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My review of Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart, which I characterize as one of the best novels ever written about the American Left, is in the latest issue of Commentary. Book lovers will also want to read Christopher Caldwell’s long skeptical look at The Kindly Ones and Algis Valiunas’s devaluation of “last summer’s megahit literary novel,” The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
Passion leaves you no will to act, because it leaves you no strength to resist.
Elaboration murders wit (it explains the joke).
Television schools your hearing: you hear crashes as stage effects, laughter as on a track.
Satire. Being hard on people in fiction.
Form is how a writer gives permanence to his work. “To His Coy Mistress,” for example, is a seduction argument because the form of classical syllogism keeps it from changing into something else—a serenade, a testimonial of the poet’s love, a praisesong to his mistress’s beauty.
If critics find a new system to stamp on a poem—something they can call a “method,” like Marxism, but divorced from belief and conviction—they feel they have something new to say.
Nemerov defines good writing as getting something right in language, adding that the appropriate response to rightness is silence. Capote says something similar in his Paris Review interview. “The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story,” he said, “is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?” Which suggests that the first test of a great work is whether it leaves you with anything to say. The immediate experience of a great work of literature is akin to clarity of vision or understanding; there is nothing more to add. The comic role of the English professor is to find something to add anyhow.
Ideology, according to Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is the perfection of the ideological state, because it has managed to destroy any basis, to remove any corroboration, for a challenge to its set of beliefs. In Oceania there is no means for establishing any “truth” which is independent of the state’s continual account of itself. There the truth is ideological.
The critic forfeits his office if and when he becomes an accommodationist.
Criticism is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
“Theoretical criticism” is a contradiction in terms; “practical criticism,” a redundancy.
Hawthorne’s remark in his journal regarding Concord is an apt description of the American university as it appears now: “Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of the first water.”
Art Durkee deserves credit for rising to my challenge to show just how my five definitive propositions about literature are conservative or essentialist.
The common error, if I may be permitted use of such a phrase, is memorably described by Philip Roth in American Pastoral:
The California novelist James D. Houston died last Thursday from cancer at the age of seventy-five. Houston taught at Santa Cruz while I was an undergraduate there. During those years he assisted his wife Jeanne Wakatsuki in writing Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir of the Japanese American internment during the Second World War. They had been married fifteen years before she finally confided to him that her family had been interned at Manzanar during the war.
A San Francisco native, Houston was educated at San Jose State and Stanford, where he studied under Wallage Stegner. (At Santa Cruz he was colleagues with Page Stegner, Wallace’s son. His closest friend on campus, though, was Ray Carver.) Between Battles (1968), his first novel, was based on his experience in the U.S. Air Force. Gig (1969) and A Native Son of the Golden West (1971) were the novels that all of the young writers at Santa Cruz read. The first was about a jazz pianist, the second about a surfer. Houston was not yet forty, and seemed to understand the countercultural youth about as well as we understood ourselves. Better, the truth is.
He also coauthored San Francisco 49er quarterback John Brodie’s memoir Open Field (1974). And he wrote five more novels, including Snow Mountain Passage (2001), about the Donner Party, and Bird of Another Heaven, a historical romance about the last king of Hawaii and his great-great grandson, which was published two years ago by Knopf.
In his comment to Frank Wilson’s kind link to my post on argument and monologue, Art Durkee says that my definitions of literature reflect “the very conservative literary view, almost the essentialist view,” while Green’s is “the more post-modern view.”
Neither of these is quite right.
The view that literature is distinguished by different and higher ambitions than other kinds of writing (it “seeks to be judged by ‘literary’ criteria”), and that it is restricted to fiction (“fiction, poetry, and the drama”), seems pretty old-fashioned to me. I would even describe it as Arnoldian—a variation, that is, on Arnold’s criterion of seriousness.
And while it is true that I am a political conservative—I was upset yesterday, for example, when President Obama opened the door to prosecution of Bush administration figures who approved or engaged in “torture”—I am entirely unclear on how my definitions of literature are conservative. Even more, how they are essentialist. What essence do I posit for literary texts?
My definitions, again, run like this:
(1) Either everything written is literature, or only some of it is.
(2) If the former, it must be arbitrarily restricted by means of some acceptable scholarly category (e.g. historical period, gender). If the latter, it must be selected.
(3) Those who pursue the former solution are literary scholars; the latter, literary critics.
(4) Except when the word is used by literary scholars (who mean “everything written”), literature is a title of prestige bestowed by literary critics upon some written works and not others.
(5) The only account that I have been able to devise that subsumes all the different selections of prestigious works made at different times and in different places by different critics is this: Literature is good writing, where by definition ‘good’ yields no fixed definition.
If Mr Durkee or someone else could tell me how these five propositions are “conservative,” I should be grateful.
For a genuinely conservative voice in criticism, I offer by contrast David P. Goldman (a.k.a. Spengler) of the Asian Times, whom I quoted below saying that the celebration of Susan Boyle, the singer who wowed the audience on Britain’s Got Talent, “validates the mediocrity of popular audiences and represents a ‘[c]hurlish resentment of high culture.’ ” Or the late Hugh Kenner, whom Patrick Kurp touchingly discusses today. It is Kenner whom I am quoting when I hold dogmatically that “There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with.” Please note, however, that I go on in particularly unconservative fashion to add that “there will be much disagreement over what [those literary works] are.” Despite the tone of smug superiority that puts off many of my readers, this addition is intended to create an opening for my intellectual opponents.
Update: Frank Wilson characterizes my views as existentialist. The correct answer, for fifty points (buzzer, please), is eclectic.
On Sunday, Stephen Romei asked, “What are the best final sentences in literature?” He himself nominated the last sentences of Der Prozess, Nineteen Eighty-Four, L’Etranger, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and Slaughterhouse Five.
Readers added the closing lines of Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway, Lolita, Brave New World, and some poor soul went on and on about the film version of Philip Roth’s Dying Animal, though what it had to do with memorable literary conclusions was last lost on me [great slip!].
Roth, however, contributed one of the best endings ever: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
Other personal favorites. From Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
The Assistant: “After Passover he became a Jew.”
Francine Prose, Blue Angel: “But how strangely light-hearted he feels, what a relief it is to admit, even just for one moment, how much he will never know.”
Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre: “But when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.”
The American: “Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it.” (The words are not impressive, but the image, returned to its narrative context, may be the best concluding image ever. On the paper is written evidence that the two people who betrayed his trust and broke his heart—Madame de Bellegarde and her son Urbain, who had forbidden Christopher Newman’s marriage to Claire de Cintre after they had published the engagement—were guilty of murder. Making the evidence public will be his revenge, but Newman decides in the end not to follow through—decides to let go of his betrayal and broken heart. He tosses the paper into the fire. And only then does Mrs Tristram tell him that the Bellegardes had depended upon him to do that very thing, not to take revenge. Then the last sentence.)
Finally, from Herzog: “Not a single word.”
A sadly neglected portion of graduate training—in any field, not just English—is what might be called the ethics of argument. Young scholars should be taught the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, for example, but they also need to be taught that attacking a man’s argument is not the same as attacking the man. While the resort to argumenta ad hominem is filthy perhaps even worse is the indiscriminate reception of any attack upon a man’s argument as an attack upon the man, because it corrupts the devotion to argument upon which the Republic of Letters relies.
I begin this way because I suspect that Daniel Green feels abused by me. He has removed A Commonplace Blog from his blogroll, and he pointedly ignores my argumentative challenges to his stated views. From my side, the matter looks slightly different. In January, we engaged in a scuffle over the definition of literature. The whole thing began when, replying to criticisms of Patrick Kurp’s and my selection of the best American fiction from 1968 to 1998, I had said: “Literature just is a selection of masterpieces. There is no getting around this obstacle. The problem is what criteria of selection you are going to use.” Now, faithful readers of this blog will recognize in this a restatement and combination of my first two dogmas: “(1) Literature is good writing, where ‘good’ by definition yields no fixed definition. (2) Literature is a title of prestige bestowed by critics. . . .”
Two and a half weeks later Green blasted my assertion, saying, “I really can’t imagine a more reductive and . . . a more implicitly dismissive view of the value of literature and literary study.” I replied later the same day, quoting E. D. Hirsch Jr. as the source and provocation of my views: “Either literature is defined by traits that someone stipulates,” Hirsch wrote, “in which case literature can be defined as one pleases; or literature is what the authorities call ‘literature,’ in which case The Origin of Species is literature.” Hence my conclusion that literature is a special status bestowed by critics, for this statement covers both of Hirsch’s cases.
As I was soon to learn is somewhat characteristic of him, Green did not reply in the Comments section of my post. In order to carry the fight to him, I was obliged to reply in the Comments section at his own Reading Experience. Fair enough: there, at least, Green accepted the responsibility of answering my challenges. I explained how I had arrived at the assertion that he had described as reductive: “Either everything written is literature, or only some of it is. If the former the problem becomes how to reduce it to manageable proportions, and the only fair tactic—since by definition you are foregoing selectivity—is by means of some arbitrary category. If the latter then you must choose.” Either one must be a scholar and read everything in an arbitrarily restricted field, or be a critic and recommend only some of it.
Either everything written is literature, or only some of it is. Green responded: “Or everything written in the forms of fiction, poetry, or drama is literature, if the author intends it to be taken as literature.” And finally, finally, we were engaged in a face-to-face debate. But not for long. I pointed out that the first half of his definition (“everything written in the forms of fiction, poetry, or drama”) was exactly what Hirsch referred to in saying that “literature is defined by traits that someone stipulates.” Not everyone agrees with the stipulation. In fact, Hirsch had supplied an example of a literary work that falls outside it: Darwin’s Origin of Species. The second half of Green’s definition, I pointed out, was tautological. But “[i]f a writer of fiction intends his work to be judged as ‘literature,’ ” Green objected, “then I don‘t see why we shouldn‘t do that.” Because then literature would not be everything written in the forms of fiction, poetry, or drama, but something else—that’s why.
Green tried again: “Literature is fiction, poetry, or drama that seeks to be judged by ‘literary’ criteria,” he said. Right. “And cows are mammals that are known as ‘cows,’ ” I scoffed. The definition begs the question. “It doesn’t beg the question,” Green replied, although denial is not refutation. “It simply acknowledges that the question can be answered only by looking at specific cases.”
At this point I threw up my hands. For if literature exists only in specific cases there is no possibility of generalizing about it at all. What sense would it make, then, to say that any text seeks to be judged by “literary” criteria? Green would have to hold that a text seeks to be judged by its own specific criteria. On the contrary, however, he explicitly maintained that specifying what “literary” criteria he would apply in judging self-described “literature” is what he had been doing for years on his blog.
My guess is that Green had confused definition with a priori knowledge, which is arrived at independently of experience. By preferring to look at specific cases, he may simply have been expressing a preference for a posteriori knowledge. But a definition can be offered in advance without its necessarily being a priori. If it is derived from experience it will serve as a summary of experience—a report delivered after the fact—although its abstract form can lead incautious readers to mistake it for something else. (It is also readily confused with dogma, for example.)
At all events, I decided to give Green some time to rethink his position, as I had invited him to do when I pointed out that he had fallen victim to petitio principii. And that is why I reentered the lists only two weeks ago, when he set forth a generalizing and abstract account of literary criticism, complete with instructions on what and what not to do, which violated his stated attachment to specific cases. I acknowledge that I was rough on him. My conclusion may even have seemed to have crossed the line into a personal attack, although I will hold till my dying day that if you are not devoted to argument—if you are content with question-begging conceptions of experience—then you can only resort to force when you put those conceptions into play.
And I say all this because, once again this morning, Green has written something to which I should like to reply. In fact, I read his review of Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff’s memoir of his mother Susan Sontag, as an invitation to an argument. While making a sharp and useful distinction between biography and gossip, Green goes on to challenge the place of biography in literary understanding. He is worried about a literary culture in which the “biographical will triumph over the exegetic.” This is, in my opinion, a false distinction. But what is the point of developing an argument to that effect if it will go pointedly ignored? Unless you open yourself to the possibility of correction and refutation—unless you are devoted to argument, even if it gets rough at times—you have chosen to set up camp outside the Republic of Letters. You have preferred the solitary life of monologue. I should welcome a dialogue on biography and exegesis, but I cannot carry it on by myself—though perhaps Daniel Green can.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories about life in small-town Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In its Jacket Copy blog, the Los Angeles Times breaks the story, noting that Strout edged out Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves and Christine Schutt’s All Souls, the other two finalists. Earlier in the year, Strout discussed the book in a talk recorded by WGBH.
