Notes to I've Been Reading Lately

Notes to I know where to hide those ludes!, or, Place-based boredom

2011-11-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

*The outer limits of conceivable eternity at that point being, say, the sixteen years (and scraggly mustache) to which your REO Speedwagon–t-shirted neighbor had attained.

Notes to The English Ghost

2011-10-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

* I can use these words that way without mixing metaphors, right? "Magpie" plays the role of an adjective, modifying "archive mouse"? Work with me here, people.

Notes to Through gates of horn and ivory, or, Entering the realm of the Oneiroi

2011-10-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

Notes to Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

2011-04-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

8 And that's only the first of a dismayingly large number of playlets, a mistake forgivable in a first novelist who feels omnipotent, far less so in a novelist submitting himself to the public a second time. I know This Side of Paradise was a success, but wasn't there any carping? Any criticism that might have buffeted Fitzgerald just enough to make him draw in his wings a tad?

Notes to Harry Mathews and the productive pleasure of constraints

2011-04-06T19:02:00.000-07:00

* When I was six, I wrote two songs: "Horses are Fun" and "Horseshoes on the Sidewalk." The latter was a sad song, in a minor key.

Notes to Surprises, pleasant

2011-03-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

* This category overlaps significantly with the category of books I find myself reading aloud from to rocketlass. The Book of Freaks had a strong showing in that category, but it's going to be tough for anything this year to top Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia. No matter what he's writing about, Frazier's work begs to be read aloud, and his Siberia book--because it's about Russia, and Russia is crazy--has something worth sharing on nearly every one of its 500-plus pages.

rocketlass is remarkably tolerant.

Notes to Peace, but not the world's peace, or, Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede

2011-01-31T19:04:00.000-08:00

* It turns out that Jo Walton is a fan, too.

** The Abbess, far from cruel but wholly dedicated to her task of keeping Brede's sisters to their vow of poverty--and keeping their attention on heavenly things--even forbids them to keep the rapidly burgeoning family of cats that lives on the grounds. They may keep two, newly spayed; the kittens, initially condemned to drowning, are saved by the extern sisters, the affiliate nuns who go out into the world on errands, and who, in this case, rapidly find homes on local farms for all the kittens.

The medieval volume of guidance for enclosed orders Ancrene Wisse has some amusingly strident things to say about cats and other animals:

My dear sisters, unless need drives you and your director advises it, you must not have any animal except a cat. An anchoress who has animals seems more like a housewife than Martha was; she cannot easily be Mary, Martha's sister, with peace in her heart. For then she has to think of the cow's food, of the herdsman's hire; to flatter the bailiff, curse him when he impounds it, and pay the damages anyway. It is a hateful thing, Christ knows, when people in a town complain about an anchoress's animals. Now then, if anyone has to have one, see that it does not bother or harm anyone, and that her thought is in no way fastened on it. An anchoress ought to have nothing that draws her heart outward.

Is it just me, or are there hints of Sei Shonagon's peremptiveness in that passage?

Notes to Casanova and Don Juan

2011-01-26T18:32:00.000-08:00

* Does this still hold, even in Tournier's native Europe? Though I know the name of Don Juan still has currency, it's hard to imagine adolescent American teenage males, as they adjust their backwards baseball caps and sing along to their Nickelback MP3s, thinking of themselves as Don Juans.

** Am I wrong to think that, however illogical this might be, Casanova would be slightly easier to defend (or enjoy without guilt) were there a female Casanova as well? I realize that 1) Casanova truly was singular, and that imagining another, of any gender, is a silly exercise, and 2) the lack of a female Casanova is in a sense, the point; that life was an option for a man, not for a woman. Maybe the Empress Theodora could be our admittedly inadequate stand-in?

Notes to Time, change, and the King

2010-11-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

* Why Christine? It was recommended by a King-fan coworker. I told her that I'd read these--
Salem's Lot
Night Shift
The Stand
Danse Macabre
It
The Tommyknockers
Eyes of the Dragon
Needful Things
Four Past Midnight
Different Seasons
On Writing
The Colorado Kid
Lisey's Story
Under the Dome-and asked what she thought I should pick up next. (The obvious answer is The Shining, but that's just too scary. I read twenty pages once, just like I saw ten minutes of the movie once, and I couldn't deal.) I was skeptical about Christine, because the premise is just so ridiculous, but she was right that it wouldn't take many pages before I gave up my disbelief.

Notes to And so we bid the ghosts adieu, or, See you in the stacks!

2010-10-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

"The Ghost of Doctor Harris," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in The Living Age on February 1o, 1900

In the year 1856 Nathaniel Hawthorne was American Consul at Liverpool. There he made many friends and acquaintances. He was an honored and weicome guest at the house of the late Mr. John Pemberton Heywood, well known in Liverpool as one of its most prosperous and respected citizens. Here it was that Hawthorne met Henry Bright (a nephew of Mrs. Heywood), who became one of his most intimate friends, and to whom he wrote many letters, some of which were published in his life.

It once happened that, when dining with the Heywoods, Hawthorne related his own personal experience of a ghost. The story was thought so remarkable by Mrs. Heywood that she begged him to write it down for her. With this request he complied. The manuscript is now in the possession of Mrs. Heywood's sister, the Honorable Mrs. Richard Denman, who kindly allows its publication.
--A. M. Wilberforce

I am afraid this ghost story will bear a very faded aspect when transferred to paper. Whatever effect it had on you, or whatever charm it retains in your memory, is, perhaps, to be attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.

We were sitting, I remember, late in the evening in your drawing-room, where the lights of the chandelier were so muffled as to produce a delicious obscurity, through which the fire diffused a dim, red glow. In this rich twilight the feelings of the party had been properly attuned by some tales of English superstition, and the lady of Smithhills Hall had just been describing that Bloody Footstep which marks the threshold of her old mansion, when your Yankee guest (zealous for the honor of his country, and desirous of proving that his dead compatriots have the same ghostly privileges as other dead people, if they think it worth while to use them) began a story of something wonderful that long ago happened to himself. Possibly in the verbal narrative he may have assumed a little more license than would be allowable in a written record. For the sake of the artistic effect, he may then have thrown in, here and there, a few slight circumstances which he will not think it proper to retain in what he now puts forth as the sober statement of a veritable fact.

A good many years ago (it must be as many as fifteen, perhaps more, and while I was still a bachelor) I resided at Boston, in the United States. In that city there is a large and well-established library, styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is a reading-room, well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. A splendid edifice has since been erected by the proprietors of the institution; but, at the period I speak of, it was contained within a large, old mansion, formerly the town residence of an eminent citizen of Boston. The reading-room (a spacious hall, with the group of the Laocoon at one end and the Belvidere Apollo at the other) was frequented by not a few elderly merchants, retired from business, by clergymen and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had amongst us. These good people were mostly old, leisurely, and somnolent, and used to nod and doze for hours together, with the newspapers before them—ever and anon recovering themselves so far as to read a word or two of the politics of the day—sitting as it were on the boundary of the Land of Dreams, and having little to do with this world, except through the newspapers which they so tenaciously grasped.

One of these worthies whom I occasionally saw there was the Reverend Doctor Harris, a Unitarian clergyman of considerable repute and eminence. He was very far advanced in life, not less than eighty years old, and probably more; and he resided, I think, at Dorchester—a suburban village in the immediate vicinity of Boston. I had never been personally acquainted with this good old clergyman, but had heard of him all my life as a noteworthy man; so that, when he was first pointed out to me, I looked at him with a certain specialty of attention, and always subsequently eyed him with a degree of interest whenever I happened to see him at the Athenaeum or elsewhere. He was a small, withered, infirm, but brisk old gentleman, with snow-white hair, a somewhat stooping figure, but yet a remarkable alacrity of movement. I remember it was in the street that I first noticed him. The Doctor was plodding along with a staff, but turned smartly about on being addressed by the gentleman who was with me, and responded with a good deal of vivacity.

"Who is he?" I inquired, as soon as he had passed.

"The Reverend Doctor Harris, of Dorchester," replied my companion; and from that time I often saw him, and never forgot his aspect. His especial haunt was the Athenaeum. There I used to see him daily, and almost always with a newspaper—the Boston Post, which was the leading journal of the Democratic party in the northern states. As old Doctor Harris had been a noted Democrat during his more active life, it was a very natural thing that he should still like to read the Boston Post. There his reverend figure was accustomed to sit day after day, in the self-same chair by the fireside; and, by degrees, seeing him there so constantly, I began to look towards him as I entered the reading room, and felt that a kind of acquaintance, at least on my part, was established. Not that I had any reason (as long as this venerable person remained in the body) to suppose that he ever noticed me; but by some subtle connection this small, white-haired, infirm, yet vivacious figure of an old clergyman became associated with my idea and recollection of the place. One day especially (about noon, as was generally his hour) I am perfectly certain that I had seen this figure of old Doctor Harris, and taken my customary note of him, although I remember nothing in his appearance at all different from what I had seen on many previous occasions.

But that very evening a friend said to me:

"Did you hear that old Doctor Harris is dead?"

