i have this joke for it I’m working on where i say i can’t be bothered to read The Art of Fielding because it sounds a bit inside baseball, but then maybe if I’m joking about Harbach I should go for pretending confusion because I think he means Henry Fielding, which is more me.
7 Post-Dickens Victorian fatigue may dampen celebrations of twin bicentenaries, of Robert Browning’s birth and Edward Lear’s on 12 May. Together they can claim an influence that has filtered through to all surreal or nonsense literature and anyone writing in character, from Jay-Z and Beyoncé to Carol Ann Duffy.
It’s the obviousness that disappoints me. I don’t think any serious writer on hip hop would dispute Browning’s influence on Hova.
(If I were the twitter sort we could have such fun mashing up browning & jay-z titles! I’d think of a clever hashtag, and we’d all be full of clever jokes. But I’m not and here we are)
(Actually I’m grateful to this article. I didn’t realise it was the Browning bicentenary.)
So Peter Reading’s dead. I think… I think there wasn’t a better poet in England. Serious, funny, formally brilliant, lucid, tricksy, unsettling, nasty, compassionate sometimes… usw.
One of the few who looked well at the dirty world of now, properly.
He then worked for 22 years as a weighbridge operator at an animal feedmill in Shropshire, a job which left him free to think, until he was sacked for refusing to wear a uniform introduced by new owners of the business.
Good man.
RIP
hello I am just dropping by say that I am thinking about running some kind of competition. There will be a big special prize and all you have to do is tell me what this Robert McCrum article is about.
I mean it looks like it might be about literary careers, but i swear I cannot make it mean a thing – precis is roughly: ‘Writers! some have short careers, some have long ones. Ebooks. There’s a thing. Writers. Sometimes, a character appears in more than one book. space to fill space to fill dictionary of quotations? Wilde.’
Strange paragraph on Yeats:
Every writer has to reconcile life and work. “My life has been in my poems,” Yeats confessed in a letter to a friend. “I have seen others enjoying, while I stood alone with myself – commenting, commenting – a mere dead mirror on which things repeat themselves.” [Letter, 1888] Elsewhere, Yeats wrote that a writer has to choose “perfection of the life, or of the work”. Every great artist who is obliged to confront that choice will come up with a different response.
i) 1888, so Yeats was 23. When 23-year-olds say stuff like that it’s just posing – even/especially when it’s Yeats.
ii) Yeats didn’t say a writer has to choose p of the life or of the work; he says the ‘intellect of man’ is forced to choose between them. I mean yes ‘writers’ are a subset of ‘man’, but he’s not making a rueful reflection on the literary life; it’s how we live, the cost of achievement, tragedy of choice etc.
I shouldn’t really post just to snark but I found this column baffling. Why was he allowed to write this? Book sections are in danger & you’re spending a half-page on this? You’d spike that shit in a second if it wasn’t an ex-ed.
by the way, I’ve taken to Google+, so yknow stick me in a circle if you’re on there. (though I may leave if they don’t calm the fuck down about the ‘give us real name, that you use in your everyday life, while out shopping say’ stuff.)
Just briefly, Strange Attractor Journal Four is out. It is a very enjoyable collection of essays, edited by the tireless Mark Pilkington.
Anyone who has met me in recent years will probably have me heard me muttering that I am working on ’something about the jesuits a sort of essay I suppose i dunno maybe essay no i haven’t published the novel’. It is in this journal, right next to Alan Moore’s John Dee opera.
I am playing it cool about this, not excited to be sitting right next to Alan Moore in a book at all omg panting panic etc.
“Gulliver’s Travels author and satirist used baby talk for coded intimacy in journal of letters”
It’s like some people/ppl didn’t know what I was talking about because they’re quite docile.
Pamela, Amelia, Belinda, Evelina, Cecilia, and of course Roxana not Roxanne.
some ppl seem think my Facebook wall is now the comments box for The Midnight Bell, and that is not so bcz I know for a fact that it will make everything written on this site copyright to Zuckerberg, (and also your book on International Relations Restitution or whatever, yes, you, I think you know who you are that I’m talking to.) So don’t.
