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76 comes before 50 and other soft-boiled lessons from a lesson on The Sun Also Rises

I have just made a mistake that, with better luck, might not have been a mistake at all. I searched the iTunes U collection for lectures about Hemingway, specifically about The Sun Also Rises, a novel that keeps calling me back for more this summer. The search led me to a lecture by Associate Professor John Bishop. Bishop devoted two of the 27 lectures in his English 45C course to The Sun Also Rises. Great. Bishop teaches at Berkeley. I graduated from Berkeley. Great.

But no.

I regret listening. I can only regret listening more if I take the time to explain all the reasons I regret listening.

Here are just three reasons:

1) Professor Bishop seems not to have noticed that the novel has scenes that are really, really funny and that there must have been days when Hemingway sat at his writing desk laughing out loud.

2) Professor Bishop quotes the novel out of context. Repeatedly. I only know this because I’ve started to memorize The Sun Also Rises. Not on purpose. Not with any premeditation. It’s just from repeated exposure to the prose. Very concentrated exposure. All of it during this summer. Really, all in the last few weeks.

3) I’ve eaten a hard-boiled egg. Many of them by now, at 37. So experience clashes hard with Professor Bishop’s statement that “You probably noticed hard-boiled eggs showing up throughout the novel. On page 73 and 126 in Spain, hard-boiled suggests everything looks hard on the outside but it’s very soft on the inside.” Symbolism is nifty, but I’m here to say that an egg is sometimes just an egg. Even so, I’m also here to say that a “hard-boiled” egg that is “very soft on the inside” needs to go back in the boiling water. It hasn’t been cooked enough. My dictionary says so. Its definition for “hard-boiled” begins with “1. (of an egg) boiled until the white and the yolk are solid.”

I’m not writing this because of eggs. I’m writing because of words like this in Professor Bishop’s lecture:

The characters who are admired keep their pain to themselves. We know that they’re in pain. And they include Bill Gorton, who on page 76 to 77 we learn has just come back from Vienna and he can’t remember what happened there, presumably because he’s been on a drinking binge. And he says that, “I make it a point never to be daunted. Whenever I feel daunted, I creep off like a cat and hide.” Now, that line’s repeated by Harry Stone on page 50. The stoic characters just go off, like Jake Barnes in his hotel room, crying to himself, and not telling everybody how miserable they are.

The least important problem with those words is that I can’t find a place where Gorton says that. Not that exactly. His speech is clipped. It’s clipped because he’s drunk. Drunk and ridiculous. So Gorton’s doing stuff like trying, on the way to a restaurant dinner, to talk Jake Barnes into buying a stuffed dog from a taxidermy shop. To me, that’s funny all by itself. Same with Jake’s disingenuous attempt to fend Gorton off with “We’ll get it on the way back.”

Damn near everything that follows is funny, too:

“All right. Have it your way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

We went on.

“How’d you feel that way about dogs so sudden?”

“Always felt that way about dogs. Always been a great lover of stuffed animals.”

We stopped and had a drink.

“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said. “You ought to try it some times, Jake.”

“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”

“Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public.”

“Where were you drinking?”

“Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George’s a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted.”

“You’ll be daunted after about three more pernods.”

“Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

“When did you see Harvey Stone?”

It goes on. But I’ll stop because that last line matters so much.

Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop. (Bishop calls him Harry Stone, but that’s nothing.) Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop because Stone “on page 50” repeats what Gorton says “on page 76 to 77.” I promise I’m not being pedantic by insisting that the guy speaking earlier on page 50 cannot repeat the words another guy speaks later on page 76. The whole point is that Gorton (page 76) is repeating Stone (page 50).

This matters because it’s this nice little joke that we’re in on with Jake Barnes. Like Barnes, we’re many, many steps ahead of the pitifully sloshed Gorton. Barnes knows he’s way ahead of Gorton. So when Gorton says “I’m like a cat that way,” Barnes doesn’t say “You know, I heard Harvey Stone say something like that a few days ago.” No, he’s so sure of the source of the “like a cat” talk that he answers straight away with “When did you see Harvey Stone?”

That makes me laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make you laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make Professor Bishop laugh. I’m just saying that Professor Bishop, minimally, needs to not ask his students to pretend that page 50 comes after page 76. I’d also urge him to rethink whether the buffoon going on about “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs” should be put quite so cleanly into the category of the “characters who are admired” and whether there isn’t actually a certain vulnerability inherent in confiding to a friend that “If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

Professor Bishop laments that “Bill Gorton and Harry (sic) Stone seem to me like versions in the novel of what Jake Barnes would look like if we weren’t privy to Jake Barnes’ thoughts and reflections.”

