Closing some tabs

And with unusual finality - I was finally due for a new computer from Columbia (we're on a four-year cycle), it arrived yesterday and I had an emergency meeting this morning at 9:30 with a faculty desktop support guy who set it up all up for me - I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a lovely but complicated trip to Cayman, England and Iceland, and it is a boon to have this new tiny computer to travel with rather than the current BEHEMOTH!

(Which I will now leave in my office so that I have a computer permanently there, and it may be the source of future blog postings, but it will no longer be the main device....)

Links:

Neglected books still neglected, including a very funny one noted by Anthony Burgess (clearly a major source for his own somewhat neglected novel The Wanting Seed). (Via.)

Listen to all ten of August Wilson's plays for free between now and the end of August!

What would Daniel Kahnemann eliminate if he had a magic wand?

Jane Goodall on 55 years at Gombe.

Sarah Waters' ten rules for writing fiction.

A delightful roundup at the TLS on four recent books about the history of British cooking and Steven Shapin at the LRB on the history of tea (subscriber-only I think).

Boxes of Organized Knowledge

A really lovely piece by Blake Morrison on Anthony Burgess as book reviewer.

Closing tabs

A lovely interview with Alysia Abbott, whose memoir Fairyland is one of my favorite of all the books I've read in the past few years.

The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.

John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).

Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.

Closing tabs

I'm slammed with work just now: lingering post-semester/post-travel fatigue and lots of exercise are at odds, alas, with the monstrous productivity I otherwise desire!

Two dissertation defenses this week, and a host of other student meetings. I have also rashly agreed to write four tenure letters this summer - it was three, the first two I automatically say yes to as a matter of principle and the third is someone I know quite well and would like to help in any way possible. But then I couldn't say no to the fourth, either - though I now have declined #5, as that is genuinely too many.

Happy to be back at home with cats, but a little dismayed at how fast the summer is slipping through my fingers - hopefully if I can really have a productive week, I will get myself back in a good work groove?

Closing tabs:

Tiny Dubliners. (Via Becca, if memory serves, though that tab has been open for a while now....)

And an additional bit of Joyceana from Anthony Burgess (via Andrew Biswell).

Enjoyed The Gloaming at LPR last night.

Have had some very decent light reading (airports, planes, subways, etc.): a teaser for Taylor Stevens' forthcoming Vanessa Michael Munroe novel, The Vessel (this is the only other series I know of that approximates the pleasures of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books - I really like 'em); Stephen King, The Shining and Doctor Sleep (will save thoughts on this for elsewhere, as I am blogging this week to celebrate publication of the style book at the Columbia UP site and still have four more posts to write!); Rachel Howzell Hall, Land of Shadows (unfair of me to single this out, there's really nothing wrong with it other than a pervasive air of unreality, but I am now officially swearing off the police procedural for a while, I'm sick of 'em!); and James S. A. Corey, Cibola Burn. I loved it - this series is amazing, though I do wish that they would stop having so many different characters have the gift for MacGyveresque engineering problem-solving - it is plausible that one or two would have that sort of imagination, but once you bestow it on everyone, the whole thing starts to seem remarkably fictitious!

Living for style

At the TLS, Ben Masters on a new edition of The Clockwork Orange.  (Speaks to my past teenage obsessive self who has read every single one of Burgess's books!)  Here is Masters on Burgess's style:

He held firmly to the conviction that a novelist’s primary job – even more important than any matter of form – is to play with language, and that language in itself is quintessentially human: it is slippery, indeterminate and attached to the messy stuff of everyday life. Above all, language is fallen. Appropriately, then, very little in Burgess’s prose is allowed simply to be. A peach is not just a peach, it is “a large mushy globe, maculate with ripeness”, a “rosary sweetness”; Enderby doesn’t take medicine, he takes “a powerful black viscidity that oozed sinisterly from a tube to bring wind up from Tartarean depths”; Napoleon doesn’t merely sit on a chair and look at his companion, he chooses “a gilt bowlegged masterpiece of discomfort and gape[s] up at the clean proud young raised stupid chin”; and Shakespeare doesn’t drink in a pub, he “down[s] it among the titbrained molligolliards of country copulatives”, while observing the “robustious rother in rural rivo rhapsodic”. Sometimes (as here) the results are ridiculous, sometimes they are deliberately funny, and often they are sublime.

