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Monday, February 22, 2010

NEWS, SORT OF

TRoL #21 is now out. When our subscribers around the world receive their copies and the bookshops that carry the magazine have been suppplied, we expect to have under fifty copies left for new subscribers. I urge anyone interested in the magazine to e-mail us as soon as possible. We deliberately do not over-print copies. We ran out of #20 within the first week. The three copies in my possession are from subscribers who have moved without telling us.

If you click on our logo above, you will be sent directly to the magazine's main site. Copies will be mailed out to new subscribers or re-subscribers in order of receipt.

It is easier and quicker for payments to be made out directly in the Editor's name and sent to our accountant, Mr. Sidney Williams, at 29 Cunningham Rd, Wellesley MA 02481.:

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You will note two new icons to the right, announcing the publication of the first two volumes of my autobiography; a third will follow by the summer.

I regret to say that copies are not available. This first edition was published for 'family and friends' in editions of 65 and 50 copies.

I have to admit that what was designed as a 'private' edition, due to take me as far as my twenty-first year, 1949, has now been circulated in so many xeroxes and has aroused so much interest, that bits and pieces have either been published or are about to be published abroad, and that my original aim of a private early life has been entirely subverted. I did not anticipate this. Clearly, however, the volume of letters I have received, including from people who do not know me at all, has touched a nerve. Without exception, those readers closest to me have urged that I not stop there, but continue -- I am currently at work on FRAGMENTS IV (1951-1953). And though I have lost all faith in publishers, I am now more or less compelled to submit it to them. At which point, I suppose copies will become available.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

LUNACY & RESPECT: THE BECK CASE

I have to admit I am not accustomed to see raving lunacy on my telly. Extremes, yes; but insanity? However yesterday afternoon, at the appointed hour, there was Mister Glenn Beck, a misplaced Isaiah to Tea Party America, literally foaming at the mouth. While I am accustomed to his rant, as I am to the general Fox/Murdoch bias, I cannot recall ever having seen such extreme, frothing-at-the-mouth disrespect of an American president.

There, behind the president, was Mr. Obama himself, explaining his policy on the stimulus package; nearer us, was Beck, his head obscuring the president -- at whom he gesticulated wildly and very personally. Did Obama really believe all the guff he was putting out? Was he a conscious liar or just an ordinary cheat? This went on for several minutes before, mercifully, we reached one of Fox's many breaks.

Now, when I came to America from Europe in 1939, one of the first things I learned was that an elected leader was, whatever one's own opinions or whether one had voted for him, entitled to some respect for his position as president. I had to learn this because in the British parliament, frontal attacks on the prime minister of the day are common; they are a part of the severity of debate in parliament. But even there, there are rules, and a Speaker to enforce them.

So far as I know, or until Mr. Beck unveils himself as a candidate for public office (alongside Madame Palin?), he is a private citizen. As such, he is entitled to have his opinion stated in public. That is free speech. But is he also entitled to incendiary opinions? to direct physical challenge to the President? Not, I think, in the crowded theater of our politics, in which crying 'Fire!' can lead to panic.

Is the majority of the country, which voted for Mr. Obama, a worthless bunch of dolts for so doing? Has anyone yet elected Mr. Beck?

I do not say this as one who believes that our president has divine right on his side, such as kings could claim to have; I say it as someone who believes that the man has a right, while in office, to our respect: because, for better or worse, he represents all of America. Many have been the presidents for whom I had scant respect, but I would not, ever, have thought of assaulting any of them phsyically: not even on a screen. If they were elected president, the people had spoken; and if he turned out to be a rotten president, the people was in a position to remove him.

Without that inherent respect for the office, whoever the incumbent, democracy quickly falls into mob rule. This Mr. Beck encouraged -- indeed lampooned. Awful as the 'left' channel is, it not show a desire to punch a president in the face, or impose its own talking heads on Obama's. That may be especially important when the president is the first black to hold the office and is also transparently -- whatever his failures -- a decent and intelligent human being. That does not merit to be dissed, for it is also as dangerous as crying 'Fire!' in a theater can be.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

MURDEROUS TENURE: AMY BISHOP

She may have been, she may be, a kook, have lactose problems, have shot her brother or not, the two hard facts are: that Prof. Bishop killed several of her colleagues and that she had been denied tenure. I am not much interested in the killing itself -- Amy Bishop is far from being unique in wanting to kill the departmental colleagues who refused her tenure -- but the whole question of tenure is one that sorely need re-thinking.

