temps perdu and all that
A dropped allusion in a great conservative critique of the right-to life movement reminds me that I picked up Auberon Waugh's autobiography a few weeks ago at a used bookstore. I'd read it when it first came out (aside from the starvation wages, I really miss working in academic libraries) but I'd forgotten the weird mix of jocularity and rage the thing was written with. Maybe I just missed it; grad school is such a great time for overlooking the incidental-but-obvious. At any event, it's no wonder it took him seven or eight years to find a US publisher - I imagine any American trade editor this side of Adam Parfrey would have become incontinent about ten pages into the MS at the prospect of publishing it.