The King's English

Michael Innes' The Case of the Journeying Boy: Irony, Circa 1949

2010-06-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

For those of you who think that irony was invented around 1970, I offer this 1949 description of a cinema billboard advertising a movie:

Across its monstrous facade sprawled a vast plywood lady. If erect she would be perhaps fifty feet high; she was reclining, however, in an attitude of sultry abandon and equatorial vegetation and in a garment the only prominent feature of which was a disordered shoulder-strap. As a background to the broadly accentuated charms of her person -- pleasantly framed, indeed, between her six-foot, skyward-pointing breasts -- was what appeared to be a two-ocean navy in process of sinking through tropical waters like a stone. One limp hand held a smoking revolver seemingly responsible for this extensive catastrophe. The other, supporting her head, was concealed in a spouting ectoplasm of flaxen hair. Her expression was languorous, provocative, and irradiated by a sort of sanctified lecherousness highly creditable to both the craft and the ardent soul of the unknown painter who had crated her. Poised in air, and in curves boldly made to follow the line of her swelling hips, were the words AMOROUS, ARROGANT, ARMED! Above this, in letters ten feet high, was the title PLUTONIUM BLONDE. And higher still, and in rubric scarcely less gigantic, was the simple announcement, ART'S SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE.

--from Michael Innes' The Case of the Journeying Boy (1949), p. 54.

From Dreamland

2010-04-30T14:46:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a dream in which my wife and I were architects. We were discussing how one handles criticism, and I deliberately tried to come up with a line to make her laugh. Here's what I said:

If you're lucky, you've got 140 stories of poured concrete howling, "Je suis! Je suis!" into the teeth of the winds of time.

Sounds like literature, don't it? (And by the way, it did make her laugh -- but I had to wait until she woke up to tell her about it.)

On Character and Writers' Conferences

2010-04-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Poet laureate Kay Ryan writes about attending the monster writer's conference put on annually by Associated Writing Programs (AWP) in 2005:

I have a weak character. I am very susceptible to other people's
enthusiasms, at times actually courting them. I like to sit among people
who feel strongly about a basketball team, say, and get excited with
them. I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers. These are, of course, innocent
examples. But this weakness concerns me in going to AWP. If I'm
exposed to the enthusiasms of others, I know that I am capable of
betraying my deepest convictions, laughing in the face of a lifetime of
hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink. The only way I've ever
gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only
enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character.
Now here I am, going to AWP. HOW am I going to remember:
these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like
individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing
fungus.

From Kay Ryan's "I Go to AWP," from Poetry, 2005.

The Hart (and Roe) of the Matter

2010-01-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

Background: while they are both guests at a country manor, the beefy Stilton Cheesewright threatens to break Bertie Wooster's spine in five places because he imagines Bertie wants to marry his [Stilton's] fiancee. Bertie considers his options:

What to do? I was asking myself. It seemed to me that the prudent course, if I wished to preserve a valued spine intact, would be to climb aboard the two-seater first thing in the morning and ho for the open spaces. To remain in statu quo would, it was clear, involve a distasteful nippiness on my part, for only by the most unremitting activity could I hope to elude Stilton and foil his sinister aims. I would be compelled, I saw, to spend a substantial portion of my time flying like a youthful hart or roe over the hills where spices grow, as I remembered having heard Jeeves once put it, and the Woosters resent having to sink to the level of harts and roes, whether juvenile or getting on in years. We have our pride.

--from P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit , p. 80.

Bertie Wooster on Deaf Adders

2009-12-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

"Once more I had the sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold and hard ... and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have felt after their session with the deaf adder. I can't recall all the details, though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is often this way, I believe, with deaf adders."

--P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, p. 39.

The Delights of the British National Anthem

2009-07-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

Second verse of the British National Anthem, otherwise known, perhaps, as "God Save the King/Queen":

O Lord our God arise
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On thee our hopes we fix;
God save us all.

Confound their politics? Frustrate their knavish tricks? Wonderful!

(Found this in Anthony Powell's The Military Philosphers, p. 226.)

Anthony Powell on Senior Officers

2009-07-15T20:41:00.001-07:00

The incident provoked reflections later on the whole question of senior officers, their relations with each other and with those of subordinate rank. There could be no doubt, so I was finally forced to decide, that the longer one dealt with them, the more one developed the habit of treating generals like members of the opposite sex; specifically, like ladies no longer young, who therefore deserve extra courtesy and attention; indeed, whose every whim must be given thought. This was particularly applicable if one were out in the open with a general.

'Come on, sir, you have the last sandwich,' one would say, or 'Sit on my mackintosh, sir, the grass is quite wet.'

Perhaps the cumulative effect of such treatment helped to account for the highly strung temperament so many generals developed. They needed constant looking after. I remembered despising Cocksidge, a horrible little captain at the Divisional Headquarters on which I had served, for behaving so obsequiously to his superiors in rank. In the end, it had to be admitted one was almost equally deferential, though one hoped less slavish.

--Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers, p. 143. (Image is a painting of the bookjacket.)

Anthony Powell on Friendship

2009-07-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward -- in contrast to love -- is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

--Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art, pp. 93-94. (Image of bookjacket painting.)

Anthony Powell on Time and Space

2009-07-15T20:18:00.001-07:00

'Seduction is to do and say/The banal thing in the banal way,' said Moreland. 'No one denies that. My own complaint is that people always talk about love affairs as if you spent the whole of your time in bed. I find most of my own emotional energy -- not to say physical energy -- is exhausted in making efforts to get there. Problems of Time and Space as usual.'The relation of Time and Space, then rather fashionable, was, I found, a favourite subject of Moreland's.

'Surely we have long agreed the two elements are identical?' said Maclintick. 'This is going over old ground -- perhaps I should say old hours.'

'You must differentiate for everyday purposes, don't you?' urged Barnby. 'I don't wonder seduction seems a problem, if you get Time and Space confused.'

--Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, p. 34. (Image from painting for bookjacket.)

Anthony Powell on Books

2009-07-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

"He spoke without a vestige of interest. I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already."

--Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones, pp. 233-234.

Ambrose Bierce's Iconoclast

2009-07-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite definitions from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is this one:

Iconoclast, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reëdify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."

X-Posts on New Yorker Fiction

2009-05-31T21:55:00.000-07:00

I've posted reviews on Emdashes of a fair amount of recent fiction from The New Yorker that I've been forgetting to cross-post here. So tonight, I'm making up for it. Here's reviews of:

Steven Polansky's "Leg," from January 24, 1994
Yoko Ogawa's "A Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain," from 2004
Three recent New Yorker stories by Gail Hareven (trans. Yaacov Jeffrey Green), Martínez (trans. Alberto Manguel), and Chris Adrian.
Three slightly more recent New Yorker stories by J.G. Ballard, Craig Raine, and Colm Tóibín.

John McPhee on the Ambivalent Glories of Using a D9 Cat

2009-05-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

From John McPhee's Coming into the Country, pp. 235-239. Ed and Stanley Gelvin are Alaskans who are panning for gold circa 1974:

They had a little Ranger -- a diminutive tractor, like a Cub Cadet -- which they had used to like purpose when they built a cabin on the Charley River years before. Ed cut the Ranger in half. They flew it to the mountains, and he welded it back together. The backhoe before long followed, and when it was at last reassembled they scooped into the center of a stream. Bedrock was eight feet down. Even at six, they panned the colors they had hoped to see.

They had intended to spend the whole of the following season ranging with the backhoe around the claims they had made, trying out pieces of seven miles of streams, but early results were so encouraging that they sharply foreshortened the tests. To put it conservatively, a pay streak appeared to be there, and what was needed now -- since the backhoe was just a fifty-seven-hundred-pound shovel -- was a means of moving gravel in a major way. The Caterpillar Tractor Company produces the eponymous Cat in seven sizes -- styled D3, D4, and so on to D9. Most gold miners use something less than the largest, but the Gelvins -- forming a partnership with two friends in Fairbanks -- decided to go all the way. The supreme Cat, twenty-seven feet long, eleven feet high, with a blade of fourteen feet, could sweep forty yards of gravel before it -- possibly a hundred dollars a shove. Ed Gelvin went to Los Angeles to shop for a used D9.

With his partners in Fairbanks putting up the money in return for a half interest in the claims, he paid forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars for a ten-year-old machine -- D9, Series G. In the fleets of general contractors, it had spent its lifetime ripping raw California land, making freeways, and preparing building sites on beaches and deserts. Who, watching it there -- clanking, dozing, wheezing, roaring, grunting like Pete the Pig -- could ever in farthest-fetched imaginings have guessed where it would go? It went to Seattle by train, and by barge to Whittier in Prince William Sound. There the Alaska Railroad picked it up and took it to Fairbanks, where, in early April, a lowboy hauled it up the dirt road north. Forty miles from Central, the haul stopped -- blocked by the still unbroken winter snows. The road had been smothered since October. Ed Gelvin, who was observing from the air, landed on the road and with Stanley put the blade on the Cat. The weather in a general way was warming. Snow was melting. Ice was beginning to rot. If the D9 was going to move up frozen stream beds and climb into the mountains, it had to keep going now. If the road was closed, the Cat would open it.

When Stanley Gelvin was a small boy and did his elementary-school work by correspondence from the kitchen table in Central, he was from time to time required to draw a picture. When the choice of subject was his to make, he always drew a Cat. He operated one before he drove anything else. Now, with a Cat all around him, he knew where things were. He sensed like an athlete the rhythm of the parts -- the tilt cylinders, the blade-lift arms. A good Cat skinner is a Cat mechanic, and from the torque converter to the sun-and-planet gears, he knew what was making the moves. 'I know what's inside the thing -- everything -- and what makes it work. My father knows how the stuff goes together, too. If the thing needs work, we do it.'

The snow-obscured road leading on toward Central was -- even at its best, in summer -- a tortuous trail. In several high places, it traversed the flanks of mountains as a fifteen-foot shelf with no rail of any kind and a precipitous plunge on the outboard side. On the last of these mountain passes, twenty miles from home, Stanley encountered drifts that were thirty feet deep. To keep going, he had to bite into the snow, doze some to the brink, send it avalanching down, then turn and bite some more -- all the while feeling for the road, feeling with his corner bits (the low tips of the blade) for the buried edge where the road stopped and the plunge began. A D9 is in some ways the most difficult Cat to operate. 'You've got so much iron in front of you can't see what you're doing.' It is also his favorite size, because it is so big it does not bounce around. This one weighed a hundred and ten thousand pounds. Its balance point was ten feet back of the blade. Repeatedly Stanley moved the blade eight feet over the edge. He knew where it was. If he had gone off the mountain, he would have raised one fantastic cloud of snow. Instead, he trimly dismantled the prodigious drifts and dozed on down to Central.

To the pads of the track Ed Gelvin welded ice grousers. They would keep the Cat from sliding. They were small pieces of steel, protruding like hyphens from the tracks. Ed and Stanley had built a steel slick plate and a steel sluice box, and Ed had rearranged them as a huge loaded sled -- eight feet wide and twenty-four feet long: I-beams, H-beams, three-sixteenths-inch plate. He had made a thousand-gallon fuel tank. It was full and on the sled. Here and there, he slipped in snowshoes, gold pans, a two-hundred-amp generator, a welding tank and torch. Finally, he secured to the top of the load a plywood wanigan -- that is, a small hut, with three bunks, propane, and a cupboard full of food. The rig, composed, weighed about twelve tons. When it was hooked to the D9, Stanley left for the mountains.

