The ambient years

Geoff Dyer exists in a vast and turbulent ocean of regret.

Deviating from the script

At the Paris Review, Wesley Yang contemplates tiger mothers and other things.

Proust would just have stayed in bed

At More Intelligent Life, Hilary Mantel on winning, losing and the consolation of guinea pigs.

"Grip the Clever, Grip the Wicked, Grip the Knowing"

At A Journey Round My Skull, Gilbert Alter-Gilbert on literary pets.

(Burroughs and friend, (c) Kate Simon)

Linkage

It is a minor stroke of genius for the TLS to assign Ian McEwan's novel to M. John Harrison for review. Interesting and thought-provoking review, too - the irk is kept relatively well in check!

Maggie Gee's new memoir sounds highly worthwhile.

The Denisova Child would make a great name for a novel...

"Nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf"

At the Guardian, Stefan Collini has a very good piece on the new volume of Eliot letters:

Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.

Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.

"Overmuch Study"?

At the L Magazine, Ed Park on office life pre-internet.

Closing tabs

David Loftus interviews Paul Collins about his new book (on how Shakespeare's First Folio conquered the world) and various other matters of interest concerning publishing, the book business and so forth.

Yale University Press chooses to omit images of Muhammad from new book on the Danish cartoon controversy.

In praise of literary hackery. (As a Young Person, I aspired to a career of literary hackery in the vein of an Anthony Burgess or a Gore Vidal, but in the event I steered myself towards academia instead, and still think it suits me better - but I love the notion of simultaneously paid and playful literary dilettantism, and am strongly drawn to those figures who pull it off...)

More from Levi Stahl on invisible libraries and his ongoing love affair with the internet, including this wonderful quotation from Max Beerbohm: "'And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books!'"

"[E]ven as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet longings" is the best description I have ever read of the psychological underpinnings of why a TBR ("to be read") pile of books does not have the same shine on it as an Amazon page for a book that hasn't yet been published! (See under: "The Other Amazon.")

The study of whiskers

Poets ranked by beard weight.

The trouble with gin

This must have been a very strange interview.

Also, if you missed it last week, Christopher Buckley's Times Magazine piece about his parents is well worth your attention.

Thinking about

the vague possibility (which would seem heretical given my non-expertise, but which has been prompted by teaching bits of Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron this week) of possibly, in future, teaching a class on Romantic poetry...

My two favorite lines from Shelley: first, of course, "Hell is a city much like London"; second, the famous stanza from "Adonais":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The happy medium?

From David Hume, "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing":

That though excesses of both kinds are to be avoided, and though a proper medium ought to be studied in all productions; yet this medium lies not in a point, but admits of a considerable latitude. Consider the wide distance, in this respect, between Mr. POPE and LUCRETIUS. These seem to lie in the two greatest extremes of refinement and simplicity, in which a poet can indulge himself, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar stile and manner. CORNEILLE and CONGREVE, who carry their wit and refinement somewhat farther than Mr. POPE (if poets of so different a kind can be compared together), and SOPHOCLES and TERENCE, who are more simple than LUCRETIUS, seem to have gone out of that medium, in which the most perfect productions are found, and to be guilty of some excess in these opposite characters. Of all the great poets, VIRGIL and RACINE, in my opinion, lie nearest the center, and are the farthest removed from both the extremities.

Conversations

At the Root, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has a very nice piece on on John Hope Franklin. (Via Bookforum.)

Missing letters

This seems to me funny.

Also: ongoing trials and tribulations of A.L. Kennedy.

Survival strategies

At the Guardian, Margaret Drabble on depression:

I learned my strategies. The walking cure, the talking cure, the Samaritans in emergencies, the bouts of inept gardening, the bottle of whisky, the long hours of lonely work, the bold decision to throw a party - and, of late, the comforting jigsaw puzzle, which has been my friend through the last few years.

Famous British Librarians

At the TLS, John Shakespeare has a rather wonderful piece about the interview he did with Philip Larkin as a young man. (The moral of the tale is clearly that one should not give the subject of one's profiles the opportunity to review the text of the piece!) Here's a funny bit:

"I hate work. Libraries are a quite pleasant way of earning a living. Dismal prospects though! Jobs connected with books like publishing are not good for creative writing. That’s why libraries, all technical and administration, are so good."

He added wistfully: “It’s too late to change now”, and, only half in jest:

"I’d like to have been a solid, uncomplicated, second-rate novelist producing a novel a year. And not 'Crouch in the fo’c’sle, stubbly with goodness'. My only ambition now is to write more, to write better and to live without working, which is immensely distasteful to me. I’d like to earn enough to retire on from football pools, which I do every autumn."

I asked him if that really was his only ambition. His answer was that, as he had spent most of his life in bedsitting rooms and was still in one (“the only life I have known”), he would also like to achieve his two private symbols of luxury, “my own lavatory and a daily copy of The Times”.

Literary minefields

From Rousseau's Confessions:

I have always considered M. de Malesherbes to be a man of inviolable integrity. Nothing that has happened to me has ever made me doubt for a moment his probity; but, as weak as he is honourable, he sometimes harms the people in whom he takes an interest through his very desire to protect them. Not only did he have more than one hundred pages cut from the Paris edition [of Julie]; but he made a cut that could even be described as an act of disloyalty in the copy of the good edition that he sent to Mme de Pompadour. Somewhere in this work there is a remark to the effect that the wife of a coal-merchant is more deserving of respect than the mistress of a prince. This sentence suggested itself to me in the heat of composition without, I swear it, any allusion being intended. On rereading the work, I realized that the connection would nevertheless be made. Faithful, nevertheless, to my own very imprudent maxim of never suppressing anything out of fear that connections might be made, provided my conscience is my witness that I was not aware of them while writing, I was reluctant to remove this sentence, but contented myself with substituting the word prince for the word king, which is what I had originally written. This modification did not go far enough for M. de Malesherbes: he removed the whole sentence, which is missing from the new page he had printed specially and stuck as neatly as possible into Mme de Pompadour's copy. She was not deceived by this vanishing act. There was no shortage of charitable souls eager to inform her of it.

Bookishness

"Unisex Richard III isn't always what the occasion demands"

A. L. Kennedy is funny!

"Is the bicycle dead?"

Donald Barthelme, "The Explanation" (pasted in from Jerome Weeks' post on Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Barthelme, but first seen by me in Louis Menand's New Yorker piece):

Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes. Very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?