"No," said I, very quietly, "and it cannot be true; for I saw him at the Athenaeum to-day."

"You must be mistaken," rejoined my friend. "He is certainly dead!" and confirmed the fact with such special circumstances that I could no longer doubt it.

My friend has often since assured me that I seemed much startled at the intelligence; but, as well as I can recollect, I believe that I was very little disturbed, if at all, but set down the apparition as a mistake of my own, or, perhaps, the interposition of a familiar idea into the place and amid the circumstances with which I had been accustomed to associate it.

The next day as I ascended the steps of the Athenaeum, I remember thinking within myself, "Well, I shall never see old Doctor Harris again!" With this thought in my mind, as I opened the door of the reading-room, I glanced towards the spot and chair where Doctor Harris usually sat, and there, to my astonishment, sat the gray, infirm figure of the deceased Doctor, reading the newspaper as was his wont! His own death must have been recorded, that very morning, in that very newspaper! I have no recollection of being greatly discomposed at the moment, nor indeed that I felt any extraordinary emotion whatever. Probably, if ghosts were in the habit of coming among us, they would coincide with the ordinary train of affairs, and melt into them so familiarly that we should not be shocked at their presence. At all events, so it was in this instance. I looked through the newspapers as usual, and turned over the periodicals, taking about as much interest in their contents as at other times. Once or twice, no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the page to look again at the venerable Doctor, who ought then to have been lying in his coffin dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post as to come back from the other world to read it the morning after his death. One might have supposed that he would have cared more about the novelties of the sphere to which he had just been introduced than about the politics he had left behind him!

The apparition took no notice of me, nor behaved otherwise in any respect than on any previous day. Nobody but myself seemed to notice him; and yet the old gentlemen round about the fire beside his chair were his lifelong acquaintances, who were, perhaps, thinking of his death, and who, in a day or two, would deem it a proper courtesy to attend his funeral.

I have forgotten how the ghost of Doctor Harris took its departure from the Athenaeum on this occasion, or, in fact, whether the ghost or I went first. This equanimity, and almost indifference, on my part—the careless way in which I glanced at so singular a mystery and left it aside—is what now surprises me as much as anything else in the affair.

From that time for a long while thereafter—for weeks, at least, and I know not but for months—I used to see the figure of Doctor Harris quite as frequently as before his death. It grew to be so common that at length I regarded the venerable defunct no more than any other of the old fogies who basked before the fire, and dozed over the newspapers.

It was but a ghost—nothing but thin air—not tangible nor appreciable, nor demanding any attention from a man of flesh and blood! I cannot recollect any cold shudderings, any awe, any repugnance, any emotion whatever, such as would be suitable and decorous on beholding a visitant from the spiritual world. It is very strange, but such is the truth. It appears excessively odd to me now that I did not adopt such means as I readily might to ascertain whether the appearance had solid substance, or was merely gaseous and vapory. I might have brushed against him, have jostled his chair, or have trodden accidentally on his poor old toes. I might have snatched the Boston Post—unless that were an apparition, too—out of his shadowy hands. I might have tested him in a hundred ways; but I did nothing of the kind.

Perhaps I was loth to destroy the illusion, and to rob myself of so good a ghost story, which might probably have been explained in some very commonplace way. Perhaps, after all, I had a secret dread of the old phenomenon, and therefore kept within my limits, with an instinctive caution which I mistook for indifference. Be that as it may, here is the fact. I saw the figure, day after day, for a considerable space of time, and took no pains to ascertain whether it was a ghost or no. I never, to my knowledge, saw him come into the reading-room or depart from it. There satDoctor Harris in his customary chair, and I can say little else about him.

After a certain period—I really know not how long—I began to notice, or to fancy, a peculiar regard in the old gentleman's aspect towards myself. I sometimes found him gazing at me, and, unless I deceived myself, there was a sort of expectancy in his face. His spectacles, I think, were shoved up, so thait his bleared eyes might meet my own. Had he been a living man I should have flattered myself that good Doctor Harris was, for some reason or other, interested in me and desirous of a personal acquaintance. Being a ghost, and amenable to ghostly laws, it was natural to conclude that he was waiting to be spoken to before delivering whatever message he had to impart. But, if so, the ghost had shown the bad judgment common among the spiritual brotherhood, both as regarded the place of interview and the person whom he had selected as the recipient of his communications. In the reading-room of the Athenaeum conversation is strictly forbidden, and I could not have addressed the apparition without drawing the instant notice and indignant frowns of the slumbrous old gentlemen around me. I myself, too, at that time, was as shy as any ghost, and followed the ghosts' rule never to speak first. And what an absurd figure should I have made, solemnly and awfully addressing what must have appeared in the eyes of all the rest of the company an empty chair! Besides, I had never been introduced to Doctor Harris, dead or alive, and I am not aware that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental fact of one of the parties having crossed the imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world. If ghosts throw off all conventionalism among themselves, it does not, therefore, follow that it can safely be dispensed with by those who are still hampered with flesh and blood.

