“Certain writers inspire affection in their readers that cannot be explained either by their work or by the facts of their lives. It proceeds from some temperamental undercurrent, some invisible connection between the writer and the reader that is more available to the senses and the emotions than to the mind. Bookish affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen do not.”
Moss was poetry editor at The New Yorker for almost forty years. His examples, pro and con, match my own. I find his prose, mostly essays and reviews, superior even to his poetry. If we can generalize from his examples, his literary preferences suggest a fondness for a quieter, more subtle, less rabble-rousing voice, little Sturm und Drang. Faulkner, whom I lionized when young, now seems too loud, too insistent, too stylistically attention-seeking. Can I explain and defend this reaction? I won’t even try. Moss writes elsewhere in “Notes on Fiction”: “Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale. Inferior writers step over the line one way or the other.”
‘You realise your children are probably never going to see Ningaloo the way you saw it’
The Bluesky Dictionary is tracking every single word used on the social media service. As of this writing, almost 40% of the dictionary has been covered, including recent additions like “boneshakers”, “microscale”, and “striations”.
I write because people are being hurt, needlessly, by our economic and political systems, and because the planet is suffering to allow a few to indulge in excess consumption, and because these things must be challenged, and better systems proposed. That is why I write this blog. And while that remains true, I will keep writing—and making videos.
- Alexios Mantzarlis of The Indicator writes, I reviewed 100 of TikTok’s “Footnotes” so you don’t have to. Spoiler alert in the subhead: Most of them were useless.
The 8 Best Internet Archive Alternatives for Digging Up Old Stuff
How to Geek: “Until recently, the Internet Archive has been my go-to wayback machine for accessing websites, documents, and files that are no longer available on their original sites. But lately, I’ve discovered some other sites that let you dig up old stuff in totally new ways. These are some of the best Internet Archive alternatives out there…”
