I mean, it's quite bad enough that P Roth was whingeing on about his wives/other women in his life failing to respect his creative processes and interrupting him with Mere Trivia -
- though looking at his output we do not see that it had any particularly Porlockian impact??? or were there GEMZ of prose and exquisite insight LOST to posterity?
- ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51, and I pretty much want to dig up all the men and flog them mercilessly with well-rotted codfish, particularly Cyril Connolly. Honestly: they were all of them perving after much younger women, exploiting them rotten, etc etc - can't help feeling that Barbara Skelton was the avenging ( Read more... )

The ever excellent and incisive Anne Billson: Anna Karina, Catherine Deneuve: how movies malign women by calling them muses.
Amid tributes to Anna Karina, who died earlier this month, the word “muse” recurred. As in “the muse of Jean-Luc Godard” or “Karina served as a cinematic muse to Godard”. And in nearly every homage and obituary, you could ( Read more... )

The Bronte Society: where diva strops are a recurrent theme.
The latest: male author quits the Society over appointment of Lily Cole, 'an actor and model who has a double first in History of Art from Cambridge [as[ a “creative partner” in the society' for the Emily bicentenary'.
Cole gives a strong and articulate response alluding to the reasons ( Read more... )

And people took this seriously, within the sort of circles where this sort of thing proliferated: Harris was 21 years old when he wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He was a virgin who had been home-schooled his whole life-an unusual profile for the author of a book proposing “a new attitude toward romance and relationships,” as the subtitle put it.

( Read more... )

Still pondering over the implications of a reported remark by a literature lecturer that there is no definitive post-World War II British literary canon.
50-60 springs are little room, I suspect, for canon formation - look at how long it took for the standard Vict-lit canon to be established - was there not a period when George Eliot (George Eliot! ( Read more... )

Yet again, the world of interior design Does Not Get Books: Recycling Books to Pot Indoor Plants. Can I get a loud, resounding *AAAAAAAARRRRRRGH* on this?

Marc Quinn: Just don't call it a freak show - I am really a bit dubious about whether he is not, in fact, using, even if he is aestheticising, bodies which could be assimilated to a discourse of ( Read more... )

We look at outrageously talented and successful people - the Beatles, Mozart, Rockefeller, Bill Gates - and assume there is such a thing as pure genius. Not necessarily, argues Malcolm Gladwell.

And what is the big black hole in this discussion? - which, I will concede, makes some extremely pertinent points about timing, being in the right place at ( Read more... )

The weather all morning was seriously opening of Jane Eyre, so I thought I might miss my last walk on the Common, chiz, chiz.

However, sun appears to be coming out.

Wheee, am Fotherington-Tomas (really need an F-T icon!) going 'Hello sun! hello sky! etc. And it can hardly be much muddier squishier sploshier underfoot than it has been earlier in the

Thanks to everybody who provided assistance in trying to discover the details of the story I was looking for - even if I still haven't managed to pin it down.

The context for me was writing up my commentator's notes from the January workshop in Cambridge as an afterword to the published papers. One of the subjects under discussion was the history ( Read more... )