Reviews and News:
Tired of all the idiots on Twitter? Take a lesson from Nicholas Lezard. Lezard and Peter Hitchens sparred on Twitter, and a day before Lezard thrashed Hitchens in his New Statesman column, Hitchens visited for tea: “During his visit I realised I had an awkward duty facing me. I was becoming increasingly conscious that, the next day, in newsagents throughout the land, the latest edition of this magazine would appear, and in it, on page 82, would be a column by me, which contained several jokes at the expense of P. Hitchens, Esq. And I knew that this column would not escape his vigilance. I massaged the bridge of my nose and launched into a pre-emptive apology. ‘I think I had better tell you…’ He seemed to take it fairly well, though I’d not given him the full nature of my assault. When we were tossing insults back and forth on Twitter, he seemed barely human; now, in my living room, he all too clearly was. I suppose this is how we all see our enemies on Twitter: as botched versions of the Turing Test, spouting opinions that are quite clearly wrong in spite of all our well-reasoned arguments. The only variable is how quickly the arguments de-evolve into base invective.”
USC leaves off the final “e” of Shakespeare’s name on a new statue. Was it intentional?
In praise of Donald E. Westlake: “Those first Westlake books zipped by so quickly that I wasn’t even aware I was reading them until they were over. And unlike all the ‘serious’ and ‘noteworthy’ books I usually tried to read, they never had me anxiously checking how many pages there were left until the next chapter, or looking up words in the dictionary, or skimming back over the previous pages to find something I had missed. Every image leapt off the page; every scene quickly set me in a location so vivid and immediate that it felt like I wasn’t entering some fictional space but simply remembering an actual location where I had already been. And every line of dialogue opened up the voice and personality of the character who spoke it.”
Curious what Purgatory will be like? Buy and read Beyoncé’s 600-page $300-dollar coffee table book on her 2016 album Lemonade.
The love affairs of Stan Laurel: “If I had to do it over again things would be different.”
John Maher at Publisher’s Weekly talks to Pamela Paul about the changes (some still forthcoming) in New York Times’s book coverage.
The man who studied the sun’s puzzling heat: “It’s natural to assume the corona is cooler than the sun’s blazing surface. But in fact it gets hotter as it ranges outward. The Sun’s surface temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The corona can get as hot as 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit. This phenomenon, known as the ‘coronal heating problem,’ ‘remains one of the great unsolved problems in space science,’ says James A. Klimchuk, research astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.”
The paradoxes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “He is a predecessor of liberalism and a theorist of fascism; a champion of the Enlightenment and its most severe critic; a Classicist critic of Romanticism and vice versa; and an advocate of humane, child-centred education, despite giving up his own five children to an orphanage and almost certain death.”
Essay of the Day:
If you only read one thing today, make it Thomas E. Ricks’s account of revising his book on Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Ricks’s submitted the manuscript to his long-time editor, Scott Moyer, 18 months ago. Moyer hated it:
“I had written five books for Scott Moyers, following him as he moved from editing jobs at Scribner’s to Random House and then to Penguin Press. We worked well together, and in part thanks to his strong editing hand, my last three books had been bestsellers.
“So what happened when I finished years of work and sent him the manuscript of my sixth book stunned me. In fact, I was in for a series of surprises.
“They began about 18 months ago, after I emailed to him that manuscript, a dual appreciation of Winston Churchill and George Orwell. When I had begun work on it, in 2013, some old friends of mine thought the subject was a bit obscure. Why would anyone care how two long-dead Englishmen, a conservative politician and a socialist journalist who never met, had dealt with the polarized political turmoil of the 1930s and the world war that followed? By 2016, as people on both the American left and right increasingly seemed to favor opinion over fact, the book had become more timely.
“But two weeks after I sent him the manuscript, I received a most unhappy e-mail back from him. “I fear that the disconnect over what this book should be might be fundamental,” Scott wrote to me, clearly pained to do so. What I had sent him was exactly the book he had told me not to write. He had warned me, he reminded me, against writing an extended book review that leaned on the weak reed of themes rather than stood on a strong foundation of narrative. I had put the works before the two men, he told me, and that would not do.
“There was more. But in short, he pissed all over it. It was not that he disliked it. It was that he f——— hated it. I was taken aback—I had enjoyed the process of researching and writing the book. So, I had expected, a reader would too. No, Scott said, the way you’ve done this doesn’t work.
“Partly, I was crushed. But even more, I was puzzled. How could I have been so off in my perception of my manuscript? This wasn’t a hurried work of a few months. For three years, I had steeped myself in Churchill, Orwell, and their times, reading hundreds of books, which were scattered in piles across the floor of my office in the attic of my home in Maine. The biggest of the piles was books by Churchill himself. The second biggest was diaries, memoirs, and collected letters by British politicians and writers of the 1930s and ’40s.
“Scott followed up with a lengthy letter—I think it was about 10 pages—detailing his concerns. I live on an island on the coast of Maine. I received the letter the day before a major snowstorm. A few hours after it arrived, several old trees along the road downed power lines, taking the internet with them.
“Cut off from email and other off-island communication, I spent that snowy day reading and rereading Scott’s letter.”
Read the rest (HT to publishing pro Bria Sanford for the link)
Photos: Scotland’s far north
Poem: J. D. Smith, “This Too Be Verse”
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