I’m back. After a week of second-guessing whether I should have sprung for the $115 antibiotics, whatever respiratory crud I had seems to have cleared out.
• “I tried to make myself read it, my mouth gaping in a silent scream, but I failed.”: In the Sunday Times, critics such as Stephen Amidon and John Carey pick their most-loathed books. Turns out, Patricia Cornwell has a lot to answer for. (Via Lit Saloon.)
• The San Diego Union-Tribune profiles the wonderful Jincy Willett. (Via Sarah Weinman.)
• The semicolon is dead. Long live the semicolon!

So, yesterday in the midst of a tiresome afternoon — it’s hot (anyone else noticed that?), I have a sinus infection, the doctor prescribed what turned out to be $115 worth of antibiotics when I am pretty confident what I have falls in the “under $15” category of illness and it took roughly 5,000 phone calls to sort it all out — I remembered that Jincy Willett’s new book, The Writing Class, came out this week.
I love Willett’s book of short stories, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, without reservation, and I’ve been dying to read this new novel since Gwenda started raving about it in email a couple months ago. And it seemed like a great bit of luck that it’s finally, finally out and available and I could croak over to the bookstore and get a copy to cheer up a lousy day.
So far it’s marvelous — very, very funny and sly in bits, and then sometimes very, very funny in a broad sort of way in others. I think the humor would appeal to just about anyone, but if you’ve ever been in a writing class, or in a position to review a broad spectrum of other people’s writing (e.g., slush pile reader), you may be particularly partial to the comedy.
Here’s one of the broader bits. After the first night’s class, Amy Gallup, the class instructor, has brought home the manuscript of one of her student’s, Dr. Richard Surtees, to read (he being the sort of student who arrives at class with 20 copies of his novel all printed out):

According to his secretary’s yellow Post-it, Amy was privileged to hold roughly half of something called Code Black: A Medical Thriller. Having watched both parents and her first husband waste away in hospitals, Amy was never thrilled by anything medical, but she always tried, when confronted with this genre in class, to put her feelings aside. As she reminded her students, they were each entitled to objective critical response, not a catalog of their critics’ tastes.
A quick glance-through told her that Surtees had cast his protagonist in that heroic mold so commonly used by doctors who want to write fiction. Unlike other professionals, physicians rarely viewed themselves with anything approaching ironic detachment–which was probably good for their patients, but not so hot for their readers. Surtees’s hero was a world-class neurosurgeon, a black belt in Karate, a distinguished amateur cellist who had studied with Pablo Casals (You have a great gift,” the old man had admonished him severely, “and you toss it away to save a few insignificant lives!”), and Merlin the Magnificent in the sack.
The plot of Code Black was apparently going to be one of those convoluted deals involving a lot of esoteric medical words and government acronyms (in an ominous footnote, Surtees promised a twenty-page glossary), and would revolve around a worldwide bioterrorist threat amplified by a perfidious liberal cabal hell-bent on imposing socialized medicine on a gullible public.
“‘What do we do now,’ Senator?” snarled Black, almost spitting in his disgust. “Why, we send each plague-ridden citizen of Manhattan to his primary healthcare provider!”

Visit here for Gwenda’s recent Q & A with Willett.

• Profiled in The Guardian, Lorrie Moore talks about the benefits of having a husband who doesn’t pay too much attention to what his wife writes:

Moore says that her ex-husband, who she was with for 14 years, wasn’t that fussed. “That was one of the positive things about him. It was easy to be a writer around him. Like, right now, I’m seeing somebody else and that’s not easy, because he’s scouring the work for signs of him. But my husband never really did that. It’s good to have someone who is mildly interested and mildly proud, and also slightly uninterested. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute.” She smiles. “Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.”

It’s a good profile — not so much because it’s revealing, although I suppose it is, but because it will make you want to go re-read all your Lorrie Moore.
• Genius strikes! The Big LOLbowski. (Via Bookdwarf.)

• Maud Newton’s extraordinary essay, “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” can now be read online at Narrative Magazine. The essay took second prize in the magazine’s Love Story Contest and will be published next year as part of the Cross My Heart, Hope You Die anthology.
• Sarah Weinman interviews Kathryn Harrison about her new book, While They Slept, which Sarah describes as “a fascinating hybrid of journalism, narrative, and memoir.”

We returned last night from the Great Minneapolis Expedition. We made stops in Louisville, Chicago, Milwaukee and finally Minneapolis, and then motored through a long, fugue-like drive back to Asheville. 2,315 miles in seven days! It was my 37th birthday last week, and it was a present from Lowell to chauffeur me on a driving odyssey through the northern hinterlands near where I grew up, which was good of him. It’s not every man who is willing to spend a vacation staring down a cranberry bog. The trip was pretty perfect: We saw plays, we canoed, we played disc golf — and we saw lots of friends, old and new.*
As Terry reported, we met up with him, Mrs. Teachout and OGIC in Chicago to see Lion in Winter at the Writers’ Theatre, which I loved as much as Terry did. It was the same night as Game 6 of the Stanley Cup, so I got to meet OGIC in the full flush of her OGIC-ness — checking game scores at intermission, and then celebrating afterward at the Red Wings win. (My campaign to woo her to visit Asheville involves a map of North and South Carolina with pushpins where all the college and professional hockey teams are.) Afterward, we went to the only place open that late on a Wednesday in the suburbs, an old-school Chicago steakhouse, for chocolate mousse and coffee, and I got to razz Terry for a while for never having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and he got to razz me for never having seen Chinatown.
Lowell and I were lucky in the second play we saw too, a very funny, glittery production of Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Guthrie Theater. It was all satisfyingly over-the-top: Trapeze entrances, elaborate costumes, and big song-and-dance numbers for the fairy speeches (which do get a little adjectival so I understand the decision to put them to music even if some of the numbers got schmaltzy). It was my first time to the theater’s fab new building, and my first time seeing Shakespeare performed live. Which, as I told Terry and OGIC, seems strange as somehow I managed to see the Dirty Dancing tour but never a Shakespeare play before?
* If you’re a friend of mine from Wisconsin and I didn’t see you this trip, it’s because I’m hoping to see you on the next trip, in October or November, when we’ll hit Milwaukee again, maybe Madison, and Appleton.

• What you’ll find in Alberto Manguel’s 30,000 volume library in rural France: A section devoted to versions of the Faust legend, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, lots of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick, Plato, thousands of detective novels, and “dozens of very bad books that I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad.” What’s not in the library: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, because “I felt [it] infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain.” (This is an older link but a goodie. Via Bookdwarf.)
• Zadie Smith’s appreciation of the best of all books, Middlemarch, begins with a look at Henry James’s review of the novel, written when he was 30: “To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”

For the past week or so, our neighborhood’s been in the throes of a full-scale cicada invasion. They emerge every 17 years in Asheville — red-eyed beasties that flutter around with metallic iridescent wings. (They look like elaborate golden clockworks when the sun hits right.) They’re everywhere, and they’re loud. As I type this, it sounds like a siren or a car alarm is going off somewhere close by. The sound starts at dawn and then dies down at dusk, hitting full volume around mid afternoon. That’s also the hardest time of day to go out for a walk; the cicadas seem to be at their most active then and can plonk you in the head as they fly by.
I asked Lowell to snap these pics. I wish he had a panoramic lens to catch the sheer plenitude. The street outside our house is littered with the various life stages of a cicada: plain brown molted exoskeletons, mating cicadas (two conjoined tail to tail), dying cicadas with quivering legs as well as dead ones, and there are grease spots running up and down the road where cars have run over them. The rest, like the ones below, are in the trees — eating and laying eggs in the branches and singing, singing.

If Terry and OGIC are playing with Jane chords, I thought I might play too. As my first little foray into the Jane game, I decided to look up the Jane chord of the original edition of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, which has the poems in the order Ted Hughes put them after Plath’s death, and compare it to the Jane chord of the restored edition of Ariel, which came out in 2004 and “reinstates” the order Plath had planned for the book.
In Her Husband, her excellent, balanced biography focusing on the Plath-Hughes marriage and creative partnership, Diane Middlebrook writes:

The Ariel Hughes published was not identical with the manuscript titled Ariel that Plath had organized in the black spring binder he found on her desk after her death. As editor, Hughes reshuffled the poems, destroying the narrative arc that Plath had described in her notes on the manuscript. He omitted some of the poems Plath had intended to include–he cut “The Rabbit Catcher,” for example. And he added poems that Plath had not included, poems written after she finished the Ariel manuscript, poems that Plath intended for another book. His most significant intervention was to replace the hopeful poem “Wintering”–the ending Plath had designed for Ariel–with “Edge”:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

Ariel original edition (with “The Edge” as the final poem): “Love drag.”
Ariel: The Restored Edition (with “Wintering” as the final poem): “Love spring.”*
It’s an illuminating difference, isn’t it?
But, as Meghan O’Rourke argued in Slate in 2004, while Hughes’s editing of the original Ariel manuscript is regarded with suspicion by many of Plath’s adherents (“he stole her hope!”), it may have been beneficial:

The real problem with Hughes’ interference is that we can’t separate the emotional relationship from the intellectual, artistic relationship–and we don’t trust Hughes to, either. But from this distance Plath seems fortunate to have had his input. It’s easy to forget now how radical Plath’s poetry–with its elemental female anger, its sexual voracity, its self-loathing knowingness–was in 1963. A number of the poems Plath wrote in 1961 and 1962 had been turned down by editors who didn’t understand them. Plath’s publishers in the U.K. didn’t want to publish Ariel, nor could Hughes convince Knopf, in the United States, to publish the new poems. “People didn’t understand what they were getting at, or didn’t like what they saw,” the critic A. Alvarez later told Janet Malcolm. Hughes did get Plath’s poems. And in a strange way, there is something moving about what he did. It is surely an emotionally complicated task to spend two years carefully reorganizing the work of your dead wife so as to persuade someone to publish a book that will implicate you in her tragic fate. And the irony is that, in reorganizing Ariel to emphasize the ultimate price of Plath’s emotional injuries, Hughes, like Samson, brought down the walls of the temple around him, even as he helped his wife take flight.

* To compare more fully, here are the last lines of each poem that turn the Jane chord around:
“The Edge”
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
“Wintering”
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.