There — right there in that lament — is Hemingway’s triumph in The Sun Also Rises. With minimal fuss, minimal sharing of feelings, we see right through to the hurt at the center of Jake Barnes and the people around him. There’s real beauty in that.

“
Anne Tyler is the person who first made me want to write: I picked up Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a bookshop, started to read it there and then, bought it, took it home, finished it, and suddenly I had an ambition, for about the first time in my life.
Nick Hornby in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, giving me yet another book I hope to find time to read and cementing my fear that I’ll become a needle-tracked junkie if someone devises a way to cook literature on a spoon and draw it up into a syringe. Stay in school, kids.
“
Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, about a fortysomething pottery teacher who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil, was moving along nicely until a character starts talking about football. He tells a teaching colleague that he’s been to see Arsenal, and that “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0.” Readers of this column will have realized by now that I know almost nothing about anything, but if I were forced to declare one area of expertise, it would be what people say to each other after football matches. It’s not much, I know, but it’s mine. And I am positive that no one has ever said “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0” in the entire history of either Arsenal Football Club or the English league. “Beat,” thrashed,” “did” or “done,” “trounced,” “thumped,” “shat all over,” “walloped,” etc., yes; “won,” emphatically, no. And I think that my dismay and disbelief then led me to question other things, and the fabric of the novel started to unravel a little. … I like Zoë Heller’s writing, and this book has a terrific narrative voice that recalls Alan Bennett’s work; I just wish I wasn’t so picky. This is how picky I am. You know the Arsenal bit? It wasn’t just the unconvincing demotic I objected to; it was the score. Arsenal haven’t beaten Liverpool 3-0 at Highbury since 1991. What chance did the poor woman have?

- Nick Hornby in The Polysyllabic Spree, one of several collections of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer magazine.

I’ve known of this book for a long time. I’ve picked it up at bookstores. I’ve held it, flipped through it. I’ve always set it down. Why? The truest and most foolish reason is that I have this aversion to music groups that wear any sort of uniform. So I’ve never given The Polyphonic Spree a chance. The title of The Polysyllabic Spree forced me to think of The Polyphonic Spree. Therefore, I couldn’t give The Polysyllabic Spree a real chance. Foolish and true. True and foolish. More foolish still since I loved High Fidelity and found Juliet, Naked engrossing enough to post “Hornby ≠ Tolstoy. And yet …” back in February.

Now, somehow, after only a few pages, The Polysyllabic Spree has won me over so thoroughly that I’m feeling guilty for never giving The Polyphonic Spree a chance.

This could happen to you.

The only reason the book is in my house is that I tried and failed to talk someone into letting my son shoot baskets at his school’s gym today. Having failed, I fell into talking with a man who’s teaching a summer class at the school. A basketball class. But he’s also a writer.

Soon, we’d gone from “Sorry. No. We have to close up.” about shooting hoops and moved on to Malcolm Gladwell, Carl Sagan, the value of prose that’s accessible without being dumb, and then ultimately on to the accessible-without-being-dumb Nick Hornby.

The man recommended the books of Hornby’s columns so enthusiastically that I hit the library on the way home. I scored The Polysyllabic Spree and Shakespeare Wrote For Money. And now, having evangelized to the two or three people on Earth who have denied themselves these books because of lunatic prejudice against uniformed musicians, I would like to go back to my reading and then on to bed.

“
Our business was advertising and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client’s toll-free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter they could go to the website, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.

- from the opening of Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End.

So, the narrator asks, “Is this boring you yet?” No. Not even a bit. The novel’s first ten pages are the most effective, engrossing use of “we” and “our” I think I’ve ever read. There’s also the efficiency of it. Take the novel’s first seven sentences:

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently.

The “we” and the “our” lets Ferris vault over relative trivialities — location, era, character names. It left me eager to read on. After ten pages, I remain eager to read on.

For more of Joshua Ferris, I recommend listening to the 5/13/2010 episode of The New Yorker fiction podcast: Monica Ali reading Ferris’s “The Dinner Party” and discussing it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

Letter to John Updike

If this were 1985 instead of 2010 and I had a Juki daisywheel printer instead of a blog, I might have interrupted The Anthologist to write letters to Nicholson Baker. Instead, I interrupted his novel to write this and this.

Without putting a return address on the envelope.

Without even using an envelope.

Also, I just want to note that I, at 37, cannot write sentences as long as Nicholson Baker wrote to John Updike when he was 28.

Instead, these fragments.

