Read in Order to Live

I found the below by accident, bouncing around the web, but the sentiment is perfectly good. 

It reminds me of a book I read about 45 years ago: The Illusionless Man: Fantasies and Meditations on Disillusionment (1966) by Allen Wheelis. Wheelis (1915-2007) was a noted San Francisco psychotherapist who also wrote stories, essays and novels. Most are of a pessimistic cast, and have frequent epigrammatic delights ("One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles" p. 132). 

The Illusionless Man is a collection of six items, four fantasies and two meditations. The one story that stayed with me the most is "The Signal" which concerns a man at a fortune cookie factory who starts writing original fortunes and becomes a notable success (while the recipe for the cookies remains unaltered). It seems like a good time for a re-read.

An Interview with Douglas A. Anderson by G. Connor Salter

A new interview with me, on "Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors," is online at the Fellowship & Fairydust site, here.  

Dunsany Castle and the current Lord Dunsany

There is a new two-hour documentary titled Quintessentially Irish (2024) in which the current Lord Dunsany appears about a dozen times, discussing several things from his great grandfather to his own experience of watching a marriage scene in Braveheart being filmed by Mel Gibson at Dunsany Castle. He also discusses his re-wilding of part of the Dunsany land, and there are a number of interesting scenes showing both the inside and outside of Dunsany Castle. The documentary as a whole is much less interesting, framed by the self-aggrandizing reminiscences of a doddering Pierce Brosnan. It seems at most times to be a superficial advertisement for anything Irish.

The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction

I would substitute "literature" for "literary fiction" in the title of this short article by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings from Persuasion, but a lot of what it says about the state of publishing in the 21st century is spot on. Witness:

Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. 

And I'm not sure I see much hope in the current situation--certainly not for the writers who expect to be paid for their work. Small presses may be good for getting publication, but the terms are unpropitious. 

The full article can be found here.

The Expensive Business of Quoting Poetry

Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction. The article is here at The Spectator.  Below are a few snippets. 

It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. . . . But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem about Christopher Robin saying his prayers – and my publishers advised me, if I didn’t want to pay, to snip it out. Which I did. The rights holders for another author of verse, who shall remain nameless here, not only asserted that ‘fair dealing’ legislation – the provision that allows you to quote without permission – didn’t apply to their author but claimed an absolute right of veto on any quotation for ebooks or audio.

Poetry, I was told, is very dangerous. Not as dangerous as pop lyrics (everyone agrees that they are ‘a nightmare’. . .) – but much riskier than prose.

The problem here is not exactly the law. The problem is that nobody wants to test the law. As media lawyer David Hooper put it when I asked him: ‘Copyright law is distinctly unpredictable and expensive to litigate, which puts the copyright holders in quite a strong position.’

Centenary Folio Society Edition of Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter

I recently learned that the Folio Society has published an illustrated centenary edition of The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Illustrated by Julie Dillon, and with an Introduction by Erin Morgenstern, and a reprinted introduction (from the 1999 Ballantine trade paperback edition) by Neil Gaiman. 

The Folio Society webpage for the book includes a 50 second video highlighting the production. It can be seen here. 

While the artist is clearly very talented, I confess her visions for the novel do not particularly appeal to me. 

A Reviewer's Life

A few extracts from an interesting article by Christine Smallwood, on "A Reviewer's Life: The Material Constraints of Writing Criticism Today":

Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the culture, but no one could pay the rent writ­ing for those outlets alone. If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether.

Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works.

Criticism is a conversation—with oneself but also with one’s editors, with readers, and with other reviewers. There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a message in a bottle or sending up a flare. . . . Who knows where the person who will read the piece is sitting?

Read the full article in the Summer 2024 issue of The Yale Review, accessible here.