is always annoyingly slow in August, but here's a good one if you want to read something absolutely scathing: Powell's excellent Review-a-Day site reprints Cristina Nehring on Erica Jong's memoirs, "Zip It: Erica Jong's Stunning Self-absorption". It's partly an effective piece because Nehring allows as how Fear of Flying's an excellent novel--I agree, and so does Anthony Burgess, who made it one of his best 99 novels in English since 1939.
(I skimmed through most of the memoir one day in the Harvard Bookstore this spring, for old times' sake, and can't say I markedly disagree with Nehring, though I would not enjoy writing such a devastating pan--the passages about the affair with Martha Stewart's husband are quite gripping in a surely somewhat unintended way. Here was my blog entry in March about the excerpt available online.)
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Sunday, August 06, 2006
A question
Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated. A resource I'm in love with is Thomson-Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online--digitized images (made from a massive microfilm collection) of almost every book published in English in the eighteenth century. But I can't read multi-hundred-page theological treatises or whatever on screen, which has led to a lot of massive printing jobs that are not a sensible use of paper. What are the options for a hand-held reading device? Has anybody tried the Sony Reader, particularly for PDF files of the kind I'm talking about? Are there other options? I'm skeptical about electronic readers for light reading--it has to do with the cost of content, not the cost of the original device, I just can't imagine paying so much money for digital files of books I could, you know, get from the library or pick up used or whatever--but I would pay several hundred dollars for a really convenient way of dealing with this kind of electronic file so that I could read it comfortably.
Maniacal blog entry #2
I got a fantastic hoard of books yesterday from a friend who to my great good fortune works at a large publisher that does a lot of the things I like, I had a look through the catalogs and made a greedy wish-list and then had this sort of bonanza arrival that had my head spinning as I tried to figure out what to read (but I don’t have time to read anything that isn’t for work).
In any case I set aside a few immediately appealing ones for mealtime small-bite consumption, but for some reason the one I pounced upon and consumed at once was Roberto Calasso’s The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, translated from German by Michael Hofman (the translator for Calasso’s Italian commentary is Geoffrey Brock).
It’s a beautiful little book (or so I assume, I’ve only got the ARC but its proportions and type and so forth are all extremely pleasing), and includes some material from Calasso’s K. as additional commentary. I read it in a stolen moment last night but had to hold off blogging until I finished the latest spate of note-taking for my chapter: but now I’ve just had a very productive long stint of work, so that my late-night reward for sitting at the computer and typing up vast quantities of notes from books is--sitting at the computer and typing up more notes from books!
These aphorisms were written during the eight months Kafka (tubercular, invalid) spent at his sister’s house in the Bohemian countryside between September 1917 and April 1918. Identifying this manifestation of illness as having enabled “a provisional leave of absence from the torment of normal life,” Calasso also sees it as enabling “a kind of daring experiment made possible only under these conditions, the appearance of a new form: the aphorism.” This is Calasso writing:
New first of all in a physical, tactile sense: Kafka typically wrote, in pen or in pencil, in school notebooks, barely even marking divisions between one text and the next as he filled them; now, however, he puts together a sequence of 103 individual slips of onionskin paper, each measuring 14.5 centimeters by 11.5 centimeters, each containing, with rare exceptions, a single numbered fragment, generally aphoristic.
…
It would be pointless to seek, among twentieth-century collections of aphorisms, another as intense and enigmatic. If published one after the other, these fragments would occupy twenty or so pages and would be almost suffocating—because each fragment is an aphorism in the Kierkegaardian sense, an “isolated” entity, which must be surrounded by an empty space in order to breathe. This need explains the point of transcribing them one to a page. But even the definition of aphorism is misleading, if we understand that word as currently used to mean “maxim.” Some of these fragments are narrative (for example, 8/9, 10, 20, 107), others are single images (15, 16, 42, 87), and others are parables (32, 39, 88).
What strikes me about these aphorisms is their sheer alienness and also the way that they are so deeply un-novelistic. It seems to me very strange (but then Kafka is a very strange kind of novelist, if you can really call him a novelist at all) that they should be like this, especially as my very favorite aphorist (see maniacal post #1 below) is a philosopher rather than a novelist and yet writes the most deeply and wonderfully novelistic aphorisms. I suppose I prefer collections of aphorisms that are more like something out of a commonplace book, short bits and pieces of prose that don’t fit into a longer narrative or argument; I’ve thought a bit more about this in the other post.
My favorites here, in any case, the ones that set some train of associations going or seemed to speak to me:
#20
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incoporated into the ritual.
#29
The animal twists the whip out of its master’s grip and whips itself to become its own master—not knowing that this is only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.
#32
The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.
#48
Believing in progress doesn’t mean believing in progress that has already occurred. That would not require belief.
#79
Sexual love deceives us as to heavenly love; were it alone, it would not be able to do so, but containing within itself, unknowingly, a germ of heavenly love, it can.
#93
No psychology ever again!
#109
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.
And that’s a good note to end on here, what a delightful endorsement of my maniacal and reclusive summer (I really do feel, by the way, as if the eighteenth century has been writhing before me in ecstasy for the last few weeks, it is a remarkably enjoyable sensation--I think the chapter I have been writing is the work of a lunatic, and I am secretly glad!).
In any case I set aside a few immediately appealing ones for mealtime small-bite consumption, but for some reason the one I pounced upon and consumed at once was Roberto Calasso’s The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, translated from German by Michael Hofman (the translator for Calasso’s Italian commentary is Geoffrey Brock).
It’s a beautiful little book (or so I assume, I’ve only got the ARC but its proportions and type and so forth are all extremely pleasing), and includes some material from Calasso’s K. as additional commentary. I read it in a stolen moment last night but had to hold off blogging until I finished the latest spate of note-taking for my chapter: but now I’ve just had a very productive long stint of work, so that my late-night reward for sitting at the computer and typing up vast quantities of notes from books is--sitting at the computer and typing up more notes from books!
These aphorisms were written during the eight months Kafka (tubercular, invalid) spent at his sister’s house in the Bohemian countryside between September 1917 and April 1918. Identifying this manifestation of illness as having enabled “a provisional leave of absence from the torment of normal life,” Calasso also sees it as enabling “a kind of daring experiment made possible only under these conditions, the appearance of a new form: the aphorism.” This is Calasso writing:
New first of all in a physical, tactile sense: Kafka typically wrote, in pen or in pencil, in school notebooks, barely even marking divisions between one text and the next as he filled them; now, however, he puts together a sequence of 103 individual slips of onionskin paper, each measuring 14.5 centimeters by 11.5 centimeters, each containing, with rare exceptions, a single numbered fragment, generally aphoristic.
