I liked best are both on albums that matter to me also: Benjamin Kunkel's "Still Ill" (The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead) and Colm Toibin's "Three Weeks in the Summer" (Joni Mitchell, Blue). (The first of these two in particular is an unmissably good pieces of writing!) I also liked pieces by Sheila Heti, Martha Southgate and Peter Terzian for reasons that had nothing to do with the albums they described.

But the real standout here for me is an odder and more unusual piece that struck me as absolutely and divinely sublime, to the point that I have just Amazoned its uncanny subject American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). I've been a huge fan of John Jeremiah Sullivan ever since I read his book Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, and this essay is basically the thing I magically most wanted to read in the world without at all knowing it yet!

Check out this paragraph:

In what is surely a trustworthy mark of obscurantist cred, one of the sides on Pre-War Revenants was discovered at a flea market in Nashville by the person who engineered the collection, Chris King, the guy who actually signs for delivery of the reinforced wooden boxes, put together with drywall screws and capable of withstanding an auto collision, in which most 78s arrive for projects like these. The collectors trust King; he's a major collector himself (owner, as it happens, of the second-best of three known copies of "Last Kind Words Blues") and an acknowledged savant when it comes to excavating and reconstructing sonic information from the wrecked grooves of pre-war disc recordings. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. A perk of magazine journalism is you can call up fascinating strangers and ask them questions on absolutely no pretext. King, like Fahey, graduated with degrees in religion and philosophy. He described "junking" that rare 78 in Tennessee, the Two Poor Boys' "Old Hen Cackle," which lay atop a stack of 45s on a table in the open sun. It was brown. In the heat, it had warped, he said, "into the shape of a soup bowl." At the bottom of the bowl he could read the word perfect: that's a short-lived hillbilly label. "Brown Perfects" are precious. He took it home and placed it outside between two panes of clear glass--collector's wisdom, handed down--and allowed the heat of the sun and the slight pressure of the glass's gravity slowly to press it flat again, to where he could play it. Now he could begin finding out what it remembered

The next two paragraphs are equally good - the volume is worth picking up for this piece alone (and you really do have to read that Smiths essay!).

Here's a playlist Peter did recently for the Paper Cuts blog at the Times.

(And here's a bonus link which I missed at the time, Lee Child's earlier installment in the same series! Much of it doesn't particularly catch my eye, but check out this description of why Child thinks of Pink Floyd's "Money" when he writes the action scenes in a Jack Reacher novel: "The lyric is O.K., but what I really like is the time signature change between the saxophone solo and the guitar solo — at that point, we really get down to it, and that’s a feeling I try to replicate whenever I start a major set-piece scene. Like saying: You want action? Try this." It is no surprise that this fellow is such a genius of light reading....)

"O to tie parcels once more!"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on the latest volume published in the scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's essays:

“writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels”, she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “O to fly free in fiction once more! – and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more!”

College admissions

The WSJ invites college presidents to write application essays in response to an essay question from each president's own school's application. (The article's politely phrased conclusion: it is a difficult genre in which to stand out from the pack!)

(Link courtesy of I.H.D.)