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ARCHIVED ENTRIES FOR
JANUARY 2007
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Patrick: Lagniappe
[Princess de Polignac] said Proust's limited
knowledge of England came through Ruskin; and that one of the first
things he wrote was preface to a French translation of Ruskin.
The last time she saw Proust was at a dinner party given for him in
Paris. He attended pale and ill, wearing a long seal-skin
dressing gown down to his ankles. The Duke of Marlborough who
was present and had no idea who Proust was, was indignant at the
informality of his clothes. The Princess again told me she
never liked Proust. He was always hopelessly, unrequitedly in
love, and this was wearisome for his friends.
----Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Wednesday,
24th November, 1943
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Patrick: Lagniappe
We then talked of eccentric people living in
country houses. Emerald told us how when she was first married
and lived in the English country, she went to call on the
Mexboroughs. Presently, Lord Mexborough was wheeled into the
room. He had a long white beard down to his knees and was
wearing a top hat. As soon as he saw Emerald he let out a
piercing scream, 'Take her away! Take her away!'
----Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Wednesday, 8th
September, 1943
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Patrick: Lagniappe
After breakfast, I carried out what I had
resolved. That is to say I took Pompey's basket, hid it away,
burned his two bones, his cotton reel, his blanket and cushion in
the incinerator in the yard. I threw his chain as far as I
could into the river. I got a taxi, and told the driver to
take me to the vet. I held the little dog on my knees without
looking at him, without (thank God) seeing his eyes. I told
the vet to destroy him, and walked out, and away. All this I
did without a qualm, for his cough was getting worse, and his fits
persisted. For five or ten minutes I felt jubilant. Had
I not done the right thing? Would someone ever do the same
service to me? In walking rapidly along the embankment I felt,
at first with surprise, then shame, the tears coursing down my
cheeks. By the time I reached the door I felt nothing but
unmitigated grief. I had been no better than a murderer.
----Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Monday, 15th
March, 1943
[N.B.: The best diarists are able to
write in telescoped form what, in fiction, would be the most
poignant of short stories. Indeed, it is not surprising that
many of the great writers of fiction also assiduously kept diaries
or journals. Note also that in this one short paragraph
Lees-Milne manages to capture some of the conflicted ambiguity of
our modern notions of euthanasia and animal rights.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
She was, to her blunt, expanded fingertips, a
daughter of London, of the crowded streets and hustling traffic of
the great city; she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy
courts and foggy thoroughfares, and peopled its parks and squares
and crescents with her ambitions; it had entered into her blood and
her bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage of her head; she
understood it by instinct and loved it with passion; she represented
its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality and its
knowingness, its good-nature and its impudence, and might have
figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified
townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the
accumulated parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of
cockneyism.
--The Princess of Casamassima by Henry
James
[N.B.: Where are the authors who can
write a sentence like that today? Oh wait, it violates the
rule of "show, don't tell"--they must have been killed off in the
creative writing abattoirs.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Where shall we set our histories?
Who are the errant, the aimless ones
outside the village boundaries,
dead meteorites from long dead suns,
unfree travellers at whose end none stirs.
The meanest priest preserved from dust
wound from wind in mummy-cloth
has more eternity than us
--our character is lost in death
and what are we to passers-by
but grey stone in a field of green?
We have no Arab story here
to bring us hope of Singing Bird
or magic water on our hair
to give us back our former shape.
Unmarried now we lie alone,
a gold ring and a skeleton.
--October by John Bayliss (excerpt)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
After tea I walked with Lord Berwick in the
deer park having been enjoined by his wife to talk seriously about
Attingham's future, and press him for a decision on various points.