He crossed low terrain at first. His mother rode with him. His father hovered in the air. Then he changed passengers, taking on a friend named Gary Powers, and they began to move up Woodchopper Creek. His altitude at the start was nine hundred feet. The highest point on the trip was well above four thousand. They travelled five days, fourteen hours a day. There was plenty of wind. The highest temperature they experienced was zero. They stopped to cut their way through trees with a chain saw (fearing to doze them because the wanigan might be crushed). The Cat fell twice through rotting ice. With no difficulty, it climbed out of the water. There was some luck in the conditions, but not much. With less ice in Woodchopper Canyon, Stanley might have been stopped. But successive overflows on the creek had built the ice thickness in places to thirty feet. Nearing the head of Woodchopper, he moved the Cat slowly up a steep slope of ice, slid back, crept again, slid back, and thought for a while he wouldn't make it. Without the grousers, the big rig would have been stopped, but they held just enough, and gradually he crawled out of the head of the creek -- only to move into snow so deep the D9's steel tracks spun out. Stanley thought it wise to stop for the night. For one thing, all this was happening in a blizzard. Next day, the sky was clear, the air colder, and Stanley moved on a contour, through the deep snow until he found an uphill route. Steadily, he climbed ridges, sometimes in little snow, sometimes in seven-foot drifts. At one point, the going was so steep that he disengaged the sled and tried first to clear a trail. 'I knew that ridge was too steep to go over, because it was almost vertical. So I went around to the right. Without them ice grousers, the machine would have slid sideways and straight to the bottom as if it was on skates. Gary was scared to death. I went real slow now, and slipped some, and then went down to a dead crawl. I had it idled as low as it would go. I went on half a mile or so. When I saw it was possible, I went back for the sled.'
Landing on skis, his father would fly him out, and the D9 would sit idle in the mountains until summer. Meanwhile, there was one last ridge to cross. 'One side was sheer, and the other had deep snow and was very steep. It must have been forty-five degrees. A guy could have maybe gone around one side -- if you'd left the wanigan, dug the snow, and plowed a road. But I didn't want to make a horrible-looking mess. I moved slowly up. The track did spin a bit. I couldn't go straight up. It was too steep. I couldn't go sideways too well. I couldn't go back, because I had the sled. I'd have been afraid to back down. You can cut a road into the side of a mountain if you want to with a Cat like that, but I just inched up the thing, and over. I didn't want to dig up the country.'

Joan Acocella on the Crusades

2009-05-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

Joan Acocella, in her usual incisive and entertaining manner, reviewed two books on the Crusades in the December 13, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. She liked both, but she had one reservation:

[Thomas] Asbridge praises the "inspired and audacious" tactics of the leaders of the First Crusade, their "military genius"; [Jonathan] Phillips roots for the men of the Fourth Crusade as, with their boats swaying beneath them and with scores of Greek bowmen firing at them, they climb their ladders and jump out onto the walls of Constantinople. Later, the authors bemoan the slaughter, but what did they think the audacious tactics were for? There is a curious amorality here. It may be endemic to military history. (What an exciting battle! Oops, what a lot of dead people!)

Transit of Hardship

2009-05-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

In the 18th-century, scientists were trying to measure the passage of Venus across the Sun. If correctly measured from multiple places on Earth, one could then work out the distance to the Sun and other planets. However, these "transits of Venus" only happen "in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more." So when the first of a pair of such transits came around in 1761, scientists from all over the world set off to take measurements.

Many suffered disasters of various kinds, but among the unluckiest of these observers was a Frenchman named Guillaume Le Gentil:

Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit -- just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.

Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next ransit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began to pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds.

Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

--from pp. 54-55 of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Marie Curie Took Her Work Home with Her

2009-05-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products ... Radioactivity wasn't banned in consumer products until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Madame Curie, who died of leukemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s -- even her cookbooks -- are too dangerous to handle. Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to see them must don protective clothing.

--from A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, p. 111.

Leslie Thomas' Last Detective and Napoleon's Unmentionable

2009-05-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

In the following excerpt, "Dangerous" Davies, a police detective, interviews a doctor with an interesting collection:

Around the walls were showcases containing items of human anatomy. Davies could see a library through another door with an encased skeleton grinning at nothing. There were other skulls, bones and nameless things in jars. The death mask of a bald man occupied another container. 'Unusual room,' mentioned Davies, accepting the doctor's Scotch.

'An unusual facet of dockland development,' smiled Kinlock. 'It's not all fancy former warehouses.' He was a small Scot with ginger eyebrows. 'It's been a fine opportunity to gather interesting specimens from medical history. I'm adding to it all the time. The death mask is of Mikhail Bakunin, the father of modern anarchy, one of only twelve made. One day, I would love to buy Napoleon's testicle.'

'That,' agreed Davies vaguely, 'would be worth having.'

--from Leslie Thomas' Dangerous in Love: a Dangerous Davies Novel [1987], p. 101.

Robert B. Parker on the Big "Aha"

2009-05-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

In the following section, the first-person narrator is Spenser, a private detective, who is interviewing the madam of a high-end prostitution ring.

***

"Who else?"

"He never said, but he was quite odd [...]"

"Tall and slim? Chewed gum?"

"Yes."

I said, "Aha."

"Aha?"

"Yeah, like Aha I see a connection, or Aha I have discovered a clue. It's detective talk."

[...] She sipped some more Campari. I drank some Heineken. "Among my enterprises," she said, "is a film business. This gentleman had apparently seen Donna in one of our films and wanted the master print."

"Aha, aha!" I said. "Corporate diversification." The waiter came for our order. When he was gone, I said, "Start from the beginning. When did you meet Donna, what did she do for you, what kind of film was she in, tell me all."

"Very well, if you promise not to keep saying Aha."

--Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes (1975), pp. 146-147.

Mervyn Peake on Comprehension

2009-03-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

Who can say how long the eye of the vulture or the lynx requires to grasp the totality of a landscape, or whether in a comprehensive instant the seemingly inexhaustible profusion of detail falls upon their eyes in an ordered and intelligible series of distances and shapes, where the last detail is perceived in relation to the corporate mass?

It may be that the hawk sees nothing but those grassy uplands, and among the coarse grasses, more plainly than the field itself, the rabbit or the rat, and that the landscape in its entirety is never seen, but only those areas lit, as it were with a torch, where the quarry slinks, the surrounding regions thickening into cloud and darkness on the yellow eyes.

Whether the scouring, sexless eye of the bird or beast of prey disperses and sees all or concentrates and evades all saving that for which it searches, it is certain that the less powerful eye of the human cannot grasp, even after a life of training, a scene in its entirety. No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse, or fly and the assumption of damsel, horse, or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.

--from Chapter 20 of Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.

A.J. Liebling on Proust's Appetite

2009-02-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book ... In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

--from A.J. Liebling's Between Meals.

Also of interest: in Paris circa 1955, Liebling writes that he "received a note from Mirande by tube next morning ..." Anyone know what "by tube" means in this context?

Ian McEwan on Not Being Understood by a Reader

2009-02-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

Whereas in Black Dogs, the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose's logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa [in the novel Enduring Love]. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remebers that not every reader accepted the point: "Poor Greg [McEwan's son] had to study Enduring Love in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, 'Well, I think Clarissa's got everything wrong.' He got a D. The teacher didn't care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too 'male' in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing."

--from the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski's, "The Background Hum."

Judith Thurman on People You Meet Playing Online Scrabble

2009-01-17T09:59:00.001-08:00

I have probably met more interesting strangers playing online Scrabble than I have in a lifetime of travel to exotic places. A Ghanaian taxi-driver from Brooklyn invited me to Prospect Park, where his Scrabble club held weekend tournaments. A tattoo artist in Alberta surprised me, between plays, with her knowledge of Gerard Manley Hopkins. An Oxford don beat me soundly, but so did a used-car salesman. I have played Aussies and New Zealanders (Scrabble is popular in the antipodes), an impertinent prodigy who confessed to being eleven, a cardsharp in Las Vegas, a lawyer in Bangalore who traded places with his wife for the endgame ("She's the family closer," he said), a corgi breeder, and a Jane Austen fan ("elizabennet") who added a few words that Jane never used -- "feeb," "ottar," "vas," and "zineb" -- to my vocabulary.

--p. 29 of Judith Thurman's January 19, 2009 New Yorker article, "Spreading the Word."

Donald Westlake on Translating a Character from Book to the Big Screen

2009-01-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

In a filmed interview called "The Hunter," [Donald Westlake] pointed out that three very different actors played his antihero in the first three films -- Karina in Pop art dresses for "Made in USA," Lee Marvin in a '60s suit for "Point Blank" and the rugged Brown for "The Split."

As Westlake recalled: "A friend of mine said, 'So far, Parker's been played by a white guy, a black guy and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.' "

--From Scott Timberg's January 8, 2009 L.A. Times article, "Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice."

A.J. Liebling on Partying Like its 1952

2009-01-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

It was a sixteen-story cooperative building with two apartments on each floor, and the woman just above us, with whom our landlord had left the key, said it was as friendly as an old-time boarding house. "All the apartments are laid out just alike," she told us, "and that makes it homey, because no matter whose apartment you're in, you know where everything is. Last New Year's Eve, eleven of us got together and gave a party in all our eleven apartments, one above the other. One apartment was South American, with a rumba band, and another was Wild West, with a square-dance caller, and another French, with an accordionist, and you just took the elevator from one to another, and lay where you fell."

--From a profile of Chicago by A.J. Liebling in the January 12, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, called "Second City."

John Stuart Mill and P.G. Wodehouse

2008-10-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

I had to chuckle when Adam Gopnik used a character from P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle books to make a point about John Stuart Mill in a recent review of a biography about Mill:

"When someone says that proof of God's existence can be found in Nature, [Mill] doesn't say it's bosh. He asks what this would actually entail if it were true, and infers that such a creator would have to be limited, inept, well-meaning, forgetful, and in a daily contest with another power: 'A Being of great but limited power ... who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have some other motives of action which he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.' What natural theology, taken seriously, shows is not the great Watchmaker or the All-Seeing Jove but the absent-minded Landlord, a sort of eternal Lord Emsworth, who, though he helps the young lovers, cares mainly about his pig."

Priceless!

DFW RIP

2008-09-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace is dead at 46.

My feelings about his writing have always been, I admit, clouded by my jealousy: though my age, Wallace was smarter, more talented, more knowledgeable, and more successful than I. Nevertheless, he could have been better still, more disciplined, less derivative; I knew it, and now I'm afraid he did, too.

My guess? He had the writer's disease -- perfectionism -- so that whatever heights he scaled, they were never high enough, what he wrote never good enough. No doubt he struggled with depression most of his adult life (the episode in the mental ward we now know about, if we didn't before) ... but it shouldn't have ended this way. I'm so sorry to hear this news. DFW was among the most admired writers of his generation, and it wasn't enough for him. That's depression, not narcissism, and it killed him. (Don't let it take you the same way -- even if it means giving up writing. I speak from experience on this one.)

