The Moleskine talks back

Here's a quick piece from McSweeney's on what your abandoned journal might say.

It starts:

You say things are "hectic." Then you add that you "don't want to talk about it." And that's all? Nothing else happened to you on April 22, 2007? Well, if I'm to believe that, then my name isn't Moleskine.

Read the rest here

Then We Came to the End

I really adored the book, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.
Funny and touching and deeply serious, "Then We Came to the End" is what happens at a Chicago ad agency as the dot-com bubble bursts and the lay-offs begin.
And it's written in first-person plural! (For the most part.) How cool is that?
Because I'm an office worker myself, this book reminded me that there's so much drama and poignancy in everyday life. This point has been made before (most notably by James Joyce's Ulysses), and maybe it's an easy, obvious point. But I still find the phenomenon to be emotionally moving and almost miraculous. Such is the artistry of the novel.
I interviewed Joshua Ferris for the newspaper, which was great. Some authors I've interviewed don't like talking about their work, but Ferris was very articulate, especially about the different characters in his book.
Read my interview with Joshua Ferris here.
Read the first chapter of Then We Came to the End here.
Here's the opening:

WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, annotated by David M. Shapard. P&P is a classic, but I read it for the first time only a year or two ago. Now I love it, this is maybe my fourth time reading it. The annotated edition has lots of interesting insights about how Jane Austen moves her plot along almost entirely through dialogue -- very interesting. It also explains nuances of vocabulary that might slip by the modern reader, i.e. amiable: "a common term of praise. It had a broader meaning then, signifying general kindness and friendliness."
I'm also reading The Untouched Minutes by Donald Morrill. It's a fascinating memoir by an English professor about how he and his wife were victims of a home invasion. It's kind of a slim book, I would describe it as a literary essay. The home invasion happened around the same time as 9/11 and the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, two professors at Dartmouth. Morrill weaves those events into his narrative to create a meditation on violence and experience. So far, it's excellent.

My strategic borrowing

If I'm browsing the stacks at a library and I run across a book I like but might not have time to read, I will check it out anyway with the idea that it will improve the book's library survival. Books that don't get checked out for years tend to lose their place on the shelves and end up on the book sale tables, and this is my little way of forestalling that.

But it's hard to tell sometimes when the last time a book was checked out. It used to be, you could flip to the back of the book and check the date due stamp. With the advent of computerized check-out, though, the dates don't always get stamped. So I ask the librarian. They usually can tell me.

Example: I recently checked out a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected works. The stamp said the last check out date was 1995. But I asked the library assistant to look it up, and the last actual check out date was 2005.

Author letters

Reader No.7 sent me this fascinating link about 300 letters written by Flannery O'Connor that were made available to the public for the first time last week:

By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.

Few people knew that Hester — an avid and insightful reader — was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O'Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O'Connor's death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were "the most personal" of O'Connor's correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester's literary executor.

In an event highly anticipated by O'Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester's request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.

The article is mostly about O'Connor, but it also notes that there is a sizable trove of letters by T.S. Eliot that are under seal -- 1,200 letters that will be opened in 2020.

Then there's a follow-up to the O'Connor story, about what happend on the day the letters were released:

Maybe it was just too sunny a day to be spent in the archives on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library on Emory's campus. By 2 o'clock — five hours after the correspondence in two large folders was made public — only five people had signed in and perused the collection of letters written between 1955 and the author's death in 1964.

Larry Hammond, 65, an insurance salesman from Atlanta, was the first to thumb through the stack. "I took a literature class a few years ago and read about this and I was just interested," he said. "I was real surprised by the language — and all the typos."

A closer inspection by O'Connor scholars may yet find great gravity in the missives.