For such reasons as these—and reflecting, moreover, that the deceased Doctor might burden me with some disagreeable task, with which I had no business or wish to be concerned—I stubbornly resolved to have nothing to say to him. To this determination I adhered; and not a syllable ever passed between the ghost of Doctor Harris and myself.

To the best of my recollection I never observed the old gentleman either enter the reading-room or depart from it, or move from his chair, or lay down the newspaper, or exchange a look with any person in the company, unless it were myself. He was not by any means invariably in his place. In the evening, for instance, though often at the reading-room myself, I never saw him. It was at the brightest noontide that I used to behold him, sitting within the most comfortable focus of the glowing fire, as real and lifelike an object (except that he was so very old.
and of an ashen complexion) as any other in the room. After a long while of this strange intercourse, if such it can be called, I remember—once, at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had not been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last appealing look, which still dwells in my memory as perfectly as while my own eyes were encountering the dim and bleared eyes of the ghost. And whenever I recall this strange passage of my life, I see the small, old, withered figure of Doctor Harris, sitting in his accustomed chair, the Boston Post in his hand, his spectacles shoved upwards—and gazing at me, as I close the door of the reading-room, with that wistful, appealing, hopeless, helpless look. It is too late now; his grave has been grass-grown this many and many a year; and I hope he has found rest in it without any aid from me.

I have only to add that it was not until long after I had ceased to encounter the ghost that I became aware how very odd and strange the whole affair had been; and even now I am made sensible of its strangeness chiefly by the wonder and incredulity of those to whom I tell the story.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Liverpool, August 17, 1856

Notes to Virginia Woolf on Henry James's ghost stories, or, "Surely there are facts enough in the world to go round."

2010-10-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

* Bible-steeped unbeliever that I am, I can't help but hear in that phrase echoes--so distant as surely to be unintentional--of Jesus's promise to his disciples in Matthew 18:20, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Where'er the significant o'erflows our powers of understanding, there . . . something is. In the best of horror, or even more gentle supernatural writing, the one thing we know about that something is that it sure isn't holy.

Notes to Shelving and Sorting

2010-07-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

1 The Way It Wasn't, by James Laughton, page 147

2 Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl, page 30

3 Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson, page 194

4 The Pritchett Century, by V. S. Pritchett, page 168

5 The Journal, 1837–1861, by Henry David Thoreau, page 300

6 Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon, page 140

Notes to Reality Hunger and What's Next

2010-06-22T17:45:00.000-07:00

* Okay, here goes:

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley."

Or,

"For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night."

Or,

"In the midst of life, we are in death."

Or, edging into inspirational poster territory:

"Live each day like it could be your last."

If you've read the novel, you'll see how ridiculous these seem, and what a joke they make of the whole enterprise of boiling the novel down to a pithy statement.

Notes to "What strange intoxication was it that he drew from books?"

2010-05-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

* Mr Garnett is David Garnett, son of translator Constance Garnett. At the time of the publication of The Common Reader, David was running a bookshop near the British Museum and had received a lot of acclaim for Lady into Fox, a novel in which a man's young wife turns into a fox. It's one of those odd books that keeps popping up on the periphery of my reading, which means I really ought to give it a try. I see that the edition I've linked to is in the Collins Library series from McSweeney's, which is a very good sign.

** Mr Masefield, whom you most likely were more quick to identify, is John Masefield, author of, among other books, the children's classic The Box of Delights.

Notes to "The Glamorous World of Publishing, Revealed!"

2010-05-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

* Ruk was played by Ted Cassidy, who at this point is better known from his earlier role as Lurch on The Adams Family. Cassidy would go on to appear in two other episodes of Star Trek, and in one of them he played yet another of the original series' many memorable villains, Gorn.

Or, more properly, Gorn!!!!!

Oh, it's also worth noting that the episode featuring Ruk, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", was written by Robert Bloch.

Notes to "Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility," or, D. H. goes to parties

2010-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

*Jeannette Winterson, in Art Objects, writes, of her Pentacostal upbringing,

I found it necessary to smuggle books in and out of the house and I cannot claim too much for the provision of an outside toilet when there is no room of one's own. It was on the toilet that I first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, and perhaps that was the best place, after all.

