A Different Stripe

A provincial lady on A High Wind in Jamaica

"(Mem.: Would it not be possible to write more domesticated and less foreign version of High Wind in Jamaica, featuring extraordinary callousness of infancy?) Can distinctly recollect heated correspondence in Time and Tide regarding vraisemblance or otherwise of Jamaica children, and now range myself, decidedly and forever, on the side of the author. Can quite believe that dear Vicky would murder any number of sailors, if necessary."

from The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield; thanks to rbhardy3rd for posting this to the NYRB LibraryThing forum.

Fairly used

Alasdair Gray is perhaps not as well known in the US as he should be, though not for lack of Gavin Grant's trying, nor, for that matter his own enlightened beliefs about disseminating excerpts of his work:

About authors' property rights I am a Socialist who thinks nobody should pay for quoting less than 200 words. Nearly everyone who wants to use my illustrations and words — sometimes whole stories — is allowed to have them free if they are not a financially successful publishing firm. I think it a pity that the law has extended dead authors' copyrights from 50 to 70 years. I thought of adding a clause to my will making the copyrights of my books free for all, but my wife is much younger than me and depends on my income, so I did not do it. [link to the post from which this is taken]

We frequently receive requests for permission to quote from books we publish—often in non-commercial publications or scholarly works. Since we do not control such reproduction rights, we cannot deny or grant permission. Instead I sometimes try to sketch out a brief description of the doctrine of fair use: a doctrine that seems to be in danger of dying out from disuse.   It's not something made up by Lawrence Lessig and his pals at Stanford, you can read about it at the US Copyright Office. The University of Texas site also includes a helpful discussion.

Will T.S. Eliot ever forgive us for this post?

Read as penance—or listen.

Knowing a hawk from a handsaw, pt 2

This selection from The Goshawk by T.H. White was sent in by writer David Rollow (his review of Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter can be read here), who, on rereading the book, says, "What a fine book. I have never forgotten the passage where [White] describes the first time the bird flew to him from a distance of 100 feet" and quotes:

To fly: the horrible aerial toad, the silent-feathered owl, the hump-backed aviating Richard III, he made toward me close to the ground. His wings beat with a measured purpose, the two eyes of his low-held head fixed me with a ghoulish concentration: but like headlamps, like the forward-fixed eyes of a rower through the air who knew his way.

Afloat vs. Afloat

A guide to telling apart two books with the same title.

Guy de Maupassant on Afloat:

This diary has no interesting story to tell, no tales of derringdo.Last spring I went on a short cruise along the Mediterranean coast and every day, in my spare time, I jotted down things I’d seen and thought. In fact what I saw was water, sun, cloud, and rocks and that’s all. I had only simple thoughts, the kind you have when you’re being carried drowsily along on the cradle of the waves.

Jennifer McCartney in coversation about Afloat:

Q: Does it aggravate you when people ask you how someone as young as you are can create a novel with so much emotional depth and complexity, or do you look upon it as a compliment?

A: I think some people are confused not so much by the emotional depth, but with the concept of how someone so young can have anything to write about in terms of life experience, and that’s fine. I’ve been lucky enough to have lived in six American states, in Scotland and England, and held over twenty-five jobs. That emotional depth comes from having a lot of different experiences, but that’s not a necessity for writing, really. A lot of Canadian and U.K. writers publish in their twenties . . . I’d like to think Afloat stands alone as a novel, regardless of my age. Most readers won’t know it was written when I was twenty-four.

Commonplace: Unforgiving Years, pt. 2

“Our unpardonable error was to believe that what they call soul—I prefer to call it conscience—was no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism. If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It is no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone—what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude!”

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge

Read a note from the editor about Victor Serge

Read another excerpt from  Unforgiving Years

Commonplace: Unforgiving Years, pt. 1

In honor of New York City's first real snowstorm of the season.

"A blizzard of thickly falling snowflakes, more opaque than white, held nightfall back over the airfield and gave Daria her first deep thrill. Snow, I salute you, dear whirling snow, you that soften the cold and fill the darkest of nights with intimations of lightness, blotting the pathways, making space huge, and setting the wolves to howling! You deliver me from the sands, no more desert, yesterday is simply the past. You deliver me from the rot of inaction."

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge

Read a note from the editor about Victor Serge

Commonplace: Advice for the poet

"Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”

—Wei T’ai (eleventh century), epigraph to Poems of the Late T’ang, edited and with an introduction by A.C. Graham, on sale today, January 22, 2008

Commonplace: "laughter is no mean ecstasy"

“Good art never bores one. By that I mean that it is the business of the artist to prevent ennui; in the literary art, to relieve, refresh, revive the mind of the reader—at reasonable intervals—with some form of ecstasy, by some splendor of thought, some presentation of sheer beauty, some lightning turn of phrase—laughter is no mean ecstasy. Good art begins with an escape from dullness.”

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance, published by New Directions
Thanks are due to Thomas McGonigle for pointing us (obliquely) to this essay.

Commonplace: Edith Wharton, pt. 4

“A man can’t serve two masters.”
“You mean business and literature?”
“No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward which of the two has the dead core.”
“How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?”
“I’m sure,” said Merrick sharply.

Edith Wharton, from “The Long Run” in The New York Stories of Edith Wharton