Archives for August 4, 2004

Who’d have thought it? I’m still struggling with the persistent remnants of last week’s chest cold, exacerbated by my recent travels to Williamstown and Washington, and after spending most of Tuesday writing a piece that refused to come easily, I found myself without enough steam to open a doll’s envelope. So I gave myself the night off, very possibly followed by a day off. If you don’t hear from me again until Thursday, that’s why. My head is full of wonderful postings (doubtless the source of all that gooey congestion), but they’ll just have to stay in there until I feel like doing more than absolutely nothing.

Later.

“Americans as a whole do not really care for poems or novels or plays as such, as individual works of art each of which is to a certain extent self-contained and autonomous. They like the generalisations that can be drawn from them or put into them, the messages, the bits of uplift or downpush, the statements, the large imponderables reached as soon and as directly as possible without niggling, limiting, specialising detail (seen in things like character, story, setting, motivation, etc.) and proclaimed as loudly and eye-catchingly as possible.”

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs