The Elegant Variation

UNPACKING THE SHELVES: D-F

The unpacking of the Sarvas Library continues, slowly but pleasingly.  As expected, there are many detours, and I've actually even refilled a few holes I've noticed.  For example, my copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had mysteriously vanished, although the rest of the trilogy remained.  So that's been replaced.  And my copy of Charles D'Ambrosio's superb Dead Fish Museum existed only as a bound manuscript, so I decided to upgrade that to an actual finished copy.

 Along the way, though, I encountered a problem that I haven't yet sorted out to my satisfaction.  I'm presently unpacking fiction only.  Typically, I've kept my collection of writers' letters - another obsession of mine - in a separate section, which has always worked reasonably well.  Now, I'm sort of wondering what to do about writers' biographies.  I don't have nearly as many of those, but I've accumulated a few since the last time the library was on shelves.  So I'm left wondering do I store my copy of Frederick Brown's Flaubert biography with the rest of my Flaubert, or do I separate the biographies as well.

(I don't know why this photo is oriented this way, having technical issues this morning.)

This might sound like a trivial question, and in the grand scheme it is.  But I've just added two more bookcases, and it's clear I won't have the shelf space for everything I own.  And as you can see from the picture above, the biography - like most biographies - takes up a healthy amount of shelf space.  So what to do?  For the moment, I'm placing the bios with the fiction, but as shelf space disappears, I might revisit.

I also notice that Alexandre Dumas wrote some truly fat books - yes, he was writing serials, paid by the word - and the 11 volumes of his I own eat up nearly an entire shelf.  Will I ever re-read The Vicomte de Bragelonne, I wonder?  Still, for now it remains.

Other than recommending a mental health care visit, any suggestions?

PRAYERS FOR CHRISTCHURCH

I was shown tremendous hospitality by the lovely people of Christchurch when I attended a literary festival there in 2008.  My hotel room looked directly down on the cathedral which now lies in ruins.  I live in earthquake land myself, but I'm speechless at the devastation of a city where I spent such happy days.  My prayers and wishes go out to everyone there, as they dig out of the rubble and begin rebuilding their lives.  

WEEKEND READ: VANISHING ACT

Take your time over the rainy L.A. weekend with Paul Collins's riveting essay Vanishing Act, about the rise and heartbreaking fall of child prodigy novelist Barbara Follett. (Many thanks for FOTEV Katherine Taylor for sharing obsessions.)

The warning notice on her door the following year, though, marked a new project: young Barbara was attempting an entire novel. On some days the eight year old topped four thousand words. While her notes to her playmates and family overflowed with warmth, she was absolute in guarding her time to write. Neighboring children who didn’t understand were brusquely dismissed.

“You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all,” she snapped in a letter to a complaining playmate.

Four thousand words a day.  Are my Novel III students paying attention?

GRAND THEFT GATSBY

Weirdly compelling.  The Great Gatsby, arcade-game style.

DALE PECK IS THE WORST CRITIC OF HIS GENERATION

OK, that’s an obvious headline.  Almost cheap, I admit.  But it got your attention, right?

Which, at the risk of getting a bit too meta, perfectly distills Dale Peck’s raison d’etre.

His recent squib at Mischief and Mayhem is a perfect summation of why he is utterly dispensable as a critic, as forgettable as he is flamboyant.  He represents the worst of the Wieseltier School – the bitterness and the careless, self-defeating rage, without the learned humanity. 

On the one hand, it’s probably unfair to hold his brief screed to formal critical standards, since Peck himself admits in the comments that the piece is “lazy”.  And given the way he breathlessly updates his post to note a link from the New York Times, it seems he was less interested in substantive commentary and more excited about bomb throwing.  (His back and forth about blurb requests just feels petty.  Anyone who has spent five minutes in publishing is a bit more savvy about blurbs than that.)

Still, it’s worth asking the question, keeping in line with my earlier post about comments here – why does Peck feel an argument can’t be engaged with, without blanket character assassination?  One may fairly disagree with Mendelsohn’s take – some of my readers here have.   But a bit like this …

Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff.  Because man is this guy wrong. Always. Every time. Completely off the mark.

… torpedoes any credibility the person making it might have.  Anyone who spends five minutes in the NYRB will see that this is the sort of scorched earth idiocy that suggests that Peck’s true métier has all along been blogger, not critic. 

Beyond the name calling, Peck’s post is shabby, subpar and, as he admits, lazy.  He makes an assertion:

I think that, ultimately, is my problem with Mr. M.: he has no inkling of the problematic but fascinating phenomenon of the postmodern savvy audience—educated to the point of jadedness, suspicious but also sentimental, craving the thing it’s been taught to distrust 

It’s an assertion that is both empty and exhausted.  First, the term postmodern has been beaten so bloody, waved so relentlessly for decades, that I’m not sure anyone can agree on what it means any more.  But Peck lazily relies on presumptions and associations, and then presumes that we will agree with him and see their truth and value.  There’s so much assuming going on here, one’s head spins.

If Peck were interested in discussion, he might take a moment and explain this allegedly fascinating phenomenon. But that’s clearly not his game, and I suspect he knows if he were called to make a more substantive argument, he’d fall on his face. Once the insults are over, he runs out of gas.

