From The Literary Hub:

“I feel like, at some level, we are all outsiders,” Nicola Barker says of the vast array of oddballs and originals who populate her bafflingly innovative thirteen novels. “Society is fluid. But you need to stand outside of a situation, a dilemma, an experience, to truly understand it. That’s what my characters often do. They are inquisitive. They can’t be satisfied by the time or circumstances they are living in.”

It is January in this deadly winter of COVID-19, and we are exchanging emails across the Atlantic—me in Richmond, Virginia, and my literary hero in the town of Faversham, formerly the home of the explosives industry in the UK. Both of us are home-bound, like most everyone else, trying to feel like writers even if we’re spending a lot of our time staring at walls. When I asked her what she’s been up to recently—during Britain’s Tier 5 lockdown—she says she’s done little but “walking and thinking,” though she spends a good deal of time talking by phone to family scattered across the globe.

Our correspondence has been a small miracle for me, as my discovery of Barker’s work a decade ago completely changed the way I write and think about writing. Often, after sending an email, I’ll spend a tortured day thinking of what I could have said that will finally prove that I am a fool (why did I insist on making that corny Bowie joke?), but I find again and again that she responds with effusive grace and a rich supply of advice on writing and life.

Hailed as an “unclassifiable genius” by the Guardian, Barker is a well-known literary figure in Britain. But if she is familiar at all to readers in America, it is often for her 2007 novel Darkmans, a wild and paranoiac book that is both about history and very much about twenty-first century life—and a strong candidate for the eight hundred funniest pages in literature. I ran into the book back in the last recession, during a phase in my life when I was hopping from job to job, rudderless, trying to hold on to some idea that I could be a writer. It challenged everything I’d learned thus far about fiction and pointed me in a new direction, one centered on character and voice and trust in one’s aesthetic obsessions and particularities, on the inner play of consciousness, on the lightning-quick moves of our real lived experience.

. . . .

Maybe I needed a change. Maybe I needed to spend a couple of years trying to write like someone else—someone who takes risks without a net—in order to discover an authentic voice of my own. Darkmans made the short list for the Booker Prize, and she made the long list for the Booker for two other novels, Clear and The Yips. One could call Barker an avant-garde writer, but she looks at her style as something more like play: “I need to feel free. I won’t be constrained. Especially not by the expectations of others or even my own expectations. I am guided by a sense of mischief. I don’t ever sit down to write and think: I’ll use this tone, this accent, this layout…”

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

Some virtues, when they become fashions, also become exaggerated. Just because nobody likes a judgmental attitude does not mean that there isn’t a sort of spoiled, self-righteous hypocrisy when one man obsessively commands other men not to judge without knowing the circumstances without himself, too, knowing their circumstances behind their judgments.

Criss Jami

From Writer Beware:

I’ve recently gotten several reports of phone solicitations from a New Jersey-based bookstore called The Reading Glass Books.

Why would a bookstore be calling authors out of the blue? Well in this case, to sell shelf space: $350 for six months. Authors can direct the store to sell the books at whatever price they like, and will get “100% of the royalties” (which of course makes no sense, since direct sales proceeds are not royalties). And if you’re thinking that the store will order the books…no, no, no, don’t be silly. Authors must provide their own copies.

Paid shelf space for self-published authors isn’t a new idea. Here’s one entrepreneur who set up a bookstore entirely on that model (the store closed in 2019). And a few years ago there was some media coverage of independent bookstores that were renting shelf space to self-pubbed and small press writers–in some cases for a good deal more than $350.

Whatever you may think of paying for shelf space, these were all real brick-and-mortar stores in the business of selling books to the public–not exploitative schemes aimed primarily at extracting money from writers. Based on its solicitation phone calls, sketchy website, and array of other paid services, my guess was that The Reading Glass Books fell into the latter category. I wanted to be sure, though, so I did some research.

Reading Glass claims a physical address–7 Wrightstown Cookstown Road (aka County Road 616) in Cookstown, New Jersey. To my surprise, there actually is a storefront. It’s located in a small strip mall on a relatively empty stretch of road. Here’s an image,, courtesy of Google (note the prime location, between Air Transport International and Domino’s Pizza).

. . . .

The mall’s roadside location is not exactly conducive to the foot traffic that real bookstores count on–though I guess it’s possible that Reading Glass gets some walk-ins from next-door Domino’s, or from the tattoo and barber shops that are also in this mall. However, those well-shaved and freshly inked book lovers won’t find the store’s inside much more prepossessing than its outside. Interior photos (a number of which are present on Reading Glass’s Facebook page and Google listing) show a small space with sparsely populated shelves. Here we are in December 2020:

Link to the rest at Writer Beware

From The Literary Hub:

I know, I know, it’s December, we’re all contractually obligated to tally up the Best Books of the Year That Was—and don’t worry, we will. (No shade to book lists, end of year or otherwise; they are, as Eco reminds us, a cultural bulwark against death. Also they are fun.) But as your father says, age before beauty, and so before we take the measure of the new kids on the block, the Lit Hub staff would like to celebrate some non-2021 books that we discovered (or re-discovered) this year.

After all, one of the great things about books is that they don’t disappear after the first year of their publication—barring floods and thieves, they can loiter forever on your shelves, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered, manic publicity cycle be damned. They can be revisited, loaned out, traded, forgotten and found. They can have strange, long lives. And hey, sometimes you’re just in the mood. So here are the older books we’ve been reading this year, whether for the first or the tenth time.

Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (1997)

I am not a huge re-reader, but in the middle of a rainy weekend bookshelf alphabetization disaster I uncovered Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, a book I read a decade ago in an MFA class called “The Hysterical Male” taught by Gary Shteyngart. I remembered the very end of the book scene by scene; I also remember finishing the book exactly at my subway stop and uncontrollably crying, much to the absolute terror of everyone around me. Either because I was aware the organizational project was soon going to break me or because I needed a distraction, I found myself spending the rest of the weekend with the curmudgeonly Barney Panofksy, self-described “wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer.” It is an exceptionally fun book to read, and from a craft perspective, Richler’s mastery of both voice and unreliable narration still feels surprising. Thoroughly recommend for a first, or second, read.

Sebastian Castillo, Not I (2020)

Sebastian Castillo’s Not I is a book of accumulation. It has twelve sections, one for each of the English language’s verb tenses; each section uses English’s 25 most common verbs to create a series of first-person sentences. The maybe-Sebastian, maybe-nobody, maybe-everybody speaker catalogues the quotidian: “I make toast.” “I go to the park.” “I will be getting surgery tomorrow.” And the emotional: “I felt depressed.” “I thought you were my friend.” “I felt sorry for myself.” The speaker bends to authority figures; indulges in moments of luxury; longs for closeness; worries about doctor’s appointments. In mapping the everyday, Castillo’s doing something close to Perec’s idea of taking an account of the infra-ordinary, but with an inventory of time instead of space.

For Not I is concerned with the end. Juries, judgments, and grades make recurring appearances. “I have accumulated the bits of my life,” says maybe-Sebastian. And: “I will have called it the past.” Not I is aware and skeptical of the urge to accomplish, to turn your life into something you can look back on and feel pride. (Like, a book.) But its format knits the past to the future, promising that even banal experiences add up. When the book hits future tense, the sentences read like mantras, and the future experiences start to feel like the reader’s. It becomes a book of faith: look at all we have done, we will do, we will have done.

. . . .

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952)

To my great shame, I must confess to never having read a Patricia Highsmith novel before 2021. Despite my love of the film adaptations of Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Price of Salt (aka Carol)—all of which I consider to be masterpieces—I never bothered to walk the quarter mile to my local used bookstore and spend the price of a pint on a battered paperback by the troubled poet of apprehension. What a fool I was. The atmosphere of unease Highsmith conjures in her novels is thick enough to choke, and this tale of sexual awakening, obsession, and liberation is (despite being, I think, murder-free) no exception. The story of a disaffected New York set designer/shop girl who becomes infatuated with a glamorous suburban housewife, The Price of Salt is also a tender, bitingly witty, and surprisingly hopeful love story.

