Category Archives: Literature

Minkin, Playing with Money

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Back to Gumperstown. The bank. “What’s my balance? I think I’m overdrawn.” Foxes to the right of him, foxes to the left of him. Goddamn branch hires tellers the way restaurants hire waitresses. Sell some tit with the sausages to stimulate appetites, better tips, return trade. But a bank?

“You’re not OD’d.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You’re not overdrawn. This is your balance.” She passed him a slip of paper that read $126.23.

“Absolutely ridiculous, madam. I haven’t had that much in there in months. Why do I give you my money to play with?”

Lexicon. I usually rephrase as, “Why do I let you people play with my money?”

From Stephen Minkin’s excellent 1979 novel about play (“Ludics”), and Northern California in the late ‘70s, A No Doubt Mad Idea.

Heinlein, Class on Orders

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“One of the more interesting and thought-provoking courses given at the Academy was the class in writing orders—the most useful English Department course Heinlein ever got. Each midshipman was given a tactical situation for which he had to write an operations order. Then everyone in the class would pick it apart, trying to find a way to misunderstand the order. This process was called “Major-Browning,” after an officer in General Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War staff, whose sole duty was to misunderstand Grant’s orders. If the order got by Major Brown, Grant okayed it for release. At Annapolis, the Major-Brown test was pass-fail: if anyone could colorably misunderstand the order, the midshipman got a zero mark for the day. This process, with its panic-making incentive, “gave me a life-time respect for exact meaning of words and clarity of construction of sentences.””

— William Patterson, In Dialogue With His Century, Chapter 6

(This has got to be in one of Heinlein’s novels, because I knew this story long before I ever read Patterson. I just can’t remember which one. Comment below — preferably with a citation — if you know which one.)

Waldrop, Alternate Titles

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“Friends who know me get real tired of hearing me talk about the stories I’m going to write. And what they hear me call them are usually not the titles you know them by.”

“Like, “The Ugly Chickens” was referred to as “the dodo story.” “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” was variously called “the doo-wop story” or “the piss-drinking story.” “I’m going to write a doo-wop story,” I would say. “Ike at the Mike,” on the other hand, was always called “Ike at the Mike.” “The alternate-Africa story” meant “The Lions Are Asleep This Night.””

“In my imagination, “What Makes Heironymous Run?” was always “the painter story,” and that’s what it says on the working title of the file folder with the research in it. (The research consisted mostly of looking at about 2000 Renaissance paintings until my eyeballs melted like lumps of Crisco in a skillet.)”

Howard Walrop
Introduction to “What Makes Heironymous Run?”
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

Lexicon, to a degree. “You know… The Africa story.”

NB: Yes, I know Bosch spelled his name Hieronymous. But in Strange Monsters, Waldrop spelled it Heironymous. Vast, multitudes, etc.

Austen, Company

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“My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

“You are mistaken,” said he gently, “that is not good company; that is the best. Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice. Birth and good manners are essential; but a little learning is by no means a dangerous thing in good company; on the contrary, it will do very well.”

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Shelves

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Michael Chabon has done an interesting project, that he calls “The Shelves of Time.”

“An imaginary reconstruction of the Fantasy & Science Fiction section at Page One Books, Columbia, MD, as aggregated and averaged by memories of regular, intense perusal during the years 1972-1980.”

It’s a kick to see many of these covers again, many of which I imagine will be familiar to y’all. It’s also a strange glimpse into Chabon’s mind.

https://msha.ke/handmadeplaylists#the-shelves-of-time

War and Peace

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I seem to have originally written this in 2018, as a review for Goodreads. I think it holds up, and is worthwhile.

So. War and Peace. Voina i Mir (Война и мир) Got that done.

First, I prefer Dunnigan’s translation because she translates the swathes of French, as well as the Russian. Pevear & Volokhonsky don’t translate the French in line with the text, but force you to endnotes (paper) or popup footnotes (Kindle). They argue this is to illustrate how the French would seem to a middle class Russian of the 1860s, but me, I just want to read the book, and this decision gets in my way. I understand it, but it’s annoying. Dunnigan is much more fluid.

Tolstoy’s main accomplishment, to me, is he obviously knows where each and every character is at all times, and there are a lot of characters. I’m even willing to give him the usually derided history lecture in Part 2 of the Epilogue, because I see it primarily as an Apologia in the old sense — ie, how and why he wrote the book.

I am not as persuaded he keeps the voices of all those characters distinct. If you want to see someone do an amazing job with narrative voices (Tolstoy writes in 3rd person omniscient), I recommend A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

If you like chess, or go, this is the book for you. So many pieces, moving so many different ways.

But… Well, I see Natasha Rostova as the ur-template for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Her flightiness for the sake of flightiness doesn’t always seem driven by the character herself, but because Tolstoy wanted to portray her that way. In fact, I’d say that’s my largest critique — too often you see the puppetmaster, moving the marionettes the way he needs to for mechanical reasons.

I fully appreciate the accomplishment here. Still, to adapt Auda abu Tayi’s line from Lawrence of Arabia, it is not perfect.

Elizabeth Hardwick

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In The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction, No. 87”

INTERVIEWER

I was present a few years ago at a panel discussion where you were asked who was the greatest American female novelist, and you said Henry James. I had the feeling you meant something serious about that. 

HARDWICK

Such remarks don’t bear scrutiny. Did I actually say that? I do remember saying once that maybe the greatest female novelist in English was Constance Garnett. Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.