Colson Whitehead

hates ice cream.

(I too remember the aversions that resulted from various summer jobs: a candy-store job that left me disgusted with chocolate and also with raspberry sorbet; a country-club grill job that left me permanently horrified at the whiff of a Philly cheese-steak; a night-shift bakery job that I only did for one night--I hadn't quite graduated from high school, I was still on a more-or-less daytime schedule and I stuck it out from 11pm or so till about 6:30am at which point the smell and the exhaustion suddenly sent me running for the toilet, where I vomited dramatically before skulking back to the supervisor and asking if I could go home--but that meant I couldn't eat muffins for years because the smell reminded me so strongly of--already extremely nauseous--scooping my arm into a plastic bin of batter to mix in the baking powder; and most off-puttingly the smell of the dishwashing areas in the Harvard dining halls, both the smell of the old food and that awful sort-of-sterilized-with-boiling-water aroma that you get when you put those super-durable plastic teacups and plates and such-like through the old-school dishwashing machines.... What a relief to get to the point where I could temp in offices instead!)

Why Poppy Z. Brite

(a favorite writer of mine, and a particularly good blogger to boot) hates John Updike (I can't figure out how to link just to that entry, so I've pasted the whole thing in below):

This is just one of many reasons, actually, but it's a dilly.

I've been reading a bunch of 'literary' magazines, trying to figure out where I might send the stories I've been writing that don't contain elements of horror or mystery or any other damn thing I can identify -- they're just stories about people. And, to be honest, I'm really not enjoying these magazines very much or feeling very excited at the prospect of publishing anything in them, assuming they would even have my popular-fiction-writing self. And I'm innocently flipping through one, and suddenly I come upon the first stanza of 'An Ode to My Hurting Left Hand':

Why has arthritis, a disease of wear
attacked you, when the right, your counterpart,
has done the work? Oh yes -- I guess in golf
you gripped the club the tighter, and at night.
to love myself to sleep, I bade you grip
my stiffened nether member while I dreamed
of copulation with an unsteadily
imagined lady, whose obliging charms
opened the path, perhaps, to drowsy calm.

Mr. Updike, I'm sorry you have arthritis. I truly am. Both my grandmothers suffered from it, I suspect I have a touch myself, and I know it is no picnic. Sometimes it's torture. In spite of everything, I wouldn't have wished it on you.

BUT WHY, O WHY, O WHY, O WHY, O WHY do we have to hear about your STIFFENED NETHER MEMBER?

I mean, I once had the misfortune to read a never-produced screenplay that contained the phrase 'tidal wave of daddy-acid,' and I thought, nay, hoped that was the worst sequence of words I would come across in my lifetime. But I really think 'stiffened nether member' might trump it.

And, while I'm at it, I'm really not all that interested in how you held your damn golf club either.

If you haven't read Liquor and Prime, Brite's absolutely delightful pair of New Orleans crime novels featuring chef John Rickey and his boyfriend G-Man, you should remedy the situation as soon as possible; and the latest installment (titled Soul Kitchen) is due out later this month.

At the Guardian Review

Edward Hammond on four books about graffiti (he writes from ten years' experience doing graffiti, but he loses credibility with me by using the awful word "youngsters" in the opening paragraph--or perhaps this is a US/UK usage thing?!?); Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine; and John Mullan on the New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes ('Such stories are richly available only from the early 18th century, when memoirs began to be published and conversations recorded. An anecdote tells how Horace Walpole would "suddenly purse up his mouth in a pointed but ludicrous manner whenever Boswell came into the room, and sit mute as a fish till that angler for anecdote and repartee had left it"').

Nature-nurture polemics

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, letter of 13 July 1813 (in The Adams-Jefferson Letters):

Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a Level. I have never read Reasoning more absurd, Sophistry more gross, in proof of the Athanasian Creed, or Transubstantiation, than the subtle labours of Helvetius and Rousseau to demonstrate the natural Equality of Mankind.