Reviews: Ann Cummins, San Francisco Chronicle; Molly Gross, Washington Post; J. A. Kaszuba Locke, BookLoons; Valerie Ryan, Seattle Times; Lizzie Skurnick, Critical Mass; Louisa Thomas, New York Times; Jessica Treadway, Boston Globe.
I have never read the book, never before heard of Strout, hadn’t even realized Olive Kitteridge was nominated. Just goes to show. What? I am not sure.
Although I have small interest in popular culture, and even less in reality TV, like pretty much everyone else in the English-speaking world I found myself arrested by the incredible story of Susan Boyle. It is a story that is particularly fitting for our time, because it requires more than words.
I had caught a short segment about Boyle on a morning show that my wife was watching as she dressed for work. But I had been unaware of the background to the segment—unaware either of her life prior to appearing on Britain’s Got Talent ten days ago or the reception Boyle was given by the audience at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. And I was only vaguely aware—aware, that is, beneath the level of verbal consciousness—of how the television directors, in both the U.K. and U.S., had selected camera angles that emphasized the 47-year-old Scottish spinster’s physical awkwardness and lack of beauty. The contrast between her looks and her voice was intended to be shattering. The power and depth of her singing—she performed “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical drama Les Misérables—were more than sufficient to move even a casual listener. For television, however, and for a world that has been schooled in its visual values, her singing was not enough. Boyle was a sensation precisely because the beauty of her voice was treated as astonishing given her lack of physical beauty.
And I write all this—not one word about literature till now—because this morning, warming up with a cup of coffee, I read a wise and lovely column about Boyle and her worldwide reception by Colette Douglas Home, a Northern Irish writer who is married to the editor of the Glasgow Herald. As they say, read the whole thing. Truth-telling does not get much better.
Update: In the New York Post, Maureen Callahan is suspicious. It is not that she believes there is really no such person as Susan Boyle. Rather, she is suspicious of the impresario Simon Cowell. “Not since P.T. Barnum has there been a show business master of the trompe l’oeil like Simon Cowell,” she says. I am in no position to judge, having only the vaguest knowledge of Cowell. Yet Callahan goes on to say that Boyle’s story “would not be so compelling without the contradictions: the beautiful voice possessed by this defiantly unglamorous woman, who can somehow fully inhabit and interpret a love song without ever having been in love.” And I wonder if his genius, if indeed Cowell staged the whole thing, may be to spot a good story when he sees one—and to know just how to heighten the contradictions, to make a good story even better. Even if all that is true, the fact remains that the contradictions depend upon just the cultural assumptions that Douglas Home identified in her column: “Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect.” Even from the likes of Maureen Callahan.
Update, II: David P. Goldman, the Asia Times columnist who writes under the appropriate pseudonym Spengler, for he too is convinced of the West’s decline, argues that Susan Boyle validates the mediocrity of popular audiences and represents a “[c]hurlish resentment of high culture.” Tone deaf as I am, I have no truly informed opinion about Boyle’s singing. As Robert Levy observes, the whole thing was great theater. Yet I still maintain that Colette Douglas Home has reported a real cultural distemper—our confusion of youthful beauty with talent and goodness, and our increasing willingness to show a lack of respect for those who do not meet our standards of youth and beauty. That insight, rather than Boyle’s singing, is what motivated my original post.
I should be nonplussed, I suppose, to have been cast as Garth Knight in Elberry’s remake of Robin of Sherwood. But it is refreshing 
to learn that Garth Knight is also a bondage artist and the father of Bristol Palin’s baby. These are cultural roles that suit my unique abilities to a farthing!
Rather than the picture that Elberry posted, I prefer this self-portrait from my pre-Raphaelite or hippie days. (I can’t decide which.) Coated with cobwebs and dust, indeed!
By the way, I shall be online only sporadically over the next three or four days, since I am on deadline with an article for a magazine. Periphrastic insults, not banal, should be forwarded to Nigel Beale, Frank Wilson, Patrick Kurp, or any other Old Boy with a blog. Although, let’s face it, none of them can touch me when it comes to being “knowing to the point of arrogance.”
Update: In the comments section, Lee Lowe accuses me of a “certain dogmatism.” I reply to the accusation there.
But her accusation got me to thinking. What are the dogmas that I have enunciated so far on this Commonplace Blog? Here are ten.
( 1) Literature is good writing, where “good” by definition yields no fixed definition.
( 2) Literature is a title of prestige bestowed by critics (who mean to distinguish good writing from, say, John Banfield’s Banville’s).
( 3) Literary persuasion is of a different order from political persuasion, because it is mediated by style—that is, the concern to write well.
( 4) English literature is a discipline of knowledge rather than a fine sensibility.
( 5) There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with, although there will be much disagreement over what they are.
( 6) The sciences are not the court of last rational resort, because the claim that they are is not itself a scientific claim, leaving other courts to conduct at least some rational business.
( 7) Fiction’s truth may only be secured extrinsically—that is, it must also be contained in the community where the fiction was originally written. More than the fictional world alone must exist for fiction to enter the service of truth.
( 8) Academic boycotts of Israel are terrorism by other means.
( 9) Meaning is produced not by the material aspects of writing, but by its intellectual conditions.
(10) Literature does not come from groups, marginalized or otherwise, but from individual men and women; and it is a product, not of the immutable racial and sexual identities they receive at birth, but of innumerable choices. Literature is a realm of freedom, including the freedom to dissociate yourself from antipathetic ideas, even those espoused by a group with which you otherwise identify.
In the name of God, what are two books by Jonathan Culler doing alongside Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, F. R. Leavis, and J. M. Coetzee in Nigel Beale’s stack of books to lug home from South Africa?
The Los Angeles Times handicaps the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, to be announced Monday. Top three picks: Marilynne Robinson’s Home (too Christian), John Updike’s Widows of Eastwick (the jury won’t award the prize posthumously), and Philip Roth’s Indignation (not a “big”-enough Roth). You heard it here first. The winner will be Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves.
Jerome Weeks appears to have abandoned Book/Daddy.
Ben Kipela discovers the nineteenth-century American poet Agnes Lee, who leads him to reread J. V. Cunningham. Any poet who achieves such an effect deserves immediate immortality.
Maud Newton interviews Marlon James, another of those novelists who has turned his back upon the unspeakable evils of capitalism to write instead of slavery.
“After a steady diet of Victorian Catholic novelists,” Miriam Burstein cheats with Stephen Booth’s Kill Call and Ruth Rendell’s Birthday Present.
Making sure that more Pulitzer Prize-winners are not forgotten, Roger K. Miller praises The Bridge of San Luis Rey (final verdict: plenty of riches, but not perfect) and one of the reviewers at Mookse and the Gripes tackles Humboldt’s Gift (arouses a curiosity about his three National Book Award-winning novels, but not for “all things Bellow”).
Patrick Kurp celebrates fiction’s ability to draw together disparate events.
And Daniel Green continues to ignore his incoherence on the question of literature.
The shortlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award was released yesterday.
One of the nominees is a personal favorite. Tim Winton is compared in the official release to Ian McEwan and Philip Roth (“major chroniclers of the human condition”). He far more closely resembles Richard Russo. His novels are similarly loose, yet driven by narrative rather than theme or thesis. They invite you to keep reading, partly because they never invite you to stop, underline a passage, and ponder. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Literary intellectuals have become too tolerant of essayistic digressions and sententious reflections. Winton’s novels don’t loop back on themselves. They drive forward. Here is hoping that Breath, his novel about surfers, brings home his fourth Miles Franklin Award.
Perry Middlemiss’s page dedicated to the award is here. It includes a list of every award-winner since 1957.
Update: The Guardian says that Winton holds the “pole position” for the award (h/t: Books, Inq.).
The American Book Exchange has compiled a list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels (h/t: Books, Inq.). First on the list is James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, which I named earlier as a celebrated book whose author had outlived his reputation. Martin Dressler hardly belongs on the same list as The Able McLaughlins and Lamb in His Bosom, though. How about Edna Ferber’s So Big, John Hersey’s Bell for Adano, or Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres?
A more useful list would include prize-winning novels that have been forgotten, but do not deserve to be:
( 1) Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux (National Book Award, 1975)
( 2) Adele Wiseman, The Sacrifice (Governor General’s Award, 1956)
( 3) Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times (Orange Prize, 2000)
( 4) Jean Stafford, The Collected Stories (Pulitzer Prize, 1970)
( 5) Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils (Booker Prize, 1986)
( 6) Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget (James Tait Black Prize, 1921)
( 7) Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (Governor General’s Award, 1960)
( 8) Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (National Book Award, 1957)
( 9) Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (Governor General’s Award, 1997)
(10) Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (Lambda Award, 2002)
So Larry Kramer, who has also collected eighteen thousand signatures on a petition calling for a boycott, does not think—not for one second—that a computer glitch caused some books by prominent homosexuals to lose their Amazon sales rankings and become harder to find in searches. Michael Lukas goes even further. The glitch “targeted” homosexuals’ books, he yells: “Not only does the incident reek of blatant bias, it also displays a profound ignorance of literary history.”
That is quite a lot for one mistake to accomplish. If Kramer and Lukas do not believe that a programming error caused the “deranking” of some books, what do they believe was behind it? Lukas is clear on the point, offering a “short list of titles that Amazon might consider for the next round of censorship” and wondering darkly whether “this is the company we want controlling the future of literature.” But aren’t these contradictory ambitions? If Amazon seeks to corner the book-buying market, why would it also seek to shrink the size of the market? Do Kramer and Lukas really believe that it is good business to eliminate homosexuals’ books from a bookstore’s inventory? How would that be in Amazon’s interests? Are homosexual writers and readers such an insignificant public that the company could afford to offend and exclude them?
The programming error suggests exactly the opposite. Amazon was apparently trying to revise its search algorithms to make it easier for customers to find books on what are politely described as “gay themes.” But here is just exactly the source of the problem. And it is evidence of special pleading on the part of homosexual writers and readers. They want books with “gay themes” to be distinguished from all other books—set apart in a separate universe, with its own separate foundation and its own separate prizes—and they annex an ever-increasing area of literary history to this universe, but then they object, as Daniel Mendelsohn does in the same New York Times article in which Kramer is quoted, that “the words gay and lesbian were clearly flagged” when Amazon sought to revise its search algorithms. Since they themselves insist upon euphemisms like “gay” and “lesbian”—to speak more plainly would be a slur—they are the ones who have installed euphemism at the heart of the process and complicated the effort of distinguishing their writing from everyone else’s. They want to be singled out. They bridle at being singled out. Perhaps the very idea of “gay literature” is to blame for the whole snafu.
Hate to post and run, but last two days of Passover start in half an hour. Comments here are moderated, because in the past I have received antisemitic remarks, advertisements for Viagra, links to irrelevant websites, and self-publishing novelists’ self-promotions. No way, then, to reply till Thursday night, when I shall be back online, and with any luck, someone will have accepted my challenges. Talk to you then.
. . . what either occurrence of the word literary refers to in the following sentence: “Th[e] ability to enlist various kinds of writing not themselves per se ‘literary’ in the creation of literary form is part of what has allowed fiction to retain its vitality. . . .” If both refer to the same thing why is the first handled with quotation marks? And if they refer to different things how do the quotation marks specify the difference? Help me. I’m lost.
In a provocative day-after-Easter post, Elberry considers the historical basis of Christianity—the subject also of an early essay by Michael Oakeshott, which I commend to him. Basing a religious understanding upon historical events is objectionable, Elberry says; few would find themselves driven to Christ even if it could be proved that his resurrection was a historical fact. “The gods cannot be proved,” he writes. Oakeshott elaborates:
