You already know this, but I’m going to say it anyway: Turning your tweets into a book is a terrible idea. “Over the past two years, New Hampshire professor and writer Seth Abramson has cultivated a #resistance Twitter following of more than 500,000 by posting lengthy threads prognosticating about the direction of the investigation into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. And now, following in the footsteps of other #resistance heroes, he’s looking to leverage his Twitter fame to get into a new line of business. In his case, he’s shopping a book…According to the proposal, the book will be based off of edited and rewritten versions of his Twitter threads—a conceit, Abramson declares, ‘whose time has come.’ The book will create a ‘comprehensive, chronological review of the Trump-Russia case by transforming my Twitter “threads” into prose.’” Well, first, it seems the book will be “composed of” not “based off of” (i.e., “based on”) rewritten Twitter threads, and, second, who in their right mind would pay to read such a thing?
Barnes and Noble continues to struggle. “Mr. Riggio, 77, the company’s chairman, disputed the notion that Barnes & Noble is mired in a leadership crisis. After all, he said during an interview at the company’s headquarters on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he has always been there. And he has a plan to turn things around. ‘I have a big stake in the business, I founded it and I’ve been here forever, so I think there’s a lot of stability that comes with that,’ said Mr. Riggio. ‘If we’re without a leader, I’m it.’” For some reason, I don’t think this will reassure investors.
Thank goodness for the return of the generation gap in pop: “Let the teens have their space, and let me finally get the chance to emulate my elders: ‘There’s no melody. I can’t tell if that’s a boy or a girl.’”
In praise of Alfred Brendel’s music writing: “Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, is also a great writer. You can often detect a good-natured smirk behind his words, but right there with it is a genuinely humane seriousness. His writing, always engaging, strikes a balance between solemn reflection and undeniable wit. A perfect example of this balance can be found in his 1985 essay ‘A Mozart Player Gives Himself Advice,’ in which Brendel urges the reader to reject the idea of Mozart as sugar sweet and precious. He writes that ‘the cute Mozart, the perfumed Mozart, the permanently ecstatic Mozart, the “touch-me-not” Mozart, the sentimentally bloated Mozart must all be avoided.’”
A deaf poet returns to the Ukrainian city of his childhood: “I am a man who comes back after 20 years and finds everyone dead. I am an aging man who takes off his jacket on a bench, sees dogs’ teeth bared, a click of tongue, a hiss. He does not know why he is here — why he is happy, free. He doesn’t know why he bought his ticket to Odessa. If his parents are dead, what is here for him, in this empty city?”
Here are a few more pieces on V. S. Naipaul: Ian Buruma on the novelist’s “raw nerves” and Kapil Komireddi on his honesty and critique of Hinduism.
A Reader Recommends: David Guaspari recommends Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman: “The book of his that makes it onto the ‘best novel’ lists is At Swim-Two-Birds, but this one is better.” Have a novel or a collection of short stories you’d like to recommend to fellow Prufrock readers? Send me an email at [email protected].
Essay of the Day:
In City Journal, David Black revisits Shays’s Rebellion and explains how it shaped the Constitution:
“In January 26, 1787, 1,500 Massachusetts rebels marched on the Springfield Armory, intending to take the weapons and gunpowder stored there. The rebels came from local western Massachusetts towns and called themselves White Indians or Regulators, after the South Carolina vigilantes who had seized state courts and government in the 1760s. They wore sprigs of evergreen in their hats, just as they had during the recent War for Independence. They came home from fighting England to find their farms being taken over for debt by the courts, often sold for knockoff prices to speculators from Boston and other cities in eastern Massachusetts. The rebels were led by a local farmer and onetime captain in the Continental Army, Daniel Shays, who intended to get hold of the weapons in Springfield and, as he wrote, ‘march directly to Boston, plunder it, and . . . destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence make the Court enact what they please, burn it and lay the town of Boston in ashes.’
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“The Shaysites believed that the merchants were profiting from their misfortune. The merchants believed that the Shaysites, especially those who bought luxuries, often on credit, were lazy. John Quincy Adams saw the Shaysites as ‘malcontents [who] must look to themselves, to their idleness, to their dissipation, and extravagances.’ The merchants, bankers, and land speculators believed that—for the farmers and small shopkeepers—gold and silver corrupted. Paper was less apt to do so. But they did not apply this principle to themselves. The rebels’ mirror image of the merchants and bankers and land speculators held, according to John Wise, an early supporter of the American Revolution, that specie inclined men to ‘[e]xtortion, dissembling, and other moral evils.’ Both sides supported their beliefs by citing statistics and biblical authority. Both argued not economics, but morality. As the struggle became a war over values, each side damned the other for its immorality and bad faith—a familiar strain in American politics. Two conflicting worlds—or, at least, two conflicting myths—collided.”
Photo: Scandinavia from space in winter
Poem: Midge Goldberg, “Curiosity No Longer Sings Happy Birthday to Itself”
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