Greatness

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

Reachermania

The effect of reading the first few pages of Lee Child's A Wanted Man was basically to bathe my cells in the soothing elixir of perfect light reading!  (The last time I felt that sensation so strongly was one day earlier in the summer, when I was in a rather bad mood until I realized that a six-minute hard warmup running around the sand volleyball court at Chelsea Piers has an amazingly pronounced positive chemical effect on the body.)  I am only sorry that the book is now finished; I might have to do a massive Reacher reread in the not-too-distant future. 

There is always one particularly funny and knowing sentence early on, sometimes but not always concerning coffee.  Here's my pick, this time round: "He had never killed or injured anyone with a car, except deliberately, but he was a realistic man and didn't kid himself: his driving was much worse than average."

My mouth seems to be truly on the mend now, so I should be able to get back to exercising tomorrow, which will be beneficial; I have chosen to err on the side of caution given risk of further compounding infection, but I think it's better enough that I can go to spin class...

The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment

At the TLS, Jonathan Barnes on the power of Conan Doyle's short stories:

There are few English writers capable of crafting so arresting a first sentence as that which opens “The Lost Special”: “The confession of Herbert de Lernac, now lying under sentence of death at Marseilles, has thrown light upon one of the most inexplicable crimes of the century”. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” begins with: “It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed”. “The Horror of the Heights” has “The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter”, and the opening of the first of the Holmes short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, is famously inviting: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”. It is in these stories – and in the chronicles of Baker Street in particular – that one encounters the puzzling energy sensed in “The Adventure of The Creeping Man”, which is largely absent in the poetry, drama and longer fiction.

Gun with occasional music

Lev Grossman on what you say when you're asked whether you write fantasy or literature.

Not really related, but I've been keeping the link open on my browser and perhaps will insert it here, with tongue in cheek: Maddie Chambers' year-long project to build a miniature model of Bag End!

Would be geniuses

From Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (required reading, in my opinion, for stylists aspirational and otherwise):

Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.

Also: antique typewriters! (Courtesy of my father.)

"Gosh, I could do with a bathe"

At the Guardian, John Mullan lists ten of the best literary swimming scenes!

(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)

In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...

(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)

(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)

Mazes of literature

Courtesy of a student of mine whose initials are distinctive enough that they would constitute no useful pseudonym, Washington Irving's "The Mutability of Literature" (the whole of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon can be found here, including a story which captivated me as a child, "Rip Van Winkle" - for some reason the detail I especially loved was the inn sign that had changed from depicting the head of King George to that of George Washington):

"Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature. Formerly there were some restraints on this excessive multiplication. Works had to be transcribed by hand, which was a slow and laborious operation; they were written either on parchment, which was expensive, so that one work was often erased to make way for another; or on papyrus, which was fragile and extremely perishable. Authorship was a limited and unprofitable craft, pursued chiefly by monks in the leisure and solitude of their cloisters. The accumulation of manuscripts was slow and costly, and confined almost entirely to monasteries. To these circumstances it may, in some measure, be owing that we have not been inundated by the intellect of antiquity--that the fountains of thought have not been broken up, and modern genius drowned in the deluge. But the inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all these restraints. They have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swollen into a torrent--augmented into a river-expanded into a sea. A few centuries since five or six hundred manuscripts constituted a great library; but what would you say to libraries, such as actually exist, containing three or four hundred thousand volumes; legions of authors at the same time busy; and the press going on with fearfully increasing activity, to double and quadruple the number? Unless some unforeseen mortality should break out among the progeny of the Muse, now that she has become so prolific, I tremble for posterity. I fear the mere fluctuation of language will not be sufficient. Criticism may do much; it increases with the increase of literature, and resembles one of those salutary checks on population spoken of by economists. All possible encouragement, therefore, should be given to the growth of critics, good or bad. But I fear all will be in vain; let criticism do what it may, writers will write, printers will print, and the world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names. Many a man of passable information at the present day reads scarcely anything but reviews, and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue."