Dudely lulls

The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the author’s own.

In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius’ 2,000-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”). He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of “celestial coition.” —Dwight Garner, NYT

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There were other goodies in yesterday's art section. Ben Ratliff's review of the Foo Fighters show had a line that made me laugh: "Mr. Grohl and his tastes may be the only carbon-based link between the Boredoms and Tom Petty, whose 'Breakdown' the Foo Fighters played during a dudely lull." Dudely lull!

And Dave Itzkoff's piece on Dylan's Asia paintings, some of which appear to be based on famous photos, mentioned the Confessions of a Yakuza controversy...which reminded me of this lyric:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine alive as you or me
Then in the year I turned 16, a man who came to recruit laborers for the Ashio copper mines asked me if I cared to work there.

—PTSNBN

Weekend Disambiguation

The Second Pass shares a favorite long sentence (from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff), and a commenter mentions a fun-sounding game:

Many years ago, I bought a deck of large cards, called Shuffle Cards, at the MOMA in New York City. The cards were illustrated with drawings on each side. On one side of each card were the words, “and the” followed by a noun; on the other side was a verb. You would shuffle the cards, lay them out, and have a wonderful, nonsensical story to enjoy with children.

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Have you listened to any Aimee Mann lately? I was going to delete a bunch of songs off my iTunes, then started listening. She's so good! (This part of the post sounds like an e-mail to my sister.)

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Dwight Garner's NYT review of Timothy Ferriss was like a gift that kept on giving:

"He is said to be very good at Chinese kickboxing."

"If a movie were to be made of Mr. Ferriss’s life, it would star Matthew McConaughey in little rectangular eyeglasses."

"Mr. Ferriss likes to pose without a shirt — in some photographs he sprouts chest hair; in others, it’s been waxed away — and to describe the veins that run across his abdomen. He tosses around words like 'thrashing' and, to refer to inanimate things, 'bad boys.' "

" 'The 4-Hour Body' reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog."

[Now that's the way to do an x-meets-y line in a review.]

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You know who's on a roll? Paul Collins is on a roll. First his Lapham's Quarterly piece, now this NYTBR essay on the first detective novel!

Toile, T.S.

A break arrived when she won a Christmas fiction contest sponsored by The Observer newspaper. But still she struggled. In 1954, after some months of popping over-the-counter Dexedrine to stay slim, she was poisoned by it and went mildly insane for a spell. Mr. Stannard writes:

“T. S. Eliot, she insisted, was sending her threatening messages. His play” — “The Confidential Clerk” — “was full of them. Some were in the theater program. Obsessively she began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams and cryptographic experiments.”

—Dwight Garner, NYT review of Michael Stannard's Muriel Spark bio

The art of reviewing, lesson CXVI

Updike's second rule of book reviewing reads:

"Give him [sic] enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste."

There's an art to quotation; sometimes a rave review will contain a passage from the work in question that will be so lackluster that it makes you go, "Eh?" (More interesting is when a negative review gives you a sample of the source prose, and the sample is so good that you're immediately suspicious of the reviewer—has s/he no ear?)

Dwight Garner's review today of Josh Axelrad's Repeat Until Rich is particularly generous with its quotes. I had little interest in actually reading this book (having come across it in a few other articles)—but now it seems like something worth seeking out. This is pretty good, no?:

“I’d been napping for close to a year. I’d found a job because you had to find a job; it was the rage, people worked. In the corporate world, pay is ‘compensation.’ That’s their bare-bones way of expressing it. Something is being made up for, amends are being made: reparations. If you’d expected of life some vital engagement that shook your soul, broke your mind, drew blood from your eyeballs, breath from your throat, shattered front teeth, minced your fingers and your toes, and left your heart squeezed dry as a juiced lime, you might have been at risk of disappointment, might have turned into one of those effete, wan-faced chumps reading Camus on the subway if you weren’t compensated sufficiently.”

(Followed by DG's aside: "Note to self: Quit being one of those effete, wan-faced chumps who reads Camus on the subway.")

This was also reasonably funny:

As if in response to criticisms of Mr. Mezrich’s book, Mr. Axelrad (who, unlike Mr. Mezrich, actually played on the blackjack team he writes about) pre-emptively announces: “Where I changed names, I changed other details too — cities of residence, prior occupations, physical descriptions (sexying everybody up, as a rule, with an eye toward a Hollywood version someday: longer legs, bigger pecs; I went ahead and added a half inch to my own height while I was at it).” But he adds: “The incidents are true.”

The wedge

I.

I like the British genre of the review which, while otherwise favorable, enumerates a paragraph or two of errors in the penultimate paragraph:

Murdoch’s youthful mind is as sharp and polished as a sword, but Conradi’s editing is not. Random footnotes pop up like glove puppets interrupting a soliloquy, to explain that “Je t’aime” means “I love you” and that Baudelaire is a French poet. There is no index, there are typos galore and a footnote that refers to the missing last page of Thompson’s final letter to Murdoch is itself tantalisingly unfinished — “how Frank signed off his last letter we will probably never”.

—Jenny D, Light Reading

II.

This is the place in a review where critics tend to wedge in the sentence that says, in so many words, “This isn’t a perfect book.” And “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” surely isn’t. But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change. It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. You might put it down only to wipe off the sweat.—last paragraph of Dwight Garner's NYT review of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Nicely done

"She runs out of breath, and then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable." —David Denby on Julie & Julia

Tracy Kidder’s books are often published under blandly soothing titles (“House,” “Old Friends,” “Mountains Beyond Mountains”) that sound more like middle-period Crosby, Stills and Nash albums than like serious works of nonfiction. The title of his new one, “Strength in What Remains,” fits the cloying pattern. —Dwight Garner (in an otherwise glowing review of Kidder's latest)

"Somewhere a dialysis machine moved through its cleaning cycle, emitting a series of soft grunts and rumbles, like a discreet indigestion." —J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

Double trouble — Hole in one

Hockey's Sedin twins:

“Because of their style of play, they are symbiotic and are effectively inseparable,” Gillis said. “As such, we will treat them as a single entity for contractual purposes while recognizing their individual needs and attributes away from the arena.” —NYT

Also: Dwight Garner on new Naipaul bio:

Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”