Weirdly, in the week leading up to Wallace's death, I received a statistically unlikely number of submissions to The King's English from fans who cited him as one of their favorite writers. Usually, authors submitting to the journal choose from a broad and eclectic band of authors, but not this week. This week, it was evenly divided between Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and David Foster Wallace. Who knows why? It's just a coincidence, but now of course it feels like an anticipatory tribute, so I want to share it. Here's what our authors had to say:

"Best novella? I'm inclined towards Salinger... but truly I have to go with the so way ambitious early work of David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way". It's in his first story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and it's the high point of the collection. The other is his short story "Little Expressionless Animals," which features Alex Trebec and the silent Merv Griffin as characters. Freaking brilliant." -PR

"Favorite personal essays: David Foster Wallace understands and conveys the complexities of human subjectivity so well, I love when his essays move in the direction of memoir. If his 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience' can be counted as a personal essay, I might call it my favorite. - SFP

"My favorite collection of personal essays is, by far, David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's what got me into non-fiction, even though I write nothing like him. The title essay and the one on the state fair are the best." -- KB

RIP, Mr. Wallace.

How to Get Published

2008-07-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Today's homily proves that word-of-mouth is the best way to get your book published -- it even works if your book doesn't exist. Case in point: a hoax perpetrated in the 1950s, when a radio DJ named Jean Shepherd encouraged his listeners to go into bookstores and ask for a fictitious book. He gave them an invented title -- I, Libertine -- author, and plot outline ... and he sent people into the streets to talk about it.

Somebody decided that it made sense to publish a book fitting its description, because noted sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon wrote it, and you can get it here. And here's a brief entry about the hoax and a link to an MP3 of Jean Shepherd recounting the whole hoax (verrry slowly) on the radio in 1968.

UPDATE: I now see that Boing Boing posted about this, which is sort of like being scooped by the New York Times.

Thereby Hangs a Tail

2008-07-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

In Emily Pecora's recent profile in Polite magazine of two Pennsylvania philanthropists -- two brothers -- I found a story so ripe with implication that I had to share it:

In October of 2004, a federal grand jury indicted Jeremy Sommers, Lansford’s K-9 officer, for planting narcotics during searches utilizing the drug-sniffing dog the brothers had donated. The Lansford city council, which had never been sure the town needed a drug-sniffing dog in the first place, [my emphasis] placed an ad in the classified section of the Times News announcing the dog’s sale.

... Jeremy Sommers was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison and a $4,000 fine and my hometown of Hazleton put in a bid to buy the dog.

Now, this is purely a flight of fancy, but what if Jeremy Sommers took a real shine to the unnamed K-9? Perhaps the dog was good and true and loyal, at a time when Mr. Sommers' personal life (I'm making all this up) was a shambles? Let's say his mother, his sole surviving parent, had advanced Alzheimer's and his girlfriend had betrayed him, and his buddies down at the bar had been giving him the cold shoulder ever since he became a cop ...

And now he's assigned to the dog, who turns out to be smart enough to star in the movies, a helluva partner. They're a great team -- except, see, there's no drugs for the pooch to find! What then?

The Chief starts breathing down the cop's neck because the City Council wants stats on the dog's success rate, and the mayor needs to send a report to the brothers who put up the money for the dog in the first place, so they feel like they did the Right Thing, that the money was well-spent, and now everybody's coming down like a ton of bricks on this poor cop, who only wants to hang on to the dog, that good dog that's been doing its job well but with absolutely no drug busts to show for it ... What then? He plants the drugs, so he can keep the dog ...

All fancy, I'm sorry to say, based on the fragments of news accounts I can find online, but I like my version better. It's heartwarming -- that is, if you're not the poor sap who got framed. But notice how, with only a few details, I automatically created an explanatory narrative? We human beings do love our stories.

Arthur Phillips on the British Museum

2008-07-03T18:18:00.000-07:00

Just read - or skimmed, actually - Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist. (You may recall that his debut novel, Prague, got quite a lot of publicity.) It opened fine, but one of the novel's main narrators got to be quite a bore (as several of the other character correctly complain). His delusional, self-centered world is appropriate enough - required, actually, for the novel's story logic to work - but even Nabokov (Phillips' model here) couldn't do much to retain one's interest in such characters. They're shrill, I find, and largely unsympathetic. (Not that Nabokov would've cared a Christly fig for a reader's sympathy, which would explain why Nabokov is (I suspect) more admired than read, Lolita notwithstanding.) Although the final ironic turns of The Egyptologist cast everything that has gone before in a tragic and moving light, the fact that it's obvious from very early on that one of the main characters is masquerading under a false identity (and I'm not good at deducing such things) rather undermines the impact.

But I took great delight in the mini-essay Phillips wrote for the "reader's guide" that appears at the back of the paperback edition of my copy of The Egyptologist, in which he praises the invaluable assistance he got from an expert at the British Museum, courtesy of the internet, answering questions that were often arcane:

If you should decide to write a novel about a topic you know almost nothing about, a scholarly discipline requiring years to master, if you feel compelled to set the story in a land you've scarcely visited, during an era you can only dimly conjure from childhood reading and yellowed clippings, if you have followed your hyperactive and petulant imagination down a rabbit hole and there gazed at glowing, magical projections of inverted pyramids and pith-helmeted lunatics and pharaohs with unconventional appetites, but found little by way of actual knowledge, rest easy, because at the British Museum you will make a new friend: an expert who not only knows everything, but who is required -- yes, required -- to answer all your e-questions, no matter how many, how foolish, how wrong-headed, fantastic, or just downright dirty.

Bleak House. Moody. Noir-ish.

2008-06-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

Ever read Dickens' Bleak House? Me neither. I've wanted to, ever since my mother told me that someone in the book dies of spontaneous combustion. Being aware that my one-time literary hero Vladimir Nabokov admired the book and wrote about it in his Lectures on Literature, (something else I never got around to reading) only added fuel to the fire.

I resisted until I saw the recent BBC adaptation (excellent, except for a bizarre use of melodramatic jump-cuts) via Netflix, which inspired me to overcome my lifetime of Bleak House-related sloth. I mooched an old hard-bound copy from someone in Australia (it was originally owned, according to the pencil signature on the flyleaf, by one A. Beange in Wellington, New Zealand, who bought it in September 1918). Once I finally started it, I was startled to discover that Dickens opens the book with reams of incomplete sentences:

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes -- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers ... Fog everywhere.

I almost felt I was reading a moody contemporary thriller. Was Dickens deliberately pushing the form, or was he writing fast, in shorthand, and decided later it could stand? Either way, I sure wish I could've used it in my never-ending arguments with my high school English teacher, who was trying to force me to abandon sentence fragments. (Never did. Loved 'em.)

Hilton Als on Jean Stafford

2008-06-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

Following closely on the heels of my earlier Emdashes post singing the praises of Jean Stafford's "In the Zoo," The New Yorker featured a story of hers in May's fiction podcast with Hilton Als. It wasn't one of her stronger stories, in my opinion, though The New Yorker seems to like it, since they not only published it the first time, but they reprinted an excerpt in the June 27, 1994 issue, and now feature it on a podcast. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Shirley Hazzard - When Transit of Venus Was Young

2008-06-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I've commented before now on how much I enjoyed re-reading Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. More recently, over on on Emdashes I performed a detailed review of four of Hazzard's stories from The New Yorker which later made up a good chunk of Transit. If I haven't convinced to read it yet, I hope this will do it.

Lorrie Moore, Read by Louise Erdrich

2008-06-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I strongly recommend that you check out the fiction podcast. In particular, I can't say enough good things about Louise Erdrich's reading of Lorrie Moore's story, "Dance in America." Phor phun, phollow the link!

Catching Up

2008-06-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss about cross-posting from Emdashes. So the next few will be re-posts of recent things I've done over there. For those of you who've already seen them, I apologize for the repetition.

I've been consumed with reading a fantasy series by Steven Erikson, which begins with Gardens of the Moon. (Pictured is the second volume in the series, Deadhouse Gates.) It's not up to the mark set by George R. R. Martin, but it's pretty good, if you like the grim stuff. Erikson's not nearly as casual about offing major characters as Martin is, but the bodies pile up by the thousands, and his characters all have a tendency to muse on mortality -- in fact, they all sound like TheSilver Surfer. Still, this is a series where the backstory grows more complex with each succeeding volume, and Erikson's imagination is epic in scope and grandeur. Once he gets going, he's a lot of fun, provided you have stomach for martial epics, and every other person seems to herald new and terrible forces unleashed upon the land. (I keep giving him left-handed compliments, but the fact is, I'm closing in on p. 900 of volume 3 of his 10+ volume epic, so the guys' got something going for him.)

Anyhow, all this to explain why, in part, my posts have been even scarcer than usual.

The King's English in Top 12 Online Literary Journals

2008-06-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

... at least if you rank them by the number of stories nominated for the Million Writers Award. Congratulations to the other journals on that list; on behalf of the editors of The King's English, however, I want to let out a dignified, cultured, "Wahoo!"

Muriel Spark Sparks

2008-05-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent and discovering (after an interval of perhaps 20 years), that it's not at all the sweet confection I remember it. Or rather, it is full of all those sharp edges Spark is known for, odd word choices and original (or just plain odd) ideas.

First, an example of odd word choice. The narrator, speaking about her name, "Fleur," says:

"Not that I looked bad, it was only that Fleur wasn't the right name, and yet it was mine as are the names of those melancholy Joys, those timid Victors, the inglorious Glorias and materialistic Angelas one is bound to meet in the course of a long life of change and infiltration; and once I met a Lancelot who, I assure you, had nothing to do with chivalry."

Um, a long life of ... infiltration? This reveals, I believe, the narrator's view of herself with regard to others. Like Spark, she is a writer, and seems to view others solely as exhibits, opportunities to plunder for her art. Still, it's a bizarre word to see in this context, and it takes a while for it to make any sense.

And here's an example of an idea I found striking:

... [W]hat I found common to the members of Sir Quentin's remianing group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes.

I've never decided on an attitude about people's flaws, whereas Fleur appears to have considered the question and come to a point of view. True to life or not, I find it fascinating whenever I encounter a character or author who seems to have consciously arrived at an opinion about something which I've left unexamined. (Since I leave a lot unexamined, this isn't difficult.)

UPDATE: Here's a couple more instances where Spark inserts material into her story that, well, stands out:

He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn't such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm ... had a private printing press on which they produced "the usual form of contract" to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author.

"Personal espionage" is an odd phrase to begin with (one must take a moment to decide that "espionage" alone wouldn't have done, because it would have connoted a shadowy network of hirelings, but it's a pause a reader shouldn't need to make use of), but what's odder about the phrase is what it says about the narrator. In the course of the story, it becomes clear (or seems to) that the narrator's publisher and several other people are conspiring to suppress her first novel. In these circumstances, one can imagine why she might be driven to "espionage," though it's never made clear when she might have done this, or why she bothered. One is left with the suspicion that our narrator is paranoid and sneaky, and Spark intended this. What she seems to have had in mind was a roman à clef in which she modeled the ruthlessness that had been necessary to her own development as a writer.

Here's a short passage that hints at this:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

At a minimum, it seems to reveal her narrator's self-centeredness; it's a tempting leap to assume the same was true of Spark herself.

Shirley Hazzard On Being Caught In Flagrante Delicto

2008-05-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the set-up: one afternoon in the 1950s, Paul Ivory, who is engaged to marry Tertia Drage, has just bedded Caroline Bell (and she him) on a lazy afternoon when they think no one will be about. Their idyll is disturbed, however, when Tertia drives up to the house and calls out for him. To forestall her from entering the house, Paul leaps to the window and speaks to her, pretending he is alone.