…
It would be pointless to seek, among twentieth-century collections of aphorisms, another as intense and enigmatic. If published one after the other, these fragments would occupy twenty or so pages and would be almost suffocating—because each fragment is an aphorism in the Kierkegaardian sense, an “isolated” entity, which must be surrounded by an empty space in order to breathe. This need explains the point of transcribing them one to a page. But even the definition of aphorism is misleading, if we understand that word as currently used to mean “maxim.” Some of these fragments are narrative (for example, 8/9, 10, 20, 107), others are single images (15, 16, 42, 87), and others are parables (32, 39, 88).
What strikes me about these aphorisms is their sheer alienness and also the way that they are so deeply un-novelistic. It seems to me very strange (but then Kafka is a very strange kind of novelist, if you can really call him a novelist at all) that they should be like this, especially as my very favorite aphorist (see maniacal post #1 below) is a philosopher rather than a novelist and yet writes the most deeply and wonderfully novelistic aphorisms. I suppose I prefer collections of aphorisms that are more like something out of a commonplace book, short bits and pieces of prose that don’t fit into a longer narrative or argument; I’ve thought a bit more about this in the other post.
My favorites here, in any case, the ones that set some train of associations going or seemed to speak to me:
#20
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incoporated into the ritual.
#29
The animal twists the whip out of its master’s grip and whips itself to become its own master—not knowing that this is only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.
#32
The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.
#48
Believing in progress doesn’t mean believing in progress that has already occurred. That would not require belief.
#79
Sexual love deceives us as to heavenly love; were it alone, it would not be able to do so, but containing within itself, unknowingly, a germ of heavenly love, it can.
#93
No psychology ever again!
#109
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.
And that’s a good note to end on here, what a delightful endorsement of my maniacal and reclusive summer (I really do feel, by the way, as if the eighteenth century has been writhing before me in ecstasy for the last few weeks, it is a remarkably enjoyable sensation--I think the chapter I have been writing is the work of a lunatic, and I am secretly glad!).
Maniacal blog entry #1
Aphorisms are not of course the same thing as notebook entries, and yet one of my favorite collections of aphorisms (and the aphorism's a form I love) is Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman and translated by Peter Winch.
One thing I don’t like about blogging is the way that if you want to say two things and the two things sort of depend on each other (Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat) you still have to have them upside-down. In other words, this is Thing Two but I’ve posted it first so that it appears beneath the other one.
I fell in love with Culture and Value when I first read it, have read it through at least three or four times since and have had it nagging at the back of my brain all summer that it was time to have another pass through. I retrieved it from my office last night and have just skimmed back through in a blissed-out kind of way for my very favorites. (I feel sure I must have posted some of these before?)
When I say that there’s something deeply novelistic about Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, I’m thinking of their autobiographical aspect but also and particularly of something about the way he sees familiar things like an alien. (Kafka by contrast sees alien things like an alien.) I like this book for some of the same reasons I like Austen. My new novel has observations a bit like these ones (only more minor) studded here and there, because the main character is someone who thinks about things. I’ve never been able to get interested in novels whose characters don’t think about things (this is why not-top-rate crime fiction and speculative fiction seem to me infinitely superior to not-quite-top-rate chick lit, where the characters are significantly less likely to have philosophical as opposed to emotional insights, but that's a topic for another day), and it’s probably one of my reservations about short stories as well, that they are if anything even less likely to have characters who have intellectual thoughts as opposed to, you know, experiencing sensations that are often registered or transmitted to the reader by way of the narrator’s observations of the physical world.
I also love Culture and Value because I am frivolous: I was talking a little while ago about this with a friend, really reading certain kinds of book you’re just looking for the aphorism bits which you then take out and weave together into your own account of something. There is a lot of wasted effort involved in this process, to take the pragmatic view: think of all the work the author has to do weaving together his/her aphorisms into a whole essay (I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin here especially), when all we really want to do is take them right back out again. I defy anyone to have rational disagreement with my claim that Minima Moralia is Adorno’s most delightful book, and that it’s because he’s just giving us the good parts and not the in-between ones. This is the eternal appeal of reading great thinkers’ notebooks, not intended for publication, rather than their polished finished out-there-in-the-world works. (Oh, dear, and look, how awful/excellent, the editor has a reproach to exactly readers like me: “It is unavoidable that a book of this sort will reach the hands of readers to whom otherwise Wittgentstein’s philosophical work is, and will remain, unknown. This need not necessarily be harmful or useless.” [!!!])
Wittgenstein himself is very good here on this topic, he sees right to the bones of it:
If I am thinking about a topic just for myself and not with a view to writing a book, I jump about all round it; that is the only way of thinking that comes naturally to me. Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. Is it even worth attempting now?
I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all.
And again:
Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake; and someone who is in a position to give us a bag full of raisins still can’t bake a cake with them, let alone do something better. I am thinking of Kraus and his aphorisms, but of myself too and my philosophical remarks.
A cake—that isn’t[,] as it were: thinned-out raisins.
Anyway, here are some but not all of my favorites (you must go and get this and read it for yourself, it is really one of the most thought-provoking and memorable books that’s ever come my way):
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
To treat somebody well when he does not like you, you need to be not only very good natured, but very tactful too.
The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. (I once heard Labor make a similar remark about musical ideas.) Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumped. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.
In my artistic activities I really have nothing but good manners.
A script you can read fluently works on you very differently from one that you can write, but not decipher easily. You lock your thoughts up in this as though in a casket.
I just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time. I had to cut half off many of them and throw it away. Afterwards when I was copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time. (Is there something feminine about this way of thinking?)
Esperanto. The feeling of disgust we get if we utter an invented word with invented derivative syllables. The word is cold, lacking in associations, and yet it plays at being ‘language’. A system of purely written signs would not disgust us so much.
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.
During a dream and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest significance. Can’t we be subject to the same illusion when awake? I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this nowadays. The insane often seem to be like this.
I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)
Two people are laughing together, say at a joke. One of them has used certain somewhat unusual words and now they both break out into a sort of bleating. That might appear very extraordinary to a visitor coming from quite a different environment. Whereas we find it completely reasonable.
(I recently witnessed this scene on a bus and was able to think myself into the position of someone to whom this would be unfamiliar. From that point of view it struck me as qutie irrational, like the responses of an outlandish animal.)
It is difficult to know something and to act as if you did not know it.
What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as though there were a custom amongst certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket.
Or what is it like for somebody to be unable to fathom someone else’s taste?
There is something about the cadence of the sentences that reminds me of Wayne Koestenbaum's writing (the precision of the word placement?); and also the use of italics makes me think of Toni Schlesinger.
One thing I don’t like about blogging is the way that if you want to say two things and the two things sort of depend on each other (Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat) you still have to have them upside-down. In other words, this is Thing Two but I’ve posted it first so that it appears beneath the other one.
I fell in love with Culture and Value when I first read it, have read it through at least three or four times since and have had it nagging at the back of my brain all summer that it was time to have another pass through. I retrieved it from my office last night and have just skimmed back through in a blissed-out kind of way for my very favorites. (I feel sure I must have posted some of these before?)
When I say that there’s something deeply novelistic about Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, I’m thinking of their autobiographical aspect but also and particularly of something about the way he sees familiar things like an alien. (Kafka by contrast sees alien things like an alien.) I like this book for some of the same reasons I like Austen. My new novel has observations a bit like these ones (only more minor) studded here and there, because the main character is someone who thinks about things. I’ve never been able to get interested in novels whose characters don’t think about things (this is why not-top-rate crime fiction and speculative fiction seem to me infinitely superior to not-quite-top-rate chick lit, where the characters are significantly less likely to have philosophical as opposed to emotional insights, but that's a topic for another day), and it’s probably one of my reservations about short stories as well, that they are if anything even less likely to have characters who have intellectual thoughts as opposed to, you know, experiencing sensations that are often registered or transmitted to the reader by way of the narrator’s observations of the physical world.
I also love Culture and Value because I am frivolous: I was talking a little while ago about this with a friend, really reading certain kinds of book you’re just looking for the aphorism bits which you then take out and weave together into your own account of something. There is a lot of wasted effort involved in this process, to take the pragmatic view: think of all the work the author has to do weaving together his/her aphorisms into a whole essay (I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin here especially), when all we really want to do is take them right back out again. I defy anyone to have rational disagreement with my claim that Minima Moralia is Adorno’s most delightful book, and that it’s because he’s just giving us the good parts and not the in-between ones. This is the eternal appeal of reading great thinkers’ notebooks, not intended for publication, rather than their polished finished out-there-in-the-world works. (Oh, dear, and look, how awful/excellent, the editor has a reproach to exactly readers like me: “It is unavoidable that a book of this sort will reach the hands of readers to whom otherwise Wittgentstein’s philosophical work is, and will remain, unknown. This need not necessarily be harmful or useless.” [!!!])
Wittgenstein himself is very good here on this topic, he sees right to the bones of it:
If I am thinking about a topic just for myself and not with a view to writing a book, I jump about all round it; that is the only way of thinking that comes naturally to me. Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. Is it even worth attempting now?
I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all.
And again:
Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake; and someone who is in a position to give us a bag full of raisins still can’t bake a cake with them, let alone do something better. I am thinking of Kraus and his aphorisms, but of myself too and my philosophical remarks.
A cake—that isn’t[,] as it were: thinned-out raisins.
Anyway, here are some but not all of my favorites (you must go and get this and read it for yourself, it is really one of the most thought-provoking and memorable books that’s ever come my way):
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
To treat somebody well when he does not like you, you need to be not only very good natured, but very tactful too.
The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. (I once heard Labor make a similar remark about musical ideas.) Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumped. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.
In my artistic activities I really have nothing but good manners.
A script you can read fluently works on you very differently from one that you can write, but not decipher easily. You lock your thoughts up in this as though in a casket.
I just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time. I had to cut half off many of them and throw it away. Afterwards when I was copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time. (Is there something feminine about this way of thinking?)
Esperanto. The feeling of disgust we get if we utter an invented word with invented derivative syllables. The word is cold, lacking in associations, and yet it plays at being ‘language’. A system of purely written signs would not disgust us so much.
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.
During a dream and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest significance. Can’t we be subject to the same illusion when awake? I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this nowadays. The insane often seem to be like this.
I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)
Two people are laughing together, say at a joke. One of them has used certain somewhat unusual words and now they both break out into a sort of bleating. That might appear very extraordinary to a visitor coming from quite a different environment. Whereas we find it completely reasonable.
(I recently witnessed this scene on a bus and was able to think myself into the position of someone to whom this would be unfamiliar. From that point of view it struck me as qutie irrational, like the responses of an outlandish animal.)
It is difficult to know something and to act as if you did not know it.
What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as though there were a custom amongst certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket.
Or what is it like for somebody to be unable to fathom someone else’s taste?
There is something about the cadence of the sentences that reminds me of Wayne Koestenbaum's writing (the precision of the word placement?); and also the use of italics makes me think of Toni Schlesinger.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
I can't wait
to read Claire Messud's new novel, which gets a great review from Sara Eckel at the Voice. I have only read The Last Life, not her other two, but I thought it was wonderfully good: there's something reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst, he and Messud both look back style-wise to the European rather than simply Anglophone nineteenth-century novel but without even a hint of the nostalgic costume-drama-ishness that afflicts so many writers who borrow the techniques of realism for comparable ends.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Geoff Dyer at the Guardian on Rebecca West's magnum opus. I read this when I was a teenager, dipped into it again in the late 90s but must get hold of it again now and reread properly; it's being reissued by Canongate.
Words and dollars
Kevin Dettmar, one of the co-editors of the twentieth-century selections in the Longman Anthology of British Literature, has a fascinating piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education about writers whose permission fees are so high that the balance is tipped against their inclusion (I'm not sure you'll be able to read this without a subscription--if you've got a university account, though, you should be able to get the electronic edition through the library catalog--but I've pasted in quite a bit of the text below, and it would make an interesting handout to give to students using an anthology in a literature class who might be otherwise oblivious to these factors):
A portion of every dollar we spend on permissions to reprint is charged against the royalties of the textbook's editors, which means that we need to be prudent without being downright stingy. In effect, every dollar in permissions cost is split between the editors and the students who buy the book: We editors split permissions costs with the publisher, whose share is built into the price of the book, to the extent that the market will bear it. Because the publisher passes along its share to the book's purchasers — primarily students — the editors are in effect equal stakeholders with the students, equally interested in keeping permissions costs down. Permissions costs can mount up pretty quickly, contributing to students' complaints that their books are too expensive.
By my calculations, almost 70 percent of the permissions costs of the current edition of the Longman result from selections in the 20th-century volume. That should come as no surprise, since for most works published before 1923 the copyright has run out in this country. But the translations and scholarly editions chosen for earlier periods often are still covered by copyright protection, and payment must be made to the translators and scholars who have made older works accessible to modern readers. Those costs can be quite high: I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the volume on the Middle Ages is the next most expensive after that for the 20th century, accounting for nearly 15 percent of the permissions costs for the entire anthology. J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, is the second costliest item in the entire anthology (after Samuel Beckett's play Endgame). Is it worth it? Absolutely: Tolkien's is a vivid, accessible translation, and his dual credentials as a medieval scholar and fantasy author make him the perfect voice to render the tale. That said, we can still hope that the windfall of the Lord of the Rings movies will allow the Tolkien estate not to charge us as much the next time around.
... [Here he discusses the first category, of specific works that must be included--i.e. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Joyce; Woolf; etc.]
A second permissions category consists of authors who must be included, but whose work might be represented in different ways: The writer is canonical, but no one text is a sine qua non. Any anthology of British literature, for instance, must include a representative selection of the poems of W.H. Auden. Quarrels continue around the borders of the canon, but Wystan is in, end of story. He has also become fantastically expensive — at an average fee of $20 per line, the modest selections we've included come to more than $8,000. Those permissions costs are a bitter pill for an editor to swallow. While Auden is in no danger of disappearing from our anthologies, and consequently from our classrooms or our cultural consciousness — "September 1, 1939," for instance, was the most visible piece of literature in the days, weeks, and months following the September 11, 2001, attacks — one begins to think about how much one can afford, and what one can afford to do without. I resent being forced to make absurd calculations, such as five lines of Auden equals one page of Salman Rushdie. Although Auden is one of the 20th century's most gifted English-language poets, he is represented in the Longman by a mere handful of poems, most of which are somewhat familiar choices.
Other 20th-century poets have suffered that same diminution, as permissions fees in some cases have actually doubled in the short time between editions. We were forced to drop Dylan Thomas's poetic radio drama "Return Journey," for example, and Eavan Boland's poem "The Journey." Poets, because their work is available in smaller discrete units than that of playwrights and fiction writers, are especially susceptible to such cuts. It's hard to feel good about that state of affairs.
A third group comprises those authors and works that one tries to include not because one must have them, but because one wants them — an interesting writer who might otherwise be overlooked, but whose work deserves attention or has become newly interesting in light of recent scholarship; a text whose inclusion helps to enrich an otherwise two-dimensional rendering of an era, problem, or movement. For the second edition of the Longman, for instance, Jennifer Wicke, my editing partner for the 20th-century volume, had the brilliant idea of adding a handful of poems by the American poet Sylvia Plath, to accompany some poetry by her (in)famous British husband, Ted Hughes. Their difficult marriage is the stuff of literary legend and now big-screen fame (the 2003 film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig). More to the point, in 1998 Hughes's poetic narrative of their partnership, Birthday Letters, was published posthumously, bringing the couple again to the forefront of literary and public consciousness.
Well, in the third edition Plath is gone again: Whether because of the recent resurgence of interest in her life (and perhaps poetry) among the American public, or some other cause, the fees demanded for reprinting just four poems suddenly rose to more than $3,500 for the U.S. and Canadian rights. Plath thereby crossed some kind of invisible line into the realm of extravagant indulgence. Assembling an anthology is a little bit like building a home: One goes into the project with big dreams, but after meeting with the architects and builders, certain features go by the boards; even more desires are sacrificed during construction, as costs overrun estimates. In our third edition, a smattering of poems by Sylvia Plath became those skylights in the kitchen that would have to wait for later.
Sometimes texts are omitted, or added, for the most idiosyncratic of reasons: This is my fourth category, probably best labeled "Misc." In thinking about contemporary responses to Eliot's The Waste Land, I very much wanted to include a poem by the contemporary Irish poet Thomas Kinsella (who also taught here in Carbondale for many years), the long poem "Nightwalker." But Kinsella himself refused permission. Why? His refusal had to do with the title of our anthology. Because we are convinced that the phrase "English literature" suggests an Anglophilic perspective that doesn't account for the vitality and diversity of British writing, which includes works by current and former members of the British Empire (is Rushdie an "English" writer?), ours is the Longman Anthology of British Literature. Mr. Kinsella objected that he is not a British writer, and of course he's right; "I am sorry to have to refuse, as I feel the adjective 'British' does not apply to my work," he wrote. On the other hand, we thought the Longman Anthology of English, Irish, Northern Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, and West Indian Literature was a bit unwieldy.
As our first edition was being prepared for press, back in 1998, we learned that permission to reprint Caryl Churchill's play Cloud 9 could not be granted. Ownership of rights to the play was then being decided in the British courts, and no one had legal standing to grant permission. The play was simply unavailable to us. Given that immovable object, Jennifer and I quickly turned to another script that we had hoped to include but hadn't found room for, Hanif Kureishi's screenplay for the wonderful film about the complexities of multicultural London, My Beautiful Laundrette. That text proved very popular with teachers and students, and by no means felt like a compromise or second choice. But when we sat down to plan the second edition, we learned that the legal status of Cloud 9 had been established and that the play would be available to us. Although it was a difficult decision, we decided to drop Kureishi to make room for Churchill — we couldn't pay, nor had we room, for both. Such is the horse trading that goes into assembling an anthology.
When we began planning the third edition, we decided to keep Cloud 9 — the play had been at least as popular with our readers as My Beautiful Laundrette, and we saw no reason to drop it. But when we applied for permission to reprint the play in the new edition, we learned that the play was now worth $10,000 up front, plus a percentage of the gross, which would have put the cost in excess of $13,000. After a good deal of soul-searching, I suggested that we contact Mr. Kureishi's people to see what it would cost to switch back to our first-edition favorite, My Beautiful Laundrette. The answer, to my delight, was $1,000.
And there was a bonus. Just as our volume was going to press, Mr. Kureishi published an essay in The Guardian, following the London subway bombings of last summer, about the costs and limitations of multicultural London. I thought the piece would make a wonderful companion to the screenplay, suggesting some of the ways that London has changed since 1985, when the script was written. Our deadline was so short — just one week — that our permissions staff told me there was no way we could clear permissions for the essay in time. I e-mailed Mr. Kureishi directly late on a Wednesday night and delivered my plea. I never heard back from him, but the following morning an e-mail message was waiting for me from the person who handles his permissions in the United States: "The author has granted his permission." Even better, he gave it to us for a song.
A portion of every dollar we spend on permissions to reprint is charged against the royalties of the textbook's editors, which means that we need to be prudent without being downright stingy. In effect, every dollar in permissions cost is split between the editors and the students who buy the book: We editors split permissions costs with the publisher, whose share is built into the price of the book, to the extent that the market will bear it. Because the publisher passes along its share to the book's purchasers — primarily students — the editors are in effect equal stakeholders with the students, equally interested in keeping permissions costs down. Permissions costs can mount up pretty quickly, contributing to students' complaints that their books are too expensive.
By my calculations, almost 70 percent of the permissions costs of the current edition of the Longman result from selections in the 20th-century volume. That should come as no surprise, since for most works published before 1923 the copyright has run out in this country. But the translations and scholarly editions chosen for earlier periods often are still covered by copyright protection, and payment must be made to the translators and scholars who have made older works accessible to modern readers. Those costs can be quite high: I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the volume on the Middle Ages is the next most expensive after that for the 20th century, accounting for nearly 15 percent of the permissions costs for the entire anthology. J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, is the second costliest item in the entire anthology (after Samuel Beckett's play Endgame). Is it worth it? Absolutely: Tolkien's is a vivid, accessible translation, and his dual credentials as a medieval scholar and fantasy author make him the perfect voice to render the tale. That said, we can still hope that the windfall of the Lord of the Rings movies will allow the Tolkien estate not to charge us as much the next time around.
... [Here he discusses the first category, of specific works that must be included--i.e. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Joyce; Woolf; etc.]
A second permissions category consists of authors who must be included, but whose work might be represented in different ways: The writer is canonical, but no one text is a sine qua non. Any anthology of British literature, for instance, must include a representative selection of the poems of W.H. Auden. Quarrels continue around the borders of the canon, but Wystan is in, end of story. He has also become fantastically expensive — at an average fee of $20 per line, the modest selections we've included come to more than $8,000. Those permissions costs are a bitter pill for an editor to swallow. While Auden is in no danger of disappearing from our anthologies, and consequently from our classrooms or our cultural consciousness — "September 1, 1939," for instance, was the most visible piece of literature in the days, weeks, and months following the September 11, 2001, attacks — one begins to think about how much one can afford, and what one can afford to do without. I resent being forced to make absurd calculations, such as five lines of Auden equals one page of Salman Rushdie. Although Auden is one of the 20th century's most gifted English-language poets, he is represented in the Longman by a mere handful of poems, most of which are somewhat familiar choices.
Other 20th-century poets have suffered that same diminution, as permissions fees in some cases have actually doubled in the short time between editions. We were forced to drop Dylan Thomas's poetic radio drama "Return Journey," for example, and Eavan Boland's poem "The Journey." Poets, because their work is available in smaller discrete units than that of playwrights and fiction writers, are especially susceptible to such cuts. It's hard to feel good about that state of affairs.
A third group comprises those authors and works that one tries to include not because one must have them, but because one wants them — an interesting writer who might otherwise be overlooked, but whose work deserves attention or has become newly interesting in light of recent scholarship; a text whose inclusion helps to enrich an otherwise two-dimensional rendering of an era, problem, or movement. For the second edition of the Longman, for instance, Jennifer Wicke, my editing partner for the 20th-century volume, had the brilliant idea of adding a handful of poems by the American poet Sylvia Plath, to accompany some poetry by her (in)famous British husband, Ted Hughes. Their difficult marriage is the stuff of literary legend and now big-screen fame (the 2003 film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig). More to the point, in 1998 Hughes's poetic narrative of their partnership, Birthday Letters, was published posthumously, bringing the couple again to the forefront of literary and public consciousness.
Well, in the third edition Plath is gone again: Whether because of the recent resurgence of interest in her life (and perhaps poetry) among the American public, or some other cause, the fees demanded for reprinting just four poems suddenly rose to more than $3,500 for the U.S. and Canadian rights. Plath thereby crossed some kind of invisible line into the realm of extravagant indulgence. Assembling an anthology is a little bit like building a home: One goes into the project with big dreams, but after meeting with the architects and builders, certain features go by the boards; even more desires are sacrificed during construction, as costs overrun estimates. In our third edition, a smattering of poems by Sylvia Plath became those skylights in the kitchen that would have to wait for later.
Sometimes texts are omitted, or added, for the most idiosyncratic of reasons: This is my fourth category, probably best labeled "Misc." In thinking about contemporary responses to Eliot's The Waste Land, I very much wanted to include a poem by the contemporary Irish poet Thomas Kinsella (who also taught here in Carbondale for many years), the long poem "Nightwalker." But Kinsella himself refused permission. Why? His refusal had to do with the title of our anthology. Because we are convinced that the phrase "English literature" suggests an Anglophilic perspective that doesn't account for the vitality and diversity of British writing, which includes works by current and former members of the British Empire (is Rushdie an "English" writer?), ours is the Longman Anthology of British Literature. Mr. Kinsella objected that he is not a British writer, and of course he's right; "I am sorry to have to refuse, as I feel the adjective 'British' does not apply to my work," he wrote. On the other hand, we thought the Longman Anthology of English, Irish, Northern Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, and West Indian Literature was a bit unwieldy.
As our first edition was being prepared for press, back in 1998, we learned that permission to reprint Caryl Churchill's play Cloud 9 could not be granted. Ownership of rights to the play was then being decided in the British courts, and no one had legal standing to grant permission. The play was simply unavailable to us. Given that immovable object, Jennifer and I quickly turned to another script that we had hoped to include but hadn't found room for, Hanif Kureishi's screenplay for the wonderful film about the complexities of multicultural London, My Beautiful Laundrette. That text proved very popular with teachers and students, and by no means felt like a compromise or second choice. But when we sat down to plan the second edition, we learned that the legal status of Cloud 9 had been established and that the play would be available to us. Although it was a difficult decision, we decided to drop Kureishi to make room for Churchill — we couldn't pay, nor had we room, for both. Such is the horse trading that goes into assembling an anthology.