Hack!

The Observer republishes a great 1992 piece by Anthony Burgess.  All sorts of good things in there, but here's one of my perennial favorite Burgess anecdotes:

For the average reader cannot imagine the immense number of books that are published until he has actually handled them. In the 1960s I was shocked to discover how many novels are published in a year. This was when I was given the job of fiction editor for the Yorkshire Post, a very reputable journal, much read in the dales and the clubs of wool and steel magnates. I had to furnish a fortnightly article in which five or six new books had to be given serious treatment and, in a kind of coda, 10 or so others granted a phrasal summation — like 'All too putdownable' or, rather ambiguous, 'For insomniacs', or 'India encapsulated in a poppadom' or 'Sex on Ilkley Moor — baht more than 'at'. When the stint began, in the January of 1960, I felt that it might be easy enough, for few novels arrived. I had forgotten that the New Year was always a slack time for publishing. As the year burgeoned, so did fiction. I was living in a small Sussex village, and extra staff had to be taken on at the local post office to cope with the flood.

The pay for the fortnightly article was very small — £6 in pre-decimal money — but the incidental rewards were considerable. Every other Monday morning I staggered to the local railway station, weighed down with two suitcases full of new fiction. The villagers, whose memories were short, assumed on each occasion that I was leaving my wife. These suitcases were emptied on to the floor of the back room of Louis Simmonds, a bookseller on the Strand. He paid 50% of the sale price of each book, in crisp new notes. This was non-taxable cash, and my walk back to Charing Cross Station was usually an irregular one.

Here's my old post  on Andrew Biswell's superb Burgess biography.

The competition is for "promising new arts journalists," and it sounds as though it would be a very good way of trying to break into bigger markets - take a look if you're starting out in that sort of line...

Secrets of style

D. A. Miller, on the perverse relation of style to the marriage plot in Austen's fiction (today I am teaching Jane Austen, or The Secrets of Style): "Though the heroine’s adoption of style may  induce the courtship plot, what brings this plot to fruition—what gets her desire to quicken, too—is a moment of mortification when, the better to acquire the selfhood she had never before wanted, the heroine forsakesstyle; or rather, what is much more demeaning, she flattens it into a merely decorative reminiscence of itself, like a flower pressed into a wedding album."

Also:

A trove of unpublished works by Anthony Burgess.

Phil Hogan interviews Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for the Observer.

"My panache"

I saw this performance what was probably later the same year when it moved to New York (it was my Christmas present, my mother and I went up on Amtrak to NYC for the day - a sort of extravagance we never did in those days! - to see the pair of RSC productions, Derek Jacobi in Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac). I've seen only a handful of things since that could claim to match it, I'd say...

Caviar, champagne, beards

Miscellaneous light reading: N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (loved it and have downloaded the next installment), Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires, a recommendation from Jo Walton (it did indeed make me want to read more novels about nuns), Liza Marklund's Studio Sex (the 'twist' involved in the journal entries is perhaps a bit too obvious from the start, but nonetheless very much the kind of book I like).

Also, the first two books in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence. These are so much beloved by a couple of my blogging friends (Levi Stahl, Ed Park) that I resolved to give 'em a chance (I have always meant to read them since I first heard about them in Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels - by the way, a previously unknown [and on the whole undistinguished] work of AB's has been unearthed - but never quite took to them when I tried); the University of Chicago Press has released the whole sequence in electronic editions, and the first installment is currently available for free.

I dislike many things about the voice and the milieu, but I realized as I reviewed my year in reading that some of my best experiences in reading this year involved immersive long novels of a sort that do not grow on trees (Dorothy Dunnett, War and Peace), and that Powell's would be worth a pop. I do not find it intellectually and stylistically engaging in the way of Proust, and it also seems to me much less interesting than Henry James in terms of these questions about what one understands at the time versus later on, but there's definitely something addictive: I've downloaded the next four onto the Kindle and certainly plan to read the rest of the sequence in coming weeks.