Paul was at the window now. He was leaning out, laconic. "Good God." He was smiling and leaning and making room for his casual elbows. 'Anything up?' There was the hard intimacy of tone, the naturalness with which he did not use her name. If he had even added so much as "Tertia."

Tertia Drage came right below the window: a pink dress, an upraised face. Perhaps she had not expected Paul to appear at once, but showed no surprise and, despite the standing down there, no sense of disadvantage. Any more than Paul did -- standing easy in, merely, the shirt and tie; and, as far as Tertia was concerned, fully dressed ...

Tertia says it's a beautiful afternoon, they should do something, Paul asks what they should do.

She raised a derisory hand. "You know the possibilities as well as I."

...Out of sight below the window Paul Ivory's bare feet had crossed themselves, negligent as his folded arms. Small fair hairs curled on his naked thighs. "Nothing too arduous," he said, or was saying, when from the fixing of Tertia's limbs he knew that Caro stood beside him.

He knew that Caro had come up behind him and was by his side at the window. Her bare shoulder, perfectly aloof, touched his own. He did not turn, but, as if he himself were Tertia Drage, saw Caro standing naked beside him at that high window and looking down; looking down on the two of them. It was he and Tertia, and Caroline Bell looking down on them. Caro's hand rested on the sill. She was wearing nothing but a small round watch.

Moments passed, or did not pass. Tertia stood impassive. Only that arm stayed raised, her gloved fist clenched and extended like a falconer's. She was looking straight up at Paul; not staring but looking hard and fast at him only. She said, "It's up to you."

"I"ll come down."

For perhaps the first time they met each other's eyes.

At the window Caro did not move. Paul withdrew and took up the rest of his clothes. His departure exposed completely the upper part of her body. Flesh-coloured light was striking her shoulder and making reddish streaks in heavy hair that fell over the collar-bone. Below, Tertia was walking round the car and opening the door. She got in, leaving the driver's seat free. In the room above, the bed creaked as Paul pulled on his canvas shoes. With no more than normal haste he took his own watch from the top of the bureau, glancing at it as he strapped it on. He might have been late for an appointment.

Yeow! I love the charged atmosphere of this confrontation, the heart-stopping moment when Caro appears at the window, and the utterly casual way in which Tertia and Paul indirectly seal their cynical union, and Caro's claim on Paul is obliterated.

Richard Price on Masterpieces of Dread

2008-04-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

The walls of the waiting room were hung with black-and-white cautionary posters, encircling Strike with admonitions, the subjects ranging from AIDS to pregnancy to crack to alcohol, each one a little masterpiece of dread. Strike hated posters. If you were poor, posters followed you everywhere -- health clinics, probation offices, housing offices, day care centers, welfare offices -- and they were always blasting away at you with warnings to do this, don't do that, be like this, don't be like that, smarten up, control this, stop that.

--From p. 403, Richard Price's Clockers.

Million Writers Award - My Personal Top 10 Online Short Stories for 2007

2008-04-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

This year, I was honored to serve as a preliminary judge for the annual Million Writers contest run by storySouth. The initial list of "notable" stories of 2007 has been posted. I highly recommend you check it out.

Each of the judges was asked to pick 10 stories from the 500+ stories nominated by editors and readers, and I thought I'd share my list with you. (I had to leave out the stories I nominated for The King's English, of course. Here they are, in no particular order:

“Arms Akimbo: A Gest,” by Corey Mesler, Menda City Review

"The Teacher," by Paul Tremblay, ChiZine

“The Beacon,” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Clarkesworld Magazine

Steiner Requests His Hole Be Dug in Poland," by D.E. Fredd, Eclectica

“Oma Dortchen and Pillar of Story,” by David J. Schwartz, Farrago’s Wainscot

"Notes on the Necromantic Symphony" by Yoon Ha Lee, Farrago’s Wainscot

"Janet, Meet Bob" by Gavin J. Grant, Lone Star Stories

“Intellectual Property,” by Angela Woodward, Monkeybicycle

“Malibu,” by Spencer Dew, Thieves Jargon

“Bones,” by Jon Michaud, Fawlt

“The Home Front,” by Paul Silverman, Eclectica

---Happy reading!

Translations from the British

2008-04-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

Got a new post up over on Emdashes. There's been a fair amount of fiction published by Brits in The New Yorker lately, with a certain amount of lingo I'd not come across before. I'm fairly Anglophilic in my reading tastes, so that's saying something. Figured I'd help make the world all tickety-boo by translating for the masses. Enjoy.

How Would Books Look to a Culture Built Entirely on Videogames?

2008-04-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

From a review of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You:

It doesn't seem right, of course, that watching "24" or playing a video game could be as important cognitively as reading a book. Isn't the extraordinary success of the "Harry Potter" novels better news for the culture than the equivalent success of "Grand Theft Auto III?" Johnson's response is to imagine what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children:

"Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying--which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements--books are simply a barren string of words on the page....

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children....

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion--you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you....This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one."

--From "Brain Candy," by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, May 16, 2005, p. 89.

New Post on Louise Erdrich's Demolition Derby

2008-03-14T20:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've been AWOL. I've been invited to be a guest columnist on Emdashes, a classy fan site for The New Yorker, covering New Yorker fiction. My latest post, on stories by Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Thomas Meehan, and William Gaddis, went up a few days ago. I've also done posts on Jean Stafford's awesome story, "In the Zoo"; another on three not-so-awesome stories by John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, and T.C. Boyle; one on who's published the most stories in The New Yorker; and another linking to some audio/video of the delightful essayist Adam Gopnik and short story master Mavis Gallant.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering why the column's called "The Katherine Wheel," it's because Katherine White was the first fiction editor at The New Yorker, and of course Catherine Wheel has the dual meaning of being an instrument of torture and a kind of firework, which aptly describes the possibilities inherent in any piece of fiction ... )

Isaac Babel on Good Writing

2008-03-02T22:17:00.000-08:00

From one of my favorite short stories:

"A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. the secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice."

--Isaac Babel, "Guy de Maupassant," trans. by Walter Morison. From The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel.

The King's English in the Top 25 Online Literary Journals

2008-02-28T18:07:00.001-08:00

As you may know, Jason Sanford of storySouth runs The Million Writers Award every year to bring attention to the best fiction being published online. The King's English has won its award for Best Online Publisher of Novella-Length Fiction three years in a row.

Recently, Jason posted an analysis of the results of the last four years of the contest -- and The King's English came in 24th on the list. Not bad, I think; proud to be in the company of so many other distinguished journals.

Charles Bock's Novel, "Beautiful Children" - Download for Free

2008-02-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

No idea if first-time author Charles Bock's novel, "Beautiful Children," deserves the hype it's been getting. (In fact, I've not seen any actual hype, just reports of hype -- meta-hype, if you will.) But Random House has done a very interesting thing: they're making the entire book available free for download for a short time -- the offer ends Friday.

I think this is a very smart move; indicative of a media company figuring out that sharing things for free, even for a short time, helps people try it out and recommend it to others. I can only imagine this will increase sales of the book. (Because very few people are going to read the entire thing on-screen.)

Download Beautiful Children here.

New Essay Posted on The King's English

2008-02-17T10:16:00.001-08:00

We're slowly accumulating material for a new issue of The King's English. Rather than do it the Old Media way, and wait for everything to come in before posting any new material, we've decided to "get with it," as the young folks say (which emoticon signifies self-deprecating irony, again?) and start publishing new fiction, essays, and poetry as we ready them for publication. Haven't decided to do away entirely with the concept of "issues" yet, but we might get there.

In the mean time, you've got a treat: James Francis' highly amusing brief essay, "Drawing Lesson." Pencils ready, class!

A Few More Bon Mots from Shirley Hazzard

2008-02-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned, I've been re-reading Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. She's not note-perfect, but damned close. Her densely allusive, imagistic narrative is haunting and compelling. A few more bon mots:

Having been at someone's else's mercy suggests that mercy may matter (60-61).

The pain was an extension of experience, so new and astonishing as to have intellectual interest (207).

Shirley Hazzard Has My Number

2008-02-13T21:17:00.000-08:00

I don't of course fall into the category of critic described below, but all the same: Ouch!

The introduction to the exhibition catalogue had been written by a leading -- or major, or brilliant -- critic. Caro read out a sentence and asked, "What does it mean?"

Vail looked over her shoulder. "They come to think they've had something to do with painting the pictures."

--Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 191.

Shirley Hazzard on Mass Production

2008-02-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

Been re-reading Shirley Hazzard's exquisite The Transit of Venus (1980) again, aproximately 22 years after I first read it and inexplicably shrugged it off as insufficiently impressive. (What was I thinking? All I can say is that I hadn't read enough, and certainly hadn't experienced enough. I was callow.) Here's her inimitable description of Australian children confronting mass-produced junk for the first time:

One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Munitions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name -- one's own for preference - and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. Set out on a classroom table, these silenced even Miss Holster. The girls leaned over, picking up this and that: Can I turn it on, how do you work it, I can't get it to go back again. No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.

It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. Even the Lalique on Aunt Edie's sideboard, or Mum's Balibuntl, were utterly functional by contrast, serving an evident cause of adornment, performing the necessary, recognized role of extravagance. The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials -- serviceable, workaday -- in contrast to these hard, high-coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.

--Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 47.

Can you imagine a more poetic description of mass-produced objects? Counter-examples will be considered; I await your favor.

Rebecca West - Tart and Acid

2008-01-22T09:24:00.001-08:00

More evidence in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon of Rebecca West’s dry wit and acid tongue. First, the dry (or tart). Speaking of the emperor Diocletian, she observes,

It would have been easier for him if what we were told when we were young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to immorality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history (145).

(She goes on to add, wisely, “The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult.”)

The acid comes into play when West goes on to describe the abuse and bloody violence to which Diocletian’s daughter was eventually subjected after her brutish husband died. She refused to marry another powerful man, who then brought “fraudulent legal proceedings against her. All her goods were confiscated, her household was broken up, some of her women friends were killed, and she and the boy Candidianus were sent into exile in the deserts of Syria. It is only in some special and esoteric sense that women are the protected sex” (147-8).

Zowie!

Bonfliglioli's Wit - Redux

2008-01-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

I just got my hands on another volume by Kyril Bonfiglioli, whom I quoted at length a while back. Nobody beats this guy for sly wit. Here’s an example.

After being violently chased from the scene of a romantic assignation, Karli – the peerless rogue and star of Bonfiglioli’s 1978 All The Tea In China– meets up with the object of his second assignation of the night:

“Karli,” she murmured as we drew apart after our first frantic embrace, “why does your heart thump so?”

“For love of you,” I lied valiantly. “It always thumps so when you are near, dearest one.”

“I am so happy that you feel so,” she said, still murmuring, “because I have such a wonderful piece of new for us.” My heart missed a thump. I cocked an ear for the baying of [pursuing] hounds but there was only the rustle of magnolia leaves, and two hearts beating as one, though for different reasons.