When we began planning the third edition, we decided to keep Cloud 9 — the play had been at least as popular with our readers as My Beautiful Laundrette, and we saw no reason to drop it. But when we applied for permission to reprint the play in the new edition, we learned that the play was now worth $10,000 up front, plus a percentage of the gross, which would have put the cost in excess of $13,000. After a good deal of soul-searching, I suggested that we contact Mr. Kureishi's people to see what it would cost to switch back to our first-edition favorite, My Beautiful Laundrette. The answer, to my delight, was $1,000.
And there was a bonus. Just as our volume was going to press, Mr. Kureishi published an essay in The Guardian, following the London subway bombings of last summer, about the costs and limitations of multicultural London. I thought the piece would make a wonderful companion to the screenplay, suggesting some of the ways that London has changed since 1985, when the script was written. Our deadline was so short — just one week — that our permissions staff told me there was no way we could clear permissions for the essay in time. I e-mailed Mr. Kureishi directly late on a Wednesday night and delivered my plea. I never heard back from him, but the following morning an e-mail message was waiting for me from the person who handles his permissions in the United States: "The author has granted his permission." Even better, he gave it to us for a song.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Gun control
Someone should put copies of George Pelecanos's last few novels in fancy gift baskets and deliver one to each member of Congress and we would have a good gun control law about one week later. Just finished reading his latest, The Night Gardener (courtesy of the divine Sarah). It's excellent. (Also I must say it has the most over-the-top blurbs I think I have ever seen, it's pretty funny: they're by two authors I love, Ken Bruen and Laura Lippman, and it's not that I disagree with what they say, I think they're both quite right about the excellence of Pelecanos, but I hope this doesn't represent a new trend in blurbing, these swathes of hyperbole in the grand style just make me want to laugh. Go and look at a copy and you'll see what I mean; oh, and buy the book!)
Random paragraph I liked (Gus Ramone and Rhonda Willis are both homicide detectives, and here Ramone's visiting the Metropolitan Police Academy):
The academy looked like any high school, with standard-sized classrooms on the upper floors and a gymnasium, swimming pool, and extensive workout facilities below. Veteran police, including Ramone, used the weight room and pool to stay in shape. Rhonda's vanity had shrunk with the birth of each successive child, and she had not exercised in many years. If she managed to put together a half hour of free time, Rhonda felt that a hot bath and a glass of wine were more valuable to her physical and mental health than a visit to the gym could ever be.
Pelecanos has this excellent style that's so understated as to be almost invisible, but if you're really paying attention you know you're reading something far more carefully crafted than most novels. I like the way he handles a large cast of characters, and of course the DC/Maryland settings (and the world of objects--clothes, cars, condiments--and the sounds and rhythms of the different kinds of speech you hear in different contexts and the always-present sense of a high-quality musical soundtrack) are the books' greatest selling points.
I have a ridiculous confession, though: I put the book down to read Edward P. Jones's story in the latest issue of the New Yorker (mmmm, good story), and then afterwards I kept on having to remind myself it hadn't been an episode in The Night Gardener! The two wove together so seamlessly, it was like something in a dream....
Random paragraph I liked (Gus Ramone and Rhonda Willis are both homicide detectives, and here Ramone's visiting the Metropolitan Police Academy):
The academy looked like any high school, with standard-sized classrooms on the upper floors and a gymnasium, swimming pool, and extensive workout facilities below. Veteran police, including Ramone, used the weight room and pool to stay in shape. Rhonda's vanity had shrunk with the birth of each successive child, and she had not exercised in many years. If she managed to put together a half hour of free time, Rhonda felt that a hot bath and a glass of wine were more valuable to her physical and mental health than a visit to the gym could ever be.
Pelecanos has this excellent style that's so understated as to be almost invisible, but if you're really paying attention you know you're reading something far more carefully crafted than most novels. I like the way he handles a large cast of characters, and of course the DC/Maryland settings (and the world of objects--clothes, cars, condiments--and the sounds and rhythms of the different kinds of speech you hear in different contexts and the always-present sense of a high-quality musical soundtrack) are the books' greatest selling points.
I have a ridiculous confession, though: I put the book down to read Edward P. Jones's story in the latest issue of the New Yorker (mmmm, good story), and then afterwards I kept on having to remind myself it hadn't been an episode in The Night Gardener! The two wove together so seamlessly, it was like something in a dream....
The pros and cons of getting an advance for a book you haven't written yet
Justine Larbalestier posted recently about why she's chosen to write her new book before selling it rather than selling the book on the basis of a proposal, and it led to some interesting discussion in the comments. Here's one of the best reasons not to sell your book first (it's Maev Kennedy writing in the Guardian):
According to new research by a leading expert on the dictionary, rather than working slowly but steadily with his assistants on the dictionary for the full nine years, Dr Johnson became completely bogged down in the work, realised he would miss his deadline, and simply abandoned the job, ignoring increasingly frantic messages from his commissioning editors.
However, Dr Anne McDermott, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, who has spent years studying all the surviving original manuscripts and sources, has a different explanation. She will announce tonight, in a lecture at Dr Johnson's House museum in London, that Johnson was in fact paralysed over the work for years, to the despair of his publishers by whom he had already been paid a hefty advance. In the end, she contends, he finished the dictionary in just over two years with only two assistants.
...
She believes that only a threat to break into his house and seize the manuscript - which the publishers mistakenly thought was almost finished - which got Johnson back to work. He was bribed with a guinea for every page delivered to the printers, and although this time he could afford only two assistants, they raced through the work and finished in two-and-a-half years.
I wish I could have been there to hear the lecture, but perhaps it will be printed somewhere soon--the TLS occasionally does pieces like that. (Aside from her many other accomplishments, McDermott is responsible for the wonderful CD-ROM version of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I use in some of my classes--but I am hoping that they are going to release an online version sometime, the interface of this one is tricky to use and at least at Columbia they never have got it set up on a LAN.)
According to new research by a leading expert on the dictionary, rather than working slowly but steadily with his assistants on the dictionary for the full nine years, Dr Johnson became completely bogged down in the work, realised he would miss his deadline, and simply abandoned the job, ignoring increasingly frantic messages from his commissioning editors.
However, Dr Anne McDermott, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, who has spent years studying all the surviving original manuscripts and sources, has a different explanation. She will announce tonight, in a lecture at Dr Johnson's House museum in London, that Johnson was in fact paralysed over the work for years, to the despair of his publishers by whom he had already been paid a hefty advance. In the end, she contends, he finished the dictionary in just over two years with only two assistants.
...
