Reviews and News:
Hilary Mantel’s childhood, God, and Wolf Hall: “Psychoanalytic criticism may have fallen out of favor, but it has not ceased to be useful. Even so bare an outline of Mantel’s life, drawn from her 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, makes clear the connections between Mantel’s biographical backstory and the goings-on at Henry VIII’s court. In her novels about Cromwell, all of Mantel’s formative issues are in play: the plot-driving engine of marital unhappiness; divorce and the impossibility of divorce; ambiguous sexual situations; the desirability but also the powerlessness of children. Mantel’s early experiences explain not only her richly ambivalent attitude toward her Tudor characters, but also her impressive ‘negative capability’ as their artist—her ability, that is, out of the small circle of her original family, either to play or to cast all the parts.
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In praise of light reading.
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It’s hard to earn a buck writing and even harder to write about earning a buck writing.
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A 2005 study of the language of a small Amazon tribe that challenged Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar caused quite a stir among linguists. Tom Wolfe’s use of the study in The Kingdom of Speech has stirred things up again.
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Norway turns off FM radio.
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Peter Augustine Lawler named editor of Modern Age.
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Essay of the Day:
In Lit Hub, Alan Jacobs writes about his early life as a reader:
“I grew up in a house filled with books, but by the standards of the cultured they weren’t good books. We had no bookshelves, which meant that you couldn’t set a glass on a table without first moving a cheap paperback of some kind, or, more likely, several of them: I spent much of my childhood making neat stacks of Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert A. Heinlein, Ellery Queen, Grace Livingston Hill, Barbara Cartland, Louis L’Amour, Max Brand, Rex Stout. My father read the Westerns and science fiction, my mother the romances, my grandmother the mysteries. I disdained love stories, but the rest I consumed.
“We were perhaps an atypical bunch of readers, not normal even among readers of schlock. I don’t believe any of my grandparents graduated from high school. Both of my parents took equivalency exams instead of earning high school diplomas: my father because he lied about his age and enrolled in the Navy in 1943, when he was 16, and stayed in the service for 11 years, during which he found time to take tests by mail; my mother because she was the brightest girl in the little country town in northern Alabama she grew up in, and so was waved through all the grades available by age 15. My younger sister ended up earning her high-school diploma but never considered going further. Everyone in my family except me is educated far beneath their intelligence—but this, I must admit, is not because they confronted roadblocks to their ambition. None in my family ever thought education especially valuable, and when it eventually came time for me to tell my parents that I wanted to go to college they just looked at me blankly. My interest was, to them, an incomprehensible eccentricity.
“I might also add that in our house the television was on all the time—and I mean quite literally all the time, at least after my father returned from several years in prison. That happened when I was ten or 11, and I soon learned that his strictest rule was that the TV stayed on. He didn’t switch it off when he went to bed—he was always up later than anyone else because he worked a late shift as a dispatcher for a trucking company—and I distinctly remember our leaving the TV on when we took our invariably brief vacations to the Florida panhandle. I think I worried that the TV would be lonely while we were gone, having only itself to talk to.
“Yet no one in our household ever watched the television. We had no favorite shows, and the only program I can remember anyone paying attention to was the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC: when it came on—announcing its arrival with the opening of the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—someone would turn up the volume, and then turn it back down again when the news was done. The rest of the time everyone just read. (Everyone except my sister, who probably didn’t read a book all the way through until she was in her forties and has since become a voracious reader.) When I close my eyes and try to remember the house I grew up in, what arises in my mind is an image of several people sitting on shabby old chairs and sofas in the salmon-pink living room, all absorbed in their books, with a cathode-ray tube in a wooden box humming and glowing from a corner.”
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Image of the Day: Ice city
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Poem: Les Murray, “The Invention of Pigs”
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