I did not make much progress in this respect. On the other
hand, he expanded in a strangely endearing way. When alone he
loosens up and is quite communicative. All the seeming
silliness and nervousness vanish. He talked to me earnestly of
the ghosts that have been seen at Attingham by the WAAFs. Lady
Berwick would not have tolerated this nonsense, had she been
present. He kept stopping and anxiously looking over his
shoulder lest she might be overhearing him, but he did not stand
stock still and revolve, which he does in the drawing room when she
starts talking business. He told me that Lady Sibyl Grant, his
neighbour at Pitchford [Hall], constantly writes to him on the
forbidden subject, passing on advice as to health which she has been
given by her spiritual guides. She no longer dares telephone
this information for fear, so Lord Berwick asserted, of the spirits
hearing and taking offence, but more likely for fear of Lady Berwick
overhearing and strongly disapproving. He is not the least
boring about his psychical beliefs but is perplexed by the strange
habits of ghosts. He asked me, did I think it possible that
one could have been locked the housemaid's cupboard? And why
should another want to disguise itself as a vacuum cleaner?
Really, he is a delicious man.
----Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Thursday, 8th
July, 1943
Norman Mailer Finally Gets His Due
In today's New York Times Book Review, Lee
Siegel, a senior editor of the New Republic, finally captures the
essence of Norman Mailer in his
feature review (indeed, not just feature, but probably the
longest review published by the NYTBR in several years) of Mailer's
new book about the fictionalized childhood of Adolf Hitler as
narrated by the devil, The Castle in the Forest. As one
can tell from the premise, Norman Mailer is a preposterous,
shambling intellectual-writer manqué who has been blessed
with an understanding critic, in the guise of Lee Siegel, who has
written a preposterous, shambling, intellectual-writer manqué
review.
One would think at first that the review is a
parody. But, no, it is something much better than that: the
earnest striving of a journalist trying to defend the indefensible
using pseudo-intellectual jargon that would make even the shade of
Sartre blush. In other words, it's a feast of
amphigory. Here's my favorite example (although there are
many, many others to choose from):
Early on, Mailer understood that in a
democracy in which the most radically different types of people
are thrown together, a harmonious encounter with "the other" is
an American dream (e.g., the national obsession with the
Relationship), the reality of which often becomes an American
nightmare (e.g., popular culture's obsession with crime).
Read that sentence three or four times and
watch any possible meaning vanish magically before your eyes.
It is the new Jabberwocky. Siegel has performed the invaluable
service of constructing a chapbook on how not to write a review.
Certainly, for such a review to transcend the merely banal in order
to enter into the gates of gaseousness it is critical to swath one's
opinions in yards and yards of undefined concepts--Truth,
Justice, The American Way (look, up in the sky, it's Supermailer!)--and
then sprinkle them about like mouse droppings in sugar.
Mouse droppings, though, are not enough for a
truly bad review. One must also set forth truly obnoxious
opinions, what I have alluded to above as "the defense of the
indefensible":
Mailer has never, like the dandy, tried to
live aesthetically. When he stabbed his wife at a party in
1960 and when he helped get released from prison a literarily
gifted killer who then stabbed an aspiring young playwright to
death, it was because he followed the wrong impulses, not the
wrong ideas. He never committed the ugliness of
insinuating that he screwed up for art's sake. He let the
ugliness and the impudence of his actions speak for themselves.
This is a deeply offensive
statement--particularly in the midst of a review of Mailer's book
which attempts to describe how Adolf Hitler became a megalomaniacal
mass-murderer. Indeed, substitute "Hitler" for "Mailer" in the
above paragraph to appreciate just how heinous it is. But
Siegel, is not satisfied with merely excusing Mailer's own forays in
personal violence--Siegel also wishes to excuse Mailer's written
advocacy of violence for its own sake:
Mailer did heedlessly write--in the
notorious essay "The White Negro" (published in the
democratic-socialist journal Dissent, a most decent,
un-notorious little magazine [N.B.: another lesson in bad book
reviewing: inappropriate and poor humor])--that the hypothetical
murder of a middle-aged shopkeeper by two hoodlums was an
example of "daring the unknown," of "trying to create a new
nervous system," of "looking for the opportunity to grow up a
second time." It is widely assumed that Mailer was tying
to shock the bourgeoisie with a sympathy for violence. But
if you read the essay all the way through, you see that he was
doing something else: trying to shock the respectable class with
an imaginative inhabitation of the violent [N.B.: do you see
Supermailer yet in his clouds of gas?]. Rather than
advocating murder [N.B.: glad to hear it], Mailer was exercising
his perfect sense of the other . . . . blah, blah, blah, ad
nauseum.