Not what one thinks of as bathroom books, at least in publishing industry terms, but it's hard to argue with her thinking here.

Notes to "All that is required in studying them is patience," or, On youthful enthusiasm

2010-04-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

* Which, speaking of enthusiasm, landed Richardson a wife! According to Richardson's Wikipedia entry,

He married Annie Dillard, after she wrote him a fan letter about Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.

Now that's enthusiasm!

Notes to Thumbnails

2010-04-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

* Though I do feel it's my duty to note that Sumner, for all his sanctimony, was serious--even fierce--in his abolitionist beliefs, for which he deserves credit, and that his recovery and his determination to return to public life after his caning by Preston Brooks on the Senate floor does him honor. Was he likeable? By most account, no. Would I have been glad to have been on his side most of the time? Hell, yes.

Notes to Tolstoy's zoo

2010-01-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

* A coworker, on learning that I wasn't all that into Bauhaus design, exclaimed, "But you have a shaved head and black-framed glasses and are the most disciplined person I know!"

Notes to The show must go on!

2010-01-06T18:01:00.000-08:00

*Amusingly, the Wikipedia entry for Nelly Ternan features an italicized subhead near its top that informs readers that

Ellen Ternan is sometimes confused with her near contemporary, the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry, whose career was more distinguished, but who did not have an affair with Dickens.

Notes to Metternich's alarm clock

2010-01-04T19:33:00.001-08:00

* Though there's far less grounds for it, I find that the terseness of the message brings to mind one of the most famous writings of Ulysses Grant, who was known for the clarity and economy of his written orders: at the Battle of Fort Donelson, in response to an inquiry from the Confederate commander, Grant wrote in response that he demanded unconditional surrender, and that "I propose to move immediately upon your works."

Notes to "Most people know little about it, aside from the fact that a great deal of dancing took place."

2009-12-30T10:13:00.001-08:00

*My brother had to leave midway through the game, just after he’d taken over the entire eastern hemisphere. As my forces had been decimated through a pincer attack by my brother-in-law and my nephew, he put me in charge of his army . . . and within three turns I’d lost it all. He was not impressed. Clearly, I’m no Napoleon.

Notes to Oh, the weather outside is--good god--frightful!

2009-12-15T19:40:00.000-08:00

* Which three categories, I think we can agree, are ultimately the same, no? Perhaps in their Platonic forms, at least?

Notes to Machiavelli, as he will, offers advice

2009-12-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

* Machivalli's preemptive dismissal of Vettori's claim that the Italians, if pressed, will band together to defeat the Swiss will amuse anyone who finds stories of Italian politics and government ridiculous to the point of disbelief--yet at the same time impossible to turn away from:

As to union of the Italians, you make me laugh, first, because there never will be union here to do anything good.

Notes to To Boldly Go Where No Blogger Has Gone Before!, or, Four years in

2009-11-18T17:38:00.001-08:00

* On our phones. What Alexander Graham Bell meant to say, before he was cut off, was "Watson, come quickly, I need you so to help me out here so that some day people can read romance novels on the subway without anyone around them knowing." Or something like that.

** Another constant: in the twenty-first century, men will still attempt to use poetry as a means of seduction; what worked for Lord Byron comes very close to working for Helmsman Mitchell.

Which reminds me of another area in which, sadly, it seems our descendants will devolve: twenty-third-century gender roles are frustratingly reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century gender roles. Helmsman Mitchell thinks nothing of calling Dr. Dehner frigid, then trying to put the moves on her right there in sickbay after softening up her defenses with a little verse; for her part, she seems not to feel that either action is particularly inappropriate.

Fortunately, by the twenty-fourth century the situation has improved at least a bit, though the uniform worn by Counselor Troi on the NCC-1701D does make one wonder if there isn't still some distance to go.

Notes to "Those rather hit-or-miss days," or, Wodehouse in spats and letters

2009-11-16T17:24:00.001-08:00

* According to McCrum, Wodehouse wrote at the time that Orwell "struck him as 'one of those warped birds who have never recovered from an unhappy childhood and a miserable school life,' but school was precisely what they shared and the two men got on very well."

** In a 1962 letter, however--also collected in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh--Mitford writes, of a trip to Venice,

Short of a book I bought the Code of the Woosters & have been shrieking but the selection of Penguins is deplorable, in all the shops they are the same: The Day of the Triffids what can that be & Ldy Cly [Lady Chatterly's Lover], in literal hundreds. Someone has blundered.

Notes to "It seemed to be always 3 o'clock," or, Ye Olde Time Sunday Feeling

2009-11-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

* Forgetting, it seems, the whole "David danced before the Lord" part, and the whole bit in Ecclesiastes where "I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labor the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." Ah, the legacy of the Puritans, it liveth on and on!

** But, Hughes explains, "If the preacher grew fierce I looked at the statue of Samveli Johnson, whom I vaguely connected with Sam Weller." It's hard to imagine a less appropriate fictional analogue for Dr. Johnson--or a less appropriate reason to turn to him. Imagine how he might have thundered at someone who was turning to him in order to avoid contemplating their eternal fate!

Notes to "And I thought, Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet?", or, P. G. Wodehouse on Jeeves

2009-11-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

{George Grossmith, as seen in the Idler, February 1893}

* From a review of Murphy's book in the National Review, I learned that Murphy contends that George Grossmith (author of the wonderful Diary of a Nobody) was the primary model for Bertie Wooster--and, more strikingly, that

Furthermore, his grandfather had helped found the Savage Club, the model for Dickens's Pickwick Club, and had been the original Mr. Pickwick. So we seem to owe to the Grossmith family half of two of English literature's most celebrated master-servant comedy teams, Pickwick and Sam Weller, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

That is a legacy in which a family could justly take pride.

Notes to "Avoid naming it straight," or, Reading Henry James

2009-11-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

* Munro gives that answer in response to a question about whether, like Proust, she ever revised something after it had already been published (and thus, in theory, finished). She goes on to confess that she has:

Actually I’ve done it recently. The story “Carried Away” was included in Best American Short Stories 1991. I read it again in the anthology, because I wanted to see what it was like and I found a paragraph that I thought was really soggy. It was a very important little paragraph, maybe two sentences. I just took a pen and rewrote it up in the margin of the anthology so that I’d have it there to refer to when I published the story in book form. I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again it seems a bit obtrusive. So I’m not too sure about this sort of thing. The answer may be that one should stop this behavior. There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore.

That interview, well worth reading in full (if for no other reason than for such lines as "An editor who thought nothing happened in William Maxwell's stories, for example, would be of no use to me"), is in the second volume of The Paris Review Interviews, of which the fourth volume (featuring P. G. Wodehouse! And Haruki Murakami!) has just been published. Christmas lists, take note!

Notes to Notes! On Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe!

2009-11-02T19:36:00.001-08:00

The premise of both The ABC Murders and "The Slaughtered Santas" is that the best way to hide one murder is in a batch of seemingly random murders: in the Christie, it's an alphabetic scheme, with a person whose last name starts with A murdered first in a town whose name starts with A, followed by B and B, C and C; in the Nero Wolfe story, it's street-corner Santas.

Notes to "It was only during the age of candlelight that the race of ghosts really flourished," or, Edmund Wilson as uncanny anthologist

2009-10-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

* Which is worth reading in its entirety if only so that you can compare the incredible number and type of ads in that May 25th, 1944 issue of the New Yorker to what appears in today's New Yorker. In a review that stretched across ten pages, there were six full pages of ads, the majority of them advertising liquor: Philadelphia Blended Whiskey, Hennessy, G&D American Vermouth, Aqua Velva, Kentucky Tavern Whiskey, Harvey's Old World Wines, Ronrico ("the best rum bar none"), Abbot's Bitters, Fox Head "400" Beer and Ale, Carstairs White Seal Whiskey ("every drop is coming from our limited pre-war reserves"), Valliant burgundy ("Meet the challenge of rationing with this smooth full-bodied burgundy."). Throw in the Chris-Craft ad, which urges you to put a Chris-Craft at the top of your list for after Victory--and until then to buy war bonds with the money you might have spent--and you've got dual pictures of very different personal and corporate worlds than those suggested by the contemporary New Yorker, for all its undeniable virtues.

**Elsewhere in the interview, which is collected in The Paris Review Interviews II, King says that his sort of story,

should be a kind of personal assault. It ought to be somebody lunging right across the table and grabbing you and messing you up. It should get in your face. It should upset you, disturb you. And not just because you get grossed out. I mean, if I get a letter from somebody saying, I couldn't eat my dinner, my attitude is, Terrific!

And thus Wilson and King part ways . . .

*** Of whose The Turn of the Screw he writes, "It is probably that James, like Kipling, was unconscious of having raised something more frightening than the ghosts he contemplated."

**** In as stark a reminder of the distance between 1944 and now as I've come across in a long time (along with the aforementioned ads, that is), Wilson (and, one presumes, his editor) feels that he needs to explain that The Metamorphosis

deals with a young traveling salesman who suddenly wakes up one morning to find that he is an enormous cockroach, to the great horror of his parents, with whom he has been living and who have been counting on him to pay off their debts.

It's hard to even imagine a world in which this story isn't yet universally familiar to readers with any sort of claim to literary knowledge--to say nothing of the ensuing decades of parody, homage, and riffs on its central metaphor, all instantly familiar to the serious reading public.

Notes to "Tis like enough, that all Monasteries had Dungeons too; for they have the power of Life and Death within themselves," or, More John Aubrey

2009-10-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

* And maybe also from another book that Britten mentions in his preface to the Aubrey, T. J. Pettigrew's "little volume," On the Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery (London, 1844)--for someone as squeamish as I am about medical matters, what better book could there be?

"The faintest restless rustling ran all through them," or, Frost hears a ghost story

2009-10-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

* Actually, Powers misquotes the line slightly, having his character remember it as "The dead are holding something back." It's unclear whether the mistake is intentional, a reminder that this is the character is drawing from memory rather the author drawing from his bookshelves, but the resulting alteration definitely weakens the line.

Loving H. P. Lovecraft

2009-10-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

* This post is bringing to mind a guy I knew casually more than a decade ago who, being fairly unpleasant, had nothing I can recall to recommend him except an appreciation of Lovecraft. Which makes me wonder: is a love of Lovecraft, in the absence of any other apparent good qualities, actually a bad quality? A red flag?

And if so, are there any other interesting authors of whom the same could be said? Vonnegut, maybe? Heinlein--to the extent that we might think he qualifies as good? Anyone else?

** Whose wonderful blog, Pinakothek, he writes--in seasonally appropriate fashion--"like a vampire, is not wholly dead, but neither is it entirely alive." May Pinakothek forever succeed in frustrating the knavish tricks of all modern-day Van Helsings.

Notes to An inner sanctum of sorts

2009-10-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

* Though it was apparently successful enough in its day to have its title adopted as the name of a literary group in Chicago. The Wikipedia entry for early twentieth-century Chicago writer Bert Leston Taylor notes that he belonged to a literary circle called The Little Room, after the story:

The group mimicked the story in that it disappeared and reappeared on Friday afternoons at such places as Chicago’s Auditorium Hotel (now occupied by Roosevelt University) and Fine Arts Building. The group was comprised of an eclectic range of distingued members including reformer Jane Addams, sculptor Lorado Taft, architects Allen Bartlit Pond and Irving Kane Pond, dramatist Anna Morgan, painter Ralph Clarkson, and poet Harriet Monroe.

** I first encountered "The Hour after Westerly" in the anthology Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury, on the advice of James Hynes last fall. To my surprise, when I returned to that book tonight to check the story's date, I discovered that its first publication was in the New Yorker--a far cry from the bland realism that at is, for the most part accurately, thought of as the typical New Yorker story these days!

*** Is it not appropriate to pause and appreciate Google Book Search for a moment? The book's been out of print for more than a hundred years and is in the collection of a mere handful of libraries--yet I was able to print and read it within seconds of discovering its existence. And--if I understand the Espresso Book Machine correctly--in a few select bookstores I could, rather than reading a loose stack of printed pages, have ordered the book itself, and by the time I'd finished browsing have had a bound copy in hand. There are plenty of questions about where Google's going with their book scanning project, but oh, the benefits!

Notes to Man is wolf to man

2009-10-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

* Another bit that I wanted to share but couldn't find a use for is this observation from Cromwell, the ever-watchful:

Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

One can learn from that, he thinks.

Like all of Mantel's work, Wolf Hall pays particular attention to the difficulties faced by women in a world dominated by men. Her portrait of Anne Boleyn is stunning: she is as intelligent and perceptive as she is ruthless; at the conclusion of a hurried meeting of her family and supporters in the wake of a crisis, Cromwell--who fears her even as he supports her--notes,

They think they are fixing her tactics, but she is her own best tactician, and able to think back and judge what has gone wrong; he admires anyone who can learn from mistakes.

But Mantel's portrait of Anne's sister, Mary, is if anything more impressive: Mary suffers the king's attention but gains none of his favor, and her plight makes her as clear-eyed as anyone in the whole book outside of Cromwell, to whom early on she issues this chilling warning:

"One day," she says, "Anne will want to talk to you. She'll send for you and you'll be flattered. She'll have a little job for you, or she'll want soem advice. So before that happens, you can have my advice. Turn around and walk the other way."

Notes to Woolf the torero, or, on The Story about the Story

2009-09-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

* Like this, from Virginia Woolf:

A writer will always be chary of dialogue because dialogue puts the most violent pressure upon the reader's attention.

Or this, from Sven Birkerts:

I believe that when we read a poem we absorb and process a great deal more than we are consciously aware of, and that it is precisely those cues that we pick up at the threshold--that we hear and feel but do not overtly take note of--that combine to give us the aesthetic surge.

Or this, from Randall Jarrell:

Miss Moore's forms have the lacy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes, seem as arbitrary as the prohibitions in fairy tales; but they work as those work--disregard them and everything goes to pieces.

Or this, from E. B. White:

I think it is of some advantage to encounter [Walden] at a period in one's life when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau in that spring of 1845 when he borrowed an ax, went out to the woods, and began to whack down some trees for timber. Received at such a juncture, the book is like an invitation to life's dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party--that the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet.

And oh, how this note could go on . . .

Notes to Wish fulfillment

2009-09-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

* No, really: I hated The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Having read a pre-publication rave review, I ordered it from the UK way back in December of 2007, then waited two impatient weeks for it to be published. When it arrived, I dove right in . . . and from the very first page I hated everything about it. I hated its awkward prose. I hated the clunky construction of its plot. I hated the odd smugness of Mikael, the male lead. I hated the undifferentiated secondary characters. And, oh, I hated the prose. By the time I was 350 or so pages in, I gave up, resorting to skimming through the final 200 pages in hopes that I would find something that would explain the book's appeal. Alas, even that wasn't worth my time.

But I really do seem to be alone. Everyone else I know who's read the book, including rocketlass, really enjoyed it. Rarely have I felt so out of synch with other readers--and that's in a lifetime of feeling somewhat out of synch with the majority of readers!

So if it's been recommended to you, by all means don't let me stop you--but if you find it as bad as I did, send me a note so I'll know that if I'm nuts, at least I've got some company.

Notes to Things I Learned from Donald E. Westlake . . .

2009-09-23T18:56:00.000-07:00

* And then there's this, which would fall into the category of Things I Would Have Suspected Had I Bothered to Think About Them, but Good God, Why Would I Ever Have Put Myself Through That?

On arriving in Vegas for his heist, Dortmunder is pegged as a crook of some sort by a cabbie, a hotel clerk, a waitress, and two security guards, all within approximately an hour after touchdown. They all politely suggest he ply his trade elsewhere--except the guards, who intimate something similar by silently flanking him as he circles the casino's Battle-Lake (where faux pirate ships wage daily battles). So his long-time associate Andy Kelp takes him clothes shopping, outfitting him in the baggy shorts and grotesquely printed shirts that signify American leisure. Dortmunder, as is his wont, is not pleased:

"I don't know about this," Dortmunder said. "I don't know about those knees, to begin with."

"You brought those knees in with you, John," Kelp reminded him. "Look at the clothes."

It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount-store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a bum rap.

Now that's a simile!

Notes to Fanny Burney tells me to put down the laptop and take up a pen right this minute!

2009-09-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

* The notes to the Penguin Classics edition explain that "Gip" was Alex's servant at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

** Penguin's notes identify the former as the Reverend Benedict Chapman, Alex's tutor--and it also points out that the boy was used to such threats from his mother. Penguin's editor doesn't gloss Dr. Davy, but from context it seems Burney must have meant not a medical doctor--so much for her feigned worries about Alex's health!--but the Reverend Martin Davy, head of Gonville and Caius. Given that Alex was twenty-two at the time, I doubt fear of that pair carried a lot of weight.

Notes to "He recited his favourite poetry at inordinate length," or, Byron and Boswell at table

2009-09-20T18:05:00.001-07:00

* The New Yorker closed its generally supportive "Briefly Noted" review of Byron in Love with,

Out of O’Brien’s kinetic recounting of scandal after scandal, a sense of the poet’s pathos emerges: Byron did, at times, love deeply. But by eliding his literary personality O’Brien risks voyeurism.

--which seems to border on the ridiculous: what else is one to do with Byron's life--at least in a short book--but gape?

** As O'Brien explains,

[T]he "bonnie lad" was still at the Albany alone as he said with his menagerie of birds; his morning routine a bout of sparring his boxing master, then posing in Albanian costume for Thomas Philips, the portrait painter, his only female companion being [his firelighter] Mrs. Mule. He omitted to mention the visits of Miss Eliza Francis, another putative author who believed that an audience with Byron would inspire her. She herself left a record of those trysts, all was sunshine, except for rats scurrying about.

Annabella, meanwhile, told Byron that his

delays are becoming "too like a dream" and she compares him to the procrastinating Hamlet.