Rebecca West on d'Annunzio and Male Privilege

2008-01-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

You don't have to know what Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio did in Fiume after World War I to enjoy Rebecca West's scorn for him, but if you do, you'll share her disgust (and she has a point, besides):

I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer. Years ago, in Florence, I had marvelled over the singular example of male privilege afforded by d'Annunzio. Leaning from a balcony in the Lung' arno I had looked down on a triumphal procession. Bells rang, flags were waved; flowers were thrown, voices swelled in ecstasy; and far below an egg reflected the rays of the May sunshine. Here in Fiume the bald author had been allowed to ruin a city: a bald-headed authoress would never be allowed to build one.

--from p. 124 of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

West's Voice of Authority

2008-01-12T06:55:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned before, in a previous post on Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, that West is authoritative in a way we don't see anymore. Her cultural references and some of her witticisms are built upon certainties about what she shares with her audience, certainties no one writing today could possibly share -- but also on an apparent confidence that she knows everything required for the subject, and what she doesn't know, she can learn so thoroughly that there will be no room (or need) for disagreement.

I've been enjoying that voice of hers as I make my way through her book, while at the same time musing on its variability, the way it will suddenly downshift from history lesson to making tender fun of someone, then climb swiftly to scorn for the Hungarians (who had so recently been overlords in Croatia). Consequently, I found Cynthia Ozick's observations on T.S. Eliot's voice particularly relevant:

That charm of intimacy and the easy giving of secrets which we like to associate with essayists -- Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Virigina Woolf when the mood struck her -- was not Eliot's. As in what is called the "familiar" essay, Eliot frequently said "I," but it was an "I" set in ice cut from the celestial vault: uninsistent yet incontestable, serenely sovereign. It seemed to take its power from erudition, and, in part, it did. But really this power derived from some proud inner figuration or incarnation -- as if Literature itself had been summoned to speak in its own voice ...

Who could talk back to that? Such sentences appear[ed] to derive from a source of knowledge -- a congeries of assumptions -- indistinguishable from majesty.

What Ozick is describing is a voice of great remove, of a sort I find dry and immensely unappealing. I like West precisely because she is familiar at times (in fact, her notional assumption that her readers share her erudition draws them closer); after all, who wants to tour Yugoslavia with Literature, forever making drearily icy pronouncements? I'd rather go with a human being, someone who can be out of countenance; someone who's amused, sharp and passionate; someone who will do me the courtesy, however undeserved, of pretending that she's providing me with summaries of medieval Balkan history merely to get me up to speed on a subject I used to know a lot about but have since had to neglect in favor of my efforts to sort out the war in China ...

So shove over, Tom Eliot, you old fraud. When Rebecca West says she's driving us somewhere, I call shotgun.

--Quotation from "T.S. Eliot at 101," The New Yorker, November 20, 1989, p. 138.

Most Amusing Metaphor of the Week - Rebecca West

2008-01-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

From (where else?) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which Rebecca West discusses the daughter of couple she knows:

There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then had published a limerick (118).

How to Be Certain Your Living Goddess is the Real Thing

2008-01-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Nepal has a 10-year-old living goddess -- the "incarnation of the powerful Hindu deity Taleju." The post rotates among young girls. Selected at a very young age from among the children of a specific village of goldsmiths, the goddess is taken off to live in seclusion until the onset of menses, at which time she returns to normal life, and a new goddess is selected.

I learned all this from an article in a local paper on the current goddess, in which the following fascinating information was included:

"At the age of four, a panel of judges examined her in a series of ancient ceremonies -- checking her horoscope, searching for physical imperfections, and, as a final test, seeing if she would be frightened after a night spent in a room filled with 108 freshly decapitated animal heads. She was not."

--The Asian Reporter, January 1, 2008, p. 5.

Rebecca West on the Importance of Narrative

2007-12-28T21:36:00.000-08:00

Rebecca West: Black Lamb, Sharp Teeth

2007-12-27T22:20:00.000-08:00

Rebecca West, discussing the law's ancient pedigree in eastern Europe:

It is a thing to be noted, the age of legalism in these parts. It is our weakness to think that distant people became civilized when we looked at them, that in their yesterdays they were brutish.

This is from her 1150-page tome on Yugoslavia published in 1941, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.Worth reading? Well, I'm only on p. 49 so far (which is where the quote above comes from), but so far, I can tell you that critics call it one of the greatest books of the 20th-century, and that the prologue is worth the price of admission. Nobody today writes with such final authority, casual erudition, or unexpected battiness.

Writing about the Emperor Franz Joseph (of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for those of you who slept through European history), she observes,

He was certain of universal acclamation not only during his life but after his death, for it is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, "Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens when has gone!" It was true that there was already shaping in his court a disaster that was to consume us all; but this did not appear to English eyes, largely because Austria was visited before the war only by our upper classes, who in no country noticed anything but horses, and Austrian horses were good.

That's from p. 10, in the prologue, and is soon followed by this from p. 14, after she discusses the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Franz Joseph, whose death was used as pretext for the war that soon became World War I:

Of that assassination I remember nothing at all ... I was then very busy being an idiot, being a private person, and I had enough on my hands. But my idiocy was like my anaesthetic. During the blankness it dispensed I was cut about and felt nothing, but it could not annul the consequences. The pain came afterwards.

By her "idiocy," West means her infamous, 10-year affair with the much-older-and-married H.G. Wells, by whom she had a son. She sets up this metaphor at the start of her prologue, when she mentions the wonders of modern surgery: "[t]hey had taken me upstairs to a room far above the roofs of London, and had cut me about or three hours and a half, and had brought me down again ..." -- as well, obviously, as the pain of her breakup with Wells, and the horror brought by the Great War. Absolutely killer.

Orwell's Still Got Our Number

2007-12-27T22:10:00.000-08:00

Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is from an Orwell essay on Kipling, from 1942, 65 years ago:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment", demands that the robbery shall continue.

--George Orwell, p. 400 of his Essays.

Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

2007-12-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

Back in 1988, Dan Hofstadter published a meandering essay about the eighth (I think) meeting of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, which sounds like a great place for brainiac foodies. At that meeting, Dr. Max Lake lectured on the "resemblance between sexual smells and the smells of cheese and wine:"

I have been fortunate enough to have access to a sexual-odor library [Lake said], which, believe it or not, consists of little bottles in a laboratory. One of the most important human pheromones is isobutyraldehyde, which is the next relative in the carbon chain to the odor of bean sprouts. Great champagne has many aldehyde tones. There are also definite cheesy and sweaty notes. These middle-range fatty-acid smells characterize, in higher apes and human beings, the pheromones of the female in mid-cycle, and are also found, believe it or not, in several of the world's most delicious and expensive cheeses ...

Another lecturer, Charles Perry -- "accomplished Arabist, a former editor at Rolling Stone, and a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times" -- lectured about "Medieval Near Eastern Rotted Condiments."

[Perry] had set out loaves of barley dough to rot in various ways, in accordance with instructions in old Arabic cookbooks. After forty days, each smelled unique. The most suitable were wrapped in grape leaves in a loosely lidded container. They were to be used with a rotted whole-wheat flat bread from a health-food store to make bunn. The loaves of barley dough "were surprisingly white throughout most of their volume, and smelled faintly but not unpleasantly of rot," he reported. "The bread had rotted vigorously, and in the end looked like a furry black kitten with pink patches." These rots Perry then ground and sifted to make the bunn, which "developed a curious richness of aroma, like that of a ripe salami, after a week," he said. "It had a loathsome appearance but was agreeable to taste, if not a delicacy by my standards." Perry concluded by wondering aloud why these condiments had disappeared. Much of his audience was apparently wondering why he had not disappeared, and one listener rose to congratulate him on his survival.

Hofstadter marvels at the adventuresome tastes of the lecturers:

Many of these foods were not only strange but also unpalatable -- even, in some cases, inedible ... Past and present symposiasts had trumpeted their consumption of -- among other items -- bear's paw, "properly rancid" yak butter, fermented fish liquid, viper in chicken broth, house cat, fox, owl, ground bats' wings, pressed lizards, pangolin, Spanish fly, and frog's ovaries, not to mention sheep's-tail fat and medieval Arab rotted-grain condiments. Was there nothing they wouldn't put in their mouths?

Apparently not.

--Quotes from Dan Hoftstadter's "Omnivores." The New Yorker, April 25, 1988.

The Mysterious East

2007-12-21T07:15:00.000-08:00

Just read a long and very boring essay about China's "Long River," the Yangzi. The two things that stuck out:

[My Chinese wife] had warned me that the more conservative Chinese -- particularly those in the countryside -- would look askance at any public show of affection or solicitude, such as my holding her arm when we crossed a street. Though she promised not to walk behind me, in traditional Chinese fashion, she did make me agree not to help her up if she slipped and fell, explaining that it would be far more appropriate for me simply to stand by and laugh.

More amusing was a passing reference to one of the categories into which people in China were classified during the Cultural Revolution (and probably before then as well, as the categories may have predated it). In the 1980s, as economic reforms took hold, the reputations of various categories, such as "capitalists," were being "rehabilitated." They were able to "recover former assets and properties as a result," but not so for "the 'stinking ninth class' -- the intellectuals, who possess little beyond what's in their heads ..."

Stinking ninth class. How's that for a résumé-builder?

--Quotations from "The Long River," by Robert Shaplen. The New Yorker, August 8, 1988.

John McPhee on Stopping Volcanic Lava

2007-12-19T20:30:00.001-08:00

In 1988, McPhee published a two-part essay on what was the only successful human intervention to divert flowing volcanic lava (to that date, at least - don't know if this has changed): a battle waged in 1973 by Icelanders to keep lava flowing out of a new volcano from filling up a key harbor. They did this by spraying the flowing lava with water. Cooled lava formed hard walls, which would direct, to some extent, new lava flows.

And if that sounds easy, it wasn't. McPhee is clear that the victory was equivocal -- though they saved the harbor, they lost much of the town (buried under many feet of new, cooling rock); many inhabitants fled the island, never to return; and in many ways they were just plain lucky.

There are some amazing descriptions though, of what it was like to be up on top of the flow, working on a thin skin of barely-cooled lava with pipes, hoses, and bulldozers amid clouds of steam-fog, while being pelted with falling ash (think hot pea gravel that can cut skin and leave burns) and lava "bombs" -- just-solidified rock with molten cores that often exploded -- falling around them that sometimes weighed as much as a third of a ton.

A large part of these operations -- including, eventually, the coordination of the pumping crews -- was directed by the Icelandic fire chief of the American base at Keflavik ... This was a slender man of deceptively mild aspect, vaguely professorial, appearing like a genie through his own pipe smoke. He sometimes wore a uniform, with stripes that suggested military rank, but he was an Icelander, not a soldier, and in any case, no width or number of stripes could ever have conveyed the status he acquired on the island. Sent by the Civil Defense to help in the emergency, he quickly assumed command of one unit after another, until his de-facto rank had outflown eagles and was far into the stars. His name was Sveinn Eiriksson, but no one much used it. On Heimaey, in the battle, he was known universally as Patton.

--From John McPhee's "The Control of Nature: Cooling the Lava." The New Yorker, February 22, 1988, p. 51, later collected in The Control of Nature.

The essay was originally published in two parts, in the February 22nd and February 29th issues of The New Yorker. The second half is much weaker than the first, as the narrative falters and McPhee includes random anecdotes that appear to be taken straight from his unedited notes. (Hard as it is to imagine, somebody at The New Yorker fell asleep at the wheel.) Reading this piece reminded me that as much as I admire McPhee for his restless curiosity, and the way in which he's able to make the unusual, obscure, and mundane interesting and educational, he's not a very good editor of his own work. The guy blurts it onto the page, shapes some of it, and then he's off to the next assignment. That said, I'll keep reading him -- I rather welcome his periodic eruptions.