(It’s also a favorite rhetorical brickbat of the aggrieved, that one who disagrees with us  is always characterized as “missing the point.”  As though “the point” was so obvious to begin with that any discussion is unnecessary.  The term is always a tipoff to impending intellectual dishonesty.)

Obviously, I linked to the Mendelsohn piece earlier because it resonated with me, and confirmed my experience of watching the program.  And the essay is considerably more nuanced than Peck’s sneering (or the Times's scandal-baiting) suggests.  Still, it can and should be engaged with, and one hopes that more responsible, intelligent and insightful interlocutors will make themselves heard.  

UNPACKING THE SHELVES

After more than two years, I have finally begun to unpack my library from storage.  I'm hauling one banker's box at a time up from the garage and filling up my bookcases again.  To give you a sense of what this endeavor entails, I worked for several hours yesterday, and finished A through C.  (I'm beginning with fiction, the bulk of my library, which I alphabetize by author.  Unsexy but effective.)

I'm struck by some things as I unpack.  The first is simply how much I have missed having ready access to these books.  I've gone downstairs over the years and pulled out a volume from time to time when I needed it for a review or a lesson plan.  But I've missed the real pleasure of lingering in front of the shelves and letting my eyes trail randomly over titles, plucking out old favorites and forgotten pleasures.  

I am also struck by what a completist I once was.  If I loved an author, I had to own and read everything. And I do mean everything.  It will surprise none of you that the "B" section is among the biggest, and it contains two full shelves of Banville.  This is a nettlesome twitch I inherited from my father the collector. His collection of MG models was the most famous in the world, and he wasn't content with one of each type of car - he had to have one of each variation.  If an MGA was made by Dinky in five colors, some with the top up, some with it down, some with two passengers, some with three, well, he had to have them all.  I would watch him spend years pursuing a single, elusive variant.

I've been similarly extreme in my collecting habits, so I've got firsts and signed firsts from both the UK and US, plus paperbacks plus galleys plus the Black books and other incidentals and one-time oddities, including a short story in a 1974 issue of Argosy that Banville himself had forgotten.  

And yet, as I unpack, I note that sort of excess has deserted me in recent years.  James Salter is the first author in years whose entire oeuvre I felt compelled to buy and read, but one copy of each title was more than enough for me.  And in truth, with the sense I have of always feeling behind in my reading, it almost seems an unforgivable luxury to commit so much time to one author.  

Still, I enjoy re-enountering my obsessions of the past.  Other authors who hog up such large sections of my shelves include Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee, and so I've just been re-exposed to their long and impressive careers.  I remembered the first time I read Oscar and Lucinda, who completely I fell for the work and its author.  And I remembered the crushing moral weight of Disgrace, the book that launched my Coetzee mania.  And I know there are others lurking in the wings as I move through the alphabet.  Which I will dutifully report here.

MARTY'S CRASH PAD

The brotherhood of cranks:  Wolcott on Martin Amis's request for "asylum" ... 

But when Amis goes on in the email to inquire about the condition of my wine cellar and whether there might be space for him to store a few bottles of his "favorite plonk," I have to wonder if this email, like the previous one of his that found its way into my in-box, may have been misdirected. I wouldn't know a wine cellar from a bomb shelter, and I never touch the stuff, wine snobbery making me break out in hives. Perhaps Marty meant to reach out to Jay McInerney and got me instead, a mix-up which will someday give us all a good laugh at the nursing home.

Wolcottt goes on to reveal that Amis has opened his yap again - only for once, the usual hyperbole notwithstanding, I'm hard-pressed to disagree with the substance.

A BLEEDING BANVILLE PREVIEW

In his recent appearance at Brown, John Banville read a "bleeding chunk" of his latest novel in progress.  Tantalizing glimpses to be found here.

I should like to fall in love again, just one more time," says the narrator in John Banville's latest novel, from which he read Tuesday evening in Salomon 001.

ON COMMENTS

A few words on my comments policy appear to be in order.

Over the last few months, I have had a handful of irate readers berate me for deleting their comments, so it seemed a good moment to revisit how comments are handled at TEV.

First, I have never understood those readers who feel entitled to have their comments posted, no matter how rude or unedifying they might be.  So let me reiterate, TEV is not a democracy.  I pay a fee to keep this site up and running, plus the investment of my time, and it is entirely up to me to decide who can and cannot comment.  If I chose to ban left-handed redheads, so be it.

Fortunately, I am not that capricious.  And contrary to the assertions of my wounded anonymous kneebiters, I do not delete comments that merely disagree with me.  Go through the archives, you will find numerous posts with deep comment threads containing spirited back-and-forths.  I am all for thoughtful disagreement and debate.

What I will not abide, and will continue to delete, are comments that are little more than name-calling.  Comments that are needlessly rude or pointlessly flip.  Comments that are nothing more disembodied snark, that take cheap shots at me or my other readers.  (Comments which without exception hide behind false names and false email addresses.)  

I have always been tremendously proud of the smart, spirited readers who make TEV their home, and the civility of the comments area is a source of singular pride.  But it has required me from time to time to show certain readers the door – are you reading, “Serge?” “GG Gaynor”?  – and I will continue to do so as I deem necessary.  And I suspect the majority of my readers will thank me for it.

Back now, to our regularly scheduled programming.  Big happenings at Skylight this Sunday afternoon, check the sidebar for details.  

READINGS UPDATED

Readings sidebar updated through May.  Some true worthies noted, so click through and check it out.