That will have to be OK.

nybooks:

Nicholson Baker

Twenty-five years ago, when I was twenty-eight and trying to write a novel, I sent this fan letter to John Updike. I lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, back then, and my girlfriend, now my wife, lived in Boston. I printed the letter out all on one page, with narrow margins, using my new Kaypro computer and Juki daisywheel printer. Updike didn’t answer—he couldn’t, because I didn’t put a return address on the envelope.

(this post was reblogged from nybooks)
“
It was actually kind of a turning point for me, as a young writer, to realize that the first person could be a very useful character. It’s a character who can change — within limits, of course — from piece to piece. It can have different uses, play different roles. Yes, everything the “I” character says in one of my stories is something I actually said, but that’s less confining than it sounds, simply because, by selecting what to quote, I can, in virtually every case, make myself out to be a jerk or a genius or anything in between.

New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan interviewed in The New New Journalism

Yes, yes, yes. I realize I’ve done several posts on this one book. I realize I’m posting about it as if I have some financial stake in selling copies of it. I don’t. There’s not even some cozy relationship between me and Robert Boynton, the book’s author. In fact, I e-mailed Boynton on May 6 with a concern about the book’s Kindle edition and I never heard back from him. My nose is a bit out of joint over that. So there’s no good reason for me to be writing so much about his book.

Except that there is. There’s a great reason. I’m finding the book so rich, so useful that I want to tell people about it. I have. Three times already on this very blog. Big deal! You can’t fathom the restraint I’ve shown.

For instance, I can’t turn up any evidence that I’ve blogged a single word about Boynton’s interview with Michael Lewis.  I stayed admirably silent about two moments in that interview that I found especially winning. It’s great — and a little dorky — that Lewis told Boynton that he cackles to himself while writing. Also, in ways I can’t quite justify, I love that Lewis said, “I have huge literary ambitions. When I bother to write a book, I hope it is a book that might one day be thought a ‘classic.’ I have grandiose notions of what my writing might be and that’s what gets me excited.”

On one level, I see that and I’m almost embarrassed for the guy. Because he said it. He said it out loud. People are going to know that he’s so grandiose.

On every other level, though, my reaction is just “Hell, yes!”

In my newspaper days, there was not a single time I did good work by reminding myself that readers would be lining bird cages with my story within 36 hours. No, I tend more toward the grandiose. So I appreciate Lewis’ company.

Andrew Sullivan wrote something Monday that might seem, at first, to drive a skewer right through the very idea of grandiose ambitions in journalism: “The basic truth is that amateurs are often as good as professionals in journalism, which requires simply basic skills, integrity and practice.”

Sullivan’s right. Especially about the last part. I’d quibble with his use of the word “simply.” Sure, “basic skills” are, well, basic skills. But “integrity and practice” are no small things. Particularly, as I’m sure Sullivan would agree, when the practice goes on for decades. And that’s what’s on display in The New New Journalism: people who have practiced their craft, people who have thought about their work, people who are so advanced that they can get back to simple. On that point, one (probably) final William Finnegan quote:

There was a time when I was almost more interested in the sound of my sentences than in whatever sense they made. Working as a journalist for a couple of decades has pretty much knocked that out of me, and I’ve stopped letting myself write the kinds of rhetorical glissandos and crescendos that I still hear in my head. On balance, that’s a good thing. I’m sure.

“
The financial world has changed a lot since I worked in it and the biggest change is more people are playing with more of other people’s money. When most of the banks were partnerships, they had to be in it for the long run because people who were partners were playing with their own capital and taking risk with their own assets.

Emanuel Derman, formerly of Goldman Sachs. (via The Daily Dish)

Reading Derman’s words, I was struck — yet again — by how prescient Michael Lewis was way back in 1989. Here’s page 136 of Liar’s Poker:

“When the firm was a partnership (1910-1981) and managers had their own money in the till, loose controls sufficed. Now, however, the money didn’t belong to them but to the shareholders. And what worked for a partnership proved disastrous in a publicly owned corporation. Instead of focusing on profits, trading managers focused on revenues. They were rewarded for indiscriminate growth.”

Lewis put a finer point on things this year in the closing pages of The Big Short:

“At some point I could not help but ask John Gutfreund about his biggest and most fateful act: Combing through the rubble of the avalanche, the decision to turn the Wall Street partnership into a public corporation looked a lot like the first pebble kicked off the top of the hill. … The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer financial risk to the shareholders. ‘When things go wrong it’s their problem,’ (Gutfreund) said …”

I was touting The Big Short just yesterday to a guy I hadn’t seen in months. He, in turn, had great things to say about 13 Bankers, which I haven’t read yet. A website for that book is here.

