“For five generations, the marquis’ name was taboo in our family,” Hugues marveled. “It was as if there was an omertà (conspiracy of silence) against him! The family no longer even used the title marquis.”
Literature
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Mortal Enemy, Immortal Ally: How Writers Measure Time
Time carried back to the future, once again seen and understood as it was in antiquity, not only as mortal enemy but also as immortal ally. The counterrevolution against the autocratic regime of uniform, global time (commercially and politically imperialist) was pressed forward by many of the artists and writers of Einstein’s generation unwilling to […]
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Mallory Ortberg on the Goofballs of the Western Canon
I went to the kind of college that really does say, “Here is the Western canon, read it.” Which is definitely not the only thing you want to do with your English major, you definitely want to reach beyond that, but it was pretty traditional in that sense. So I read the Western canon and […]
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Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: ‘The Longest and Most Charming Love Letter in Literature’
Orlando has long had a towering, and very much deserved, reputation in the LGBT community; it was published the same year Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness, depicting lesbianism as a tragic curse, became a bestseller. Woolf’s creation of a figure who effortlessly changes sex casually upends any notion that biological sex is related […]
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The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown
Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There […]
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Maya Angelou on the Joys of Being Edited
When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him […]
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When Groucho Marx Quoted ‘The Waste Land’ to T.S. Eliot
Strange but true: Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot were pen-pals. Their correspondence began in 1961, when T.S. Eliot sent Groucho Marx a fan letter. It continued for several years, with them finally meeting for dinner in 1964. From a recent post on Daybook: The much-postponed event took place just seven months before Eliot’s death at […]
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A Well-Rounded Scholar: The Many Alter Egos of A. D. Harvey
Charitably, we can see the practice of reviewing one’s own works as a kind of knowing critique of the insider trading that can occur among authors and reviewers. Why bother to solicit reviews for your books when you can write them yourself? There may, however, be something more poignant here. Even for holders of tenured […]
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Television vs. the Novel
Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel: Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel. In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, […]
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Where the Gift of Writing Comes From
Let me state it so you get the picture clear as wind chimes in a soft breeze on a somnolent noon. Underlying my existence is a deeper intelligence that speaks to me when I am writing. My artist friends say I am an anomaly—no education, no family grounding, no proper socialization. My writing gifts seem to […]