BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:THE JOYS OF READING

“I don’t know if it’s ever very wise to give up on 
Dickens. in my experience , a sudden panic about 
my own ignorance is followed firstly by the 
desperate desire to read nonfiction, and then, 
usually very swiftly by a realization that any 
nonfiction, and then, usually very swiftly by a 
realization that any nonfiction reading I am going 
to do is going to be hopelessly inadequate and partial. 
If I knew I was going to die next week, then I’d
 definitely be keen to read up on facts about the 
afterlife, in the absence of any really authoritative 
books on the subject (no recommendations, please), 
then I think I’d rather read great fiction, something 
that shoots for and maybe even hits the moon, than 
a history of the House of Bourbon.”

Nick Hornby. More Baths, Less Talking 

**

A 20th CENTURY AUTHOR HAVING FUN

jMost likely most of us have heard about the great
Artist Domenikos Theototokopoulos, better known as 
El Greco. In John O’Hara’s 1934 novel Appointment in
Samara, there is a bootlegger named Al Greco.

**

OPENING TO DWIGHT GARNER’S REVIEW OF 
PURE COLOUR by Sheila Heti

“Sheila Heti’s new novel, “Pure Colour,” is about a
young woman who turns into a leaf. ‘Unrequited love’s
a bore,’ Billie Holiday sang. So, it turns out, is photosynthesis.”

Dwight Garner. “Metaphysics Laced With Magic” 
in The New York Times” (February 8, 2022)

**

ON READING IN CHINA

“Fiction only makes up about 7 percent of the printed
 books sold in China,” Walsh points out, but “the
mainland’s internet literature boom makes it the 
largest self-generating industry of unregulated, 
free-market fiction in the world.” On sites hosting 
millions of titles, some writers pound out 30,000 
words a day! (“The Great Gatsby” is 47,000 words.) 
Hundreds of millions of users spend countless hours 
per week reading fantasy romances that are often more 
than 6 million words long. “

Rectual in politics. "Via ovica
 Washington Post (February 11,2022)

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WRITING HARDY BOYS
BOOKS UNDER THE CATCH-ALL PSEUDONYM FRANKLIN
W. DIXON

Most of the early volumes were written by Canadian 
Leslie McFarlane, who authored nineteen of the first 
twenty-five titles and co-authored volume 17 The 
Secret Warning, between 1927 and 1946[  Unlike many 
other Syndicate ghostwriters, McFarlane was regarded 
highly enough by the Syndicate that he was frequently 
given advances of $25 or $50, and during the Depression,
when fees were lowered, he was paid $85 for each Hardy 
Boys book when other Syndicate ghostwriters were 
receiving only $75 for their productions.According  
 to McFarlane's family, he despised the series and 
its characters.[

WIKIPEDIA
** 
ON READING KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

 Kitchen Confidential is the knuckle-crack of a fighter
getting ready to wallop. I still catch my breath reading
his description of the palms of a fearsome chef, a line
that wouldn’t be out of place in Moby Dick: ‘The hideous
constellation of water-blisters, angry red welts from 
grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or
hot fat had made the skin simply roll off.’”

Helen Rosner. Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview
(Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010)

**

ON CLOSE READING

: “Showmanship for Magicians is a handbook meant 
to turn amateurs into professionals. Its subtitle 
is Complete Discussions of Audience Appeals and 
Fundamentals of Showmanship and Presentation. I 
held my first copy and solemnly turned the pages, 
reading each sentence so slowly  that it’s a miracle 
I could remember what the verb was. The cover was 
plain-faced – like as secret manifesto that should 
be hidden under your mattress – and  the pages were 
thick as rags.”

        Steve Martin. Born Standing Up (New York: Scribner, 2007)
**

LITERARY NOTE #40

“Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds.”
 Ah, well. Wallace Stevens did not write poetry for clods.

LJP

**

DOROTHY PARKER & CONVENTS

“Convents don’t teach you how to read; you have to 
find out for yourself. At my convent we did have a 
textbook, one that devoted a page and a half to 
Adelaide Ann Proctor; but we couldn’t read Dickens; 
he was vulgar, you know. But I read him and Thackeray,
 and I’m the one woman you’ll ever know who’s read 
every  word of Charles Reade, the author of The Cloister 
 the Hearth. But as for helping me in the outside world, 
the convent taught me only that if you spit on a 
pencil eraser it will erase ink.”:

Dorothy Parker in an interview with Marion Capron, 
published in Writers at Work: The Paris Review 
interviews (NY: Viking Compass Edition, 1959)
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