Sartre, Sartre--call your lawyer, you're being
mercilessly parodied.
I could go on with a number of other important
lessons that Siegel imparts, but you should read the review on your
own to appreciate it's unique brand of . . . deliciousness.
I will leave you with this last lesson contained in the final
paragraph where the bad book reviewer attempts to sum up the
greatness of a writer by setting forth some literary trait which,
rather than revealing literary genius (or advocating murder, for
that matter), instead reveals that both author and critic are
certifiable nincompoops:
Alone among American writers, Mailer has
earned the right to use the triple negative.
And there you have it, the greatness that is
Norman Mailer: the triple negative. I couldn't have said it
better myself.
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Patrick: Lagniappe
For dinner we had soup, whiting, pheasant,
apple pie, dessert, a white Rhine wine and port. Lady Hoare
has no housemaid, only a cook and butler. But she said with
satisfaction, "The Duchess of Somerset at Maiden Bradley has to do
all her own cooking." She kept up a lively, not entirely
coherent prattle. She said to me, "Don't you find the food
better in this war than in the last?" I replied that I was
rather young during the last war, but I certainly remembered the
rancid margarine we were given at my preparatory school when I was
eight. "Oh!" she said. "You were lucky. We were
reduced to eating rats." I was a little surprised, until Sir
Henry looked up and said, "No, no, Alda. You keep getting your
wars wrong. That was when you were in Paris during the
Commune."
----Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Monday, 12th
October, 1942
[N.B.: Do you find entries such as the
above quite amusing and witty? Too bad such books are not
published in the United States--although you can pick up a copy at
amazon. I highly recommend it.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I used my time in translating from foreign
languages, and even now I hold this to be the best way for a young
poet to understand more deeply and more creatively the spirit of his
own language. I translated the verse of Baudelaire, a few of
Verlaine, Keats, William Morris, a short drama by Charles van
Lerberghe, a novel by Camille Lemonnier, pour me faire la main.
Just because very strange language at first offers opposition in its
most personal turnings to those who would copy it, it invites forces
of expression which, otherwise unsought, would never come to light:
and this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate
essence and to mould it as plastically into one’s own language, was
always a particular desire on my part.
--The World of Yesterday by Stefan
Zweig.
Why I Don’t Finish Books, Part II
Besides lazy writing, I also get frustrated
with a writer’s lazy imagination. For me, this is exemplified by a
book many praise for its surfeit of imagination, the new National
Book Award winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. A
thumb-nail sketch of it would seem to support his fans’ praises:
Mark Schluter flips his truck on a deserted Nebraska road and
sustains brain damage which causes his sister, Karin, to quit her
menial job and care for him; his brain damage, though, has made him
paranoid causing him to believe that his sister is an imposter;
called in to consult is a world famous brain doctor, modeled on
Oliver Sacks, who helps Mark recover to some degree; oh, and mixed
up in all this is a meditation on the migration patterns of cranes
and their battle against an evil real-estate developer out to
destroy their habitat. Okay, maybe the sketch does point out a lazy
imagination. For me, though, plot is beside the point; and my
favorite authors are those whose plotting tends to be minimal (Henry
James) or slipshod and secondary (Charles Dickens and William
Shakespeare) in order to concentrate on the interactions of their
characters. So let’s not hold Powers’ plotting—such as it
is—against him.