Nora Ephron, Heartburn (1983)

If you’ve seen You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally a thousand times, as I have, it’s perhaps time to venture into the rest of Nora Ephron’s oeuvre. Reading this novel feels like watching one of her beloved movies, at a tilt. It comes with all of her signature wit, but it’s by no means a romantic comedy. (NB: Heartburn was, in fact, adapted for the screen. Directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, it’s definitely not what you’re expecting. But the book! The book feels closer to classic Nora.)

Reader, meet Rachel Samstat. She writes cookbooks for a living. She’s a devoted wife, a doting mother, she’s pregnant with her second child—and then she finds out her husband is having an affair. The rat bastard! For a book that revolves around such devastating discovery, it’s unexpectedly light. We have our effervescent narrator to thank for that. She’s smiling through her tears! She’s finding something funny in the tragedy! And she’s doling out tips for a killer vinaigrette!

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

From The Wall Street Journal:

Enjoying the novels of Ernest Hemingway can be a difficult thing to do after reading the man’s biography. “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” are masterpieces of efficient storytelling that changed Anglophone writing forever. But their author was an inveterate liar, prone to hedonism and violence, vicious beyond belief to wives and friends, and culpably stupid on political subjects.

The case of Hemingway is an extreme one, but the truth is that most supremely gifted artists are not in possession of high moral character and have wrought immense pain in the lives of those closest to them. Their admirers learn to manage the tension between life and work as best they can. Some cases are easier to manage than others, depending on the nature of the work and one’s emotional and intellectual attachment to it. But in the end, work almost always trumps biography. I doubt there are many people inclined to relish the music of Richard Wagner who refuse to do so on account of his anti-Semitism and all-around repugnance. Lord Byron’s sexual propensities would be hard to describe in a respectable newspaper, but one learns to forget them while reading his poetry.

Is there much to say about the capacity of terrible people to produce works of great beauty? I have on my shelf a marvelous collection of essays by the literary critic Brooke Allen, “Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior” (2004). Ms. Allen holds up her subjects’ disgraceful conduct and splendid literary productions and registers little more than gentle surprise that one can produce the other.

But the young today, and especially the inhabitants of elite college campuses, are no longer content simply to contemplate the mystery that wonderful works of art can emerge from the crooked timber of humanity. The highly educated young are ready to judge—even if, in a world without mythology or religion, they lack clear principles on which to base their judgments. In “Drawing the Line,” Erich Hatala Matthes aims to give them those principles. He acknowledges the perils and excesses of a worldview in which past sins constantly threaten to nullify accomplishments and soil reputations, but he accepts its premises almost entirely. The didacticism of his subtitle—“What to Do With the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies”—captures the spirit of the age. What to do with them!

Mr. Matthes, who teaches philosophy at Wellesley College, uses four chapters to ask four questions: Do immoral artist make worse art? Is it wrong to enjoy the work of immoral artists? Should immoral artists be “canceled”? And how should we feel about immoral artists?

There are, to my admittedly hidebound sensibilities, basically two problems with the book. The first is that Mr. Matthes draws no distinctions between what constitutes “art” and what doesn’t. Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Louis C.K., Paul Gauguin, Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr, Roald Dahl, Caravaggio, Chuck Close—all are simply and equally “artists.” But they are not all artists except in the loosest sense. Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr are comedians. Michael Jackson was a stupendously gifted entertainer but not the creator of any transcendent or ennobling work of the human spirit.

The distinction matters. The only reason an aesthetic artifact deserves to remain in the public consciousness is that it possesses unique and abiding worth. We can argue about what constitutes that worth, but a catchy pop song with a forgettable tune and nonsense words, or a mildly humorous comedic routine memorable mainly for its idiotic vulgarity, is bereft of it. Enjoy it as much as you like. Or don’t. The argument that its creator’s deplorable personal deeds or retrograde social views should determine its longevity in our collective life is simply not interesting.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes if the free link doesn’t work for you, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG says that the artist is not the work and vice-versa.

If they are the somehow linked, do we put the work of an artist who committed a serious crime in prison? Or do we destroy it completely?

How, exactly, does condemning art (and, presumably, putting it away someplace where no one will be offended by it) that gives many or some people pleasure make the world a better place?

Exactly how evil does the artist have to be in order to be banished from society?

In the United States, generations of people referred to African Americans by what is now described as the “N-word”. At the time and in the place where this practice was common, it was the standard term for African Americans. If a person at those times and in those places did not use the N-word, he/she/they would be perceived as making some sort of distinction between members of the race.

During PG’s lifetime, the word, “Negro”, has moved from a polite way of referring to an individual’s race into something that may lead to some degree of scorn for someone who utters the word.

A great many Americans also used slang words to describe other groups of people as well. Poles, Germans, Japanese and Jews come immediately to PG’s memory. Some of those slang words have moved into the impolite realm of language. PG is unaware of any that have reached the negative place occupied by the N-word, but time continues to march on.

In summary, a bad person can produce good art and good literature.

In PG’s youth, those who banned or attempted to ban books were regarded with scorn and disdain – narrow-minded, prissy neo-puritans.

“Banned in Boston” referred to the time period during which Boston officials had wide authority to ban works featuring “objectionable” content, and often banned works with sexual content or foul language. This even extended to the $5 bill from the 1896 “Educational” series of banknotes featuring allegorical figures which were partially nude.

Per Wikipedia:

Banned books included those from Walt Whitman, Giovanni Boccaccio, Eugene O’Neill, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway (twice), William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and The Everly Brothers (for “Wake up, Little Susie”)

Google’s Site Kit reported that TPV was not loading as fast as it should, so PG added a plug-in that is supposed to fix that.

If anyone has been having problems with the speed with which the site has been loading or starts to have problems with site loading from here on forward, let PG know through the Contact PG link at the top of the page.

From Public Books:

In 1879, Alphonse Bertillon joined the Parisian police department. At the time, people who committed multiple crimes were having a good run of it—branding had been banned and fingerprinting had not yet been widely adopted. Officers’ memories, as Richard Farebrother and Julian Champkin have detailed, were the main remedy against repeat offenders, who gave false names, claimed it was their first offense, and were able to avoid serious consequences. The only alternative for 19th-century law enforcement: sifting through stacks of notecards cataloging prior arrests, which were completed idiosyncratically and organized haphazardly.

Struck by the system’s inefficiency, Bertillon created a cunning new method to identify alleged offenders. He envisioned “giving every human being an identity, an individuality that is certain, durable, invariable, always recognizable, and which can be established with ease.” Photography had just begun to arrive on the scene, and Bertillon recognized its potential for cataloging people who had been arrested. He pioneered the idea of seating accused people in the same chair, set a standard distance from the camera, and photographing them at standard angles. In so doing, Bertillon invented the mugshot.

More than a century later, face surveillance has gone digital. In January 2020, journalist Kashmir Hill revealed that a secretive start-up company called Clearview AI had scraped photographs from untold numbers of websites, collecting more than three billion pictures (now closer to 10 billion) to fuel face recognition technology used by law enforcement. The public was horrified. But the massive consentless collection of face data for carceral purposes is a foundational approach to face surveillance that originated with the two men who developed it, first as an analog technique and later as an automated technology.

As Bertillon’s story makes clear, the earliest applications of face surveillance were also not rooted in consent. Nearly 150 years ago, using images of faces to identify people who’d committed crimes was done without permission of those portrayed. Law enforcement officers were the primary users. And that tradition continued when Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Bledsoe automated face surveillance in the 1960s.

These essential flaws cannot be corrected with greater accuracy or oversight. Despite more than a century of time for potential introspection about face surveillance, it seems that law enforcement has not truly grappled with the collateral consequence of its expansion: the elimination of privacy for everyone. Instead, more law enforcement agencies are adopting face surveillance as you read this article. Face surveillance began as a carceral technology, and that application continues to ensure that the technology will be available, attractive, and financially advantageous to law enforcement and the companies who serve it.

Bertillon and Bledsoe’s work assumed that law enforcement personnel should have the power to surveil the faces of the people they were supposed to protect and serve. Today, law enforcement continues to buy into that belief. But Bertillon’s and Bledsoe’s stories reveal that face surveillance was flawed from the start and illustrate why those flaws persist.