She believes that only a threat to break into his house and seize the manuscript - which the publishers mistakenly thought was almost finished - which got Johnson back to work. He was bribed with a guinea for every page delivered to the printers, and although this time he could afford only two assistants, they raced through the work and finished in two-and-a-half years.
I wish I could have been there to hear the lecture, but perhaps it will be printed somewhere soon--the TLS occasionally does pieces like that. (Aside from her many other accomplishments, McDermott is responsible for the wonderful CD-ROM version of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I use in some of my classes--but I am hoping that they are going to release an online version sometime, the interface of this one is tricky to use and at least at Columbia they never have got it set up on a LAN.)
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
One book
The one-book meme, via Kate's Book Blog and About Last Night:
One book that changed your life
I had a bad habit as a child of going over to a friend's house for a sleepover and instead digging in so deeply to some book I found on the shelves that I became deaf to everything else including the increasingly frustrated friend until I finished reading it. At sixteen or so I remember sleeping over at my friend S.'s dad's house, her stepmother had done a master's degree in English and I pounced upon Roland Barthes's S/Z and couldn't put it down. I knew the name Barthes but only older and more conventional literary criticism had hitherto come my way; this book transformed my sense of what would be possible in my own writing and reading life.
One book that you've read more than once
My most-reread book ever has to be Pride and Prejudice. I had a beaten-up garage-sale copy as a child, with the most hideous Regency-romance cover (a very blond and supercilious Elizabeth Bennett in a pink bonnet, plus very tight-breeched Mr. Darcy and a strange bumpy texture to the physical cover). I read it again and again until the covers fell off and the spine started to split. It is possible that I have read this book as many as thirty-five times, and I almost burned out on it five years ago when I found myself teaching it in two different classes (Literature Humanities and an undergraduate seminar on Austen) the same week. I have lectured on it to Columbia parents, I own at least four (five?) different copies, I have taught it at least six times, at times I have felt so sick of it that I can hardly stand the idea of rereading it. It is definitely no longer my favorite Austen novel. And yet its formal perfection and its strange and remarkably intelligent use of the third-person voice mean that every time I read it again (I think I can safely say I will reread it at least twenty more times in my life, assuming I teach for another thirty-plus years) I find something striking and new.
One book you'd want on a desert island
This is a wholly boring and conventional answer, and yet there is no doubt in my mind that I would have to have the Riverside Shakespeare. Which is of course not itself a boring and conventional book at all.
One book that made you laugh
Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature, which should be much more widely read than seems to be the case.
One book that made you cry
Ken Bruen's The Dramatist. Nothing makes me cry, but the ending of this book made me cry.
One book that you wish had been written
Rebecca West wrote a novel called The Fountain Overflows that is my single most cherished top-choice number-one-favorite-novel of all time. It was with some amazement as a teenager that I found on the new books shelf at the public library two further installments in the story of the Aubrey family, both published posthumously: This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. The story is incomplete, though; a fourth volume was projected, and at the end the editor published West's synopsis of the entire sweep of the narrative. There is no book I would rather read than the last part of that story, and no author I would trust to complete it in West's stead. She herself felt (I don't have the book here, so I can't give you the exact words) that she found herself bumping up against the very limits of her own technique and couldn't figure out how to meet the challenge posed by the story's completion, which included among other things Rose Aubrey attending the Nuremberg trials and hearing an account of the behavior of a (deceased) concentration-camp victim and realizing it was her cousin Rosamund, and that the entire shape of her cousin's life had been meant to bring her to that point.
One book that you wish had never been written
This isn't a book, exactly, but I wish Jonathan Swift had not written the poem "Cadenus and Vanessa." I love Swift, but this poem's combination of bad faith and general creepiness make me hate him instead for as long as it takes me to read the poem.
One book you're currently reading
Anne Burt's My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between. This one comes with a funny coincidence: my friend Steve Burt recently recommended an anthology on stepparents edited by his cousin, I followed the link and it sounded interesting but I am neither a step-child nor a step-parent and its acquisition therefore held no urgency for me, though a few days later I sent a copy to a friend who has found herself recently in closer proximity to these issues. Then I found myself a few weeks ago in conversation before Pilates class (yes, yes, it is ridiculous, I know) at the Columbia gym with one of the few other non-undergraduate-age people in the group. And she introduced herself and I suddenly realized that this was Anne Burt, editor of aforesaid volume and cousin of Steve. It was distinctly disconcerting (I had no idea she worked at Columbia) but in a good literary way, and so I immediately ordered another copy of the anthology from Amazon and have been dipping into it. It seems excellent: definitely recommended on grounds of style as well as substance.
One book you've been meaning to read
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind. I've got a whole shelf of new novels that I purchased in various fits and/or frenzies this spring and early summer and now don't have time to read....
One book that changed your life
I had a bad habit as a child of going over to a friend's house for a sleepover and instead digging in so deeply to some book I found on the shelves that I became deaf to everything else including the increasingly frustrated friend until I finished reading it. At sixteen or so I remember sleeping over at my friend S.'s dad's house, her stepmother had done a master's degree in English and I pounced upon Roland Barthes's S/Z and couldn't put it down. I knew the name Barthes but only older and more conventional literary criticism had hitherto come my way; this book transformed my sense of what would be possible in my own writing and reading life.
One book that you've read more than once
My most-reread book ever has to be Pride and Prejudice. I had a beaten-up garage-sale copy as a child, with the most hideous Regency-romance cover (a very blond and supercilious Elizabeth Bennett in a pink bonnet, plus very tight-breeched Mr. Darcy and a strange bumpy texture to the physical cover). I read it again and again until the covers fell off and the spine started to split. It is possible that I have read this book as many as thirty-five times, and I almost burned out on it five years ago when I found myself teaching it in two different classes (Literature Humanities and an undergraduate seminar on Austen) the same week. I have lectured on it to Columbia parents, I own at least four (five?) different copies, I have taught it at least six times, at times I have felt so sick of it that I can hardly stand the idea of rereading it. It is definitely no longer my favorite Austen novel. And yet its formal perfection and its strange and remarkably intelligent use of the third-person voice mean that every time I read it again (I think I can safely say I will reread it at least twenty more times in my life, assuming I teach for another thirty-plus years) I find something striking and new.
One book you'd want on a desert island
This is a wholly boring and conventional answer, and yet there is no doubt in my mind that I would have to have the Riverside Shakespeare. Which is of course not itself a boring and conventional book at all.
One book that made you laugh
Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature, which should be much more widely read than seems to be the case.