What I will hold
against him is his failure of empathetic imagination. What I mean
by that is his inability to sympathetically portray characters whose
mindsets are very different from his own. Instead, he engages in
the Heep Big Injun school of writing: condescension. A
still-revered writer John Steinbeck, exemplifies this school in his
short novel, Tortilla Flats, the loving tale of a group of
paisanos (i.e., Hispanics) in the eponymous California
coastal town near Monterrey who spin not, neither do they eat (much)
but they sure drink a lot of wine. They might commit rape, arson,
burglary and assault—but it’s all in good fun and everyone can still
laugh about it afterwards. This kind of writing should be regarded
as deeply offensive. It is worlds away from the sensitive treatment
of India and its inhabitants as portrayed by Rudyard Kipling. And
yet Powers engages in his own brand of such condescension as he
depicts the world of those Red Neck Nebraska-billies in thrall to
them big, evil corporations.
For me, Powers made
three strikes and was out early on in the book concerning the
Nebraska Natives, thus requiring that the book be quietly interred
without a formal ceremony (please, no flowers). Strike one comes on
page eight when Mark’s sister has just arrived at the hospital:
Back in the
waiting room, she witnessed eight middle-aged men in flannel
standing in a ring, their slow eyes scanning the floor. A
murmur issued from them, wind teasing the lonely screens of a
farmhouse. The sound rose and fell in waves. It took her a
moment to realize: a prayer circle, for another victim who’d
come in just after Mark. A makeshift Pentecostal service,
covering anything that scalpels, drugs, and lasers couldn’t.
The gift of tongues descended on the circle of men, like small
talk at a family reunion. Home was the place you never escape,
even in nightmare.
Yes, Lone Ranger,
those are Apache doing the Spirit Dance in their bright-colored
flannel and slow-moving eyes. They are calling for Big Medicine to
save their Chief. It is best we leave here before they get restless
and we cannot escape. Heigh-ho Silver.
Strike two comes on
page eleven when Karin needs to find a place to sleep for the night
after visiting the hospital:
As next of kin,
she qualified for the shelter house a block from the hospital, a
hostel subsidized with the pocket change of the world’s largest
global fast-food cartel. The Clown House, she and Mark called
it, back when their father was dying of fatal insomnia four
years before.
Yep, them evil
cartels are always trying to sucker us dim-bulb consumers by using
their pocket change to throw us a sop like the Clown House. What do
they think we are, a bunch of Cedar Choppers? Actually, the
Ronald
McDonald House is about the last thing that Powers, in his smug
inability to think outside of his own limited imaginative box,
should have attacked in such an off-hand manner. The cheap shot is
the mark of the cheap artist.
Powers, though, is on
a roll, preaching truth to power, and on page thirteen he has his
third and final strike by demonstrating his hilarious ignorance
regarding any and all business issues. Here, Karin is calling her
own employer—obviously,
Gateway—to
let them know that she’ll be out for a while:
They were a big
outfit, the third-largest computer vendor in the country. Years
ago, in the early days of the PC clone boom, they’d broken out
of the pack of identical mail-order vendors on the simple
gimmick of running herds of Holsteins in their ads. Mark had
laughed at her when she’d dragged back to Nebraska from Colorado
and got a job with them. You’re going to work complaints for
the Cow Computer Company?
Just as with the
second strike, this is not the occluded, first-person viewpoint of
one of the backwoods, goat-roping characters but rather the
pronouncement of our omniscient narrator-in-chief. Well, of course,
the way that dumb Cow Computer Company was able to dominate its
field was just by running a bunch of cows in its ads. Surprisingly,
no other company has tried to hawk its wares using this simple
expedient. Powers seems to revel in his lack of imagination as he
gets in yet another cheap shot. And so the book is tossed.
One last point:
Powers is a good example of the author who writes what his readers
already know in a form that they are receptive to consuming. He
makes them feel smart and sophisticated while he feeds them pablum
served on a bed of polenta. He is a child of his time. And you
know what that means.