Oh no, not the ironing board

David Edgar has a fascinating essay at the LRB about the theatrical legacy of John Osborne. It's funny, I clicked on the link thinking "Oh, it's months ago that I first was reading reviews of this new Osborne biography, surely this is completely belated?" and yet it is a completely different piece than any of the others I've read, a good example of what the London Review of Books really does wonderfully well: Edgar uses the biography as the jumping-off point for an extremely perceptive and persuasive account of Osborne's role in twentieth-century British theater.

And a sidebar bonus: Jeremy Harding on a Syd Barrett biography published in 2003. (But I must disagree with him on The Wall; I haven't seen the film since the 80s, I will admit, but I remember watching it again and again with my brothers when we were in high school--it was one of only four or five movies that we had in the house, not a carefully selected pack but a slightly random set of oddments, the others as I recall being two excellent ones that should be in every collection--This Is Spinal Tap and The Shining--and two completely random ones--Romancing the Stone and Magnum Force. Readers are invited to contribute their own "surreal small movie collection" lists in the comments....)

More on Shelley

(And this was H. R. Woudhuysen's more detailed Shelley piece in the TLS, no subscription required--I read it with interest the other day but felt I had already posted enough about the TLS for one week! It's too intriguing to skip, though....)

Not an angel

Paul O'Brien on this newly discovered Shelley poem, at the Guardian. I must say this whole discovery thing is cool (not quite as cool as if it were Byron's memoirs, but still...).

I have mixed feelings about Shelley but I do sort of love him, he's more my type of thinker than Keats although I love Keats too (but Byron is my favorite). Richard Holmes's Shelley biography (oh, and look, it's been republished in paperback by the excellent New York Review Books--now that is an organization I would like to be involved with, what fun it would be to propose new titles for them & figure out who should introduce) is a wonderfully good book, it has my highest recommendation.

I think my absolute favorite Shelley poem is Peter Bell the Third (and "Hell is a city much like London" is one of my favorite lines ever, I hear it often in my head for no particular reason!), but I'll just leave you for this morning with one stanza from Adonais, my other favorite (it's the poem Shelley wrote in response to hearing of Keats's death, and it's quite spectacular, it has the most amazing momentum imaginable). That link has the full text in fairly readable format, though it's close to 500 lines and probably really too long to read online; but here's my particularly cherished stanza:

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.

It's like reading a really good fantasy novel, isn't it? Zombies and alternate worlds and such. . . . But strictly on the level of language, something about the italics in that line--"We decay / Like corpses in a charnel"--just gets to me. So there's your cheery thought for the day....

Simile!

John Mullan at the Guardian on the value of a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays:

If there are rich and hungry collectors out there, the Dr Williams copy should tempt them. It is in unusually good condition and has a near-contemporary binding. Thanks to the eccentricities of the Jacobean printing house and the depredations of time (readers removing pages), many surviving copies are incomplete (the Oriel-Getty copy lacks two leaves from Romeo and Juliet). Here, only the very first printed leaf, Ben Jonson's 10-line verse To the Reader, is not original (it was replaced in the 19th century). Defacing some of the pages, but probably raising the value, are the marginal scribbles of one of its first readers. In brown ink this early Shakespeare devotee marked interesting passages with circles or wavy lines, often scrawling, like some early A-level candidate, 'joy', or 'wit', or 'time', or, most commonly of all, 'simile'.

Oh dear, that does suggest to me that someone had to read it for school.

One thing that makes me absolutely crazy, by the way (somewhat unrelated to main topic), is how often a book I check out from the library seems to be absolutely covered with underlinings and marginal annotations. I don't really care what you do with your own books, tear out the pages if you like, but it is never all right to write in a library book! Not even in pencil. (Though it is true that I use post-its on library books, and a strict preservationist would say this also is very bad: but at least there is no evidence left perceptible to the naked eye or finger of subsequent readers.)