Bertillon believed that “every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth.” His approach, as Kelly Gates details, was not actually intended to reveal the inner workings of the individual—unlike physiognomy, an old, racist pseudoscience that postulated that certain facial features predicted criminality. Bertillon’s use of scientific measurement seemed a stunning development. He coupled his mugshots with intrusive measurements of people who had been arrested, such as their arm length and head circumference, to create measurements collectively known as a Bertillonage. He was assisted by Amelie Notar, a woman with impeccable handwriting whom he met crossing the road and who later became his wife.

It seemed improbable that an arrested person would share the same Bertillonage with any other person (though that assumption was ultimately proven wrong). Bertillon’s mathematical approach to identifying people who had allegedly committed crimes was popular and effective. Ultimately, Bertillonage identified more than 3,500 repeat offenders in its inaugural decade.

Bertillon himself became quite famous. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle referred to his own famed detective, Sherlock Holmes, as the “second highest expert in Europe”—after Bertillon, of course. But his methods proved fallible.

In 1903, a Black man named Will West arrived at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. As was the standard procedure, identification clerks took his Bertillonage and matched the measurements with one William West. Police expressed no surprise that Will West was a repeat offender, nor that he denied being one. But upon investigation, Will West was discovered to be an entirely different man serving a life sentence for murder in the same penitentiary. The two men had identical measurements, something Bertillon and other police had believed impossible.

The fallibility of Bertillonage is among the least problematic aspects of Bertillon’s legacy. When he was not photographing people who had been arrested, Bertillon was writing a book called Ethnographie Moderne: Les Races Sauvages—translated, Modern Ethnography: The Savage Races. Bertillon also concocted a handwriting test used in the Dreyfus Affair, a now infamous case of government anti-Semitism. His participation in the trial spurred his brother, married to a Jewish woman, not to speak to him for years.

By the turn of the century, Bertillon’s “science” had been discredited. But the mugshot lived on. And it fueled generations of corporations, governments, and researchers curious about mathematically measuring the faces of people accused of committing crimes.

Link to the rest at Public Books

From The MIT Press Reader:

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI).

As early as 3,000 years ago we encounter interest in intelligent machines and AI that perform different servile functions. In the works of Homer (c. eighth century BCE) we find Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithing and craft, using automatic bellows to execute simple, repetitive labor. Golden handmaidens, endowed with characteristics of movement, perception, judgment, and speech, assist him in his work. In his “Odyssey,” Homer recounts how the ships of the Phaeacians perfectly obey their human captains, detecting and avoiding obstacles or threats, and moving “at the speed of thought.” Several centuries later, around 400 BCE, we meet Talos, the giant bronze sentry, created by Hephaestus, that patrolled the shores of Crete. These examples from the ancient world all have in common their subservient role; they exist to serve the desires of other, more powerful beings — either gods or humans — and even if they have sentience, they lack autonomy. Thousands of years before Karel Čapek introduced the term “robot” to refer to artificial slaves, we find them in Homer.

Given the prevalence of intelligent artificial objects in Hellenic culture, it is no surprise that engineers in the later Hellenistic period turned to designing and building these machines. Mathematicians and engineers based in Alexandria began writing treatises on automaton-making and engineering around the third century BCE. These included instructions for how to make elaborate dioramas with moving figures, musical automata, mechanical servants, and automata powered by steam, water, air, and mechanics. Some of these devices were intended to illustrate the physical principles animating them, and others were scaled up and incorporated into public spectacle. Regardless of size, they were intended to evoke a network of emotional responses, including wonder and awe.

Robots were so prevalent in the imaginative and material culture of the Greek-speaking world that they were seen as emblematic of Hellenistic culture by others. Buddhist legends focused on north-eastern India from the fourth and third centuries BCE recount the army of automata that guarded Buddha’s relics, built with knowledge smuggled from the Graecophone world. In one version, which features both killer robot-assassins and robot-guardians, a young man travels in disguise to the land of the Yavanas (Greek speakers) to learn the art of automaton-making, a secret closely guarded by the yantakaras (automaton makers) there, knowledge that he then steals to make the artificial guards. We find stories of automatic warriors guarding the Buddha’s relics in Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindu, and Tibetan texts. Additionally, mechanical automata also appear elsewhere in the Chinese historical record: for example, at the court of Tang ruler Empress Wu Zhou (c.624–705 CE).