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Patrick: Lagniappe
This temple of progress [i.e., the Viennese
newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse] preserved another sacred
relic in the so-called
feuilleton: like the great Parisian dailies such as the
Temps and the Journal des Débats, it printed admirable
and authoritative essays on poetry, theatre, music, and art in the
lower half of the front page, separated sharply from the ephemera of
politics and the day by an unbroken line that extended from margin
to margin. In this space only well-established authorities were
permitted to express themselves. Sound judgment, the comparative
experience of years, and finished artistic form alone could summon
an author to this holy place after years of probation. Ludwig
Speidel, a master of the pen, and Eduard Hanslick had the same
pontifical authority in the theatre and music as Sainte-Beuve had in
his Lundis in Paris. Their yes or no in Vienna decided the
success of a work, a play, or a book, and with it that of the
author. Each of these essays was the talk of the day in intellectual
circles. They were discussed, criticized, admired, or attacked, and
whenever a new name bobbed up among the time-honoured and accepted
feuilletonists, it was an event. Of the younger generation
Hofmannsthal alone succeeded, with a few of his capital essays, in
gaining admission. Other young authors had to be content to sneak in
and find refuge in the literary section at the back. He who appeared
on the first page had hewn his name in marble, as far as Vienna was
concerned.
--The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
[N.B.: Newspaper editors constantly complain about
their subscription erosion due to the inroads made by competing
media such as cable television, but here’s an old idea that cannot
be easily replicated by any other medium that delivers content to a
relatively passive audience—oh, wait, it requires "intellectual
circles." Sorry for the interruption, please go
here for
further amusement where the feuilleton still flourishes in a medium
that requires the active participation of its audience.]
Why I Don’t Finish Books
For years, I was afflicted with a serious malady: I
would finish every book I started. No matter how dull the writing,
or the subject matter, or both, I’d feel honor bound to earn my
reader’s merit badge by trudging through the wastes of some wretched
tome. Luckily, I had an epiphany that I would be dead—sooner
rather than later (indeed, we all go sooner rather than later)—and
should discard this habit which was hastening my demise. I
mean that literally in the sense that spending time on an activity
with no benefit other than the expenditure of that time serves no
purpose other than to bring one ever so much closer to that time
when time will be time-less. Hence, my general aversion to
television. And so, along with turning off the TV, I turned off
books that I found off putting for one reason or another.
Actually, I have two basic reasons for discarding a
book in media res: (1) lazy writing; and (2) lazy
imagination. I have just put down (as in, put to sleep) two books,
each of which illustrate one of these two cardinal faults: Paris:
The Secret History by Andrew Hussey and
The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Let’s handle the
easier case first, lazy writing. What I mean by lazy writing is not
synonymous with bad writing—bad writing one can recognize in a
paragraph or two and hence discard the book precipitously without
wasting hardly any time at all. Lazy writing is more insidious.
Certainly, the writing might lack a certain sparkle and verve, but
it’s not aggressively painful to peruse. Instead, the writing
is repetitive in the sense that the book is not only flat but tends
to repeat the same few points over and over again with only a slight
variation in the repetitions (a good example is the entire
classification of business-management books where the same simple
five or ten rules are repeated ad nauseum throughout the
entire genre). Since Richard Powers just won the National Book Award
for The Echo Maker it’s safe to say that his book does not
suffer from this fault. And so we move on to the titillating-titled,
Paris: The Secret History.
I came across Paris: The Secret History in my
yearly perusal of the stacks of Barnes & Noble after having received
a gift card to this establishment. Admittedly, I was becoming
a bit desperate that I would not be able to redeem the card except
at the in-house Starbuck’s, which is to coffee as Barnes & Noble is
to books, when I stumbled across Mr. Hussey’s (apt name for the
subject matter) book regarding a down-and-dirty review of the more
louche aspects of Parisian history. I was heartened to
see that it was highly recommended by Peter Ackroyd who had accorded
a similar treatment to his home-town haunt,
London. Ackroyd is a fantastic writer, so I snatched up
the book. Little did I realize that I had just been bitten by
proxy by the blurb-bug, that pesky parasite which causes great
writers, for one reason or another, to praise indifferent offerings
by their lesser-talented fellow craftspeople (it must be some kind
of guild requirement).
Paris: The Secret History is a frustrating book.
Andrew Hussey is the head of French and Comparative Literature at
the University of London Institute in Paris, so he would seem to
have decent credentials for tackling such an enterprise as the
gutter’s view of Parisian history. Instead, he offers a
standard, potted history of Paris as it relates to its central place
in the history of France, and, every few paragraphs or so, adds a
variation of the following:
This kind of random violence was also a reminder
that the real city of Paris was still filthy, disease-ridden, a
good place to be stabbed or raped, or to starve to death. If it
was at the centre of European history, few Parisians sensed that
they occupied a privileged and unique position.
Hussey also makes mention every page or so to the
Parisian whores. Not any colorful detail, mind you, just that
Paris had a bunch of ‘em: whores, whores, everywhere one looks, one
can’t help but trip over two or three. The Sun King might be
plotting his next military adventure in the splendor of Versailles
but just down the road a piece there’s a number of demi-reps selling
theirs. Oooh, how transgressive; how, how, well, lazy. Wake me
when the whores leave.
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Practical, useful and beneficial as an academic
career may be for those of average talent, it is superfluous for
individually productive natures, for whom it may even develop into a
hindrance.
--The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Sound of Bogey’s Voice
I have just finished reading a book by
Vincent Price—yes,
that
Vincent Price—I Like What I Know, his paean regarding an
amateur’s appreciation of contemporary art and the delights of
tasting the various objet d’art on offer in Europe. He
has fairly good instincts—such as owning a gigantic Richard
Diebenkorn that I would give my right arm for (I’m left handed,
actually). Besides praising
Diebenkorn—this is in 1959, mind you—he also admires
Mark Tobey. Not a bad two-fer (on the debit side, he does go
ga-ga over an aging starlet’s artistic progeny, but let’s file that
error under the old cliche: undue praise is the coin familiarity
pays to mediocrity). Perhaps this little book of artistic
musings is not a lasting monument to art appreciation and is more an
example of Dr. Johnson’s lady preachers and dancing dogs as applied
to showbiz types and art books, but I found it highly entertaining
nonetheless.
Why was this book so much fun? Because I have
seen and, more importantly, heard, so many Vincent Price movies
that, as I read the book, it seemed that it was being narrated by
none other than Vincent Price himself. I’ve experienced this
sensation just one other time with respect to the works of Raymond
Chandler. There, I thought that the exploits of Philip Marlowe,
which are invariably told in the first person, were being recited by
the great Bogey—Humphrey Bogart. As a result, in such an
instance, my critical faculties are completely overcome by the odd
sensation of being read to by these long-dead celebrities. I
wonder if others experience this odd sensation from time to time and
what books might provoke such a response.
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It would not be easy to make a young person of today
understand to what degree we ignored all sport and even disdained
it. To be sure, in the last century the sport wave had not yet
reached our continent from England. There were as yet no stadiums
where a hundred thousand people went wild with joy when one boxer
hit another on the chin. The newspapers did not yet send reporters
to fill columns with Homeric rapture about a hockey game. Fights,
athletic clubs, and heavy-weight records were still regarded in our
time as a thing of the outer city, and butchers and porters really
made up their audience; at best the noble and more aristocratic
sport of racing drew the so-called "good society" several times a
year to the course, but could not lure us who looked upon every
physical activity as a plain waste of time. At thirteen, when this
intellectual-literary infections set in, I stopped skating, and used
for books the money which my parents allowed me for dancing lessons.
At eighteen I could not yet swim, dance, or play tennis; and today I
still can neither ride a bicycle nor drive a car, and in all sports
any ten-year-old could put me to shame. Even now, in 1941, I am
highly confused as to the difference between baseball and football,
hockey and polo, and the sporting page of a newspaper with its
inexplicable figures seems to me to be written in Chinese. In the
matter of all speed and ability records in sport, I have always been
of the same opinion as the Shah of Persia who, when urged to attend
the Derby, replied with Oriental wisdom, "Why? I know that one horse
can run faster than another. It makes no difference to me which one
it is."
