Archives for August 2005

“To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.”

Edmund Wilson (quoted in Louis Menand, “Missionary,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8 and15, 2005)

“To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.”

Edmund Wilson (quoted in Louis Menand, “Missionary,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8 and15, 2005)

I slept for nine hours Saturday night–the first really good night’s sleep I’d had in two weeks. Outside of going to see Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays at the Lincoln Center Festival, I spent the whole day digging myself out from under two weeks’ worth of accumulated mail, finishing at one-thirty in the morning. Then I set to the agreeable task of returning my Upper West Side apartment to its normally pristine state. By the time I finally climbed into the loft and turned out the light, the two dozen pictures that hang on my walls were straightened and the piles of Louis Armstrong-related books on the floor of my office neatly squared off (my cleaning woman doesn’t believe in right angles). My drama calendar was up to date and the incoming mail had all been read, sorted, and filed, save for a beautifully penned, much-appreciated letter from the West Coast that I put aside to savor at my leisure. It was pure pleasure to arise the next day knowing that the natural order of things had been restored.

Now comes the greater challenge of completing the work I left undone during my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. I managed to do a certain amount of writing while I was home, but not much. As of this moment I have to finish three and a half pieces and see a play and an art exhibit between now and noon on Wednesday, when the last piece, my drama column for this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, comes due. Then I’ll pick up a Zipcar
from the garage around the corner and vanish for three days. I know where I’m going, but nobody else does, and I mean to keep it that way. The world is too much with me, a disorder for which I’ve prescribed the best of all possible cures, the sound of running water. I hate to wish time away, but I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to picking up that car and driving over the George Washington Bridge to parts unknown (except to me and my innkeepers).

Like I said, I’ll be around between now and then, and I’ll probably even do some blogging, though not right away–today is likely to be a trifle hectic. But come Wednesday at noon, I’m shutting the shop down and handing the keys to OGIC. If I pass you on the highway, don’t tell anybody you saw me.

The day that some old friend

Said something sad about you,

I knew right then

I was no longer mad about you.

For I’d always gone to pieces

At the mention of your name,

But all that I could say this time was,

“Isn’t that a shame?”

David Cantor, “Mad About You”

The day that some old friend

Said something sad about you,

I knew right then

I was no longer mad about you.

For I’d always gone to pieces

At the mention of your name,

But all that I could say this time was,

“Isn’t that a shame?”

David Cantor, “Mad About You”

Things I Learned Sophomore Year

1. A good imitation of measles rash can be effected by stabbing the forearm with a stiff whisk-broom.

2. Queen Elizabeth was not above suspicion.

3. In Spanish you pronounce z like th.

4. Nine-tenths of the girls in a girls’ college are not pretty.

5. You can sleep undetected in a lecture course by resting the head on the hand as if shadng the eyes.

6. Weakness in drawing technique can be hidden by using a wash instead of black and white line.

7. Quite a respectable bun can be acquired by smoking three or four pipefuls of strong tobacco when you have no food in your stomach.

8. The ancient Phoenicians were really Jews, and got as far north as England where they operated tin mines.

9. You can get dressed much quicker in the morning if the night before when you are going to bed you take off your trousers and underdrawers at once, leaving the latter inside the former.

Robert Benchley, “What College Did to Me”

From Louis Menand’s essay on Edmund Wilson in the current New Yorker:

Wilson did not engage well with literature at the level of the text. He was also not at ease or reliable at the meta-level. He had a journalist’s suspicion of abstractions, and he did not think theoretically. When he tried for the broad view–when he undertook to explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or to describe the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticism in modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic “wound”–his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was unsurpassed at the level of the writer and the work. When he gives his tour through “Das Kapital” or “Finnegans Wake” (a book he was excited by) or “Doctor Zhivago” (which he also admired extravagantly), it is as though the book’s interior had suddenly been lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers who thought they already knew the book can see things that they missed, and they realize how partial and muddled their sense of it really was. And the hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a complete grasp of the corpus, each of the writer’s strengths and flaws laid out with juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the body of work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis; anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite picture….

One of the reasons why I like this description so much (other than that it’s perfect) is that it also sums up some of the things I try to do in my own writing, which was deeply influenced by Wilson’s back in the days when I was setting up shop as a critic a quarter-century ago. I don’t read him much anymore, partly because I once read him so closely that I remember his work too well. But Menand’s essay has created in me a fresh appetite for revisiting Wilson, which strikes me as one of the essential attributes of a great piece of literary journalism.

Read the whole thing here, by all means.

From Louis Menand’s essay on Edmund Wilson in the current New Yorker:

Wilson did not engage well with literature at the level of the text. He was also not at ease or reliable at the meta-level. He had a journalist’s suspicion of abstractions, and he did not think theoretically. When he tried for the broad view–when he undertook to explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or to describe the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticism in modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic “wound”–his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was unsurpassed at the level of the writer and the work. When he gives his tour through “Das Kapital” or “Finnegans Wake” (a book he was excited by) or “Doctor Zhivago” (which he also admired extravagantly), it is as though the book’s interior had suddenly been lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers who thought they already knew the book can see things that they missed, and they realize how partial and muddled their sense of it really was. And the hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a complete grasp of the corpus, each of the writer’s strengths and flaws laid out with juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the body of work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis; anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite picture….

One of the reasons why I like this description so much (other than that it’s perfect) is that it also sums up some of the things I try to do in my own writing, which was deeply influenced by Wilson’s back in the days when I was setting up shop as a critic a quarter-century ago. I don’t read him much anymore, partly because I once read him so closely that I remember his work too well. But Menand’s essay has created in me a fresh appetite for revisiting Wilson, which strikes me as one of the essential attributes of a great piece of literary journalism.

Read the whole thing here, by all means.