I take it as stipulated that tenure at the university level -- dreamt up decades ago to protect the market place of ideas and to protect a teacher's right to utter unpopular opinions -- has long been little more than a guarantee of lifetime employment for professors, regardless of the quality of their teaching, their research or their contribution to the education of the young. And I would further stipulate (from long experience in university teaching) that the first thought of the members of any departmental committee engaged in assessing a colleague's suitability for tenure is, how would granting tenure to X affect me. One might accept a brilliant young man or woman as an instructor or even an Assistant Professor -- such people don't take much of the budget -- but as a colleague for life?

The process is slow, it is laborious -- department, provost, president, trustees -- and much more likely to reflect mediocrity than to promote excellence. As we know from the electorate at large, like favors like: women will vote for women, minorities for minorities, and dullards for dullards. The last thing any university department wants is someone who will rock their cozy craft. A productive scholar is an implicit criticism of the unproductive; a reputation outside the department arouses envy.

In the most recent case I can recall, a composer of genuine musicality, much loved by his students, much performed outside of the university's own concert halls, was denied tenure for fourteen years. The composers on his committee all, save one, knew their own talents were more modest; the candidate did not fit the kind of music which forms the current (outdated) orthodoxy of composition classes. The musicologist member thought the matter through and saw that more students were now studying to be composers than considering such arcanae as the manuscripts of seventeenth century Spaniards. The teachers of various instruments wondered whether a composer might upset the way in which they recruited profitable paying students from Taiwan, and so on down the line.

University departments are now, as the nation is, a set of interests. They are like Greek civil servants: better the country should flounder than take a cut in pay.

I don't offer this as a pretext for Professor Bishop's acts, nor is it necessarily so that she was unfairly denied tenure. I merely suggest that the criteria for the granting of tenure are so arbitrary and the results so obviously damaging to education, that perhaps the system out to be scrapped. Unless this is done, dumbing down, useless publications, PhD mills, plodders reading their one text year after year, our universities will continue to decline into the high schools they have become, the talent pool of our universities will fail to be steadily enriched, and the young faculty be forced to conform to the prevailing opinion of their seniors rather than infuse their students with the love of learning that is the only justification for the existence of universities.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

WRITER BIOGRAPHIES: WILSON, HAMSUN, MAUGHAM

I have before me three not very good biographies of writers. I read them because I am a writer and because lives are always interesting. Also because I have long been a foot-note, a mention, ot a contributor to the biographies of writers whose lives have crossed with mine.

The first, Lewis Dabney's remaindered Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (FSG), is a professional job, drably written, and Wilson happens to be one of my household gods -- as who could fail to be who actually read Edward Everett's Gettysburg Address? Wilson was a compulsive diarist and a far better stylist than Dabney, but his introspection was faulty; he looked outwards, not inwards, dabbling in autobiography via his fiction, which Dabney does not admire but I do. The second, Selena Hasting's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray), about a writer who 'made it' with his books but not with his life was intended to be boffo stuff but is actually an avid study of a professionally selfish and priapic monster that fails even to inform us to what gender within the homosexual world he belonged. The third, Ingar Sletten Kolloen's Knut Hamsun Dreamer and Dissenter (Yale University Press), abridged and Englished by 'acclaimed (by whom?) translators Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik' makes a real hash (Yale should be ashamed of its editing) of a fascinating and quite mad writer.

What reduces all three of these biographies is, of course, the current mantra that human lives are driven by their sexuality -- a gross example of which was a much-praised work on poor Flaubert, a long masturbatory fantasy of the biographer's. In none of these books will you learn much about those with whom they had their amorous or amoral relationships -- for the good and simple reason that such matters are a closed book, one read, at best, only by one of the partners.
Wilson was a wencher, a plump, not overly attractive and overbearing non-lover of anyone but himself. His signal failure to connect derived from the unhappy fact that he was a Writer, and writers are unfit companions or spouses to all but their own fantasies. As Maugham romps with (or through) his various catamites and rival predators, while marrying and even procreating (once) for the sake of respectability, what you see is not what he or they felt, but how useful this patch, 'twixt the fleet and the urinal, was to his stated goal of making enough money to be able to flaunt it. As for Hamsun, so muddied is the tale told, that it is hard to imagine why any woman would even approach him, much less marry him. Power was his game, power and control, and as we should know from history, the lust for power is really a death-wish: real power, like celebrity, wipes out the self.

For writers, maybe alas! sex is the least interesting aspect of their lives, and not one of these biographers has very much to say about our art. They are clearly not writers themselves, so perforce they deal with the trade: how many kroner Hamsun or Maugham earned, how Wilson made his way up into the higher journalism. This part is quite riveting and shows, if that is needed today, just how craven and parasitical most publishers and critics are.