--The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Elegy for a Book Browser
I am sometimes bewildered by the idiosyncratic
topics that the New York Times chooses to cover on a regular basis,
but there’s one that I’m always drawn to in the way one slows down
to view an automobile accident on the side of the road: the demise
of the independent book store. In Wednesday’s NYT, there was
yet
another in this continuing elegiac series bemoaning the
impending end of one Micawber Books [N.B.: the article’s writer
feels compelled to explain who
Micawber is—if that’s not a sign of the decline of literary
culture, I don’t know what is], a quirky Princeton book store that
has existed for a quarter century or so and, true to form, has an
irascible owner (is irascibility a requirement of independent
bookstore owners?), Logan Fox. The article follows the usual
format for this series so I won’t bore you with the details
(rise—begins in a sleepy business district with other mom-and-pop
establishments; decline—the first chain moves in; fall—more chains
come, the advent of the internet, the rise of television babble
replacing book babble, etc.). Instead, I’ll just point out
this one oddball reason for decline that I had not run across
before:
But beyond those factors, Mr. Fox said, he
blames a change in American culture, in the quickening pace of
people’s lives, in the shrinking willingness to linger.
During the 1980s, in the store’s early days, customers would
come in and stay all afternoon, carefully inspecting the books
that were packed tightly together, spine to spine.
No longer. "The driving force of all of this is
the acceleration of our culture," Mr. Fox said. "The old days of
browsing, the old days of a person coming in for three or four
hours on a Saturday and slowly meandering, making a small pile
of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven
gems they wanted, are pretty much over. If you go to the Strand
or to Micawber Books today, it’s a whole different gear, where
society wants satisfaction and fulfillment now."
Oh dear. I just spent a few hours browsing in my
town’s best independent bookstore,
Book People,
"making a small pile of books, being very selective [and] coming
away with six or seven gems" that I really wanted—at least I hope
that’s what I was doing. I might add that there were several
other book browsers engaged in the same endeavor. Is this truly
endangered behavior?
True, I live in Austin, where one observes all sorts
of odd behavior not particularly prevalent in other parts of the
country. Indeed, Austin is one of the worst cities in the
country for browsing for used books because there’s too many
readers. The city is dominated by a giant used-book chain,
Half-Price Books, which apparently has hit on the winning formula of
having no inventory, no selection, no helpful staff and no low
prices. And yet it thrives in Austin because there’s no where
else to go. Austin is in the fortunate position of being awash in
book lovers (as evidenced by the
Texas
Book Festival). So, pace Mr. Fox, perhaps in the
illiterate Northeast book browsing has gone out of business along
with independent book stores, but down here in Austin, it’s still a
thriving activity.
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Patrick: Lagniappe
There is a great stir in Brooks's about the
member who has been asked to resign, and won't go. He doggedly
makes use of the library every day and even insists on privileges
which the most hardened old members would not dare demand after half
a century's membership. He has been so rude to the servants
that in a body they informed the Secretary they would leave unless
he did. Now there is to be an extraordinary meeting in order
formally to expel him. Such a thing has never been known in
the whole history of Brooks's. The offender is a vulgar,
sinister-looking fellow, who prowls around the club. When he
leaves a room the older gentlemen break into muffled whispers.
--Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Monday, 2nd
March, 1942
A special meeting was held at Brooks's this
afternoon formally to expel the member who has been rude to the
servants and has used bad language. The Chairman announced
that he had just received a letter from the member announcing his
resignation after all, and promising never to cross the threshold of
the club again. Great relief was expressed by everybody at
this end to their embarrassment. Later in the day, I passed
the man, looking unconcerned and truculent under the arcade of the
Ritz. Instantly I felt sorry for him and wondered why he had
behaved like this. I can quite understand how, if one senses
that one is disliked, one is impelled to make oneself detested.
--Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
(abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch), entry for Wednesday,
18th March, 1942
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