Something about the style definitely continues to irk me: I marked passages as I read that seemed to me both remarkable and annoying. Here's a good example from the first installment:

On the whole it could not be said that one felt better for Uncle Giles's visit. He brought with him some fleeting suggestion, always welcome at school, of an outside world; though against this had to be weighed the disturbing impact of home-life in school surroundings: even home-life in its diminished and undomestic embodiment represented by my uncle. He was a relation: a being who had in him perhaps some of the same essence that went towards forming oneself as a separate entity. Would one's adult days be spent in worrying about the Trust? What was he going to do at Reading? Did he manage to have quite a lot of fun, or did he live in perpetual hell? These were things to be considered. Some apology for his sudden appearance seemed owed to Stringham: after that, I might try to do some work to be dealt with over the weekend.

I suppose part of the slight embarrassment of reading a passage like this is that the naive narrator is never really fully cast off - the novel's ongoing playfulness about youthful versus slightly older misapprehensions makes the reader (a reader like me?) uncomfortable. The work I am most reminded of, though superficially nothing like it, is Pope's Essay on Man, a poem I particularly dislike because of the trouble it takes to develop an elaborate and fluent idiom that seems to me overequipped given the relative banality and commonplace nature of the thoughts therein expressed!

These passages from the second installment will give a clearer sense of the quality I'm both struck and troubled by:

I must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and held then many rather wild ideas on the subject of women: conceptions largely the result of having read a good deal without simultaneous opportunity to modify by personal experience the recorded judgment of others upon that matter: estimates often excellent in their conclusions if correctly interpreted, though requiring practical knowledge to be appreciated at their full value.

In business, at least in a small way, he had begun to 'make a bit' on his own, and there seemed no reason to disbelieve his account of himself as looked upon in his firm as a promising young man. In fact, it appeared that Peter, so far from becoming the outcast from society prophesied by our housemaster, Le Bas, now showed every sign of being about to prove himself a notable success in life: an outcome that seemed to demand another of those revisions of opinion, made every day more necessary, in relation to such an enormous amount of material, accepted as incontrovertible at an earlier period of practical experience.

All the same, although still far from appreciating many of the finer points of Mrs. Andriadis's party--for there were, of course, finer points to be appreciated in retrospect--and, on the whole, no less ignorant of what the elements there present had consisted, I was at the same time more than half aware that such latitudes are entered by a door through which there is, in a sense, no return. The lack of ceremony that had attended our arrival, and the fact of being so much in the dark as to the terms upon which the party was being given, had been both, in themselves, a trifle embarrassing; but, looking back on the occasion, armed with later knowledge of individual affiliations among the guests, there is no reason to suppose that mere awareness of everyone's identity would have been calculated to promote any greater feeling of ease: if anything, rather the reverse. The impact of entertainments given by people like Mrs. Andriadis, as I learnt in due course, depends upon rapidly-changing personal relationships; so that to be apprised suddenly of the almost infinite complication of such associations--if any such omniscience could, by some magical means, have been imparted--without being oneself, even at a distance, at all involved, might have been a positive handicap, perhaps a humiliating one, to enjoyment.

The periphrasis is so noncommittal, ultimately! But there are some good moments, and I am slightly tempted to adopt the artist Barnby's excuse as a catchphrase: "The dust must have confused my powers of differentiation. . . ."

Steamrollered

Tired, sad.

Closing a few tabs:

An amazing story from Oliver Sacks' forthcoming book, about a novelist whose stroke cost him the ability to read but who learned to circumvent the visual cortex and 'read' letters by shaping them with his tongue. (Link courtesy of the tireless Dave Lull; I can't wait to read The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks is more truly my writerly hero than anyone else I can think of.)

Three things I liked at the Independent this weekend: the Anthony Burgess archive opens in Manchester (here was my post a few years ago on Biswell's wonderful biography); the beauty of the periodic table of the elements; an interview with Terry Pratchett.

I have nothing much to say about War and Peace except that it is an outrageously good book; I was mesmerized by it when I read it for the first time at age 17, and was absolutely captivated by it again as soon as I opened the first page last week. Not enjoying Anna Karenina so much: it might be that it is not so much my sort of novel. (Just as one is an Iliad or an Odyssey sort of person, one also has a strong preference for the one or the other of Tolstoy's big novels? I am strongly Iliad, strongly War and Peace...)

Will save more detailed thoughts on Tolstoy's narration for the novel book, whose thunder I will steal if I blog all of it here in advance. But I did like Matthew Engel's dispatch from Waterloo in the FT this weekend (site registration required).

Wednesday miscellany

The second paragraph of this piece was so extraordinarily vicious that I read to the end with a kind of enthralled fascination! I have no reason to disagree with its verdict, and I too am rendered extraordinarily irritable by slack writing, but it has also always seemed to me that it is bad for the soul to write a review of this ilk very often...

At Tor.com, Fabio Fernandes on translating A Clockwork Orange into Brazilian Portuguese.

A countdown of the hundred best fantasy and science-fiction novels?

The syllabus for Matthew Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar on simulations.

Last but not least: Charlie Williams prefers typecasting to podcasting.

This week's mostly all about catching up on miscellaneous medical appointments (nothing major), rehearsing for Tino's Guggenheim piece and trying to sort out a good exercise routine - not doing so well on the last front, but it is a work in progress. The other major activity is a massive reading binge - at the humane society charity shop in Cayman, one of the volumes I picked up was Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. I liked Dunnett's mystery novels very much when I was a teenager, but her historical ones never held much appeal for me, despite my dear friend E.B.T.'s enthusiastic advocacy of them during our grad school years. But long is good when it comes to charity-shop light reading, and though I wouldn't say it's my perfect light reading (also it suffers from the unfortunate juxtaposition with Hilary Mantel's really brilliant Wolf Hall!), I certainly enjoyed the first installment enough to go and check out volumes two through seven from the Barnard Library yesterday.

(Where, by the way, I ran into a colleague of mine who is also doing Tino's piece - and as we discussed it, the young lady behind the library checkout counter exclaimed, "Are you doing Tino's piece? So am I!" It is a cast of thousands!)

There is something truly lovely and addictive about reading through a huge series in a relatively small amount of time. I read Lian Hearn's trilogy like that; Susan Howatch is perhaps my most recent long immersive series-reading experience, at least the one that comes most strongly to mind; but I was reminded as I plucked Dunnetts from the shelf of how I held out for a long time against the Aubrey-Maturin novels and then read the first one and basically couldn't really do anything else until I had read all of them - every day I went to Cross-Campus Library at Yale and checked out another armful or four or five of them and took them home and read them all, four or five days later I was done and wished I had eked them out for longer, but it was well worth it!

(On which note, I will conclude by adding that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, another long book I read in fits of transport...)

Streets of crocodiles

Not freely available online, unless you have registered at the site already, but the New Yorker fiction issue includes a must-read piece by David Grossman on Bruno Schulz, the writer whose stories spurred Grossman's extraordinary See Under: Love.

Hmmmm, that novel is due in my life for a re-read; and so is Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, as this Open Letters Monthly piece by John Cotter reminded me (link via Maud Newton).

I vividly remember reading both of those books for the first time. The Grossman was given to me by an Israeli friend in grad school, and I read it with amazement and delight. The Burgess conjures up an almost hallinatorily intense scene of me sitting (it was a very beautiful spring day, with clear blue skies) on the bleachers on the school playing fields, age 13 and dressed in the glen plaid skirt and polo shirt that were our team uniforms, reading frantically and desperately hoping that I would not catch the coach's eye and spur her thought that she should put me in at point for the remainder of the lacrosse game - a sport I truly, truly did not enjoy playing, and gave up very happily after that ninth-grade year...

A product that runs through time

Carolyn Kellogg has a delightful post at the LA Times Jacket Copy blog: Anthony Burgess interviews Dick Cavett!

(Link courtesy of the author of Personal Days, a novel that has earned the Phil Nugent stamp of approval. Cross-link alert--this cycle of links is taking on ourobouros properties...)