The Elusive, Enigmatic, Entirely Indispensable Véra Nabokov
The Man Booker Prize Turns 50, Flawed But Still The Best Judge Of English-Language Literature
Propwatch: the pencils in Fun Home
Poets no longer seem to have much fun. They’re a dour crowd, twitching with resentments, earnestly wooing the Muse and writers of blurbs, comporting themselves with all the right emotions – sensitivity, sincerity, tolerance – but for what? No one takes them seriously and no one laughs. It wasn’t always that way. One thinks of poets as various as Byron and Stevie Smith, complicated people and amusing writers eager to amuse. Happy to be in their company was Tom Disch, who ended his life on this date, July 4, Independence Day, in 2008. That the funniest poet of his generation should commit suicide was no surprise to his close readers. No one courted death in his verse so ardently as Disch. He titled his 1991 collection Dark Verses & Light
How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds. “The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span.”
The year before he died, I unexpectedly discovered Disch’s final collection, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007), on a shelf in Borders, now as dead as Disch. A happy jolt of excitement connected me to my adolescent self, and I recalled finding Disch’s novel Camp Concentration on a library shelf in 1969. In my experience, it is the only work of science fiction worth reading more than once. About the Size of It is pure pleasure, unlike most contemporary poetry. Even at his most savagely satirical (especially on the subject of other poets), Disch is having a romping good time. Here is “Systems of Mourning”:
“The Irish hire keeners, the English mutes.
Some hobbyists will bronze the loved one’s boots.
“Revival theaters devote entire weeks
To proofs that Elvis Lives and Garbo Speaks.
“Vikings consign their chieftains to the waves,
And Amy Clampitt visits famous graves.
“Sorrowing bees return to ruined hives,
And Hindus burn their neighbors’ grieving wives.
“A dog will mourn his master like a serf
By pissing on the dear departed’s turf.
“Some weep in silence, others cry out loud,
And Susan Cheever sells her father’s shroud.”
'We Can't, for That, Omit Their Praise'
How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds. “The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span.”
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee may boost chances for a longer life, study shows
If you’d liked to be jerked around less, provoked less, and more productive and inwardly focused, where should you start?
↩︎ The Nature Conservancy
“In spite of all the books I have read there are so many more that I want to read and there is so much more that I want to know,” Kaye-Smith writes at the end of All the Books of My Life. Sadly, however, she did not even live to see this last of her own books in print.
100 useful things “is an expanding collection of durable objects presented by the people who use them every day”
Book clinic: which books best explain why life is worth living?
Julian Baggini in The Guardian:
Surprisingly, few of the world’s great philosophers have directly addressed this question. Instead, they have focused on a subtly different question: what does it mean to live well? In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasised the need to cultivate good character, finding the sweet spot between harmful extremes. For example, generosity lies between the extremes of meanness and profligacy, courage between cowardice and rashness. A remarkably similar vision is presented in the Chinese classics TheAnalects of Confucius and Mencius.