The Limits of Author Interviews

2007-12-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

The usual practice, when invited to write the introduction to an anthology, is to praise its contents. How refreshing to come across an introduction that finds most of the volume under discussion wanting (and manages also to achieve resonance well beyond the book under discussion):

Some of the Americans in this book are perhaps a little too eager to explain themselves. All that has ever really happened to them, one feels, is the experience of being writers. When they talk about themselves, these "selves" become sacred objects. As so often happens with Americans, the terror of failure hangs over them ... By contrast, Blaise Cendrars seems carelessly bountiful of everything, and recounts his life, his friends, his many countries and adventures simply as anecdote and observation, for the pleasure of talking about them. His interview makes an extraordinary impression on us who are saturated in literature: this is not merely a writer seeking to be a writer, this is a man who has lived.

-Alfred Kazin, in the introduction to Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series, 1967.

Didion the Slow Learner

2007-12-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

A while back, I praised Joan Didion's style, which led me to catch up on some of her recent writing and her interviews (in 1978 and 2006) from The Paris Review. The thing about Didion is that she seems to have sprung, like Athena, from the brow of Zeus. Everything she's published is so clearly, distinctively hers, that it's hard to believe she ever suffered a moment's doubt about her craft.

I suppose I should find it encouraging or heartwarming to read that Didion does suffer such doubts, but oddly, I find it merely ... doubtful. But see for yourself. Here she is, from the 1978 interview, talking about her novel, Run River:

It's got a lot of sloppy stuff. Extraneous stuff. Words that don't work. Awkwardness. Scenes that should have been brought up, scenes that should have been played down. But then Play It As It Lays has a lot of sloppy stuff. I haven't reread Common Prayer, but I'm sure that does, too. [It doesn't.]

Actually, I didn't much care for either Run River or Play It As It Lays when I attempted them years ago, but to suggest that Book of Common Prayer is sloppy --!

Well all right, then: may all writers be cursed with such messiness.

What's Wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities

2007-12-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

I'm a fan of Tom Wolfe's, if by that you mean a fan of his classic journalism - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and The Right Stuff, both of which I read in high school. And though I don't agree with his anti-Modernist ranting in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, I enjoy his brio.

What soured me on his work was The Bonfire of the Vanities, in part because I found his ideas about what novels should be terribly limiting. What with all the hoopla over his Harper's essay on this topic that presaged the appearance of "Bonfire," and the subsequent barrage of publicity that accompanied the book's eventual publication, I began to realize that Wolfe was an aesthetic and moral bully. And truth be told, when I read the book in 1988, I wasn't terribly impressed: it was engrossing, but it was populated with thinly-drawn characters, mere counters to be moved around the board in the service of Wolfe's satire. It didn't stick with me.

How satisfying, then, to learn that I wasn't alone in my feelings about it when I ran across Terrence Rafferty's respectful demolition of Bonfire, which came out at the time. Rafferty begins his review by addressing the bold panache with which Wolfe debuted as a novelist:

... he's not about to come on all insecure and timid and terrified of committing a gaffe, as if he were just another eager arriviste. Bearing this gigantic book, he crashes the novelists' party, and it's as if a professional wrestler in full signature regalia had suddenly appeared, waving his arms and declaiming and hurling people to the floor: he makes a big impression.

The book, Rafferty says,

... allows Wolfe to show off his talents as a listener and an observer: he knows how to cram scenes full of visual and verbal details without slowing the momentum of the narrative, so the novel seems rich and generous while we're reading it. But why does it feel so thin when we're done with it? Dazzled by the flamboyant performance, we may still wonder, when the wrestler has finally left the room, what the hell that was all about.

Aye, laddie. Done and dusted.

Origin of "Honesty is the Best Policy"

2007-12-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

Just read a long biographical essay/review by John Updike about Benjamin Franklin -- worth reading in its own right -- and ran across this interesting tidbit:

Among the assertions of Poor Richard is not "Honesty is the best policy;" this saying dates from the sixteenth century and appears in the "Apophthegms" [sic] of Archbishop Whately of Dublin, with an interesting second thought: "Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by the maxim is not an honest man."

--From "Many Bens," by John Updike, The New Yorker, February 22, 1988.

Vicki Hearne on Cats

2007-12-02T19:02:00.000-08:00

I used to hear older experimenters advising younger ones about working with cats. It seems that under certain circumstances if you give cats a problem to solve or a task to perform in order to find food they work it out pretty quickly. But, as I heard, "the trouble is that as soon as they figure out that the researcher or technician wants them to push the lever they stop doing it; some of them will starve to death rather than do it."

That result fascinated me -- I would have dropped everything in order to find out what the cats were trying to do or say to the researchers. After all, when human beings behave that way we come up with a pretty fancy catalogue of virtues in order to account for it. But, of course, I was stupidly supposing that the point of these efforts was to understand animals, and it wasn't at all. The point was simply to Do Science, or so I began to suspect when I heard one venerable professor tell a young researcher, "Don't use cats. They'll screw up your data."

-from Vickie Hearne's "Questions about Language," Part II. The New Yorker, August 25, 1986.

Vicki Hearne on Language about Animals

2007-12-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

... [I]n the trainers' world different kinds of animals exist from the ones that I heard and read about in the university. For the trainer, there are hot working Airedales, dutiful and reliable German Shepherds, horses with intense, fiery, and competitive temperaments, other horses who are irredeemably dishonest. In the universities, there were more or less Cartesian creatures of uncertain pedigree, revised by uncertain interpreters of Freud and Jung, which may be why animals are invoked in the world of letters in general to mark "primitive" and usually unsavory impulses, while in the trainers' world they are more like characters in James Thurber, who insisted that in his work dogs represented "intelligence and repose." The trainers' language was ... the right language, the philosophically responsible language.

--"Questions about Language," by Vicki Hearne, The New Yorker, August 18, 1986, p. 38.

Joan Didion Skewers George Herbert Walker Bush

2007-11-25T20:16:00.000-08:00

Recently, I posted a great metaphor describing Joan Didion's style, which reminded me how much I love her work and inspired me to catch up on some of her recent essays. So here's a lengthy quote from her work. If you're not familiar with it, you should know that she has an abiding fascination with how public narratives are constructed by politicians, policymakers, and influential people -- narratives that usually are seriously disconnected from what she has called "observable reality." She particularly likes to see the way this works when it comes to American foreign policy, which is frequently developed, as her essays invariably reveal, in an alarmingly offhand way, without concern for its human impact or "collateral damage." While the story below is not an example of foreign policy in its highest sense, it betrays a self-centered obliviousness that does not recommend itself for diplomacy, and which is all too common:

In August 1986, George [Herbert Walker] Bush, traveling in his role as vice president of the United States and accompanied by his staff, the Secret Service, the traveling press, and a personal camera crew ... working on a $10,000 retainer paid by a Bush PAC called the Fund for America's Future, spent several days in Israel and Jordan. The schedule in Israel included, according to reports in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, shoots at the Western Wall, at the Holocaust memorial, at David Ben-Gurion's tomb, and at thirty-two other locations chosen to produce camera footage illustrating that George Bush was, as Marlin Fitzwater, at that time the vice-presidential press secretary, put it, "familiar with the issues." The [personal camera] crew did not go on to Jordan (there was, an official explained to The Los Angeles Times, "nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs"), but the Bush advance team in Amman had nonetheless directed considerable attention to improving visuals for the traveling press.

Members of the advance team had requested, for example, that the Jordanian army marching band change its uniforms from white to red. They had requested that the Jordanians, who did not have enough equipment to transport Bush's traveling press corps, borrow the necessary helicopters to do so from the Israeli air force. In an effort to assure the color of live military action as a backdrop for the vice president, they had asked the Jordanians to stage maneuvers at a sensitive location overlooking Israel and the Golan Heights. They had asked the Jordanians to raise, over the Jordanian base there, the American flag. They had asked that Bush be photographed studying, through binoculars, "enemy territory," a shot ultimately vetoed by the State Department, since the "enemy territory" at hand was Israel. They had also asked, possibly the most arresting detail, that, at every stop on the itinerary, camels be present.

-from Joan Didion's "The West Wing of Oz," in Political Fictions, pp. 60-61.

Cyril Connolly on E. M. Forster and Style

2007-11-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

In 1938, Cyril Connolly performed a rather bleak assessment of the state of English literature. He singled out E. M. Forster as a novelist whose work seemed to be surviving the passing years. Heres part of what he had to say:

Much of his art consists in the plainness of his writing for he is certain of the truth of his convictions and the force of his emotions. It is the writer who is not so sure what to say or how he feels who is apt to overwrite either to conceal his ignorance or to come unexpectedly on an answer. Similarly it is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.

Lest you think Connolly is an enemy of style, rest assured that he is not. But he does like precision, as he states with admirable beauty here:

The vocabulary of a writer is his currency but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of the mind and heart which back it.

In drawing this analogy, Connolly goes against the now long-established rule of literary criticism that one should not confuse an author with his or her work -- a good rule in general, though I can say from bitter personal experience that Connolly is absolutely correct, if I understand him aright, to draw a connection between a writer's prose and his or her personal qualities. Some of us are not made to write massive 19th-century Russian novels (never mind our inability to speak the language): some of us were made for (very) light verse.

--from p. 6 and 10 of Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.

Calvin Trillin Runs out of Spanish

2007-11-22T09:57:00.000-08:00

Even when I seem to be doing pretty well in speaking Spanish, I can run out of it, the way someone might run out of flour or eggs. A few years after I passed up the chance to stay in Madrid, some friends and I went to Baja California to mark an occasion I can no longer remember, and I became the group's spokesman to the owner of our motel, a Mrs. Gonzales, who spoke no English. Toward the end of a very long evening, as I listened to her complain about some excess of celebration on our part, I suddenly realized that I had run out of Spanish. It wasn't merely that I couldn't think of the Spanish words for what I wanted to say. ("I am mortified, Mrs. Gonzales, to learn that someone in our group might have behaved in a manner so inappropriate, not to say disgusting.") I couldn't think of any Spanish words at all. Desperately rummaging around in the small bin of Spanish in my mind, I could come up with nothing but the title of a Calderón play I had once read, to no lasting effect, in a Spanish-literature course.

"Mrs. Gonzales," I said, "life is but a dream."

She looked impressed and, I must say, surprised. She told me that I had said something really quite profound. I shrugged. It seemed the appropriately modest response; even if it hadn't been, it would have been all I could do until I managed to borrow a cup of Spanish from a neighbor. Eventually, I came to look back on the experience as just about the only time I had been truly impressive in a foreign language.

-from Calvin Trillin's "Abigail y Yo," from The New Yorker, June 26, 1989, pp. 83-84.

Don DeLillo's Pseudonymous Novel Reviewed

2007-11-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite all-stops-out novels is Don DeLillo's Amazons: An intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League, published in 1980, under the pseudonym of Cleo Birdwell. You rarely see it discussed anywhere, but it's one of the funniest things I've ever read. I'm not up to describing its varied pleasures, but lucky for you, I am able to direct you to a recent review. If you're a fan of plot or moral seriousness, skip it. Otherwise, here are your orders: acquire it ASAP. You'll likely have better luck on Advanced Book Exchange than Amazon (ironically), but use whatever works for you. Should you run across it in a used bookstore and find yourself wrapping your fingers around it just as someone else does the same, be ruthless. It's worth it.

