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| Kingsley Amis taught at Vanderbilt University in the late 1960s |
John Wain [minor English poet, novelist, and critic] slotted in his three years of undergraduate residence while I had been away at the war. He had been found unfit for military service (lungs), like Philip [Larkin] (eyes), like others who, when counted in with those who had craftily evaded service elsewhere, like Dylan Thomas, made up quite a total and suggests, as part of an answer to the old question, Why were the Great War poets better than the Second War lot? Because a good half of the Second War lot managed to stay out of it.
I digress, however....
I found [John Wain] most attractive, lightly caustic with a voice and manner to match, knowledgeable, worldly wise, a budding academic without crap....
...He was full of stories, like the one about the sherry bottle that held something other than sherry. The inconvenience of his rooms in Redding had led him to pee habitually into a bottle last thing at night, emptying it first thing in the morning. Once, about to hand some guests glasses of what was meant to be Tio Pepe, he had noticed at the last moment that this was not so and deduced in the nick of time that what had gone down the pan that morning was the Tio Pepe.
"Hold it," he had blurted, "this isn't good enough for you. It's piss, in fact. Have some gin instead".... [at about 1:45 into a 12:52 reading]
I first laid eyes on Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, in the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vermont, which beautiful town I remembered fondly in yesterday's post. I read the memoir last year, and one of the many passages that fascinated me was Hitchens's account of meeting Margaret Thatcher. It must have been in 1974 (when Hitchens was 25 years old), soon after she became the leader of the Conservative opposition:Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.
Your proudest achievement? Since I can't claim the children as solely "mine," being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest. [p. 370]I've downloaded a half-dozen of Amis's books to listen to, or to at least try to read. I started with his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence. Hitchens doesn't mention the book, but Sean Carroll does in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, in which he cites the novel's telling a story in reverse. Real time can flow only forward, but must a story?
It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you will about it, the present is unavoidable.The present is unavoidable. It's just the way it had to be. And the Judeo-Christian ethic could not have developed with any more inclusive affirmation of life than it did. "What if" conjectures about its (or anything else's) having been different from what it was are of mostly academic interest. Mostly idle.
Like Walter [Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad], we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.*There, less of a muddle, I hope.
Like Walter, we might individually resist, but happenings continue to roll on just the way they collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.That paragraph wasn't literally the conclusion. It was followed by a sort of coda about the unrolling of things' being believed by some as "God's plan in action," with special favors doled out to the believers.
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| Bush reads to children at Emma E. Booker Elementary |
Gore Vidal could hardly wait to go slumming2. He took the earliest opportunity of claiming that, while Osama bin Laden had not been proved to be the evil genius of the attacks, it was by no means too early to allege that the Bush administration had played a hidden hand in them. Or at least, if it had not actually instigated the assault, it had (as with Roosevelt at Pearl Harbor!) seen it coming and welcomed it as a pretext for engorging the defense budget and seizing the oilfields of the southern Caucasus. His articles featured half-baked citations from the most dismal, ignorant paranoids.[Hitch-22, p. 245]The irony for 9/11 Truthers who share Vidal's view is that
President Bush had evidently forewarned himself of the air piracy in order that he could seize the chance to look like a craven, whey-faced ignoramus on worldwide TV. [ibid]Or in order to be photographed reading a book upside down? Or were those photographs and reports fabricated by a conspiracy of untruthers skilled in the use of Photoshop? Or...?
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| [review] |
Tom Driberg in the last years of his life was still a true legend on the journalistic and cultural left. In youth, he had been an original member of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead set, while also maintaining good relations with the more radical forces clustered around W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He had, indeed, given the young Auden his first copy of The Waste Land, and joined him in reading it aloud...Anyway, he was sometimes invited to contribute the "Londoner's Diary" to the New Statesman, and one week issued an appeal to readers to help him complete an indecent limerick the first line of which ran: "There once was a man of Stoke Poges." This highly respectable town in Buckinghamshire seemed to cry out for the rhyme "poke Doges," which in turn meant that the remainder of the limerick would have to be Venetian in flavor.Anyway, I invite you to submit your nomination for what the final line of the limerick concocted by Mssrs. Driberg, Hitchens, Fenton, and Holden might have been:
Fenton and I [poet James Fenton], assisted by our dear friend Anthony Holden, accepted the challenge and were duly invited to a lunch by old Tom held at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, above which Karl Marx had once kept his squalid lodgings. How we completed the task I don't entirely remember ("entirely resolved to poke Doges. So this elderly menace / Took steamship to Venice..." But what was the last line?). At all events [I continue quoting beyond what's necessary simply in able to get to Hitchens's mention of the actor who played Lawrence of Arabia; like Frank Harris, Hitchens seems to have known everybody]...
At all events, by the time the restaurant had finally insisted on throwing us out—this in the days when the pubs in London were not allowed to stay open in the afternoon—Tom simply took me down the street and up a flight of dingy stairs and made me a member of the infamous "Colony Room Club," an off-hours drinking establishment run by a tyrannical Sapphist named Muriel Belcher. Renowned to this day for its committed members, from Peter O'Toole to Francis Bacon, the joint at that epoch gave off an atmosphere of inspissated gloom, punctuated by moments of high insobriety and low camp.... [pp. 151-152]
Left hand panel from
Francis Bacons' 1966 triptych
Three Studies for a Portrait
of Muriel Belcher
There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________
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| Christopher Hitchens |
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| Jonathan Franzen |
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| Antonio R. Damasio |
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| Sam Harris |
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| Jonathan Safran Foer |
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| Stieg Larsson |
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| Richard Dawkins |
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| Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
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| John Le Carré |
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| Philip Roth |
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| Martin Cruz Smith |
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| Daniel C. Dennett |