I e-mailed my favorite blogger last night. Today he excerpted my e-mail on his blog. I’m grateful.

As it stands, my words are attributed to “a reader.” It’s an accurate description, but I can’t stay true to my own standards unless I sign my name to my e-mailed critique of “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Nicholas Carr’s piece in the current Wired. If I keep my name off the critique, I will need to stop griping about the sucker punches people throw from the shadows of online anonymity. I like that high horse and I’m unwilling to dismount.

So I’ll post my full e-mail here. As you’ll see, the e-mail refers to “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble,” the title of the post that brought Carr’s article to my attention and prompted last night’s e-mail. The post’s title came from an image Carr used in Wired: “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.”

Here, without any further throat-clearing, is last night’s e-mail …

Dear Andrew:

I’m writing because I found “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble” to be almost entirely unpersuasive. It just struck me, though, that there’s something I should do before I dissect Nicholas Carr’s claims: retrace my steps, tell you how I got here. I’ll do this because my accidental, unpremeditated path feels meaningfully different from the “watching the landscape from a train” experience you described.

This started with my wife sending me an e-mail with an uncapitalized “sullivan” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, she pasted your Ralph-the-pig-themed “Emails of the Day.” Reading those, I saw the words “pig nipples” in hypertext. Now, I’m not a prude, but I haven’t ever clicked the words “pig nipples” before. Tonight I did. Why? My best guess is that many of those futile, little thimbles that I’ve splashed into the bathtub of my mind have been infused with this basic idea: “Dear Bathtub: We got these ideas from Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan posts worthwhile stuff. He uses links sparingly and intelligently. We can’t click all links. But Sullivan’s links tend to be worthwhile. Remember this. Yours sincerely, Thimble.”

And so I clicked “pig nipples.” This launched my browser, pulled up “The Sexually Ambiguous, Swimming Pig, Ctd” post, and gave me the pleasure of learning the expression “worthless as teats on a boar hog.” In fairness to Nicholas Carr, I can’t be sure that I will remember that expression two months from now. But I’m OK with that. Truly.

Having finished reading the “teats on a boar hog” post, my eyes drifted toward the right of the screen. I saw your picture. My gaze drifted further right to Megan McArdle’s picture. I thought of my friend Aaron, a doctor with keen ideas on healthcare reform who has been unimpressed by some of McArdle’s work. Right or wrong, the thought of Aaron pulled my eyes away from McArdle and back to you. Under your photo, I saw the cryptically truncated words “Filling A Bathtub With A…” With the interrupting ellipses, those five words were even less promising than “pig nipples.” But I clicked anyway, read through your “Filling A Bathtub With A Thimble” post, and emerged feeling skeptical. Remembering Thimble’s note, Bathtub reminded me that you use links sparingly and intelligently and that I could delve deeper into Carr’s ideas by clicking the link in your post. So I clicked.

As I clicked, I was distracted — not by pop-up ads or by a surfeit of hypertext but by hearing my spaniel pad past. This reminded me that I’d already broken my promise to take the dogs straight out five minutes earlier. When made to wait, our dogs sometimes pee inside. I eyed the spaniel, confirmed that he was settling in for a nap instead of sniffing around for a peeing spot, and started to read Carr’s piece. By the end of the first paragraph, I was completely distracted — not by Twitter, not by incoming e-mail, not by the peril of canine piss but by a flaw in the evidence Carr cites.

Carr opens with a UCLA study in which volunteers “used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics — the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car — (while an) MRI scanned their brains …”

Well, Bathtub was roiling at this point. Bathtub wanted me to stop reading, to forget about Carr. Why? Because long experience has taught Bathtub that Google is useful for learning precisely because it allows users to sprint after information at the moment when curiosity strikes, at the exact moment when our minds are most primed to receive, value, and retain information. And Bathtub somehow doubted that these UCLA volunteers, gamely going along with the experiment, were ablaze with curiosity about the nutritional benefits of chocolate or vacationing in the Galapagos Islands or buying a new car or whatever the other “preselected topics” may have been. So Bathtub didn’t think this experiment had anything to tell Carr or you or me about real-life Internet use.

But Bathtub is nothing if not fair. So Bathtub then reminded me that I’ve always learned better by hearing than by reading and that it would be a simple matter to put Carr’s piece on my Kindle, plug in some headphones, leash up the dogs, go outside, stop worrying about pee-puddled carpeting, and command the Kindle’s little text-to-speech robot man to read Carr’s words to me while the dogs sniffed around the front yard. So that’s what I did.

I ended up believing that Carr gets things right and wrong: right when he acknowledges our agency by writing that “we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture”;  wrong, among other places, when he implicitly denies our agency with the “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” subtitle of his forthcoming book.