Of course, all three were public figures, and their public selves, their use of their childhoods, their families, their friends, make very good reading indeed. Wilson presided over the demise of those standards -- learning, style, languages, reading -- which put American letters on the map. As much a literary historian as a critic, his range and scholarship put our age to shame. Maugham was long the most-read writer of his day, and it was a lot better stuff than the Da Vinci fraud. Why was he so? Ms Hastings has her theories, which are largely WSM's theories -- that he acknowledged his second-ratedness. But there are few writers (and none among the books in college courses or workshops) better equipped to teach the young writer his craft. Ever acutely aware of the Reader, careful not to intrude, he is the absolute master of narrative and was (as all writers must learn) a compulsive listener, an eavesdropper of high quality. Hamsun, of whose many novels only a very few are translated into English, was not of much credit to himself, but was a self-made writer and a self-destroyer. It must be said that as a writer of the Right, the extreme right, he doesn't fit the mold. Hunger is not a novel one reads for pleasure, something that Maugham dispenses in tight little dollops. The Growth of the Soil, on the other hand, is touching in its agrarian innocence. That he was a convinced Nazi, a friend and follower of Quisling, bothers me not at all. So were many; many too were communists. The mob likes to be led by the nose, by fashion, by ambition. What does bother me is his reason for so being, which is a madman's view of a paradise lost. There is no paradise to be lost, and no new Caesar to lead us back there. And who plays Follow the Leader is responsible for the destruction the leader wreaks -- be he Hitler, Stalin, Murdoch or the latest Pop Star. Writers owe it to their art to have discernment. Hamsun alone paid the penalty.

Lives are the building blocks of history; who we are is every bit as important as what we do. Great literary biographies or autobiographies -- Tchaikovsky's, Paul Leautaud's journals,
Michelet, Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini -- exist and illuminate: the place, the time, the art. They are a great literary form. In all these I mention, there is not a word about Sex. About which even the smartest of us knows nothing at all, there being nothing to be known.

Monday, February 8, 2010

E-BOOKS

Left right and center I am urged to buy an e-book tablet of some sort, to download this or that, keep a traveling library, to dispose of physical books What books? I ask. I am not aware that Amazon is a particularly well-informed literary critic, no more than is Barnes & Ignoble suited to the task or, for that matter, most publishers. But I yielded to temptation, using someone else's passwords, and asked Kindle to kindly offer me the books I wished to read, books that I normally buy from John Sandoe. Perfectly current, ordinary books, such as John Banville's The Infinities, L.P. Hartley's The Brickfield, Indrisson's Hypothermia, Willaim Trevor's Love and Summer, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Nikolas Andreyev's A Month on the Fence, Victor Meyer-Schoenberger's Delete, etc.. Not one of which was available.

Not unsurprisingly, what was available was the equivalent of an Amazon/New York Times best-seller list. Do I detect a whiff of ordinary commercialism? Yes I do, and the lovely arteficial pricing quarrels between book publishers and Amazon Etc. prove it. E-books are no economy. $9.95 may be half the price of a hardbound edition, but it is exorbitant for something that costs Amazon nothing to produce and gives the writer very little back.

The truth of the matter is that the conventional book (with few exceptions) has steadily risen in price and diminished in quality (not only obviously of the content, but also of book-making), and I have been compelled to instruct my regular book-sellers not to send me any books that are perfect-bound, such books being unreadable on a flat surface and having spines that crack and break and pages that tumble out long before one has finished reading. Why should I pay $15 for a poorly-made object? Let's not even mention so-called scholarly books, which are nnow so priced that they are available only to the libraries that are forced to buy them.

These are of course not my only only objection to the e-book. In the case of a classic text, which edition will I receive? How about books in 'foreign', since all America purveys -- as though only English would do -- is of local production? Does Kindle offer you books from England, from Ireland, from Australia? Largely, no. It is as provincial as B&N. Can I fit an iBook or an e-Book in my pocket? Can I have one with me wherever I go? What about the world's Great Book Bazaar, those out-of-the way places where, for want of anything else, one can buy for next to nothing, books one might never otherwise see?

Above all, however, a decline to e-book myself because to do so is to deprive me of history. Its intent is to take me straight to the market: not, for instance, to the many writers of value whose early books are all on ABE second hand, not to the edition I want (e.g., the Clarendon Edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, but to the many subsequent editions as sorted out by the professorate) but to the newest, the latest. In keeping with technology of all kinds, e-books exist in a perpetual present tense. And once you've invested in the technology, you can be sure that that $9.95, already exorbitant, will soon rise to $13.95, then $15.95! And soon enough be obsolete.

I close by a curious experience. Among the Google ads was one from Book Collectors, a .com company which promised to make the cataloguing of your library ("I have 800 books," one testimonial read, when I have 18,000) dead easy and automatic. Well, in keeping with the presentism of Amazon & Co, you will not be surprised to learn that this service does indeed work: if your books happen to have a bar-code!