I don’t think Amelia is in print. Does anyone else think that’s weird? I think that’s a bit weird. It’s weird isn’t it?
No, come on, it is a bit weird that Amelia isn’t in print. I can go into any shop in the land and buy a copy of Evelina or Pamela or Belinda or Roxana or even Cecilia. But if I asked for Amelia I’d be laughed from here to Timbuktu, which is in Mali.
A bit weird is all.
Maybe like Keymer is on it.
I think… I think we might end up going the long way round to nowhere here. Let’s see.
I like Hazlitt. You should probably stop staring at this screen now and go read some Hazlitt: he’s a better writer than me in most regards, and in fact it’s only really in lives of Napoleon where I’m really confident I have the edge, and that’s only because the sexy stuff I threw in between Boney and Ney gave a lift to some dull bangbangbang it’s-war sections.
Anyhow, being a Hazlitt liker, I was glad to see this article on ReadySteadyBook. But it’s a bit confused; this idea of ‘neglect’ is a little odd, esp w/r/t Hazlitt.
Let’s start with the little practical things:
A fairly flimsy copy of his Collected Essays by Oxford World Classics is the only book readily available on Amazon, itself dating from 1991.
The only book by Hazlitt? The Tom Paulin selected and the OUP selected are both readily available; that Paulin selection is 650pp. Also I don’t know what this ‘Collected Essays’ would be. If it’s 1991, it’s the OUP Selected, 450 pages or so. I think you’d have been stuck with the Ronald Blythe Penguin before that came out; and there was no Amazon or Abe to help you dig up cheap copies of Winterslow or Table Talk.
Three studies by Tom Paulin, Duncan Wu and AC Grayling made a bold stand in favour of his recognition in the past two decades, but are themselves not exactly bestsellers.
rly, the author should give up on the ‘neglected’ hook here: 3 books, all pushed v heavily for a literary subject. They weren’t bestsellers because almost no books like that are: The Day Star of Liberty got plenty of publicity, and did alright, from what I remember, and they all got a fair bit of space, because leftish thinking journalists love Hazlitt, or the idea of Hazlitt. He had a column in the Guardian in about 2001! They organised a whip-round to get him a new headstone!
Basically, Hazlitt’s had a good 20 years: he’s been talked about, a lot, and he’s back as the central figure in Romantic prose (speaking of which, NOTES ON SOME CONTEMPORARIES: I don’t think there’s a really representative selection for De Quincey available; Leigh Hunt only gets a little attention (he is quite boring tbf); Landor is truly neglected. Going a bit later, Pater’s also missing a decent selection. Discursive prose got buried sometime in the 20th.)
I can nit-pick, but really the essay picks up in the second half; sympathetic politics, a heartening call-to-arms.
(By the way, worst essay I’ve ever read on Hazlitt was the long middle by Paul Johnson that the TLS published last year. Thoughtless critical clichés from the 1940s school that scolds Hazlitt for the embarrassment of Liber Amoris. I know the TLS leans Tory, but that’s no reason to host outright fucking divviness.)
It’s just this idea of ‘neglect’ I don’t trust: same as ‘underrated’ – ‘by whom?’ is the question that follows, and I just don’t know who’s neglecting Hazlitt, or why we should mind if the answer is ‘the books pages’. But even that seems untrue: the canons of the 19th and 20th centuries have lost their authority and I think I’ve seen more articles on Hazlitt in the last 10 years than I have on Pope, on Browning, on Spenser (ooh. Hadn’t seen this. In fact can’t see all of it. But Fenton playing the ‘neglected’ card with a bit more style and fit hesitancy there.)
But to step back further, it’s not how things are now: everything is available and the gatekeepers – journalism and academia – look frail. So there’s no need to say Hazlitt is neglected; it looks like a cheap rhetorical position to me; it’s enough to argue that we should read him.