The Internet is not doing anything to our brains. We may be doing bad things to our brains. But the things that we are doing have been possible as long as there have been libraries. Any library patron has always been free to read a paragraph, re-shelve the book, grab a new one, skim its preface, re-shelve it, wander to the periodicals section, grab the New York Times magazine, flip to the fancy real estate ads in the back, think of West Egg and East Egg and Jay Gatsby, put down the magazine, head to the fiction section, reach out for Fitzgerald’s classic, realize that he’s never read anything by Fitzgerald’s wife, wonder if this makes him a sexist, decide that it just might, scan the fiction Fitzgeralds until he finds Zelda, grab a copy of Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, start to read the first paragraph, question his own memory, flip to the author bio to confirm that Zelda was truly married to the Gatsby author, see that Zelda was born in Montgomery, think of the Montgomery bus boycott, remember that he’s been meaning to buckle down and read Taylor Branch’s MLK biographies, head off for the biography section.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Most of us don’t do that in libraries. But we could.

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

If you’ve read this far, Andrew, you may still be a more patient reader than you imagine yourself to be.

With best wishes,

David

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newyorker:

Fiction Podcast: Monica Ali reads Joshua Ferris’s “The Dinner Party.”

For more from Monica Ali.
More from Joshua Ferris.

This podcast left me so impressed with Joshua Ferris that I immediately got the audiobook of his latest novel, The Unnamed. Ferris reads the novel himself. It works.

There’s also an interview with Ferris on the last CD. Very worthwhile stuff in that. I plan to write about it here soon.

(this post was reblogged from newyorker)
“
Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain.

an especially effective sentence from page 18 of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains

I also admire the three sentences at the end of that same paragraph:

For a while, the air is smarting with mosquitoes, and weird little bugs that don’t bite but just dive right for your eyes. Later there are stars, and silence. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.

Great Plains, according to the paperback’s cover, was a bestseller back in 1989. So it doesn’t need my meager, belated help. And Frazier shouldn’t have to put up with the backhanded compliment I’m about to type. So he should look away. His fans, too. Better to read the introduction to Frazier’s Believer interview.

This next part is only for people like me, people who — just as I was this very morning — are tempted to put Great Plains down almost as soon as they pick it up.

I might have stopped on page 3, the book’s first page: all those exclamation points! I might have stopped on pages 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8. But someone I respect had vouched for the book. So I kept going.  Then, page 9. I felt — without knowing it yet, of course — like the woman on page 13: “… you come over a little rise, and the horizon jumps 100 miles in an instant. My friend’s jaw — her whole face, really — fell, and she said, ‘I had no idea!’”

Rather, in my case, the horizon got pleasingly closer. No more views from flyover jets. No more peering out across time to spy mere glimpses of 1806 or 1822 or 1918.

I’m in the flow now. This post is premature since I’m still early in the book and can’t promise I’ll stay in the flow. My purpose is narrow. I want this to be here — even if it’s only once — when a reader as impatient as I am Googles the book’s opening sentence in search of some like-minded kvetch, some blogger who will say, “No. You’re not crazy. All those exclamation points are off-putting.”

But the !phobe will also find two more words: Keep reading!

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I don’t know what’s wrong — or right — with my brain that I can tolerate and even savor having the robot voice on my Kindle read stuff to me. The sound clip above from Infinite Jest is the Kindle’s perfomance of David Foster Wallace’s recreation of a speech defect. Here, for the karaoke-minded, are the words so you can sing along:

… I’ll always wemember this one day, boy. It was against Sywacuse, what, eight seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day and a avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine. Seventy-thwee for Chwist’s sake. Open me anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky was cloudy. When he punted you spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung. He had a long hang-time of eight-point-thwee seconds that day. That’s sewious hanging, boy. Me I nevewit five in my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they never heawd anything like the sound of the son of a bitch’s seventy …

Played 265 times
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nybooks:

Podcast: Dan Chiasson on Lydia Davis

Dan Chiasson reads from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which he reviewed in the April 29, 2010 issue of The New York Review, and talks to Gabriel Winslow-Yost about accidental greatness, lonely translators, and reading at stoplights.

Back in February, I blogged my own very first impression of Davis. It was about as preliminary as a thing can be, but it’s reassuring that it seems approximately in harmony with what Chiasson has to say in this NYRB podcast. I enjoyed Chiasson’s take. I also like that, thanks to Davis’ conciseness, Chiasson reads her at stoplights and tacks up entire stories of hers outside his campus office.

(this post was reblogged from nybooks)
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