New Bill Bryson? I'll have to check the bookstore tomorrow night to see if it's out yet.
There's a book on the bestseller list I hadn't heard of yet that sounds fascinating, Loving Frank, a fictionalized account of the scandal that rocked Oak Park, IL about 100 years ago, when Frank Lloyd Wright left his wife and six kids for the wife of one of his clients. WGN radio is going to have the author on tomorrow morning. IIRC, the paramour/second wife is the one who was later murdered by their handyman at Taliesin.
Loving Frank
I heard an NPR story about that and had to look up his Wikipedia entry so I could find out what the "tragic end" of the story was. It certainly was tragic.
Huh. Do Betsy and my wife know about The Victorian Web: Literature, History and Culture in the Age of Victoria?
(This particular article is about Bleak House.)
Which leads me to Nabokov's lectures on Bleak House which I really love.
Some readers may suppose that such things as these evocations are trifles not worth stopping at; but literature consists of such trifles. Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular revelations, not of schools of thought but of individuals of genius. Literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist. The passage describing the harbor at Deal occurs at a point when Esther travels to the town in order to see Richard, whose attitude towards life, the strain of freakishness in his otherwise noble nature, and the dark destiny that hangs over him, trouble her and make her want to help him. Over her shoulder Dickens shows us the harbor. There are many vessels there, a multitude of boats that appear with a kind of quiet magic as the fog begins to rise. Among them, as mentioned, there is a large Indiaman, that is, a merchant ship just home from India: "when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea. . . ." Let us pause: can we visualize that? Of course we can, and we do so with a greater thrill of recognition because in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time, with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sound of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. And then Dickens goes on to indicate the way "these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed" — and I think it is quite impossible to choose and combine any better words than he did here to render the delicate quality of shadow and silver sheen in that delightful sea view. And for those who would think that all magic is just play — pretty play — but something that can be deleted without impairing the story, let me point out that this is the story: the ship from India there, in that unique setting, is bringing, has brought, young Dr. Woodcourt back to Esther, and in fact they will meet in a moment. So that the shadowy silver view, with those tremendous pools of light and that bustle of shimmering boats, acquires in retrospect a flutter of marvelous excitement, a glorious note of welcome, a kind of distant ovation. And this is how Dickens meant his book to be appreciated.
Isn't it? While I'm at it, I'll include these fun snippets from Time's review of Nabokov's lectures (which Pynchon attended, incidentally):
... from the podium he projected another character of his own creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings."
No collection of Nabokov's lectures and notes could fully recapture the flavor of his professorial persona, but "Lectures on Literature" comes as close as one could hope for. Elegantly edited by Fredson Bowers, handsomely printed in an oversized format, it includes discussions of seven classic European and English novels and is extensively illustrated with Nabokov's drawings, diagrams, maps, floor plans and marginal annotations ("Idiot!" he scrawled typically next to one of the many mistranslations that outraged him).
Heh. "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives."
Is anybody going to read Denis Johnson's
Tree of Smoke?
"This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives."
I had a professor just like this. Adored him.
Also, now I want to change my name to "Quiddity."
Hec and others will enjoy this article about William Gibson.
Nice piece, P-Cow. This quote was a little distressing:
"If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'
"But I'd say -- ' But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's not --'
"And I'd say, ' But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security."
