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

“In view of the fact that I was once again on my feet, instead of flat on my back, the concept of ‘later’ suddenly seemed less quixotic than realistic. If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”

 Clive James. Latest Readings (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 2015)
**

ON READING THE WISH BOOK – THE SEARS AND ROEBUCK CATALOGUE 
IN THE LATE 1930s

“ The Sears and Roebuck catalogue was much better used 
as a Wish Book, which it was called by the people out 
in the country, who would never be able to order anything 
out of it, but could spend hours dreaming over.
   Willalee Bookatee and I used it for another reason. We 
made stories out of it, used it to spin a web of fantasy
 about us. Without that catalogue our childhood would 
have been radically different. The federal government 
ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company
for bringing all that color and all that mystery and 
all that beauty into the lives of country people.
      I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue 
because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, 
a toe split, an ear half-chewed away….

Harry Crews. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978)

**

A FORGOTTEN BOOK


“The Destiny Man concerns a ham actor who seizes a 
last chance for stage fame when he discovers a lost Shakespearean play left behind on a train. There 
is a crime involved, but the novel’s impetus 
derives from knowing that the hero – who has 
wangled sole rights to the play’s performance – 
is going to turn the event into a hilarious 
fiasco when he tries to rise to the role’s 
challenge. Van Greenaway even has the nerve 
to create chunks of the bard’s missing play 
from scratch, and pulls them  off  with enormous 
dispatch. The ending is a surprise and too 
delightful  to be given away here.”

Christopher Fowler. The Book of Forgotten Authors 
(London: Riverrun, 2017)

**

THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF CASANOVA’S 12 VOLUMES 
OF HIS MEMOIR—“HISTOIRE DE MA VIE”— HELD BY A 
GERMAN PUBLISHER

 The original handwritten manuscript, penned in
French, was  “under lock and key, where it barely 
survived the bombing of Leipzig, in 1943. Two 
years later, Winston Churchill made a worried 
inquiry and an Army vehicle was dispatched to 
evacuate it from the rubble. The complete text 
was first published in 1960 (the year that a 
British jury found redeeming social value in
 Lady Chatterley’s Lover”).

Judith Thurman. “In Flagrante” in The New Yorker
(June 27, 2022)
**

DESCARTES IN HIS DREAM READS A BOOK

“On the night of 10-11 November 1619 Descartes, 
then aged twenty-three, had three dreams which 
he considered came from high, and took the trouble
to write down and interpret in some detail. 
Unfortunately his own account of them is not extant; 
but the account given by Baillet, in his Vie de 
Mr. Des-Cartes, from which I shall be quoting, 
can be taken as fairly close to Descartes’s own.”

    Alice Browne

…
“In this final dream, he found a book on his table,
 without knowing who had put it there. He opened it, 
and seeing it was a Dictionary, he was delighted,
 hoping it could be very useful to him. At the same 
moment, he found another book under his hand, with
 which he was equally unfamiliar, not knowing from
 where it had come to him. He found it was a collection 
of poems by different authors, entitled Corpus Poetarum
 Etc. He had the fancy to read something in it; opening 
the book , he fell upon the verse Quod vitae sectabor
 iter? (What path in life shall I follow?). At the 
same moment, he noticed a man whom he did not , but who
 showed him a piece of verse, beginning with Est & Non, 
(Yes and No) and praised it to him as an excellent 
piece. M. Descartes told him he knew what it was, 
and this piece was one of the Idylls of Ausonius, 
which were to be found in the big collection of 
poets which was on the table…”

Alice Brown. “Descartes’s Dreams” in the Journal
 of the Warburg and Coutland Institute, vol 40 (1977)

**

FROM J.D. SALINGER’S THE CATCHER IN THE RYE


“You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset
 Maugham, , though I read  it last summer. It’s a 
pretty good book and all, but I wouldn’t want to 
call Somerset Maugham.  I  don’t know. He just 
isn’t the kind of  guy I’d want to call up, that’s
 all,”

**
ON PLAYBOY & BOCCACCIO

“Ah, yes, the sultan’s daughter. Haven’t I heard 
that one before? Yes, in Playboy, perhaps, where 
Boccaccio showed up in the “Ribald Classics” section 
back there in the mid-fifties. Stealing the magazine 
from beneath a counselor’s bed at camp (I was thirteen 
or fourteen ), I may have read a Boccaccio tale or 
two, finding the stories between a photo  of Jayne 
Mansfield lying heavily in the grass and was so serious
 – yes, there amid Hef’s interminable ‘philosophy’ and 
pages of redundant debonair balderdash (dating, food, 
clothes, jazz), there would be Boccaccio, in 
shortened form, accompanied by a cartoon.’

David Denby. Great Books(New York: 
Simon & Schuster,1996)
**

LITERARY MATTERS ARE NOT ALEWAYS
WHAT THEY SEEM

This 400 page novel is a master of disguise.

*
MY POETICAL INDEBTEDNESS 
TO A.E.HOUSMAN

A.E.
I.O.U.

**
ON READING ABOUT LITTLE ELSIE DINSMORE

As I pondered weak & weary,
My eyes grew moist & then quite teary.
I cried & cried. I cd not stop.
I am a sucker for sentimental slop.

LJP