A novelist friend writes:

Have you ever considered writing fiction? I’m editing a collection of original stories and I was on the highway today when it occurred to me…what if Terry wanted to write a short story?

So I’m throwing the idea out there. Feel free to throw it back at me with “ARE YOU CRAZY?” But if you want to do it, I want you to do it.

Alas, dear friend, you are crazy. Not that I wouldn’t like to write you a short story, but I have on more than one occasion dug deep within myself in search of the stuff of fiction and found…nothing. I’ve gone so far as to start two or three novels, invariably petering out after the first few chapters. I did manage three years ago to write a full-length play, but once the first hot flush of enthusiasm and vanity wore off, I realized that it simply wasn’t good enough, and scrapped it.

I’ve always wondered what was missing from my psyche that might have made it possible for me to write fiction. Anthony Powell, if I remember correctly, once claimed that the reason why Cyril Connolly, a very gifted essayist and parodist, was unable to write good fiction (his lone novel, The Rock Pool, was a clever disaster) was that he was insufficiently interested in the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of other people. This may be one of those explanations that sounds good but doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny–or possibly not. Though I always thought I was interested in other people, it’s also true that I’m not the world’s best noticer. No sooner does a friend tell me that she’s in trouble than I’m all solicitude and consideration, but often I’m too lost in my own thoughts to spot the fast-growing pool of blood at her feet.

Whatever the reason, I’ve reached the age of forty-eight without once successfully completing a work of fiction (or unsuccessfully, for that matter), and though it’s not unheard of for incautious writers to unexpectedly extrude a novel in the middle of life, I doubt it’ll happen to me. I regret it bitterly, just as I regret never having learned to speak another language, but by now I’m reasonably content to stick to the cards in my hand and do my best to play them as well as I know how.

“In middle age,” Evelyn Waugh told a correspondent in 1960, “a writer knows his capacities & limitations and he has a general conspectus of his future work….A writer should have found his métier before he is 50.” I seem to have found mine. My self-designed business card describes me as CRITIC, BIOGRAPHER, BLOGGER. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

“‘How’s the literary grift go?’ I asked.

“He looked at me sharply, demanding: ‘You haven’t been reading me?’

“‘No. Where’d you get that funny idea?’

“‘There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven’t met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?’ He had always liked to talk that way.

“‘Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk.'”

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse

Further praise for Erin McKeown comes from a reader in NYC:

I couldn’t agree with you more about Ms. McKeown. I was one of the lucky folks who got to hear her first set a few years ago at the Falconridge Folk Festival. Every now and then at New Singer/Songwriter showcases someone quite amazing pops up. For the rest of the weekend everyone wanted her on stage with them and her CD was what was played while the bands were setting up. I’ve seen her in person as often as I’ve been able to and forced her CDs on unsuspecting friends (it’s always been appreciated). She’s quite amazing.

And how do we know this correspondent’s judgment is trustworthy? Well, for one thing, she has superior taste in cities:

I was in your great town this past weekend to attend the 50th birthday party of close friend. My pals at work tease me that I’m a total flight risk whenever I visit, I love Chicago so much, and they are right. New York is my husband, but I’d have an affair with Chicago at the drop of a hat.

Saucy! Well, Chicago is kind of a sly temptress that way. Just ask my increasingly smitten co-blogger….

The Guardian asked a few prominent Brits to think out loud about the deceased Jacques Derrida’s theories. The results, it must be said, are a little Onionesque.

“Farce is higher than comedy in that it is very close to tragedy. You’ve only got to play some of Shakespeare’s tragedies plain and they are nearly farcical. All gradations of theatre between tragedy and farce–light comedy, drama–are a load of rubbish.”

Joe Orton (quoted in John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton)

Among all the retrospectives and remembrances of Derrida that are still multiplying like bunnies out there, I’m struck by this frank and thoughtful one by the pseudonymous literary blogger Leonard Bast. Mr. Bast looks at M. Derrida from the perspective of the college English major he was in the heyday, and comes to some sensible conclusions:

What did everyone see in him?

I persisted, and eventually I came to the kind of rudimentary understanding of Derrida that I think many people passing through English departments during that time arrived at. (How strange that time now seems!) He and his friend Paul de Man, the leading deconstructionists, had come up with a method of reading literary texts that was quite simple, even mechanical, if you could decode all the playful punning of the verbiage. To wit: identify a “binary opposition” between two terms in the text. Show how these two terms, despite being opposed, actually depend on each other and are mutually constituted. Then seize upon some obscure moment in the text, use all your ingenuity to show how, if you picked at it long enough, the apparent opposition between the two terms would unravel. Proclaim that the text had deconstructed itself, and that this was a function of language (or, to use the preferred term, “discourse”) itself, not something that you, the reader, were “doing” to the text. This was the underlying “lesson” of all texts, so it could be repeated, ad infinitum.

Sounds disappointing, right? For someone like me, it was. I realized from the start that Derrida was primarily a philosopher and I was not, and that there were other issues at stake in what he was doing (to use the philosophical jargon, the “critique of the metaphysics of presence”). What my teachers were doing with Derrida really was an oversimplification, and philosophers who defended him were not complete idiots. I could, somewhat hazily, get a grasp of the issues at stake in his philosophy, especially on the occasions when I was willing to dig into the philosophical tradition he was commenting upon. But among the people I knew, these strictly philosophical considerations had little to do with why he was “hot.” On the one hand, he provided an easy method of reading. On the other, some people claimed to find radical politics in this method, and enlisted it in the support of various kinds of feminism and identity politics.

This closely resembles my own, admittedly uninformed take on Derrida (my undergraduate study was blissfully theory-free, and by the time I got to graduate school, the historicists had grabbed the spotlight). It has the invaluable added bonus of providing a credible justification for my ignorance. I just didn’t know it was my take until Leonard so nicely articulated it.

As of today, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine is now available for immediate purchase from amazon.com.

You know what to do.

“Corker looked at him sadly. ‘You know, you’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.'”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop