Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 23, 2010The Latest Literary Flap in the TLSEric Felton's "De Gustibus" column on Friday in the Wall Street Journal is always a good read, and today he reported on the Times Literary Supplement's coverage of a flutter in the British dovecote. Historian Orlando Figes tried to blame his wife for writing some of those Amazon "reviews" which trashed other people's work and praised his own [he has since confessed to doing it himself]. Another writer, Rachel Polonsky, was responsible for the unmasking. I was tickled to read about this in the WSJ, since I don't get my TLS until it's a week or so late.
I wonder, though, if Felton hits quite the right note.
"Rachel Polonsky is the heroine of the story," declared the Times Literary Supplement [...] And yes, perhaps she is. But she's also comic relief. Isn't there something vaguely ridiculous about a prominent author obsessing over a single lousy review from a single lousy anonymous critic?
Well, yes, there might be, and the TLS will regard the whole thing pretty much the way Felton does. "The heroine of the story" is irony; it is that paper's delight in this sort of thing that makes some of us turn to the TLS's letters page first thing each week.
April 23, 2010Now It's the Baptists Who Are in TroubleI had the good fortune to meet and speak with Christopher Hitchens a year or two ago in Ames, Iowa; now he is involved in planning to have the Pope arrested in connection with covering up sexual abuse by priests. Speaking of the Times Literary Supplement, I wonder if Christopher is aware of the review in the issue of 16 April by Patrick Lindsay Bowles of Christa Brown's book, This Little Light. Brown was raped as a child by a pastor, who quoted scripture all the while; she has recovered 30 years later, and has turned out to be quite a writer and something of a detective. This is about the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Conference, America's largest Protestant church. To quote from the review:
Data from American insurance companies suggests that Protestant clergy lead Catholics in the sexual abuse of children, with the SBC the worst offender [...] When the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse disappears, as it inevitably will, the resulting class action will probably spell the end of the SBC.
Hitchens and Dawkins have their work cut out for them, bringing down the Catholic church. That church has more money.
April 23, 2010A Book is a Book is a BookStill on the subject of the Times Literary Supplement, the 16 April number has a review by Keith Miller of Reality Hunger, by Keith Shields, billed as "a manifesto for weary writers of fiction". Shields's book is a sort of compilation, like a commonplace book, so this is complicated, but it made me want to jump and shout. Here is Miller quoting Shields:
A defining moment for Shields was the furor which rang out when James Frey was found to have invented portions of his "misery memoir", A Million Little Pieces, and was made to hang his head on the Oprah Winfrey Show: "Oh how we Americans gnash our teeth in bitter anger when we discover that the riveting truth that also played like a Sunday matinee was actually just a Sunday matinee". The problem for Shields is not the invention part:
[This is from Alice Marshall, one of 618 numbered paragraphs]
I'm disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn't a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about themselves is a liar. I created a character meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be. He could have talked about the parallels between a writer's persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.
Yes! There is no such thing as an autobiography, not even an autobiography. In order to write my life story I would have to write the life stories of everyone I have ever known, and of all of my ancestors, and the job would never be done: my autobiography could only be a prejudicial salami slice of my story; and it would stand or fall as a work of art just as if it were marketed as fiction. Frey's publishers offered the money back to any reader who was disappointed; there were very few takers.
Nobody knows who Oprah Winfrey really is; she will never write an autobiography, and if she did I would not believe a word of it. Yet she is the queen of daytime television. There is a lesson in there somewhere. I promise to believe in her if she gives me a a new car.
April 23, 2010No End to Epiphanies as Long as We LiveI am corresponding with Gavin Bantock, who lives in Japan, and who is a fan of Jascha Horenstein, and spotted the CD discography of Horenstein elsewhere on this site. He is the grandson of the composer Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946), and has very kindly sent me some recordings of his grandfather's music. It is a revelation.
There is a disc on the Dutton label of chamber music for cello, which I have not even got to yet, and a box of six CDs of Bantock's orchestral music on Hyperion, by Vernon Handley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. (Handley was one of the best-loved British conductors of his generation, who died in September of 2008.) Bantock had his greatest success before the First World War, before broadcasting and talking films: his music takes us back to another world, when instead of being dazzled by special effects and car chases, people were able to enter a sound-world about Dante and Beatrice, Sapho, The Cyprian Goddess, and so on. I have just listened three times to Bantock's most successful tone poem, Fifine at the Fair (c.1912), on a poem by Browning: I cannot decide whether it is as though Mahler and Strauss had never lived, or whether Bantock should be added with them to the dry stone wall between Wagner and the 20th century. Whatever, this is music with integrity which has been overlooked for a long time.