Ethics and education

Also in this week's free TLS sampler, Martha Nussbaum discusses the shortcomings of Harry Lewis's critique of education at Harvard:

So lacking in curiosity is Lewis about what his colleagues in the Humanities have been doing that he fails (at least in this book) to grasp a very fundamental distinction that goes across the Humanistic disciplines: between the intellectual aspect of character-building and the many other ways (personal advice, personal influence) in which young people can find their characters shaped by what they encounter in a university. He repeatedly suggests that the main way in which universities build character is through the latter set of techniques – mentoring, advice-giving, personal example. In consequence he makes the alarming proposal that candidates for academic posts should be evaluated for their moral character: not just that part of character that is relevant to the performance of one’s job, where severe substance abuse or a penchant for sexual harassment might possibly be legitimate issues to raise in the hiring process, but their private lives as well, their treatment of their children, and so forth. I think that Lewis simply doesn’t believe that the intellectual endeavour of the Humanities makes any contribution to building character. Because he has not spent any time with the Humanities, he cannot picture what that contribution might be. But one may learn to take apart and deeply appreciate a line of Latin verse from someone whose behaviour to his or her children is simply not known or, even, is known to be bad. One may learn how to think about the arguments of Plato and Aristotle from someone whom one might not like to have as a friend. Learning these modes of analysis, however, does make its own contribution to citizenship, for the reason identified by Socrates: most people, having never learned to examine their beliefs, are actually somewhat half-hearted and crude in their commitment to them. If you simply don’t know how to distinguish a utilitarian from a Kantian argument, there are issues that you may easily miss – as a doctor, as a juror. You might think, for example, that respecting a patient’s choice and promoting the patient’s interest are the same thing, and you might just assume that your own judgement about the patient’s interests is the only thing that needs considering – as many doctors are all too inclined, paternalistically, to do.

That's good, isn't it? I find these questions fascinating. I don't think you could have a whole faculty composed of people you wouldn't want to be friends with, but the distinction's an important one.

Oh, and she offers a paragraph of commentary later on in the piece about reasons to tenure from within, a topic of great interest in university circles:

And yet Harvard does have one large problem, peculiar to itself, which Lewis fails to mention, rather like the elephant in the room. This is that Harvard, with its requirement that all candidates for tenure survive an international search and an ad hoc committee including outside experts, tenures far fewer people from within than its peer institutions, with the possible exception of Yale. The University of Chicago tenures about 50 to 60 per cent in the arts and sciences; at Harvard, the figure would at one time have been closer to 5 per cent, although there has recently been improvement in some departments. Instead, Harvard typically lets its young faculty go, and brings people in at a much later career stage. So far as I can see, this additional selectivity doesn’t fully pay off in quality. Institutions with higher tenure rates, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, do extremely well in departmental quality. Even more clearly, however, Harvard’s policy deprives Harvard of young scholars just at the time when they may be most creative as teachers and programme-builders. Therefore many young people will find that they get a better liberal education at the many fine liberal arts colleges, which are a little more generous than Harvard, and even than other elite universities, in granting tenure to younger faculty.

Julia Kristeva=Julie Christie

Alberto Manguel at the TLS on the art of conversation:

For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo got together in the evenings to talk. In the mid-1960s, through a series of trivial circumstances, I became the lucky witness to many of these conversations. For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy's vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with "the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman's poems, Toulet's contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles". Whoever attended the dinner was forced either to enter the conversation according to implicit rules of subject and tone, or to drown in the flow of words. A third possibility (which I timidly chose) was merely to sit and listen.

Similar in appearance, but utterly different in their essence, were the gatherings of Roland Barthes, Severo Sarduy and Francois Wahl around a table at the Cafe de Flore in Paris. These were never communal undertakings: here nothing mingled and became one. Their talks had the feel of oral essays, of recitations and quotable repartee. I can remember whole chunks of these talks: Barthes on the new Drugstore that had opened on the rue de Rennes, and on the lamented removal of the Paris pissotières; Sarduy on Manuel Puig’s belief that Julia Kristeva was a pseudonym for Julie Christie; Wahl on the metamorphosis of the magazine Tel Quel into Change (“plus ça change, plus ça reste tel quel”). Brilliant as the talk was, it was not a conversation, rather what Rebecca West, quoted by Stephen Miller in his new book, Conversation, called “intersecting monologues”. On the other hand, I would find it impossible to recapture the conversations at Bioy’s flat, except for a few words here and there which I probably read later in an interview or an essay. Perhaps proof of the success of a conversation is the very fact that it cannot be reproduced. A conversation at its best exists solely as it happens, in the moment in which it is spoken.

Ivy league chick lit

Leon Neyfakh on Ivy League chick lit at the New York Observer. It's sort of a mixed review of a couple different books, but I definitely must get and read Diana Peterfreund's Secret Society Girl: it sounds altogether delightful....

Fathers and daughters

Hillary Chute profiles Alison Bechdel at the Voice; Powell's also has a very interesting conversation between Bechdel and cartoonist-graphic novelist Craig Thompson. (Thanks to Sara Ryan for the link.)

The funniest part of their exchange comes after they've been talking about writing versus drawing (Bechdel having characterized herself as more comfortable with writing than the visual):

Bechdel: Really, though. I feel like as part of a younger generation you've been exposed to more visual language. And you've internalized it. At least that's my theory about you. I would never think of the way you see those things.

Thompson: If we're going to talk generations of cartoonists... you're older than I thought.

Bechdel: I'm very old. I'm forty-five.

Thompson: I had no clue. But Joe Sacco is roughly the same age, and he's also very young-looking, like you. The cartoonist Seth...

Bechdel: I just met Seth.

Thompson: I was surprised that he is as old as he is.

How old is Craig Thompson?!? (Born in 1975, I learn from Wikipedia.) It does sound funny, though, doesn't it? Not very polite, although I don't know why we should care--the place where he said "I had no clue" is where he should have said "Oh, that's not very old!"

In any case everyone should read Fun Home (here's what I had to say about it in June). I sent a huge box of books recently to my brother who was hanging around in Alpine, Texas with not much to do, I wrote on a post-it "read this first, it is a work of complete genius" and stuck it onto the front of Bechdel's book.

(Then I got sucked into writing annotations on a lot more post-its too for the other fifteen or so books I sent, it was pretty maniacal--I had a horrifying glimpse of a mad elderly future self going around sticking crazy notes on books and sending them to everyone I know....).

And when I talked to him the next week (charmingly he had in the meantime found something to occupy himself--his girlfriend's working on a movie down there but in the end he wasn't able to get hired on the job though he thought he might--& was at work in a carport next to a geodesic dome building the prototype puppets for a piece of puppet theater written by Daniel Day-Lewis's eight-year-old child, to be performed in a lunch truck on the set of There Will Be Blood, which is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! whose title really does include that exclamation point). And he agreed that it is a work of genius. And if I have inappropriately breached either family or movie-set privacy rules someone must e-mail me and tell me to edit this post retroactively.

RIP Syd Barrett

Here's the obituary; link viaBoing Boing. I have a pitifully small and somewhat eccentric music collection (the library thing doesn't work the same way for CDs as for books, you know?), but for some reason Opel is something I got a long time ago and at one point listened to quite often. I would listen to it right now, except that my wretched iPod is busted--it definitively crashed this morning--I have a 7:40pm appointment at the evil Genius Bar downtown, I am not happy at having lost the best part of a work day to this indispensable little device....

I almost bought this last week

but didn't, now I think I must go ahead and get it: Nicholas Wade reviews Matt Ridley's biography of Francis Crick at the NYT. Ridley is one of my favorite popular science writers, the book looks really good (but short).

This new book about M. Night Shyamalan

sounds hilariously awful, I am almost tempted to get it and read it....