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January 20, 2005
OGIC: Reading around
- Erin O'Connor has discovered the wonder that is Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. She gets further than I ever did in explaining what makes the novel so palpably different from other books one reads, what gives it its unmistakable aura:The novel cannot be read quickly and still be read well. Its nuance demands a dipping method of reading, in which the reader stops reading frequently to consider what she has just read, and in which the reader routinely disrupts her forward progress to reread a passage whose precision cannot fully be grasped at once. It's a rare and exquisite pleasure to read this way and to be rewarded for it, a reminder that nothing is ever bland, and that the closer one attends to the details of life, the more there is to see, to know, and to feel.
I received for Christmas the Hazzard novel you never hear about, The Bay of Noon. I've read just a few pages and won't be able to return to it anytime very soon. My brief initial foray revealed the fine writing and keen eye I would have expected--but not that, you know, that thing (snaps fingers). That thing is a rare thing. Truth be told, it would be a little disappointing to find out it's replicable.
- Mr. Elegant Variation is multi-talented. I very much enjoyed his super-short story at Pindeldyboz. "The Everhappy Eterna Comfort Band™" may be a diminutive thing, but it has some teeth on it.
- Finally, Colby Cosh writes fascinatingly here on the relative homogeneity of journalists' class backgrounds and the difference of his own from the norm. Here's a swatch:
If you compared the average working physicist to the average working journalist, I believe you'd find that the latter had parents whose income was much higher. And I believe this is so even though it's the physicist who is ostensibly in greater need of early-life educational advantages, an encouraging household milieu, and (to stick one toe into Larry Summers territory) inheritable cognitive endowments. This happens not because journalism is a cliquish, incestuous business, or just because it is; it's also because a child of intellectuals or businessmen just has a much easier time imagining getting paid for doing mental work and nothing else.
Posted January 20, 2005 11:54 AM