Billy Wilder on Why Screenwriting is Worse than Playwriting

2007-11-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of the picture maker, as opposed to the playwright, is that for the playwright the play debuts in Bedford, Massachusetts, and then you take it to Pittsburgh. If it stinks you bury it. If you examine the credits of Moss Hart or George Kaufman, no one ever brings up the play that bombed in the provinces and was buried after four shows.

With a picture, that doesn't work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they're still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it. You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back! We don't bury our dead; we keep them around smelling badly.

--from p. 421 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Michael Cunningham on Joan Didion's Style

2007-11-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

Michael Cunningham on Joan Didion, quoted on the National Book Critics Circle blog:

She writes sentences that seem sculpted out of dry ice. She writes in a style that never feels like a style. You could put a drink down on a Joan Didion sentence.

He's not right that her style "never feels like a style" - on the contrary, especially with her more recent work, it feels mannered. But Christ, what a manner!

On Taste - Wine & Marijuana

2007-11-17T10:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, so first, Tom Christensen's quirky, entertaining blog linked this week to Jonah Lehrer's post describing some experiments with wine experts being given blind taste tests, with amusing results, quoted below. (Don't take them too seriously, though, unless you track down the original research, links for which are given in the many comments on Lehrer's blog.)

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

I'm no wine expert -- don't really care for it, unless it's sweet, which puts my wine-loving friends into paroxyms -- so I always find the language used to describe wines both un-illuminating and amusing. (Probably the same way others feel when I talk about what makes one piece of writing better than another.) Imagine, however, how ludicrous it would be if a cadre of critics applied such language not to wine, but to marijuana?

Well, much to my surprise, you don't have to imagine: such critics evidently exist. Recently, on the "new books" shelf at my library, my wife noticed The Big Book of Buds, Volume 3, which turned out to be a coffee table book about ... pot. And not just any pot, but serious, genetically- modified pot that's nothing like your daddy's pot. It looks like ... well, pot on steroids. (I work in the field of adolescent treatment, as it happens, so I'm under no illusions that "you can't get addicted to pot," or that kids who use it aren't smoking several cigar-sized blunts a day and drinking as well, but I also believe in free speech, so the appearance of this volume at the local library gave me an ethical headache.) Here's how the "Sour Cream" strain was reviewed:

Sour Cream descends from two powerful North American lines. The New England "diesels" are non-haze sativas that push marijuana's citrus-like pungency into the realm of fuel. Sour Cream's mother is the near-pure sativa Sour Diesel, a clone-only strain derived from Chem crossed with Mass Super Skunk. This version of Sour Diesel is known for her sour Kush-like smell and her stand-out sour candy taste. The father, G-13 Haze, is a cream of the crop male that shows his true colors in this cross, but with improved yield. Sour Cream brings these two North American strains together for a complex, unusually calming stone.

--From p. 142 of the Big Book of Buds, Volume 3: More Marijuana Varieties from the World's Great Seed Breeders.

I only understood about a tenth of this, but my theory is that if you substituted the word "varietal" for "sativa," the word "wine" for "marijuana," and "glass" for "stone," you could post this on a wine-lover's blog and get at least 10 people writing in complaining that their local wine shop doesn't carry "Sour Cream" or -- better yet -- "Mass Super Skunk."

Ian Frazier on How Stories About Bears Help Them Survive

2007-11-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

When Ian Frazier is walking in Montana and meets his first bear:

For some reason, I picked up a rock. I felt the weight of the rock in my hand, I smelled the breath from a wild rosebush, I saw the sun on the tops of the mountains, I felt the clothes on my back. I felt like a man -- skinny, bipedal, weak, slow, and basically kind of a silly idea (77-78).

He goes on to engage in what Anne Fadiman once referred to in an essay as "anticipatory plagiarism," i.e., stealing an idea I elaborated on almost a decade later about the supremacy the stories we tell about wilderness has over our actual experience of it:

Today, for grizzly bears to survive in the mountains of several Western states they must also survive in people's imaginations ... [In newspaper stories] and in magazines and on television, too, bears fatten on certain feelings people have for wilderness, and suffer for others ... In a way, a grizzly is as alive in the pages of a newspaper as he is walking through the trees from which the newspaper is made (79).

---from Ian Frazier's essay, "Bear News," from The New Yorker, September 9, 1985.

John Dufresne on Talking Dogs

2007-11-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

John Dufresne's book, Love Warps the Mind a Little, which I read a few years ago, was not what I signed up for - it was a lot sadder and much more affecting than I'd expected. But it's stayed with me. I recommend it, with the caveat that it starts out easy, and turns into a tough trip.

Here's one of the easy parts. The narrator in the following paragraph goes to the dentist, who gives him nitrous oxide for pain relief. His dog's name is Spot.

Under the gas I dreamed that Spot and I were cruising down a back road in Vermont. I was driving my father's car, the '71 Plymouth Fury. Spot was watching cows out the window and telling me that some dogs, mostly your purebreds, believed in an afterlife, but he certainly wasn't one of them. I said, Look at me when you talk. I want to see your lips move.

--From p. 154 of Love Warps the Mind a Little.

John Dufresne on How Being a Writer & Holding a Job Don't Mix

2007-11-03T16:41:00.001-07:00

"I was reminded of teaching and of how a job is incompatible with writing. So are a marriage, kids, religion, a bowling team. Probably everything is. And why is it called writing when the words are only a part of it? How do you explain to someone that your eyes are drifting up and to the left because you're trying to watch this actual person you made up cross the room and close the blinds, and that this is your job?"

--From page 6 of John Dufresne's powerfully affecting Love Warps the Mind a Little.

Homer-Dixon Connects Economics to Ecology

2007-11-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

Thinking about alternatives to the growth imperative means thinking about alternatives to conventional economics -- an elaborate apparatus of assumptions, theories, and empirical research that reinforces the legitimacy of globalized capitalism and the power of the world's capitalist elites. At the heart of this view is the assumption that the economy is separate from nature and operates much like a machine. The machine's behavior is linear, predictable, and reversible, so it can be managed by a planet-wide class of technocrats -- including central bankers and government officials -- trained in the arcane science of economics. An alternative theory would recognize that the economy is intimately connected with nature and its energy flows. This larger economic-ecological system often doesn't act like a machine at all. Instead, its behavior is path dependent, marked by threshold effects, and often neither predictable nor controllable. An alternative view would also recognize there are no good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like biodiversity and a benign climate. Because we can't adequately replace these things with something else once they're gone, we need to create ways of giving them explicit economic value so people will have an incentive to protect them. Such an alternative view, if developed in detail, would help everyone understand that conventional economics is not unchallengeable truth but rather a particularly potent ideology -- a blend of scientific finding, analytical gymnastics, value judgments, and self-congratulation.

--from p. 293 of Thomas Homer-Dixon's The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization.

Author Stephen Marche on Why Canadian Fiction Sucks

2007-10-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

Setting is everything in Canadian fiction. Plots don't matter much. There are only a few plots anyway: recovering from historical or familial trauma through the healing power of whatever (most common); uncovering historical or family secrets and thereby achieving redemption (close second); coming of age (distant third place).

The characters are mostly the same: The only thing that changes is the location of the massacred grandmother, what kind of booze the alcoholic father drinks himself into fits with, what particular creed is being revealed, in deft and daring ways, as both beautifully transcendent and oppressive.

From: "Raging Against the Tyranny of Canlit." Of course, all that said, 31-year-old Marche seems a little too taken with the American youth cult he left behind in Brooklyn.

After Watching a Documentary about a Slaughterhouse

2007-10-13T09:15:00.001-07:00

The quote below comes from a 1967 essay by critic Raymond Durgnat about Le Sang de Bêtes [literally, the blood of beasts], a documentary about a slaughterhouse in Paris. And if that's not removed enough for you, I've neither seen the movie nor read the essay in its entirety, but cribbed the quote from p. 252 of Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy: or What a Carve Up!

It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious ... that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives ...

In Which St. Anselm Belabors the Obvious

2007-10-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

For, just as what is thought is thought by means of a thought, and what is thought by a thought is thus, as thought, in thought, so also, what is understood is understood by the mind, and what is understood by the mind is thus, as understood, in the mind. What could be more obvious than this?

--From St. Anselm's Reply to Gaunilo, in Proslogion, with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm.

Newsflash: It's O.K. to Take Candy from Strangers

2007-10-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

More evidence that Americans increasingly live in a climate of fear of their own making.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the tradition of Halloween trick-or-treating came under attack. Rumors circulated about Halloween sadists who put razor blades in apples and booby-trapped pieces of candy. The rumors affected the Halloween tradition nationwide. Parents carefully examined their children's candy bags. Schools opened their doors at night so that kids could trick-or-treat in a safe environment. Hospitals volunteered to X-ray candy bags.

In 1985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren't prepackaged. This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy.

Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren't caused by strangers. A five-year-old boy found his uncle's heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death of his own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide.

In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It's your family you should worry about.

--From pp. 13-14 of Chip Heath & Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Jonathan Coe on the Illusory Nature of Banking

2007-10-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

Banking, as he once told a television interviewer, had become the most spiritual of all professions. He would quote his favourite statistic: one thousand billion dollars of trading took place on the world's financial markets every day. Since every transaction involved a two-way deal, this meant that five hundred billion dollars would be changing hands. Did the interviewer know how much of that money derived from real, tangible trade in goods and services? A fraction: 10 per cent, maybe less. The rest was all commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist. In that case (countered the interviewer) surely the whole system was nothing but a castle built on sand. Perhaps, agreed Thomas, smiling: but what a glorious castle it was ...

--From p. 310 of Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy: or What a Carve Up!

Stop Being a Workaholic? Naah - It's Too Much Work

2007-10-09T17:31:00.000-07:00

... Tony decided to attend a Workaholics Anonymous meeting in New York City, near his home ... When he got to the meeting, there were four other people gathered around a table in a church basement. It turned out that the group's size hadn't increased significantly since its founding a decade ago ... [As] Tony was leaving, one of the participants approached him. "Welcome to the French Resistance," the man said with a sly smile. "There are five million workaholics in New York, and you've just met the only four who are in recovery."

--From pp. 40-41 of The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

Why Human Ingenuity May Not Be Enough this Time

2007-10-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

A hopeful public, including leaders in business and politics, views the growing problem of oil depletion as a very straightforward engineering problem of exactly the kind that technology and human ingenuity have so successfully solved before, and it therefore seems reasonable to assume that the combination will prevail again. There are, however, several defects in this belief.

One is that we tend to confuse and conflate energy and technology. They go hand in hand but they are not the same thing. The oil endowment was an extraordinary and singular occurrence of geology, allowing us to use the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Once it's gone it will be gone forever. Technology is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, but not the fuel itself. And technology is still bound to the laws of physics and thermodynamics, which both say you can't get something for nothing, and there is no such thing as perpetual motion. All of this is to say that much of our existing technology simply won't work without petroleum, and without the petroleum "platform" to work off, we may lack the tools to get beyond the current level of fossil-fuel based technology. Another way of putting it is that we have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to make that happen.