One book that made you cry
Ken Bruen's The Dramatist. Nothing makes me cry, but the ending of this book made me cry.
One book that you wish had been written
Rebecca West wrote a novel called The Fountain Overflows that is my single most cherished top-choice number-one-favorite-novel of all time. It was with some amazement as a teenager that I found on the new books shelf at the public library two further installments in the story of the Aubrey family, both published posthumously: This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. The story is incomplete, though; a fourth volume was projected, and at the end the editor published West's synopsis of the entire sweep of the narrative. There is no book I would rather read than the last part of that story, and no author I would trust to complete it in West's stead. She herself felt (I don't have the book here, so I can't give you the exact words) that she found herself bumping up against the very limits of her own technique and couldn't figure out how to meet the challenge posed by the story's completion, which included among other things Rose Aubrey attending the Nuremberg trials and hearing an account of the behavior of a (deceased) concentration-camp victim and realizing it was her cousin Rosamund, and that the entire shape of her cousin's life had been meant to bring her to that point.
One book that you wish had never been written
This isn't a book, exactly, but I wish Jonathan Swift had not written the poem "Cadenus and Vanessa." I love Swift, but this poem's combination of bad faith and general creepiness make me hate him instead for as long as it takes me to read the poem.
One book you're currently reading
Anne Burt's My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between. This one comes with a funny coincidence: my friend Steve Burt recently recommended an anthology on stepparents edited by his cousin, I followed the link and it sounded interesting but I am neither a step-child nor a step-parent and its acquisition therefore held no urgency for me, though a few days later I sent a copy to a friend who has found herself recently in closer proximity to these issues. Then I found myself a few weeks ago in conversation before Pilates class (yes, yes, it is ridiculous, I know) at the Columbia gym with one of the few other non-undergraduate-age people in the group. And she introduced herself and I suddenly realized that this was Anne Burt, editor of aforesaid volume and cousin of Steve. It was distinctly disconcerting (I had no idea she worked at Columbia) but in a good literary way, and so I immediately ordered another copy of the anthology from Amazon and have been dipping into it. It seems excellent: definitely recommended on grounds of style as well as substance.
One book you've been meaning to read
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind. I've got a whole shelf of new novels that I purchased in various fits and/or frenzies this spring and early summer and now don't have time to read....
Hardy and Ibsen
Paul Binding on connections between the two, at the TLS. In general I feel I have the perfect job but my one regret about being an academic is that I can't very often throw over the traces & read intensively and waywardly for a month here or there--not pleasure reading, more intellectual-exploration reading--I was drooling as I read this piece with the thought of how much I would like to delve into Hardy and Ibsen, and I am still feeling a Beckett itch that is not going to get scratched any time soon....
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
In a very exciting development
(actually I am quite thrilled, this is the kind of writing I've been wanting to do for a long time) I've got an essay in this month's issue of The Believer. The full text is available online if you click that link (of course you should also think about getting a subscription, as a reader I find it very good value for money), and here's the first paragraph:
I fall in love with individual books all the time, books I praise passionately, even promiscuously, to anyone who will listen. Out of the hundreds I read every year and blog about, though, only a few speak to me so loudly that I bestir myself from torpor and plunge into fanatical book-fiendish evangelizing. Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories came to me for review this January in the form of a ridiculously cumbersome wad of xeroxed eleven-by-seventeen pages, inadequately secured by binder clips: it weighed three or four pounds, at a guess, with the flat cartilaginous heft of a stingray. Once I recovered from the format, I felt the shock—painful, delightful—you experience when you encounter something so perfect you’re furious you didn’t know about it sooner. My list of such things includes the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” Paradise Lost, Fabergé eggs, and the taste and texture of meringue. You will have your own list, but find a place on it if you can for this collection of the columns Schlesinger wrote for the Village Voice from 1997 to 2006 under the rubric Shelter.
Here's a previous blog entry on why Toni Schlesinger's a genius and here's the Amazon link for Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories (which is a very, very special book--please read my essay so that you will understand why and feel compelled to go and experience it for yourself).
I don't believe in having resolutions, in my opinion you either decide to do something and then go ahead and do it or else you don't really want to do it after all and you might as well not fool around with pointless verbal flourishes. But I do have a resolution for the coming year, which is to write at least a couple more essays in a similar vein to this one. So this is more of a promise to myself that I'll jump at the next chance I get to do one, whether that's because I find the perfect topic or because someone invites me to contribute to something. I really love the essay, it's a particular favorite genre of mine and one that I feel called to write as well as to read, but it's been edged out of my life for many years by novel-writing and academic writing (both of which I also love). But now it's time to put it back into the mix--blogging has been an interesting way of developing something akin to an essay-writing voice, and I must make good use of it.
I fall in love with individual books all the time, books I praise passionately, even promiscuously, to anyone who will listen. Out of the hundreds I read every year and blog about, though, only a few speak to me so loudly that I bestir myself from torpor and plunge into fanatical book-fiendish evangelizing. Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories came to me for review this January in the form of a ridiculously cumbersome wad of xeroxed eleven-by-seventeen pages, inadequately secured by binder clips: it weighed three or four pounds, at a guess, with the flat cartilaginous heft of a stingray. Once I recovered from the format, I felt the shock—painful, delightful—you experience when you encounter something so perfect you’re furious you didn’t know about it sooner. My list of such things includes the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” Paradise Lost, Fabergé eggs, and the taste and texture of meringue. You will have your own list, but find a place on it if you can for this collection of the columns Schlesinger wrote for the Village Voice from 1997 to 2006 under the rubric Shelter.
Here's a previous blog entry on why Toni Schlesinger's a genius and here's the Amazon link for Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories (which is a very, very special book--please read my essay so that you will understand why and feel compelled to go and experience it for yourself).
I don't believe in having resolutions, in my opinion you either decide to do something and then go ahead and do it or else you don't really want to do it after all and you might as well not fool around with pointless verbal flourishes. But I do have a resolution for the coming year, which is to write at least a couple more essays in a similar vein to this one. So this is more of a promise to myself that I'll jump at the next chance I get to do one, whether that's because I find the perfect topic or because someone invites me to contribute to something. I really love the essay, it's a particular favorite genre of mine and one that I feel called to write as well as to read, but it's been edged out of my life for many years by novel-writing and academic writing (both of which I also love). But now it's time to put it back into the mix--blogging has been an interesting way of developing something akin to an essay-writing voice, and I must make good use of it.
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