The trope of the guardian/killer automaton also appears linked to stories about the ancient world from medieval Latin Christendom — where, unlike much of the rest of Eurasia, people lacked the knowledge of how to make complex machines. In an Old French version of the Aeneid (c.1160 CE), a golden robot-archer stands sentry over the tomb of a fallen warrior queen, and in the history of Alexander the Great (c.1180 CE), the ruler encounters golden killer robots guarding a bridge in India and armed copper robots protecting the tomb of “the emir of Babylon.” Hellenistic handbooks on automaton-making, translated into Arabic in the ninth century CE at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, also influenced the design and construction of automata in Islamdom that were usually placed in palaces and mosques, and included musician-automata, programmable clocks and fountains, and mechanical animals. These makers in Islamdom innovated on the designs of the Alexandrian School and created increasingly complex machines; although some of the objects hearken back to much older forms. In the work of courtier and engineer al-Jazari (1136–1206 CE), for example, we find designs for wheeled cupbearers and servants, an echo of the wheeled servants attending to the gods on Mount Olympus.

Al-Jazari’s courtly mechanical servants and the killer sentries in imaginative literature share a link to surveillance, foreshadowing another purpose to which AI and robots have often been turned. Sentries and guards keep watch and discern friend from foe, while courtly servants operate in ritualized, hierarchical environments where people are under constant scrutiny. Objects like those of al-Jazari’s designs were found throughout Islamdom and the eastern Roman Empire, but were unable to be built or reproduced in the Latin Christian West until the late 13th century. However, they appear earlier in imaginative texts as luxury objects, in elite settings, as fantasies of perfect surveillance and perfectly obedient servants.

. . . .

Robots and AI have long been used both to foreground and to trouble the conceptual boundary between born and made, and the related boundary between life and not-life. Yet the contexts in which these stories appear supply different meanings to the same story. In the early Taoist text “The Book of Liezi”(compiled circa fourth century), the skill of the artificer is appreciated by the king and his court, but in other stories about learned men and their automaton-children, such as those attached to Albertus Magnus in the 14th and 15th centuries, and to René Descartes in the 18th and 19th centuries, the robot is destroyed by ignorant people out of fear. In E. T. A. Hoffman’s version of this tale, “The Sandman” (1816), the inability to distinguish made from born drives the protagonist, Nathanael, insane and, eventually, to his death.

Link to the rest at The MIT Press Reader

The MIT Press article is excerpted from The Lovemakers, edited by Aifric Campbell

From The Wall Street Journal:

If fame is the name of your desire, writing about literature is among the least likely ways to find it. From the 17th century until today, only four literary critics, John Dryden (1631-1700), Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Matthew Arnold (1828-1888) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)—five if one includes that one-man Tower of Babel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)—have attained enduring reputations. All five also wrote poetry, but, apart from Eliot, it is doubtful if today any would be remembered for his poetry alone.

What these men have in common is that all were, in the old-fashioned phrase, men of letters. T.S. Eliot, who may have been the last of the breed, defined the man of letters as “the writer for whom his writing is primarily an art, who is as much concerned with style as with content; the understanding of whose writings, therefore, depends as much upon appreciation of style as upon comprehension of content.” Literature, for the man of letters, who not only writes about it but practices it by himself writing poetry, fiction or drama, provides wisdom beyond all other wisdoms, surpassing science, social science, history and philosophy, while incorporating them all.

The man of letters, like the poet, has a responsibility to the language, for, to quote Eliot, “unless we have those few men who combine an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over words, our own ability, not merely to express, but even to feel any but the crudest emotions, will degenerate.” He is also responsible, as Eliot wrote in his essay “The Function of Criticism” (1923), for “the reorientation of tradition” in the arts, and, like the artist, is “the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real.”