--From pp. 101-2 of James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

V.S. Naipaul Seeks Out Erotic Carvings

2007-10-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

I went to the Nepalese Temple, 'disfigured', Murray's Handbook said, by 'erotic carvings; they do not catch the eye, provided that the attendant can be discouraged from pointing them out'. The attendant was a youth with a long switch; I begged him to point them out. 'Here man and woman,' he began unexcitedly. 'Here other man. He Mr. Hurry-up because he say, "Hurry up, hurry up.'" Tourist lore: the gloss did not please me. The pleasures of erotic art are fragile; I wished I had followed Murray's advice.

--From pp. 266-7 of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India.

V.S. Naipaul Appreciates an Exquisite but Often-Unrecognized Skill

2007-10-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Appreciation of different kinds of intelligence -- or, more accurately, different ways of expressing it -- is not common. As a writer myself, I used to judge people's smarts based on their verbal ability. It took me many years to dimly grasp how wrong and foolish this was, as I think Naipaul demonstrates below. (I'm not sure he's entirely serious, actually, but I'd prefer to think he means it.)

[Aziz] seemed to be so many persons. It was especially interesting to watch him at work on our friends, to see applied to others that process of assessment through service to which, in the early days, we ourselves had been subjected. They had servants of their own: nothing bound Aziz to them. Yet he was already taking possession of them; and already he was binding them to himself. He had nothing to gain; he was only obeying an instinct. He could not read or write. People were his material, his profession and no doubt his diversion; his world was made up of these encounters and managed relationships. His responses were acute ... He had picked up his English by ear; he therefore avoided Indian eye-pronunciations and spoke the words he knew with a better accent than many college-educated Indians. Even his errors ... showed a grasp of a language only occasionally heard; and it was astonishing to hear a word or phrase I had used coming back, days later, with my very intonations. Would he have gone far if he had learned to read or write? Wasn't it his illiteracy which sharpened his perception? He was a handler of people ... To us illiteracy is like a missing sense. But to the intelligent illiterate in a simpler world mightn't literacy be an irrelevance, a dissipation of sensibility, the mercenary skill of the scribe?

--From p. 162 of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India.

V.S. Naipaul Reveals Why Domestic Staff in 19th-Century Novels are so Uppity

2007-10-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ever had to supervise others in the workplace will recognize what Naipaul describes below.

On that small island I had become involved with them all, and with none more so than Aziz. It was an involvement which had taken me by surprise. Up to this time, a servant, to me, had been someone who did a job, took his money and went off to his own concerns. But Aziz's work was his life. A childless wife existed somewhere in the lake, but he seldom spoke of her and never appeared to visit her. Service was his world. It was his craft, his trade; it transcended the formalities of uniform and deferential manners; and it was the source of his power. I had read of the extraordinary control of eighteenth-century servants in Europe; I had been puzzled by the insolence of Russian servants in novels like Dead Souls and Oblomov; in India I had seen mistress and manservant engage in arguments as passionate, as seemingly irreparable and as quickly forgotten as the arguments between husband and wife. Now I began to understand. To possess a personal servant, whose skill is to please, who has no function beyond that of service, is painlessly to surrender part of oneself. It creates dependence where none existed; it requires requital; and it can reduce one to infantilism. I became as alert to Aziz's moods as he had been to mine. He had the power to infuriate me; his glumness could spoil a morning for me. I was quick to see disloyalty and diminishing attentions. Then I sulked; then, depending on his mood, he bade me good-night through a messenger or he didn't bid me good-night at all; and in the morning we started afresh. We quarrelled silently about guests of whom I disapproved. We quarrelled openly when I felt that his references to increasing food prices were leading up to a demand for more money. I wished, above all, to be sure of his loyalty. And this was impossible, for I was not his employer. So in my relations with him, I alternated between bullying and bribing; and he handled both.

--From pp. 120-121 of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India.

On V.S. Naipaul on the Importance of Being an Outsider

2007-10-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

One thing I forgot to add to my previous post on this topic: Naipaul's upbringing -- as an outsider in Trinidad, and later as an outsider in England -- was a prerequisite for developing his superb eye for detail and limning the outlines of cultures he's only visited.

Perhaps that's so obvious it could've gone unsaid. Well ... too late, now!

V.S. Naipaul on the Importance of Being an Outsider

2007-10-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

When I've talked with other white people about racism in America, they've often said they think it's largely a thing of the past. What they (like myself, until fairly recently) often don't understand is that being black or brown in a predominantly white community changes the way others react to you in usually subtle, but constant ways, and you feel differently about yourself as a result. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're white and you live in a community that is predominantly of color: you stand out, and other people make you feel it. (And your attitude toward your own difference also contributes.) In any case, constant awareness of one's difference from the surrounding community has an up side. Here's V.S. Naipaul -- born in Trinidad, whose grandfather came from India -- on the topic, describing what it was like for him to go to India for the first time and lose his sense of difference:

And or the first time in my life, I was one of the crowd. There was nothing in my appearance or dress to distinguish me from the crowd eternally hurrying into Churchgate Station. In Trinidad to be an Indian was to be distinctive. To be anything there was distinctive; difference was each man's attribute. To be an Indian in England was distinctive; in Egypt it was more so. Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd. I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn't know how.

--From p. 39 of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India.

Michael Crichton on the Need for Editors

2007-10-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

Strange to say this about anything by Crichton, but a truer word was never said:

... I'll tell you, I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like AMBULANCE on ambulances, the words everybody needs an editor.

--From p. 346 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Rebecca West on Getting Something on One's Mother-in-Law

2007-10-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

WEST: I won't say I'm interested in spies, but they do turn up in my life in quite funny ways. There was a man called Sidney Reilly, who was a famous spy, a double agent. My mother-in-law was very upset because my husband married me instead of the daughter of a civil servant. My husband's mother thought she was a nice Catholic girl, who'd be so nice for my husband, and it always tickled me because it gradually emerged that this girl was the mistress of this very famous and disreputable spy. It was a wonderful thing to have in your pocket against your mother-in-law.

--From p. 268 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Rebecca West Trashes T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, and The New Yorker

2007-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

I love it when a writer expresses a strong opinion about a colleague. You don't see it much now.

INTERVIEWER: Are you interested in T.S. Eliot's writing?

[REBECCA] WEST: Goodness! T. S. Eliot, whom I didn't like a bit? He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, I don't think I like that man.

INTERVIEWER: What about the work of Somerset Maugham, whom you also knew?

WEST: He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart. He wrote conventional short stories, much inferior to the work of other people. But they were much better than his plays, which were too frightful. He was an extremely interesting man, though, not a bit clever or cold or cynical.

[...]

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever had a close relationship with an editor, who has helped you after the books were written?

WEST: No. I never met anybody with whom I could have discussed books before or after... And I very rarely found The New Yorker editors any good.

INTERVIEWER: They have a tremendous reputation.

WEST: I don't know why.

--From pp. 259 and 261 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

V.S. Naipaul on Experiencing Wilderness

2007-09-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

I've never seen anyone talk so eloquently -- and so precisely -- about what it's like to visit the mountains.

The Himalayan summer was short, its weather treacherous. Every exploration, like every pilgrimage even today, had to be swift ... Beyond the Amarnath Cave was the mountain of Kailas and beyond that the lake of Manasarovar. And legends attached to every stage of the Amarnath pilgrimage. These rocks were what remained of defeated demons; out of that lake Lord Vishnu arose on the back of a thousand-headed serpent; on this plain Lord Shiva once did the cosmic dance of destruction and his locks, becoming undone, created these five streams: wonders revealed only for a few months each year before disappearing again below the other, encompassing mystery of snow. And these mountains, lakes and streams were indeed apt for legend. Even while they were about you they had only a qualified reality. They could never become familiar; what was seen was not their truth; they were only temporarily unveiled. They might be subject to minute man-made disturbances -- a stone dislodged into a stream, a path churned to dust, skirting snow -- but as soon as, on that hurried return journey, they had been left behind they became remote again.

--From p. 165 of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India.

Wodehouse Updated via Kyril Bonfiglioli, circa 1972

2007-09-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

I don't trust a book review that compares an author to P.G. Wodehouse: it's never apt. For example, Paul Murray's An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Sure, the narrator's British and he's featherheaded and feckless, but that book is so freighted with sadness that it's a ridiculous comparison. But recently I stumbled on a book that was described by a reader as "Like Wodehouse on acid," and for once, the comparison is dead-on.

Item:

He greeted me with his usual surliness: dealers in illegal firearms almost never smile, you must have noticed that. [p. 47]

Item:

(I yield to none when it comes to eyebrow-raising; I was taught by my father himself, who could have eyebrow-raised for Great Britain had he not been so haughty.) [p. 105]

Item - our narrator is speaking figuratively of a verbal skirmish he has just lost:

'Thank you, yes,' he replied. My attack was wiped out. I felt just like an infantry subaltern who has thrown away a platoon against a machine-gun emplacement he forgot to mark on his map. (Listening to the Colonel's remarks afterwards is not nearly so unpleasant as sitting down to write twenty letters to next-of-kin while the people in the Orderly Room pretend you're not there. The worst bit is when your batman brings you your dinner to the foxhole or bivvy-tent, saying 'Thought you might be too tired to dine in the Mess tonight. Sir.' But I reminisce.) [p. 131]

Item:

The clerk droned legally for a while; Jaggard put on a joke-policeman voice while he read bits from his notebook about how he had proceeded from here to there on information received ... but I must not trouble you with such minutiae: I am sure you have been in magistrates' courts yourselves. [p. 165]

Item (in which our hero is on the losing end of a shoot-out in a factory that butchers pigs):

Had I been a religious man I should probably have offered up a brisk prayer or two, but I am proud, you see: I mean, I never praised Him when I was knee-deep in gravy so it would have seemed shabby to apply for help from a bacon-factory. [p. 178]

From Kyril Bonfiglioli's1972 After You with the Pistol.

Rebecca West on War

2007-09-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

Rebecca West: ... I think the Second World War was much more comfortable because in the First World War the position of women was so terrible, because there you were, not in danger. Men were going out and getting killed for you and you'd much prefer they weren't ... It was very curious, you see. There I sat on my balcony in Leigh-on-Sea and heard guns going in France. It was a most peculiar war. It was really better, in the Second World War, when the people at home got bombed. I found it a relief. You were taking your chance and you might be killed and you weren't in that pampered sort of unnatural state ...

Interviewer: And yet a [conscripted] army, as fought in Vietnam -- you laugh?

Rebecca West: Well, I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learned in the rest of the world that you can't now go round and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it.

--From p. 242 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Rebecca West Does Ian McEwan Justice

2007-09-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

I've never understood why people revere Ian McEwan's novels. How gratifying, then, to come across this 1981 interview with Rebecca West, in which she skewers his novel, The Cement Garden:

Rebecca West: ... I do think modern novels are boring on the whole. Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that's the sole point of the story. Mum just smells. That's all that happens. It's not enough.

Interviewer: This is a new Ian McEwan, isn't it?

--From pp. 261-2 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Hemingway's Metaphorical Advice for New Writers

2007-08-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Interviewer: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?

Ernest Hemingway: Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

--From p. 42 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Truman Capote Digresses Spectacularly

2007-08-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

... I despised school -- or schools, for I was always changing from one to another -- and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street -- a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame. Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I'm wandering again ...

--From pp. 21-22 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Truman Capote on Finding the Shape of a Story

2007-08-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final.

--From p. 21 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)