"superPatricket"

Ian Parker profiles Edward St. Aubyn for the New Yorker (gruesome, gripping):

James met me in London. Within a few minutes, he said, “I have an odd relationship with Teddy, because he has never, ever been, in any way, cruel to me.” He described going with St. Aubyn and Shulman to a weekend party held by “the Earl of somebody or other,” at which the flirtation between St. Aubyn and a fellow-guest was painfully obvious. James also recalled how St. Aubyn sometimes reacted, at dinner parties, to a stranger’s careless remark: “A not terribly bright girl might say, ‘Ooh, that’s fun,’ and he would play with her use of language in a way that humiliated her.” He added, “It was like a wolf savaging a sheep. It was absolutely terrifying, and difficult to interfere with.” I later spoke with a woman who had had exactly this experience, in France: “I said something about a book I didn’t really know. He made me feel very young, and very stupid.”

James placed this behavior in a generational setting. “That’s what Teddy’s father used to do,” he said. In the fifties, James’s parents, both psychoanalysts, had a second home in Cornwall. David Astor, the owner of the Observer and a family friend, encouraged them to visit Arthur Koestler, who was staying nearby “with this person called Roger St. Aubyn.” (“Such was the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ nature of things,” James said.) Roger, in his early fifties, a qualified but inactive doctor, had by this point divorced his first wife—Baroness Sophie von Puthon, an Austrian—and married St. Aubyn’s mother. Alexandra, Edward’s older sister, had just been born. “My mother described it as an incredible situation in which you had this sadistic, horrible man being vicious to his young heiress wife,” James said. “She was looking after this baby, in this doomy, bleak Cornish place, with Arthur Koestler being intellectual and not particularly nice.”

A reread of the Melrose books is on my list of near-future things to do: I was going to write an essay about St. Aubyn (and may still do so), only laziness and a preference for advancing my own large-scale projects will probably get the better of me. I also have an idea for a class I want to teach on a certain strain of contemporary fiction (projected syllabus to follow - one thing I really like about this time of year is the fact that I am bursting with thoughts and ideas that I haven't had time to pursue during the school year, and now have three months of liberty to do exactly as I like).

I read Lost for Words the other day. Minor work, but with sentences of exceptional sharpness and clarity (I try and avoid using the preposterous "lapidary"): "Her openness to infidelity filled him with an optimism that her choice of infidelity discouraged" (!).

Freaks and geeks?

I've been keenly awaiting this piece, which I knew was in the offing: at the Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer on Stephen Burt as poetry's cross-dressing kingmaker!  (Which gives the whole thing a Game of Thrones flavor...)

"Old biographers have got something extra"

I desperately want to read Claire Tomalin's new Dickens biography!

This piece is a profile of Tomalin by Rachel Cooke, and it's got one of those amazing and awful glimpses of the life of women in London in the 1950s:

In a review of Janet Malcolm's book, The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath, Tomalin wrote: "... one of my most vivid memories of the 1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes – there were no washing machines – while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. I had wanted to do something with my life – I thought I had some capacities and here they were going down the plughole with the soapsuds."

Carr/Talese

The perils of the magazine publicity shoot as experienced by reporter David Carr. (The whole piece, by Tom McGeveran, is worthwhile if you're interested in the present-day state of newspapers in the US; and the offending shot can be seen here...)

(Via Bookforum.)

It is the sort of detail

that can hardly be noted without plunging into sentimentality, at least in fiction, and yet it seems to me quite persuasively true. From John Henley's profile of Henning Mankell for the Guardian:

Besides the theatre, Mankell does a lot of charity work in Africa, including a project called Memory Books, which helps parents dying of Aids to record something of themselves in a book, to be passed to their children when they go. "I was in a small village outside Kampala, Uganda, years ago now," Mankell says. "It had only very young and very old. Everyone in between had died. There was a small girl who showed me a folded scrap of paper in her hand, and in it was pressed a dead blue butterfly. She said her mother had loved blue butterflies. That was one of the most important books I've ever read."

(It might be that the italics on the words most important are also an attempt to counter readerly cynicism and the threat of the sentimental?)

Fabulous beasts

I cannot resist sharing Lynn Barber's 2001 Observer profile of the wonderfully dreadful Marianne Faithfull....

All-Clad, nesting

Zachary Woolfe profiles Nico Muhly at the Observer.

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.

Professional development

From Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young":

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

!

At the FT, a very charming reminiscence by one of Britain's last lighthouse-keepers (site registration required):

Some of the lighthouses didn't have running water, working toilets or heating. Winters at Needles Rock, on the Isle of Wight, weren't great. We were confined to tiny rooms and often spent hours in the dark. Food wasn't exactly a highlight; we would start with joints of meat but they would soon disappear and usually it was all tinned. I'm sure every keeper has bad memories of corned beef!

Jawboning, mental orifices

Novelist and editor Colin Harrison's Sunday routine.

"187 Men to Avoid"

At the Sunday Times, Andrew Collins on the appeal of Dan Brown. This paragraph on The Da Vinci Code made me laugh:

I read it, in late 2004, for a far more prosaic reason: because everybody was reading it. The New Yorker published a piece in 2005 by the magazine’s editor David Remnick, who, on a visit to London to report on Tony Blair’s re-election campaign, said: “I was reading the novel that everyone in London seemed to be poring over in the cafés and on the benches in St James’s Park, Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” A convenient idea, but, in fact, everyone was still reading The Da Vinci Code. I’m not one for confessional journalism, but I admit I loved it. Any deficiencies in style or research went unnoticed as I raced for the finish. I promise you I am not an idiot, but I was so taken with it that I bought the special illustrated edition and the Rough Guide.

"She said I was skeletal and scary eyed"

Rachel Cooke has a morally lowering but grippingly readable profile of Liz Jones in the Observer.

"Escape is entertainment"

New York City's comptroller is a Star Trek fan...