The responsibility of the man of letters is finally for the culture at large. His duty, as Eliot wrote in the 1944 essay “The Responsibility of the Man of Letters in the Cultural Restoration of Europe,” is “neither to ignore politics and economics, nor, certainly, to desert literature,” but to “be vigilantly watching the conduct of politicians and economists, for the purpose of criticising and warning, when the decisions and actions of politicians and economists are likely to have cultural consequences,” for “of these consequences . . . the man of letters is better qualified to foresee them, and to perceive their seriousness.” As he views politics as being too serious to be left to the politicians, the man of letters feels education is hopeless without a clear ideal of the educated individual. “I hope,” Eliot wrote in “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” “that we shall not consciously or unconsciously drift towards the view that it is better for everyone to have a second-rate education than for only a small minority to have the best.” Which is, of course, where we are today.

. . . .

In his late 20s Eliot would write of Henry James, whom he much admired, that “it is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.” Cosmopolitan in interest and outlook though he was, Eliot went on to become an Englishman to the highest power: He applied for British citizenship, at the age of 39, in 1927, the same year he was confirmed in the Church of England. So rigidly English did he seem that Virginia Woolf called him “the man in the four-piece suit.”

The young T.S. Eliot was also a careerist, fully aware what would bring him the prominence and ultimately the fame he craved. Eliot wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his teachers at Harvard, that there were two ways to succeed in the literary life in England: one being to appear in print everywhere, the other to appear less frequently but always to dazzle. Eliot arranged to do both, publishing his dazzling poems at lengthy intervals, propelling himself to prominence with the prolificacy of his brilliant criticism and commentary.

. . . .

How prolific, and to what impressive effect, is now revealed in “The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot,” a handsome trans-Atlantic co-publication of Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, London. An eight-volume hardcover collection, “The Complete Prose”—edited by many hands under the guidance of Ronald Schuchard, a professor of English emeritus at Emory University—is elaborately but relevantly footnoted, a work of learning and scholarship. The separate introductions to its eight volumes, running to roughly 250 pages, constitute a splendid biography in themselves. This edition of the prose makes plain, as nothing before it quite has, that T.S. Eliot, as the introduction to the seventh volume has it, “lived life large—larger than we have known.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Should be a free link, but if it doesn’t work, PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From Michigan Live:

Crazy Wisdom Bookstore is closing permanently early next year due to the “relentlessness” of running a retail business, its owners said.

“Our own family has grown up, and we’re in our 60s, and we’re ready to look out upon a new and different horizon,” Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter, bookstore owners, wrote on Facebook. “The bookstore had a very profitable year (due to having closed the tea room at the onset of the pandemic), and that’s not a bad way to go out.”

. . . .

“We know that Crazy Wisdom has been a unique destination and special bookstore in our region, and treasured by its friends and customers,” the owners wrote. “We and our longtime managers and staff, past and present, have so much gratitude for having had the privilege over these decades to serve people in our region who are searching in their lives – spiritually, psychologically, holistically, and in terms of sustainable and conscious living.”

The building itself, which Zirinsky and Schekter own, is not for sale, they said, adding that they are, however, open to selling the bookstore or renting the space.

Although they have no “preconceived ideas” about who a potential buyer might be, they do want someone with “financial werewithal,” Zirinksy said.

“That allowed us to sustain the store for over three decades, and to create a physically appealing environment in a historic building downtown, and to expand into having live music, poetry readings, fairy teas, storytelling nights, and so on,” Zirinsky wrote in an email to MLive. “But one would also want that buyer to be a reader, a lover of the written word, a wordsmith. And to appreciate the fine aesthetics of the store’s jewelry and craft items, and its non-linear loveliness.”

Link to the rest at Michigan Live

For visitors from outside the United States, Ann Arbor is the home of the 200+ year-old University of Michigan, a selective public university with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and a faculty and staff of about the same size, including 20,000 employees at the University’s hospital.

Per the 2020 US Census, Ann Arbor had a population of about 124,000 people. (PG has no idea how many students were or were not included in this count.)

Suffice to say, the University and those associated with it are most of what’s going on in Ann Arbor on a daily basis.

PG includes this information because college and university towns are generally known as places where people purchase a lot of books. Traditionally, these have been wonderful places to operate a bookstore.