From A Far Cry from Kensington, here are Mrs. Hawkin’s reflections upon the upper and the ordinary classes:
I will say, now, that I learned a lot about upper class habits while I was with Mackintosh & Tooley. In the end I concluded that it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper [...]
I have a deep, abiding love for a type of book that I believe should constitute its own category in the Library of Congress catalogue. My name for this literary genre: The. Best. Book. Ever.
How to know when you are in the presence of The. Best. Book. Ever? You quickly develop a curious tic, the [...]
From A Legacy:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous, ça n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit. Never as bad, never as good… When? At [...]
I’m always lusting after something but have never wanted for anything, unlike my mother, who when she was a little girl used to cut watches out of the Sears catalog and tape them to her wrist.
Prunes and Prism
Maybe the indictment really is “Washington’s hottest literary form.” Mark Leibovich at the Washington Post thinks so. Could the charging document someday eclipse the memoir? It’s too soon to tell, but in only a few months, we’ve seen the genre grow at an absurdly fast pace: Libby, DeLay, Safavian, Scanlon, Abramoff. And yet, as reading [...]
I am still quivering with delight after learning that Frostine99 has just launched a blog: Prunes and Prism. (Frostine99, you may recall, knows cat blogs — and so, so much else.) The name of her site comes from Little Dorrit, the Dickens novel in which young ladies seeking husbands are instructed in “very good words [...]
Over at Slate, Jess Row looks at Ben Marcus’s recent essay in Harper’s, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Of realist vs. experimental writing, Row writes:
These days few writers would self-consciously place themselves firmly on one or the other side of these boundaries. Living, as [...]
Harold Pinter on words: “Moving among them, sorting them out, watching them appear on the page, from this I derive considerable pleasure. But at the same time I have another strong feeling about words which amounts to nothing less than nausea.”
I have a review of Joan Didion’s new book in this week’s issue of Time Out New York, another addition to the already substantial critical love experience. (Link to the TONY review to come eventually. The magazine posts content on the web site a few weeks after it’s been in print.)
UPDATE: Here’s the link.
I’m half-way through Joy Castro’s memoir The Truth Book, a grim account of “escaping a childhood of abuse among Jehovah’s Witnesses.” By the late 90s, the author, who is now in her 20s, has escaped. (At least, one hopes she has.) She is finishing up her dissertation on “leftist women writers” and, desperate for money, [...]